The Contrast of the Woman and Judas

Being an apostle, do you rebuke me? And while the woman prepares for the tomb, the disciple hands over the Lord to death. The woman is a sinner, I know; but she had nothing to grant me, or a fountain of tears, pouring out fountain upon fountain, offering an incorporeal atonement to an unskillful teacher.

But you also test, you wretch, saying it is worthy of three hundred denarii; yet you test not so that you might praise her great extravagance, that she consumed all the wealth gathered from evils for the honor of the perfume, but so that, grumbling, you might show how you have fallen into such an evil misfortune. But it is not great, if you are distressed by the loss of three hundred denarii, from which, having taken thirty, you departed from the Lord. For, he says, 'What do you want to give me, and I will give you Him?'

Wretch, does a slave sell a master? The order is overturned; for I myself buy you from sin with my own blood, but you repel Him with thirty obols? Furthermore, does a man sell God? Let it be granted that He is being sold, but who is the one buying? How much will someone buy God for? And why do you make the matter a triviality? Someone sells God for thirty obols in the form of a man, as a servant, as a barbarian? Even if one distinguishes, how much is the God dwelling within, and how much is the man appearing?

'What do you want to give me?' he says. What do you want to receive? For they have nothing to give in exchange for God. And they stood before Him with thirty pieces of silver, he says. Someone sells a physician for thirty obols' wages, a physician blinding the eyes of the blind, raising the lame to run? I say these things so that I may catechize your mind, that you cause toil for the woman, because she honored Him who is free among the dead and, before death, as one dead, and through the perfume of the burial and the resurrection, she prefigured the grace.

But you shall have the fruit of betrayal, the rod; but her memory, wherever the gospel shall be proclaimed, shall remain undiminished. And the deed was spoken and done thus: that the offering of Aaron, the offering of Eleazar has ceased, the perfume and the horn have worked, but the alabaster of this woman is extended to the whole age, having the fragrance of memory undiminished.

But toward Judas, and toward the grumbling Pharisee, Christ says thus: 'Simon, I have something to say to you.' O unutterable grace! O unspeakable philanthropy! God and man are conversing, and He proposes a problem and a standard of philanthropy, dissolving its wickedness. For 'Simon,' he says, 'I have something to say to you'; I have something to say which is like none of the old ways.