It is amazing that we do what’s good right but miss what’s best. This is a problem not only for parrot owners, but for parents as well. We may provide for our children as we work extended hours and in jobs which take a toll on our lives - so much so that we lose touch with them. It’s a problem not just for parents, but for each of us any time in our life when we go about our lives forgetting the God we serve. We can be so busy being moral, so caught up in doing good that we easily forget who and what we are is derived from God. We neglect the one we are to serve. The problem of misspent priorities is seen in our passage this morning as we look at Matthew 26. 1. When Jesus had finished saying all these things, he said to his disciples, 2. "As you know, the Passover is two days away--and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified." 3. Then the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, 4. and they plotted to arrest Jesus in some sly way and kill him. 5. "But not during the Feast," they said, "or there may be a riot among the people." 6. While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, 7. a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table. 8. When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. "Why this waste?" they asked. 9. "This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor." 10. Aware of this, Jesus said to them, "Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 11. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. 12. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. 13. I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her." 14. Then one of the Twelve--the one called Judas Iscariot--went to the chief priests 15. and asked, "What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?" So they counted out for him thirty silver coins. 16. From then on Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over. We are at the beginning of the end of Matthew’s story about Jesus. The previous 25 chapters all point to these final three. Nothing which was said up to this point would make any sense unless understood in light of what is about to transpire. Everything about Jesus focuses on this final event: His passion, that is, His suffering and death. Jesus’s priority is His passion. The passage begins with the summary statement: “When Jesus had finished saying all these things.” As Matthew arranged his story about Jesus’ life, he grouped Jesus’ teachings together. The sermon on the mount, the sending of the first missionaries, talking about the church, the parables are grouped together. All that is now over. What He has said will be made more clear by what He does. The Passover is two days away. This is Tuesday night. In the last few days much has happened as He entered Jerusalem on Sunday, cleared it out on Monday, fought with the religious leaders that day and then on Tuesday described the destruction of Jerusalem. It is important to remember that the Passover was one of the crucial holy days on the Jewish calendar. People from all over the world gathered in Jerusalem that week. Josephus, the Jewish historian in the first century, says that the city swelled to over three million as pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem each spring. The Passover celebrated God’s passing over each house in Egypt which had the blood of a sacrificial lamb spread over the doors and on the door posts of each home. That night, over a thousand years before, the first born of the Egyptians died while the Jewish sons were spared, all because of a substitute. Jesus was to be the final substitute. While Jesus prepares His disciples for His death, another group in town are likewise making preparations. The chief priests and elders, the leaders with whom Jesus has been in conflict for the past several years have had enough. They gather in the High Priest’s palace, trying to figure some way to arrest Jesus and then kill Him. The one thing they must avoid are the crowds. It was usual for the Jews to punish criminals at the public festivals; but in this case they were afraid of an insurrection, as our Lord had become very popular. Attention is shifted once again back to Jesus. Unlike the leaders gathered in a palace, Jesus is enjoying a meal in the house of Simon the Leper. We don’t know much about this fellow. He may have been a leper who was healed by Jesus. John’s account in John 12 says that Lazarus was there along with Martha and Mary. Then an unusual event takes place. A woman (John says it is Mary) brings an alabaster jar of expensive perfume and pours it on His head. Alabaster is a white translucent stone from Egypt. The contents of this jar was expensive perfume. Mark says it is spikenard, a fragrance from India, worth 300 denarii. Most laborers earned a denarius a day, so this was a year’s salary. This ain’t the cheap stuff from Walmart. She poured it over His head. This fragrance is not an oily or sticky substance, but would evaporate quickly, filling the room with a sweet smell, something appreciated in a hot climate without the advantages of people bathing or owing a Maytag washer. It was common practice to offer oil to a visitor, but that was often an inexpensive oil. Mary goes way beyond common practice. For her, Jesus was not a run-of-the-mill visitor. The disciples can’t believe their eyes: “What a waste!” They perhaps thought Jesus would applaud their holy indignation over such extravagance. It was earlier in the day that He explained how when we show compassion on those who are hungry, thirsty, strangers or in prison, that we show compassion to Christ. If it is important to show mercy to the poor, why waste money like this? Now, that sounds not only like a logical argument, but a very benevolent and worthwhile one. The trouble is their priorities are all wrong. They seem to know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. They are like the pet shop owner, intent on doing good, but forgetting the best. Their values were topsy-turvy. The story is told of a man who loved old books. He met an acquaintance who had just thrown away a Bible that had been stored in the attic of his ancestral home for generations. "I couldn't read it," the friend explained. "Somebody named Guten- something had printed it." "Not Gutenberg!" the book lover exclaimed in horror. "That Bible was one of the first books ever printed. Why, a copy just sold for over two million dollars!" His friend was unimpressed. "Mine wouldn't have brought two dollars. Some fellow named Martin Luther had scribbled all over it in German." We all too easy find our priorities wrong. What is valuable to God is worthless to us. What we consider precious, God looks at as something of little use. The diamond commercial which has been on for several years illustrates this strange ordering of priorities. Wanting us to realize that diamonds are forever, have you noticed that in the commercial the people are but shadows, it is only the diamonds which are real? But when I give a diamond (if I were to give one) it is the person who should be real. That is what matters. Jesus responds: “Why are you bothering her?” Literally: “why are you beating her up?” It is so hard for some people to allow others' liberty for their own personalities to express themselves. While the disciples were fixated on the waste, Jesus was more concerned about her hurt. The disciples were concerned about the irresponsible use of money, but Jesus was upset over the irresponsible use of a person. But then Jesus says something that seems so callous: “The poor you’ll always have with you.” It seems to contradict what he said he said earlier in chapter 25. This statement has often been misused, as if to say, "Don’t worry about poor people, they’ll always be plenty of them." It is unfortunate when the church takes a cavalier attitude toward those in need and tries to justify it by Jesus’ words. What Jesus is saying is not ignore the poor, but remember the priority, keep in mind the proper order. He quotes from Deuteronomy 15:11. Rather than a casual dismissal of the poor as something that will always be around, He is pointing the disciples to the proper priority as to how we can reach the poor. Deuteronomy 15 commands us to reach out to the poor, not to ignore them. Too often we are like the woman buying all the accessories for her parakeet, but we forget the food. We rush about doing good in God’s name, but forget God. Last week I had the opportunity to spend time with a fellow who works with issues of poverty none of us understand. John Macy works in Sao Paulo Brazil with street children. These are kids, 7,8,9 whose parents have thrown them out of the house. There isn’t enough food, the mom has a new boyfriend and the kids are seen as a nuisance. When John began this work ten years ago, he asked around why some churches seem to succeed in working with the poor and others have failed. He spoke with a Pentecostal pastor who said that years ago all the mainline American churches came to work with the poor and brought with them loads of money and wonderful programs. But in time the money dried up and the programs vanished. The poor left the churches when the money left, for they thought that is what the church was all about. But, the Pentecostal pastor added, we Pentecostals never had any money - all we had was Jesus. And the people remained. What John realized was that far too often we place the social action before the gospel, at times even in place of it. John knows what it means to provide a necessary social ministry to the poor. He does. He doesn’t just tell the kids Jesus died for sinners like them. No he provides housing and education. But, in the front of it all is the gospel. Mary understood the order; she prepared Christ for His burial. It was customary to prepare bodies after they die, but in the case of those who would die a criminal death, people would often do some of the preparation before hand. Jesus had repeatedly told His followers He would die. They repeatedly either ignored his warnings or misunderstood what he said. But she understood that all worship must start with an understanding of Christ’s death. All service toward others only has meaning when viewed with respect to the Cross. The passion of Christ, His suffering for us, gives meaning to our actions. Actions without the Cross are empty. It is not uncommon for people to consider prayer and reading Scripture a waste of time when there is so much which needs to be done. People may want to gut the Christian faith of all but the moral, for that serves a common good for society. Thomas Jefferson published an edited version of the Gospels, having removed all the supernatural and those aspects which he felt served no benefit to the reader, like the resurrection. What was kept were the wise sayings. But Christianity is more than wise sayings or proverbial wisdom as to how to live. Christianity is fundamentally how we should live, but how Christ lived for us, and died for us. A parent in one church expressed concern that her kids were not being taught well; I inquired to find out what the problem seemed to be. Her concern was that too much time was spent on theology, on who God is and what Christ did, and not enough time on how to say no to drugs. I tried to explain that without the former, the later makes no sense. We can’t have a Christian faith if we remove Christ and His work on the cross from it. We respond to the needs in the world only as we clearly understand that we are made in the image of God and that as stewards of God’s creation we have a mandate to help others. We can respond to the needs around us when we realize that Christ’s death for us gives us a message to share, a message of hope. This kind of ordering of our message and our work will often meet with criticism much like this woman received. Just as Christ tolerated this woman’s extravagant display of devotion rather than make a statement in the community with the money from the perfume, so the church has often been ridiculed for having a weak hand-holding ministry to “old ladies” at the expense of a strong fist-shaking ministry against established powers, of being weakly pastoral rather than strongly prophetic. If we are not careful, the mind of Judas can grip socially sensitive Christians and lead to apostasy. We can become active, but empty. This was too much for Judas. What was it that frustrated Judas? It may have been frustrated ambition. Judas wanted glory, honor, and greatness, but Jesus’ constant references to His death and burial depressed Judas and convinced him that Jesus was a loser, not a winner. What kind of help to him is a Christ who can’t do anything else but let himself be anointed by a mere woman, a "groupie." We are never really told what the reason is Judas decided that night to go from the house of a leper to the High Priest’s Palace - but what is interesting is that he does so for 30 pieces of silver. That was the price to be paid for a slave who is gored by a bull, a price that was rather inconsequential. We can see how low Jesus had sunk in Judas’ mind, when he was willing to turn Him in for so little. But what have we betrayed Jesus for? What have we willingly traded so that we might find our lives more comfortable, when faced with the choice of a life focusing on His death or the more glamorous activity done without reference to His death for us. This passage so well describes us. We believe more or less rightly. We behave more or less ethically. We have priorities, but they are skewed. We lack the zeal, fire and enthusiasm this woman displayed in her worship of Christ. Her worship was focused on His death; she considered nothing too great to spend to honor His death for her. We are so consumed by the good, that we forget the best. What best have you forgotten this week? Have you spent your time trying to be good without the God who will declare you to be good? Do you find the stress in the Bible on Christ’s work on the Cross to be wearing, redundant, meaningless? If so, you are buying accessories for a dead canary. To try to be a Christian without Christ’s death is not only useless, it is foolish. But there is good news. Jesus died for fools like you and me. |
