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She has done what she could.
Mrs. Snodgrass's Victoria jam sponge for the chapel garden party was quite good… under the circumstances. The "circumstances" are never fully explained, but you are left with the feeling that Mrs. Snodgrass's baking has managed to produce a cake – but not as we know it, Jim.
Mr. Volestrangler read the lesson on Sunday morning quite well… all things considered. The things about the occasion that you might have considered are never given any detail, but you are left with the suspicion that half way through the reading, Mr. Volestrangler may have been wracked by a violent sneeze which propelled his false teeth out of his mouth with hurricane force and saw them embed themselves in the right ear of Miss Possett who was at the time still sitting upon the organ stool.
She has done what she could… nowhere is it mentioned what everybody else thought that she might have done if she had really put her mind to it.
It is called "damning with faint praise", isn't it? Is that a particularly English procedure, matching the well-known English art of understatement, or can it be found in other cultures as well? Well… given the writings of La Bruyère in the seventeenth century and Voltaire in the eighteenth, the French are probably pretty good at it too.
She has done what she could. In this biblical instance, this is not faint praise, but whole-hearted praise. There is an echo of correspondence between this anointing and the story of the widow's mite, recounted just two chapters previously. But there is also a subtle difference. In the story of the widow placing her coins in the temple treasury, the woman gave everything that she had – "her whole living," as Jesus said. In this story of the anointing of Jesus, there is no suggestion that the woman sold everything that she had to purchase the flask of very costly ointment. But, having brought the gift in order to anoint the head of Jesus, she used all of it for that purpose. "She broke the flask," Saint Mark says. In other words, she did not un-stopper it, pour out a little bit (or even an expected amount), and then replace the stopper and keep the rest for another occasion. Having intentionally broken the flask, she had to use it all, which is what she did. She has done what she could… she has not done less than she could have done… She has done what she could… on the given occasion.
The differentiation between the two stories is very important for ordinary Christians who would have no aspirations to being wonderful, exceptional saints. Perhaps you are an extraordinary Christian, but I am only an ordinary one. An extraordinary Christian may feel that being a Christian is about the art of the impossible, but despite divine inspiration and human intention, I still tend to feel that Christian living is about the art of the possible.
What do I mean? Well, consider this. My father was, and indeed, many other Methodists are, very uncomfortable about attending the annual Covenant Service. And if you aren't uncomfortable, then perhaps you ought to be. He used to reckon that the Covenant vows require a quite unrealistic degree of devotional and material commitment. We all say them, but very few of us realistically mean them. It is the same with that well-loved hymn, "Take my life and let it be". We get to the fourth verse and we blithely sing on…
Take my silver and my gold,
Not a mite would I withhold;
And yet we do not mean it, and we do not practise precisely what we have sung, because none of us has taken the formal vow of poverty required of a monk or a nun.
In our best moments, most of us try to manage to achieve what the woman who anointed Jesus managed to achieve. She has done what she could… and we do what we can. In the given moment, relative to the circumstances, we practise the full art of the possible, not the hypocritical commitment to the impossible.
She has done what she could… and I try to do what I can, relative to my circumstances, relative to the opportunity of the moment. It is the notion of the relativity that, I hope, helps me to avoid the accusation of hypocrisy in my Christian intent and living. So when I sing these following lines…
Take my intellect and use
Every power as thou shalt choose.
…there is no reason why God should not have the lot, as far as that is concerned, on every given occasion. I have never taken a vow of the restriction of the intellect.
She has done what she could… Well, what she did was what could not be done later, at a more appropriate time, because when the women went to the tomb on the dawn of Easter Day they could not anoint the dead body of Jesus in his burial, because the body was not there. Did she know that what she was doing was done in anticipation of what could not be done later? I am not sure, but what I do know is the truth of what Jesus said about her… She has done what she could. May the same ever be able to be said about us – in spiritual simplicity, and without the slightest hint of over-optimistic devotional hypocrisy!