Apprenticing Under the Master March 26, 2006
Extravagant Love for Jesus
Mark 14:1-11
Kevin putting up sign for Faith
Have you ever done something extravagant for love?
Jesus tells the woman at the well that “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship Him in spirit and in truth.
Here we have an example of true, extravagant worship. In this story, we can learn from another apprentice as well as Jesus
True, Extravagant Worship
Led by the Spirit
It’s not explicitly said, that the woman in the story is led by the Holy Spirit, when she anoints Jesus with this expensive ointment, but it is implied. How else would she know to do this at this time, to prepare Jesus’ body for burial?
If we want to show extravagant love to God, we need to listen to what he desires. People can perform all sorts of acts for God without asking him if he wants it.
It is like wanting to show love to a friend by making them a beautiful roast beef meal with all the trimmings and gravy and all, but they are vegetarian!
There maybe times when our so-called extravagant acts of worship are more about us than they are about God. We can perform extravagant acts of worship for ourselves and say they are for God!
Jesus says “Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?” Then I will tell them plainly, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evil doers.” Matthew 7:22-23
We must learn to worship, led by the Spirit, so that what we do in worship, will be received as worship by God!
Motivated by Love
There is a similar story found in Luke 7:36-48
One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to come to his home for a meal, so Jesus accepted the invitation and sat down to eat. A certain immoral woman heard he was there and brought a beautiful jar filled with expensive perfume. Then she knelt behind him at his feet, weeping. Her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them off with her hair. Then she kept kissing his feet and putting perfume on them.
When the Pharisee who was the host saw what was happening and who the woman was, he said to himself, "This proves that Jesus is no prophet. If God had really sent him, he would know what kind of woman is touching him. She’s a sinner!"
Then Jesus spoke up and answered his thoughts. "Simon," he said to the Pharisee, "I have something to say to you."
"All right, Teacher," Simon replied, "go ahead."
Then Jesus told him this story: "A man loaned money to two people--five hundred pieces of silver[f] to one and fifty pieces to the other. But neither of them could repay him, so he kindly forgave them both, canceling their debts. Who do you suppose loved him more after that?"
Simon answered, "I suppose the one for whom he canceled the larger debt."
"That’s right," Jesus said. Then he turned to the woman and said to Simon, "Look at this woman kneeling here. When I entered your home, you didn’t offer me water to wash the dust from my feet, but she has washed them with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You didn’t give me a kiss of greeting, but she has kissed my feet again and again from the time I first came in. You neglected the courtesy of olive oil to anoint my head, but she has anointed my feet with rare perfume. I tell you, her sins--and they are many--have been forgiven, so she has shown me much love. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love." Then Jesus said to the woman, "Your sins are forgiven."
Whoever has bee forgive much, love much, whoever has been forgiven little, loves little.
We can have all sorts of motivation for showing signs of love to God, or even to people – we want something from him, so we are trying to butter him up, we see it as our duty to show worship, sp we go through the motions. Our worship is to be motivated by love. It is usually in response to God’s love shown to us.
Humble
For a woman to enter a room of men and do this was at once bold and humble. She came into a place where she was not welcome and was sneered at for what she did.
Because we have a charismatic culture around this church, there may be times when our extravagant acts of worship are out of pride rather than out of humility. We are hoping that everyone notices what we are doing for Jesus and hoping that they are duly impressed with us. This is why Jesus tells his disciples not to make a big show of their prayers or their fasting, or their alms giving – it is for God to see, not for others. This woman’s act of extravagant worship was fairly public, but it was not for the others to see, it was all for Jesus. Our extravagant acts of worship might be public, but they must always be first for him. If you feel led to dance for God in worship, that might be great in our public service, in fact we encourage it – you worship blesses the rest of us. But if you find that you’re not that interested in dancing in private with only God as your audience, you need to ask yourself, is this really for God? Is it in humility, or am I showing off? This can be applied to any form of worship – if you feel the need to draw attention to it, who are you really doing it for?
You may be called to do something in public, keep it humble.
Costly
The woman breaks an alabaster jar of pure nard over Jesus’ head. If you follow the footnote down you see that the disciples think you could have got 300 denarii for it on ebay. A denari was about a day’s wage for a labourer. If you translate that into today’s money, even at minimum wages, it would be worth about $20,000!
In New Testament times, there was no banking system, no mutual funds, so this was likely the woman’s retirement savings, her emergency fund, or even her dowry. This was no small sacrifice. Extravagant starts to sound like too small of a word to describe what she did. I can barely imagine performing such an act of love and sacrifice.
It was pointed out to me that what the Christian peacemakers were doing in Iraq might be close to this woman’s sacrifice. They are not understood by many of their peers, and they are even sneered at by some, but they were willing to give their lives to see God’s peace come
2 Samuel 24:18-24
On that day the prophet Gad went to David and said to him, "Go up and build an altar to the LORD on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite." So David went up, as the LORD had commanded through Gad. When Araunah looked and saw the king and his men coming toward him, he went out and bowed down before the king with his face to the ground.
Araunah said, "Why has my lord the king come to his servant?"
"To buy your threshing floor," David answered, "so I can build an altar to the LORD, that the plague on the people may be stopped."
Araunah said to David, "Let my lord the king take whatever pleases him and offer it up. Here are oxen for the burnt offering, and here are threshing sledges and ox yokes for the wood. O king, Araunah gives all this to the king." Araunah also said to him, "May the LORD your God accept you."
But the king replied to Araunah, "No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the LORD my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing."
So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen and paid fifty shekels [c] of silver for them. David built an altar to the LORD there and sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings. Then the LORD answered prayer in behalf of the land, and the plague on Israel was stopped.
Our extravagant acts of worship must cost something – time, money, pride, our life…
It is the cost of the act that the men in the room balk at. They are likely upset by the intimacy of the act, but it is the cost that they go after her on. What a waste!
You might relate more to the men than you do to the woman, or to Jesus in this story. But we need to listen to what Jesus says. Verses 6-9
The picture of God that we have in this story is not an accountant, but an artist, and a lover. We might not get this act of love, but God does.
We need to be much slower to judge other’s acts of worship. I remember the first time I saw someone lift their hands in worship: I thought “what are they on about? Who are they trying to impress?” Really they were on about God and they were impressing him. We need to let people be free in their worship. If we have friends that need a little tweaking in their ways of worship, (maybe they are trying to impress others,) we should approach them on it prayerfully, in humility and love. But in general, we must not be so quick to judge – we’re most likely to get our judgments wrong, just like the disciples did.
I have to comment on Jesus phrase “you will always have the poor with you”
I have heard this phrase used over and over again as an excuse not to serve the poor.
The logic goes, “Jesus said that we will always have the poor with us, so anything we do won’t solve the problem, so we shouldn’t do anything at all.”
This logic takes this one little phrase and uses it to ignore all of the commands in the Bible to care for the poor. The in the old Testament, the Law commands us to care for the poor, the histories command us to care for the poor, the psalms and wisdom writings command us to care for the poor, all the prophets command us to care for the poor. In fact, much that the prophets say that God is angry with Israel for, is their lack of care for the poor! In the New Testament Jesus command us to care for the poor, Paul and all the other writers of letters command us to care for the poor. Even Revelation speaks of God’s heart for the poor. Rick Warren author of The Purpose Driven Life, speaking on his recent conversion to care for the poor said, “I can’t believe I missed the over 2,000 verses in the Bible on the poor.” The whole Bible calls us, as well as our governments to care for the poor. We cannot use what we think is the logical conclusion of one verse to ignore the commands of God.
Even the logic that people use for this verse is flawed – it assumes that God is a pragmatist. A pragmatist is someone who says if something works, it is good, if it does not, it is bad. If this passage teaches us nothing else it teaches us that God is not a pragmatist! The disciples are the pragmatists, calling the woman’s act useless since it accomplished nothing. God does not say “care for the poor as long as you have a working plan to end world poverty.” He says “care for the poor because I love them, I have a special place in my heart for them, and I have given them to you to care for.”
Jesus is not saying that we should not care for the poor – we need to understand what a Biblical person Jesus is. When he says you will always have the poor with you, he is quoting Deuteronomy 15:11 which says “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be open-handed toward your people who are poor and needy in your land.” You can see even in Mark’s account Jesus adds the words “and you can help them any time you want.”
Jesus was also not downplaying service to the poor over extravagant acts of worship. He was answering the disciples who were degrading the extravagant act of worship. In John’s account of this occurrence, he puts the words, “why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor?” in Judas’ mouth with the understanding that Judas was stealing from the treasury. Giving the money to the poor was a ruse to hide the fact that Judas wanted to line his pockets with the money. You need to hear the sarcasm in Jesus’ words when he says “that’s ok, the poor will still be here tomorrow and you can serve them then.” He was calling Judas’ bluff. In verse 10, Judas is so fed up with this misguided messiah and His lack of understanding of the value of a dollar (or 300 denarii) that he goes immediately to the chief priest to betray him.
Who knows, It could be that the extravagant worship that the Holy Spirit is calling you into is extravagant service to the poor!
Prophetic
We actually don’t have a choice on this one, but there are times when extravagant acts of worship that the Holy Spirit calls us to are also Prophetic. An act or words are prophetic when they speak God’s will, words and ways into peoples lives and into the heavenly places. Prophetic acts and words can also foretell the future that God has planned. This act was prophetic – it foretold Jesus coming death and burial.
This extravagant act of love foretold the most extravagant act of love that has ever happened.
Jesus poured out something worth far more than 300 denarii for us. He poured out his very life. Within days of this encounter, Jesus goes to the cross and dies that we might have life.
Because we have been separated from God since the garden of Eden, and because we deserve death for our sin, inherited and committed, and because God wants to be in eternal relationship with us regardless of cost, Jesus to on himself the punishment we deserve and he died in our stead.
God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life – John 3:16
Ephesians 1:7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us.
The woman’s extravagant love for Jesus was a response to his extravagant love for her, in his life, and in a few days in his death.
The first act of extravagant love that we are called into by the Spirit is also a response to the extravagant love that Jesus has for us. That act is to give our whole self to him. To say, Jesus, I’ve pretty much messed my life up so far, here it is, take it and make it something right and beautiful.
Romans 12:1 says, “Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is true worship.”
The first extravagant act of Love the Holy Spirit calls you into is to give your whole self to Jesus. Will you do it?
