If you have your Bibles with you today, please open up to John 12:1. We have been looking through the book of John and we took a break from the book of John during Christmas and now we are picking it back up as we go from Christmas to Easter. It is very appropriate to pick it up here at chapter 12 because it is the beginning of Jesus’ last week on earth. Unfortunately, the gospel writer John takes about nine chapters to talk about the last week, so we will be into this last week for quite some time. It does begin Jesus’ last week on earth. If you were here in November, you might recall we finished talking about the raising of Lazarus from the dead. In today’s passage, we see Lazarus again. This time he is not coming out of a tomb. This time he is reclining at a table with Jesus at a dinner. A dinner that is given in honor of Jesus. It is at that particular dinner where Mary, out of the blue, does something very outrageous. She takes a jar of very expensive perfume and she pours it upon the feet of Jesus. We are going to read from John 12:1-8 (Scripture read here.)
The situation here is pretty straightforward. Jesus is at a dinner in honor of him. He is sitting there with Lazarus and also the disciples are there. There are some other people from the crowd that are just coming in because they saw Lazarus raised from the dead and also Martha and Mary were there. Mary is not the mother of Jesus. Mary is the sister of Martha, the sister of Lazarus, and good friends with Jesus. We saw Martha and Mary at the tomb when Lazarus was raised from the dead. You also may recall that we saw Martha and Mary at another dinner function. Remember Martha was serving the meal and Mary was sitting at the feet of Jesus. During that particular time Martha was quite upset about situation because she thought Mary should be helping her serve. In this particular case, you get the sense that Martha really isn’t that annoyed this time. She is not complaining. Mary is no longer just sitting at the feet of Jesus as a student and he is the teacher. She is sitting there as someone who just experienced the resurrection of her own brother from the grave. She is sitting there now as a devoted follower of Jesus Christ. She is sitting there now looking at him as Lord in an amazing way. At some point, we don’t know when, she got this prompting by the spirit to get up and take this very expensive perfume called nard and she basically just dumps it on his feet and begins to wipe it up with her hair. We see that in verse 3 where it says “Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”
A little background on this word nard. I had to do a little bit of research but apparently nard is a fragrant oil that is prepared from the stems and roots of an herb that is found only in northern India. It is very expensive and because you have to import it in that adds to the cost of it. It actually becomes a very good investment too because it is small and very portable. It really can fetch some good money on the open market. This is a very expensive perfume. What Mary did would be considered extremely outrageous and very impractical because as we saw in the passage, it had the equivalent of a year’s pay of the common laborer. The equivalent today would be anywhere from $20,000 to $25,000 for a pint of this perfume. What she did was very impractical and also what she did was very improper. Back then, it was very improper for a woman to let down her hair let alone use her hair to wipe up the feet of Jesus. But you know what? Mary didn’t care. She really didn’t care at all what people were thinking at the time. All she cared about was showing love and devotion to her Lord. She did that by anointing his feet with oil.
As a side note, to anoint has a very rich history in the Bible. It can have several different meanings depending on when it is used. Sometimes anointing oil was used to anoint a king. They would pour it on the king’s head and that would symbolize that this king was being set apart for a divine purpose. In other instances, you have oil being used to set somebody aside for God’s particular care such as someone who has experienced some sort of a health issue or possibly about to encounter some sort of severe trial. In fact, at the church here sometimes people come and they are dealing with a health issue and they come and ask the elders to anoint their head with oil. It is very common to do in the church. It is in the book of James where we are instructed to do that. It is setting people apart for the specific care of God to the people. Another reason that particular oil could be used is for burial purposes. Particularly, it would be used for royalty or someone of high status.
When we look at Mary, we really don’t know what is going on in her head. We have no explanation of why she chose this particular method to show her love and devotion. All we know is that it was very extreme. It was an extreme act of worship. It was an extravagant act of worship. Anytime you have an extravagant act of worship you have somebody that is probably going to make some sort of an objection to it. What is strange about this case is that of all the people that make an objection, it is one of Jesus’ very own disciples. In this case, it is Judas. Judas was saying that perfume could have been sold and the money could have been given to the poor. He objected to it. We see that in verse 4-6. “But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, ‘Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.’ He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.” He is saying this should have been sold and given to the poor. John gives us a little bit of editorial there and lets us know that Judas’ motives were not quite pure. Judas was a thief and Judas was a person who liked to dip his hands into the till. Once again, he is not thinking about the poor. He is thinking about himself. He is thinking about the money that he is not able to get his hands on because he is the treasurer of that little band of disciples and now he can’t get his hands on that particular money. John is letting us know he is not thinking about the poor. Jesus comes and what he does is rebukes Judas. The passage goes on to say “‘Leave her alone,’ Jesus replied. ‘It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.’” Jesus is not saying ignore the poor. That would be inconsistent with what we read throughout the rest of the gospels. But he is saying you are going to have plenty of time to take care of the poor, but you only have about a week left with me, so you should be focusing on me. Mary once again is demonstrating that she has her priorities right. She is once again sitting at the feet of Jesus.
Really what we do have here is, in my view, an example of extravagant worship. Before we continue on, let’s see if we can define what we mean by extravagant worship. I looked up extravagant in the dictionary and extravagant basically means exceeding the bounds of reason. Going beyond what is deserved or justifiable. That makes sense. Worship is a little trickier to define. Worship has the idea of giving worth to someone. A good definition for worship is a human expression of a proper worth being placed on the person being worshipped, and in our case it would be God, and the personal cost of the practice or worshipping him. So it is giving appropriate value to the one we worship. True worship comes at a cost. True worship always involves some form of sacrifice. That is consistent through the entire Bible. The person doing the worshipping has to give something of his or herself in order to be truly worshipping. Once again, when we think of Mary, this is really a picture of extravagant worship. Mary in her desire to worship her Lord, she exceeded the bounds of what was reasonable at a personal cost, a sacrifice to herself. I would say that Mary’s action would be classified as extravagant worship.
There is another example in the Bible that I thought I would talk about for a few seconds here. It comes from the character King David. King David is found in the Old Testament, particularly in the book of Samuel. If you have your Bibles and want to look there it is 2 Samuel 6:12 we are going to be looking at. Basically David was a worshipper of God. In fact, he wrote about 150 worship-related Psalms. He loved to worship God. In this particular setting what is going on here is that the Ark had actually been taken away from Jerusalem. It was taken by the Philistines and it had been gone for 20 years. The Ark is not Noah’s Ark that we are talking about here. We are talking about what is called the Ark of the Covenant. The wooden chest that was believed to hold the original Ten Commandments, the stone tablets, also Aaron’s budded rod, and also a jar of manna. In fact, if you ever saw the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark with Harrison Ford that is what they were going after. That is what we are talking about the Ark. This Ark had been gone for 20 years. The thing about the Ark was the Israelites associated the Ark with the presence of God. When the Ark was taken, what they believed was that the presence of God had been removed from Jerusalem. It had been gone 20 years. Now it was finally being returned to its rightful place. It was finally being returned to Jerusalem and King David is so excited he is beside himself. He begins to dance like a fool. So we will look at 2 Samuel 6 starting at verse 12. “Now King David was told, ‘The LORD has blessed the household of Obed-Edom and everything he has, because of the ark of God.’” Basically the ark was sitting in this house for a short period of time and the Lord had blessed the house. “So David went to bring up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with rejoicing. When those who were carrying the ark of the LORD had taken six steps, he sacrificed a bull and a fattened calf. Wearing a linen ephod, David was dancing before the LORD with all his might, while he and all Israel were bringing up the ark of the LORD with shouts and the sound of trumpets. As the ark of the LORD was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD, she despised him in her heart.” So the ark is coming to town and David the king goes a little crazy. He starts dancing around like a fool. I think what is going on here is you have another picture of extravagant worship. You have someone who is exceeding the bounds of what is reasonable and also doing it at a sacrifice. You think what is King David sacrificing? What he is sacrificing there is his pride. He is sacrificing the fact that he is a king and he is willing to set aside his crown and his pride to dance before the Lord. Of course, he too encounters some opposition. Not from Judas. Judas wasn’t around for another thousand years or so. He encounters it from his wife of all people. His wife is watching him and she is thinking when you get home David I am going to lay into you a little bit.
I am going to skip down a few verses to verse 20 where it says “When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him and said, ‘How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, disrobing in the sight of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!’” She is upset. David is going to be sleeping on the couch tonight. Then it goes on to say “David said to Michal, ‘It was before the LORD, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the LORD’s people Israel—I will celebrate before the LORD. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of, I will be held in high honor.’” Then we know what happens to his wife. It says “And Michal daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death.” She was made barren and was basically cursed by God. You have once again King David doing extravagant worship. His wife mocking him about it. His wife objecting to it.
So we have two examples. We have the example of Mary and the perfume. We have the example of David and dancing before the Lord as examples of extravagant worship. I began to think about what would extravagant worship look like today? How would you define extravagant today? It could be related to giving of tithes and offerings. Extravagant giving. That is so hard to put a handle on because what is extravagant to one is not extravagant to somebody else. Somebody could give $5 a month to the church in the offering tray. It doesn’t seem very extravagant unless you are someone who doesn’t give anything. If you are someone in the world that basically says I am not giving anything to the church. Anything that you give is considered extravagant. The person who gives $1000 a month, which there are people that do that. That would be considered extravagant to the person who gives $5 a month. Then there are people who give several thousand dollars a month and that would be considered very extravagant to the person who gives a thousand. I will tell you a story because you are here today. About six months ago, we had a gentleman that no longer attends this church. He moved to a different area. In fact, if I mentioned his name you probably wouldn’t even know him. He was a very quiet gentleman. He came in one Sunday and you know those little greeting cards in the pews that the outreach team puts in there? By the way, they are meant to be used to write a note of encouragement. These greeting cards often get filled out and addressed to people and we put a stamp on it and mail them out. This particular day there was a greeting card in the offering plate. It didn’t have the name of a person. It just said Bellevue Christian Church. It ended up on my desk. I open it up and the only thing that was written on the note was “I need a receipt for this” and there was a check for $45,000. True story. By the way, we were looking to get air conditioning installed this spring, and you have that gentleman to thank. When we get that air conditioner up there, I am not going to give you his name, but we are going to do some cards for that man because that is the reason we are getting an air conditioner. How many would consider that extravagant giving?
It doesn’t always have to relate to financial giving. It could be related to the giving of time. How many hours people are willing to give to the church or to God’s kingdom work. We have people that give several hours a week. We have some of the retired people come in for hours on end doing repair work or filing away music and doing all sorts of things that we take for granted. These retirees are doing it. There are some churches that are staffed by volunteers. By people who retired from the work world but instead of spending their golden years golfing or going on vacations, they give 40, 50, 60 hours or more free volunteer labor to the church. How many think that is a little bit extravagant? A little bit. It is. It doesn’t always relate to money or time. Sometimes it has to do with how we express ourselves in worship. There are people that will sit on the pew and standing up once in a while is about as expressive as they want to get. We also know that there are people that will stand up. They will raise their hands. They will clap. They will give an amen periodically. Some would consider that a little bit extravagant. We had a guy about a year or so ago that decided in the middle of the service he was going to dance. We call him dancing Bob. Debbie was leading the choir and all of a sudden he got up and decided to dance up and down the aisles. How many think that is extravagant? A little bit. I think all these things, these three examples I gave you, would be considered extravagant worship because they exceed the bounds of what would be considered reasonable. They are at a personal cost either of time or finances or pride. Also I think one of the key ingredients of what determines whether something is extravagant or not is whether you have anybody objecting to it. I think that is one of the keys too.
As a side note, when I think about objecting to extravagant worship, a lot of times the objection says more about the person objecting than the actual person doing the worship. In other words, it is often a reflection back on the person doing the objection. Think about Judas. Judas was complaining about the gift but really at the same time what he was doing was exposing his own greed. David’s wife was complaining about David. I think it might have been exposing a failure of her to be dancing with David when the ark was coming back. When the presence of God was coming back into Jerusalem. When somebody complains about somebody giving too much to the church that is often a reflection that says maybe I should have given more or I should have given some money with that windfall that I got. When somebody complains about another person giving too many hours to the church in service it is a reflection that says maybe I don’t give enough. Maybe once a month is not enough. Somebody who complains about somebody being too expressive in worship on a Sunday morning or Wednesday night or whenever is a reflection on them. Maybe they are being convicted and saying I need to be a little bit more expressive in my worship.
As a side note, some objections I think are valid. Getting back to the gentleman that decided to dance one Sunday. Frankly, I think it was right to object and we did object because it was the first time he had visited the church. He didn’t know us. We didn’t know him. We didn’t know if his heart was right. We didn’t know where he was from. To be honest, he could have been a demon for all we know. We really don’t know. You can’t assume that just because somebody comes in and is doing something crazy that it is always for God. It could be a distraction. In that particular case it was a distraction because Debbie was leading the choir. The focus was on the choir. When he started dancing, the focus went on him so he was a distraction. There is an appropriate time for an objection.
But getting back to this idea of elements of extreme worship, once again we see exceeding the bounds of reason. We see it involves some form of sacrifice whether time or talent or pride. And it often encounters the objection of people. When all those things are in place, we really don’t know if the worship is really extravagant. We really don’t. The only two people that know and can really determine whether worship is extravagant is the worshipper and the one being worshiped, God. The only two people are yourself and God that can determine whether the worship truly can be classified as extravagant. Let me explain. Think about Mary. We look at the gospel about Mary and we say wasn’t Mary extravagant to give that pint of perfume that is worth $20,000? Wasn’t that extravagant? She could have been thinking I could have done more. I had two pints of perfume in the cupboard. The Lord was prompting her not to just anoint one foot but to use a separate pint on each foot. So maybe she was feeling that she held back a little bit. Even David. David was dancing. Maybe the Lord was telling him I don’t want you to dance this time. I want you to sell everything in the palace and give the money to the poor. Maybe that is what David was feeling. We look at David and say he was being extravagant. Or maybe the guy who gave the $45,000 check. The Lord was saying you have been going to church for 30 years and you have not once lifted your hands up to God. Instead of lifting his hands up to God he said I would just rather write the check. It is a lot easier. Do you see what I am getting at? Only you and God know whether worship is truly extravagant. It is a thing that happens inside of you. It really has to do with when you are feeling a prompting of the spirit of God and how you choose to respond to it. When you are in your comfort zone of worship in any degree in any place and you are feeling that maybe you should do something different, you should move beyond the comfort zone, and you actually do move beyond the comfort zone, what you have entered into is the realm of the extravagant. You have obeyed God. You have obeyed the prompting of God. It has little to do with the size of the sacrifice. It could be something as simple as the person who gives $5 a month is prompted to give $10 a month. It could be as simple as someone who is serving an hour a month is now feeling convicted to work two and he or she does that. It could be the person who is used to just sitting in the pew week after week, month after month and decides to get up and lift hands or come forward during time of prayer and kneel. When it all boils down to it, God is not so much interested in sacrifice as he is in obedience. Obedience to his commands and his promptings is what he desires and then you are entering into true worship. The reality is also that we can never truly get to the point of extravagant worship when it comes to God. When you think about it, if extravagant worship has the idea of placing value on God, could any of us do anything that would demonstrate that we have done enough for God? Could we give enough of ourselves? Could we give enough of sacrifice? We could never get to a place of extravagance. Even if we could, God wouldn’t let us because he doesn’t want us to get comfortable in our worship.
You are thinking Chuck there is only so much you can do at the church in worship or giving money or service. That is true. That is why worship is not confined to the four walls of the church. True worship of God is designed to be pushed out of these four walls into the community. It is designed to be pushed into the community at large. It is designed to be pushed into your homes, into your schools, into your workplace. It is designed to manifest itself in obedience in those situations and you begin to see that everything you do for the honor of God, whether it is work, school work, business, or raising your kids, what you are doing is entering into what the writer Paul talks about, your spiritual act of worship that involves your whole being. Paul says it best in Romans 12:1 where he writes “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship.” We don’t’ have time to go back to the 11 chapters preceding the Therefore, but basically what he is saying is in light of what God has done for you, in light of the fact that we were sinners and needed a savior, in light of the fact that he sent his son Jesus to this earth to die on the cross for your sins to give you eternal life, in light of the fact that because of that you can now begin to live life the way you were designed to live it, in light of that fact present your whole being as one act of worship to God. That is what he is saying here. Really that is what we have all been designed to do. That is the way God designed us. God designed us as worshippers. I have said it before and I will say it again until you get it. We left the garden. We were worshipping beings. We were created to populate the earth, to do our work, but to do it all under submission to God. In other words, under the worship, under the authority of our creator. We decided we wanted to take charge of things. We walked away from worship. The entire Bible is one long journey. We left the garden. We left the worship and we are returning back home to worship. That is why Revelation is all about worship. That is what we are going to. Really all of life can be seen as worship practice. We talk about worship practice. The band meets at 7:30. The worship team meets at 7:30-8 to do worship practice. That is not worship practice. Life is worship practice. That is what we are supposed to do. We are called to worship God through our entire being. Through our entire life and allow the worship to manifest every area of our lives.
In closing, as we think about New Year’s Day, last year I think we talked about resolutions. We make all these practical resolutions. Make this list. Lose weight. Save money. Take these trips. We forget about them a month later. I would say I am not going to ask you to do any resolutions but one. The only resolution I am asking you is to be better worshippers. If you do anything this year, become a better worshipper. That is what I am asking you. Listen to the spirit of God. Pay attention to the spirit of God in your quiet time as you are walking along the road. As you are listening to the radio. Listen to what God is saying to you and then respond to it especially if it forces you out of your comfort zone and begin to watch what happens. Begin to push toward the extravagant all the while knowing that you are never going to experience truly extravagant worship.
My prayer for all of you this year would be that you begin to seek a more extended worship, a more expanded view of worship. That you press beyond the bounds of reason. That you take a little bit more risk as you seek to worship God in a new way. As you respond to the promptings of God and you begin to crest towards extravagant worship, you actually begin to press into the presence of God. Really you become the person that you were designed to be. Let us pray.
