As we’ve said over the last few weeks, John does not simply make lists of miracles. There are seven signs and the final sign, the raising of Lazarus, comes just before our passage this morning. The ministry of Jesus is about to change radically at this point. You might say this story comes between the final sign and the beginning of the end. It is an in-between moment, a pause, a rest in one of his favorite places with people he loves and trusts between the two momentous events – the raising of the dead and the triumphal entry. No miracles here. No signs. No big audience. Just Jesus, his beloved friends and disciples.

The end of chapter 11 closes with the Pharisees and the High Priest, Caiphas, setting their sights squarely on Jesus. No more questions and arguments. These miracles and increasing numbers of followers of Jesus is a serious religious and national problem. “What are we accomplishing? Here is this man performing many miraculous signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” Caiphas speaks for all the leadership when he says, “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

So, everyone is looking for him. Some to see more miracles and some to report him to the authorities. Some are expecting something big to happen and don’t want to miss it while others are determined to keep it from happening.

And then this scene where Jesus comes out of his retreat in Ephraim and arrives in Bethany where a dinner is being given in his honor. I wondered about this and looked up the word here. It is the Greek word for dinner or supper and there is no mention of it being done to honor him. However, even if it is look at the difference between friends giving a dinner in his honor and his reaction to the praise of men earlier.“Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, many people saw the signs he was performing and believed in his name.But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all people. He did not need any testimony about mankind, for he knew what was in each person.” And in chapter 5 he says, I do not accept praise from men – only the praise that comes from God.

So, this is not a dinner to make a big deal out of Jesus but simply a dinner to recognize the relationship between him and those to whom he is so close. After all, what would you do for someone who had just raised your brother from the dead?  How could they not honor him? It is one thing to be honored by a crowd as a celebrity and another to be rightfully thanked by those who know you the best.

Here we are then at the moment between two great events and Jesus chooses to risk capture and spend it with friends and disciples. And now something happens that is totally unexpected and met with surprise, delight, and offense.

Let me make four observations about the dinner in Bethany.

First observation: The posture of her giving

Even though the value of the gift may have been as much as $25,000 today, this is not a response to a campaign or a request for a major gift. It is completely out of the blue except it was part of God’s plan. “It was meant that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial.” It was an act of worship and extravagant love. The posture of genuine giving is on our knees and not as it is done too many times with the donor being recognized and held up. This is not the same as being anonymous. This was far from anonymous on her part. Just the opposite. It caught the attention of everyone. But it was done in humility and genuine worship.

Judas could have received all sorts of recognition for a gift that size and, no doubt, that was in his mind. This is the poverty of philanthropy – the desire for recognition. This is the difference between donations and worship. We include giving as part of the worship service but in the early church the offering was brought and put at the feet of the apostles. It was giving as worship that we do bent over on our knees. We may not be able to be on our knees physically when we give but we can be on our knees in our hearts.

Just as Mary’s perfume created a smell, so does worship include a scent whether we know it or not. Scripture is full of references to the smell of worship. God loves the scent of our worship and he is put off by the bad smell of religious activity. We probably miss something since we do not use any kind of smell in our worship. We see and hear but we have eliminated the smell of worship.

I’ve told the story before of Mrs. Saltonstall in Boston from a staunch Protestant family. She was the scandal of Boston when seen going to worship in a Catholic Church. When asked why she said, “When you cannot see and you cannot hear you need a religion you can smell.”

Judas had lost his sense of smell. He thought religion should be austere but not fill the room with fragrance. That was too extravagant by far.

Second observation: The right priority of the poor

Taking care of the poor is not the first priority – but it is the second. If we put our concern for the poor ahead of worship we will fall into the trap of spiritual dryness. If we do not worship first our hearts will, over time, become hard to God and hard to those we seek to serve.

Oswald Chambers wrote:

“Beware of outstripping God by your very longing to do His will. We run ahead of Him in a thousand and one activities, consequently we get so burdened with persons and with difficulties that we do not worship God, we do not intercede. If once the burden and the pressure come upon us and we are not in the worshipping attitude, it will produce not only hardness toward God but despair in our own souls. God continually introduces us to people for whom we have no affinity, and unless we are worshipping God, the most natural thing to do is treat them heartlessly, to give them a text like the jab of a spear, or leave them with a rapped-out counsel of God and go. A heartless Christian must be a terrible grief to our Lord.”

We need to stop our busyness that comes from our fear of being bored. Even our worship has to keep us distracted and busy moving from one activity to the next. Social action – whether it is working with the poor, the homeless, migrant workers or reforms of many kinds – may become just social activity. We cannot genuinely serve if we lose our own souls – and that is a constant possibility. We become not only weary in well- doing but hardened and disillusioned.

The third observation: The place of beauty

Judas had lost his capacity to see beauty, holiness and genuine love. All he could see was, “this should have been sold and the money given to the poor.” Without knowing it, he had become more impoverished in his soul than any of the poor in the world. The same can happen to us if we lose our perspective with all that is happening in the world today. God does not want us to hermetically seal off ourselves from the pain of the world but he does not want us to lose sight of the beauty and joy of the creation.

Look at the difference between William Wordsworth’s description of London and that of Charles Dickens. First, Wordsworth and then Dickens:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

And now Dickens:

“It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.” 

Both are accurate. Both are true. But focusing on the perspective of Dickens without the balance of Wordsworth will make us cynical and people with small souls. Two things keep us from seeing the beautiful more than anything else: Envy and resentment. When they get rooted in our lives they absorb and distort all our capacity for enjoyment in the midst of despair. That is a picture of this passage in a way. Between the dark threat of Caiphas and the coming storm of the trial and crucifixion there is this moment of friendship, extravagance and worship.

I hope I can look at the world with an eye to both but in the end say with Annie Dillard:

If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look, I see fire: that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

The last observation: the point of extravagance

The extravagance of God is from one extreme to another. On the one hand is the extravagance of the widow who gave until she had nothing left and Jesus praised her as an example. On the other is Mary who does not give everything but just as extravagantly. Both women have become examples of extravagance and as Jesus said in Luke’s account, “I tell you the truth, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

Extravagance is in the nature of God.

We read in the Psalms, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?”

Our galaxy (the Milky Way) contains hundreds of billions of stars and our star, the sun, is just one of them. There are hundreds of millions of known galaxies with each of them containing hundreds of billions of stars. One galaxy is at least 13 times larger than ours. That’s hundreds of billions times hundreds of millions. Would you call that extravagant?

Judas had lost his capacity to comprehend the extravagance of God. Don’t we at times? Mary had not. And here is the turning point for Judas. Here is the final step in another story that everyone will remember throughout the world. “Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them.”

Maybe that’s the lesson. What had happened to Judas over time and what had happened to Mary. She knew the posture of giving and Judas knew only self-righteous giving. She knew the place of beauty and Judas knew only the poverty of his own spirit. She knew the right priority of worship and Judas knew only the hardness of his own heart because he had forgotten how to worship. She was free to respond to the extravagance of God and the spirit of Judas had shrunk so small that it could not receive – it could only find fault.

Where are we this morning?

Are we givers of expensive gifts looking for recognition or are we on our knees with extravagant worship?

Have we become so busy with a thousand and one activities that our souls are shrunk or are we like trees that have been planted by streams of water?

Have we become what Wordsworth calls “dull of soul” through despair, grievance, resentment and complaining or are we still able to see “the beauty of the morning all bright and glittering in the smokeless air.”

Have we tried to replace an extravagant God with one who is cautiously moderate in all things or can we still experience the wonder of one who would give everything to the one who already owns billions of galaxies and trillions of stars – the one who needs nothing.

 

J