Belonging to Jesus

[0:00] The scripture reading this morning is from the book of Mark, chapter 14. So we've been reading week by week through different sections of the book of Mark, and now Mark 14 is the beginning of what they call the passion narrative.

[0:17] So we're in the last moment of Jesus' life now. We're going to read Mark 14, verses 1 to 11.

[0:30] It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, that is, Jesus.

[0:48] For they said, Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people. And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly.

[1:05] And she broke the flask and poured it over his head. There were some who said to themselves indignantly, Why was the ointment wasted like that?

[1:15] For this ointment could have been sold for more than 300 denarii and given to the poor. And they scolded her. But Jesus said, Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her?

[1:26] She has done a beautiful thing for me. For you always have the poor with you. And whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. She has done what she could.

[1:38] She has anointed my body beforehand for burial. And truly I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.

[1:50] Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him. And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money. And he sought an opportunity to betray him.

[2:04] Amen. This is God's word. So if Mark 14 has a single theme, the whole chapter, it's the abandonment of Christ.

[2:16] Because at the very beginning, you have Judas Iscariot leaving Jesus and betraying him. And the chapter ends with Peter saying, I never knew Jesus.

[2:28] And all in between, the disciples are falling away. But here at the outset of all of that abandonment, you have a surprise. You have this woman, this nameless woman, who instead of running away from Jesus, comes toward him.

[2:43] And the bigger surprise than that in the passage is that Jesus accepts her. He calls her to come forward. Because everyone around Jesus is telling this woman she has done wrong.

[2:58] Mark tells us that everyone who saw what she did, they were indignant with her. They rebuked her. And yet Jesus tells this woman that what she has done is not just okay, but it's good.

[3:10] And it's actually the proof that she belongs to Jesus. The way he puts it was, her name will always be associated with me wherever the gospel is told.

[3:22] And, you know, as Christians, we believe that one of, that the best thing you can find in life, the best hope that you can have, the best blessing you can find in life, is to belong to Jesus. You know, whenever Paul in Romans talks about what it means to be a Christian, one of the ways, one of the phrases he uses to describe it is he says, Christians are those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.

[3:44] And like any relationship, belonging to Jesus is not just about entering into the relationship. It's about living in that relationship in such a way that it changes you.

[3:59] So that whatever else is going on in your life outside, you can say, I will be okay because I belong to Jesus. And so what we want to talk about this morning is about belonging to Jesus.

[4:12] How do you know it? And what I want to give is two trademarks of someone who belongs to Jesus that you see in this passage. Trademarks of what it means to belong to Jesus. And the first one is this.

[4:25] People who belong to Jesus love Jesus according to his work. People who belong to Jesus love Jesus according to his work. And, you know, it may sound like a surprise, but that's the message of the passage, because everything that this woman does seems disproportionate.

[4:41] It's not according to work. It's all out of whack. And when Mark tells the story, it's almost like the way he tells it, he wants you to know what this woman did is kind of crazy.

[4:52] You know, can you believe this lady? Because he says, you know, first he says, this is not just any oil. He says, this is nard oil. And nard, I didn't know this, but you find this when you read the books. Nard oil is oil that comes from the Himalayas.

[5:06] And so to get it to Israel would have been a huge expense. And so he says it's nard oil, and then he follows it up by saying, very expensive. And then later he says, this bottle of oil was so expensive, you could have sold it for 300 denarii.

[5:22] And if you've got a footnote in your Bible, it probably says that that's close to a year's salary for an average worker. And then when she pours it over his head, Mark makes the point of saying that she breaks the bottle.

[5:35] So there's kind of this, you get this sense of kind of a reckless abandonment, not away from Jesus, but to Jesus. And everyone around says, what a waste, what a waste. How could she have done all this at once?

[5:47] And there's all kinds of backstory that you would love to know. Maybe this was this woman's family heirloom that she had had for generations. It was probably her greatest treasure. And the disciples are sitting there doing the math in their heads, and they're saying, how many mouths could we have fed with that oil?

[6:06] How many people could we have fed? How much good could we have done for the poor? And you know what that's like, right? When you see someone buy that really expensive car, and you think, I could have done better with that money.

[6:20] You know, you see someone buy a luxury item, and you say, oh, we could have, think of what we could have done with that money. And it's always the case that we always happen to know what should have been done with the money.

[6:32] And that's what the disciples are like here. And yet Jesus looks at her, and he says that it was the right thing to do. So what's, you know, what's the rub here?

[6:42] Because I kind of, I sympathize with the disciples. Give the money to the poor. Don't waste a year's salary in one moment. But what Jesus is saying here in this passage is he's saying, it's what the woman did was not a statement about what she thought about the poor.

[6:57] She wasn't denigrating the poor. What she was doing was she was saying, it was about the love of Jesus. She saw Jesus as so precious, as so wonderful, as so lovely, that he was worth her greatest gift.

[7:15] And no one else in the world was worthy of it. He alone was worthy of it. And Jesus says she was right to do it. And you could say the disciples' problem was the exact opposite. The problem wasn't that they cared too much about the poor.

[7:29] It's that they didn't see in Jesus someone that was worthy of such an extravagant gift. They didn't see Jesus as worthy. But the woman, what does the woman do here?

[7:41] What is she doing? She's loving Jesus according to his worth. And it shows that she belongs to Jesus. You know, I think one of the dangers that all of us face in the Christian life, especially in a context where everyone around you says that we're a Christian, is the danger of moderation.

[7:58] You know, the world tells us it's okay to love Jesus. Just don't love Jesus too much. Don't be weird.

[8:10] Don't make a scene. Don't be irresponsible. Don't be what I've heard called a Bible thumper. Don't be like that. It's okay to love Jesus, but don't love him too much. You know, for example, you know, how many parents would be so happy to hear that their children, their grown children were in church every single Sunday, right?

[8:31] They'd be thrilled to know their kids went to church every Sunday. But how many of those same parents would be happy to hear that their child decided to go bring their ministry to the inner city, a very unsafe place, or their children decided to go to the Congo to be missionaries.

[8:50] You know, then all of a sudden the parents say, you don't have to do that. Don't be crazy. You know, it's not, it's not safe. In a situation like that, the question is about Jesus's work.

[9:04] And it's a practical question. You know, I knew when I was living in Jackson, I knew a pastor, I used to work with one who was a long time missionary overseas. And he said that one time he came home to visit his, his mother and father.

[9:20] And just before they were about to fly back overseas, the missionary is, is in, he's just shattered. He's in tears. He can't, he can't stand the idea of saying goodbye to his mom one more time.

[9:33] And he said that just as they were about to get onto the airplane, his mother looks at him and grabs him by the arm and says, the lamb is worthy. The lamb is worthy.

[9:45] She saw in Jesus, some, someone that was so worthy, but it was even worth letting your kids and your grandkids go for his sake.

[9:58] And, you know, I think the best question to ask of a passage like this, well, this passage in particular is not, what is my alabaster jar? What is, what is the big sacrifice that God wants me to make?

[10:11] I think the better question to ask is how worthy is Jesus? How worthy is Jesus to me? Do I see Jesus as worthy as this woman saw Jesus, that she would give up her most costly treasure for his sake?

[10:30] That's how worthy she saw him. You could argue, I think that the, all the, all the abandonment of chapter 14, the fact that every disciple walks away from Jesus, at least for a time, it's all because for a moment, at least some permanently, but for a moment, they lost sight of Jesus's worth.

[10:51] They lost sight of what he was worth to them. Judas, Judas lost sight of that permanently. And he got to a point in life, having followed Jesus for three years, he got to a point where he was, he said in his heart, whether he realized it or not, I would rather have money than have Jesus.

[11:09] And he, and he took that choice. He said, I'll give up Jesus to get money. And if you know the story of Judas, that ended up costing him everything, but he lost sight of Jesus's worth.

[11:22] And every single disciple faces a similar dilemma. I mean, maybe Peter said to himself in his moment of panic, just the next day or two later, maybe he said to himself, I love Jesus and Jesus is worth a lot to me, but he is not worth my life.

[11:39] Maybe that was the calculation he made in his head when he said, I've never known Jesus. But by the end of his life, he got to a point where he said, he's worth everything. He's even worth my life if that's what it took.

[11:50] Right? So talking about what is Jesus worth to me can be really abstract. You know, I can ask you, what is Jesus worth to you? And you can say, Jesus is worth everything to me.

[12:01] Or you can say he's worth the whole world to me, but that's not how life comes at us. Life presents us with dilemmas that are way more specific and way more hard. You know, for example, is Jesus worth losing money in this business deal?

[12:16] Because I won't sacrifice my ethics for the sake of Jesus. For Jesus' sake, I won't sacrifice my ethics. Is Jesus worth waking up every single Sunday and coming to worship him?

[12:29] Is he worth that much? He's worth everything, but is he worth that? Is Jesus worth taking that risk of awkwardness, of talking to your neighbor about Jesus?

[12:40] Is he worth feeling the awkwardness that you know is going to come from that? Is he worth losing a relationship over? Is he worth the pain of fighting a sin that has gotten into your life?

[12:52] And you say, if I'm going to confront this, it's going to hurt. Is he worth fighting that sin? The dilemma about what is Jesus worth is not just abstract.

[13:05] It's a dilemma that faces every single one of us every single week. And now just as a side note, you know, Jesus makes a point here that you actually cannot love him like this woman loved him because he says, I'm not always going to be here.

[13:19] And so his body's not here. So you can't, you can't bring the alabaster jar to Jesus. And I'd like to say you could bring it to the church and it'll be the same thing, but it's not. Jesus says, I won't always be here.

[13:31] And when, when John Calvin wrote about this passage, one of the things that he said, which kind of struck me was, he said, if you want to make a sacrifice today, the way to do it is not to give money to your church so you can have a fancier service.

[13:45] He actually, he says that. He says, the way to do it is to give your money to the poor because that's who is still with you. And that's who Jesus has called you to serve. But it's a question of love.

[13:57] It's a question of, how do you see Jesus? Is he worthy? The older theologians, when they used to talk about sin, they talked about sin, they called sin a problem of disordered loves.

[14:11] And C.S. Lewis made this really popular last century. And his idea was, when you sin, what's going on is you're loving something, you're loving things that you should love, but you're loving them in the wrong order.

[14:24] So for instance, maybe you, you, you work really hard and God has made you to work and he's made you to, to, to work hard in your job and to love the, to find satisfaction in work.

[14:35] And, but so often it's the case that ambition really takes over, right? And suddenly you begin sacrificing every other part of your life, for work, even your relationship to God for work.

[14:47] And what's happening there? You're loving something that's okay to love, but you're putting it in the wrong place. You're putting it even above God. And the problem is not just that in a situation like that, you're not giving your due to God.

[14:59] It's that, um, anything that we love in the way that we're supposed to love God will destroy us because it can't love us back the way God can love us back. G.K. Chesterton, G.K. Chesterton, a famous writer of the last century, a Catholic writer.

[15:16] He wrote, he said, he said, the young man who rings on the doorbell of the brothel, whether he knows it or not, unconsciously, he is looking for God. It's a way of saying, all of us are looking for the greatest satisfaction we can find.

[15:32] And anywhere that we go to besides God to find our greatest satisfaction will leave us longing and broken people. And the reason Jesus treats this woman as exemplary, as, as worthy of looking at and saying, this is wonderful, is because this woman has her loves in the right order.

[15:53] She gives the greatest part of who she is to the person that is the most worthy of that love, the most worthy of who she is. And that's all Jesus is asking of us in the gospel.

[16:06] Give your love for the thing that's most, that's most worthy of your love. And I think that's an invitation. You know, if you look at your life and you say, I think my loves are all out of whack and I give my loves to the wrong place.

[16:20] What the gospel says in the first place is just come and look at Jesus, come and see who he is. And the more you look at him, the more you will be transformed by who he is and it will change you.

[16:31] And you will begin to love him naturally. So that's the first point. But the second point is this, what's a trademark of someone who belongs to Jesus? The second trademark is this, briefly.

[16:43] People who belong to Jesus, they receive Jesus' love. People who belong to Jesus receive Jesus' love. You know, did you notice when Jesus talks to the disciples about what this woman has done, he does this thing where he interprets her gift to him as a response of his love to her.

[17:06] So you see it in verse eight. He says, she has done what she could. She has anointed my body beforehand for burial. Now, a lot of people, when they look at this passage, they wonder, did this woman really mean that?

[17:20] You know, when she anointed his body, was it really, was she intending to anoint his body for burial? Cause that's pretty dark. And we don't know. We don't know. But what we do know is that Jesus wants us to see the gift in that way.

[17:33] He's saying, this is how she needs to interpret that gift and how we need to interpret as a preparation for Jesus' own death. That's what the gift means. And by this point in the book of Mark, you should know this is typical of Jesus.

[17:46] Jesus is at a normal event. You know, notwithstanding this woman who's done something kind of crazy. This is just a normal evening. And here comes Jesus one more time saying in the middle of everything, he just says, now, remember, I'm going to die.

[18:00] So morbid. And he keeps bringing it up. And this time it's not just verbal. It's visual. He says, this oil that's on me, I am being prepared. My, my corpse is being prepared for death right now in front of you.

[18:14] And it's morbid. And yet in the same breath, Jesus talks about good news. Right on the edge of his death. He says, truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel, and you know, the gospel is just a Greek word for good news.

[18:30] Wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. Isn't that amazing? That even when Jesus's future weighed the heaviest on him, he could still see the bigger picture.

[18:46] You know, he's about to experience incredible suffering. And yet he can still see his death as good news. And it's, and it's, it's good news because it's not death without purpose.

[18:58] It's death for something. And it's death for someone. And so Jesus is saying, this woman is giving me a gift, but she's preparing me for the gift that I'm going to give to her.

[19:09] And, you know, I think a mistake you could make when you're reading this passage, if you're trying to say, what does this tell me about Christianity? One of the mistakes would be to say, all right, so you bring your gift to Jesus.

[19:21] And then Jesus, if he accepts it, he'll give you a gift. You know, that's not what the gospel says. The gospel says, we love because he loved us first.

[19:33] We love because he has first loved us. And that's kind of the point that Jesus is making here because Jesus planned his redemption long before this woman ever made a gift to him. And he's saying her gift to me is really just the final step of his gift to her.

[19:49] He's preparing to give something to her. And what does that mean? I'm coming to a close here. What do we do with this? It's so simple. And yet it's so easy to lose sight of the fact that the bedrock of the gospel, the bedrock of our belonging to Jesus, is in his love.

[20:11] It's in what he has done for us before we could do anything for ourselves. We love because he first loved us. Paul says, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us at the right time.

[20:23] And we, in just a few minutes, all of us, most of us are about to come down here and we're going to take communion. We're going to receive the body and the blood of Christ symbolically. And that's a message to us about what the gospel is.

[20:38] Everything that we do for Christ, everything that we do in the name of Christ, is never to secure Christ's love for us. It's always our response to the love that he has shown to us in the first place.

[20:49] You know, there are, when you read about this woman in all the, in all the books and all the commentaries and all the historians, what you find out is that there are rumors about this woman.

[21:00] Some people say that this woman was most likely a prostitute. If this story is the same story that Luke is talking about in Luke seven, Luke chapter seven, then this woman was a prostitute.

[21:13] And that was such a jarring image for the Pharisees when they saw it, that they said, how can Jesus allow this woman to even come close to her? And the reason that he can allow it, we don't know who she was, but we know she was a sinner, right?

[21:29] The reason Jesus can allow a sinner to approach him is not because she has proven herself worthy. It's because he has chosen to love a sinner.

[21:41] The great paradox of the gospel, one of the great paradoxes of the gospel is that we are called to love Jesus according to his worth. And yet Jesus loves us, even though the gospel says we were not worthy of his love.

[21:56] And all you can do when you hear that is you can say, you can either accept it or you can walk away from it, but you can't earn it. So the gospel this morning is the invitation. Can you accept the love of Jesus Christ, who has been anointed for burial to die for you?

[22:12] Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we do praise you for the gospel. We praise you for what Jesus Christ has done for us. Let us never trivialize it. Let us never minimize it.

[22:22] Let us see its full weight and let that full weight bear itself out in who we are and in what we do. In your son's name we pray. Amen.