March 21, 2010
Overdoing It - John 12:1-8
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadA friend of mine told me one time that he lived in some apartments when he was young and he heard a commotion one afternoon. He went downstairs and noticed that this door to an apartment down there was open. He had a funny feeling about the whole thing, so he walked in the door, through the living room, down the hall, and finally found a woman lying down naked on her bathroom floor. She had been raped, and she was lying there terrified and helpless. He said the most amazing thing about that was the place had an odor. He swore to me that evil has a smell. Scientists tell us that of all our five sense, the sense of smell is most linked to memory.
Fortunately, most of the time, smell brings back a good memory. The preschool hallway here smells just like the hallway at Grace Christian School, where I went to preschool. I promise you that the last time I smelled that smell was in Mrs. Foy’s four year old class. I can still, after all these years, remember how my grandmother’s fried chicken smelled. Nobody has ever cooked it like she did, and I remember that smell very vividly. It’s funny how smell works.
Bethany had a odor to it, too. In the 11th Chapter of John, it had a horrible odor. Lazarus had just died. In fact he had been dead for 4 days. Jesus had shown up too little, too late, it appeared. Lazarus’ sister, Mary, said with tears in her eyes that his body had already developed an odor. It was an awful odor, and mostly a sad one. Death, I think, has a odor too, you know, and that was what Bethany smelled like.
Now Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, which obviously was something that only Jesus could do. But Mary, the same one who met Jesus earlier, did something very significant in Bethany, too. A few days after Lazarus had been raised, Jesus was back at Bethany, probably in in Lazarus’ house, eating supper with his disciples, when Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with this perfume. It was very fine perfume, worth a years’ wage. It would be similar to something like $30,000 today. It weighed a whole pound. She poured – she threw according to the Greek – the whole expensive, genuine pound of perfume on Jesus’ feet. The whole house, John writes, was filled with that fragrance. In just a matter of a few short days, actually in just a matter of one extravagant gesture, Bethany went from smelling like death to smelling like life.
I don’t think John is all that concerned about how the place smelled, but I do think that John uses that metaphorically to show us how Mary changed the place. Bethany went from a place of death to a place of life with her foolishly extravagant act. Mary did something that Mary, theoretically, should not have been able to do. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. Jesus brings life to things that have died. Only God can really change a place, or even a person, or even ourselves. But in this case, it seems to me, Mary did that. Mary was the very first person in the Gospel to embody the love that Jesus commanded of his disciples. In doing that, Mary did something extraordinary, almost super-human.
Do ya’ll think it’s possible to over-do your faith? I told you a few weeks ago about this girl who I knew in college who gave up her bed for Lent. That’s a little ridiculous to me. Giving up dark chocolate is one thing (which I haven’t done this year), but giving up your bed and sleeping on the cold floor is quite another. That’s overdoing it. Dietrich Bonheoffer was a German theologian who moved to the United States and taught at Union Seminary in New York. When Adolph Hitler took power, he felt that his faith beckoned him to go back home and oppose Hitler. Now people who opposed Hitler normally ended up in a gas chamber. Bonheoffer managed to bypass the gas chamber, but he did end up hanging from a noose. Now that’s overdoing it. I read a letter one time written to Martin Luther King that said if he didn’t leave town, then he and his family would be killed. I would have left town. King stayed. That’s overdoing it.
In the event that you don’t already know, the mighty Terriers of Wofford College made it to the NCAA tournament this year. Now there aren’t very many Wofford fans out there, but you all know one fan very well. I don’t know how many of ya’ll did this, but I would like to have seen you put just a little money on Wofford, not to win anything, but because you would making history. It’s hard for me to even get the words, “NCAA tournament and Wofford,” out of my mouth. Out of love and respect for yours truly and out of respect for history, you could have put $5 or $10 down on Wofford.
$100, now, would have been overdoing it. $1,000 or $10,000 would really be overdoing it. I love that place and all, but it’s a miracle that we even got there. Putting more than $10 on Wofford in the NCAA tournament is foolish. Putting $10,000 is completely ridiculous. That’s kind of, sort of, what Mary did. Except she put $30,000 on Jesus. This was six days before the Passover. So within two weeks of Mary dropping 30 grand on Jesus’ feet, he was dead. I wonder how she felt then. We knew this was going to happen. We have the gift of hindsight, of course, but Mary knew it, too, because she had half a brain. She knew what happened to people when they got on the wrong side of the Romans. They died. Why would she hedge her bets on Jesus? And why would she hedge that much? Why would she overdo it? Why would she drop 30 grand on Jesus’ feet? He’s not God, is he? Or is he?
You tell me. How much are you willing to bet? I have had this theory for a long time that I was never gutsy enough to try, until now, until I read this passage. The theory starts out with question. If it turned out that our faith is false, if Jesus really is not God, or if there is no God at all, what would we have lost? I know we would certainly have lost a lot of hope, maybe some trust, and assurance. But what tangible things would we have lost? Mary would have lost $30,000. What would he have lost? That’s the question. Here’s the theory. The answer correlates with our belief. If you would have lost a lot, then you believe a lot, and visa versa. You might never see that theory in a text book. I don’t know.
I do know this. God overdoes it for us. Most of the time, he loses on that investment. Yet he keeps on investing. He keeps on overdoing it. I have studied world religions to a very limited degree, and the one thing that I can say that separates the Christian God from all others is that our God overdoes it. The challenge of our faith is for us to overdo it. Are we willing to foolishly put it all on the line, too? Maybe God is calling you to become a missionary, for example, to sell your house, and uproot your family, and go to seminary, and leave the comfort of America behind and go to Africa. Or, maybe God is calling you to stand up to your boss. Maybe God is calling you not to take that promotion, or to move, or to take an unpopular stand. But what happens if you lose on all that? When God calls us, the stakes are always high. If we lose, we lose big time. And if we “win,” so to speak, then the only thing we really “win” is the knowledge that we were faithful.
I just finished reading this book on Karl Barth’s preaching. Karl Barth was a German theologian and was probably the most prominent theologian of the 20th Century. In fact, he was a mentor to Dietrich Bonheoffer. If you read his sermons, he is absolutely adamant that God saves us, and that we do absolutely nothing in that salvation. The problem with that, of course, is that our actions don’t matter, in theory. The irony of Karl Barth’s life is that though he emphatically believed that our salvation, our hope, our standing with God is something that God himself alone determines, even though he really believed that hymn, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,” even though he really believed that he was a poor little wretch who was saved only through God’s grace, only through God’s overdoing it, he did more with his life, because of that belief, than just about anybody in the last hundred years. He stood up toe to toe to Adolph Hitler, like Bonheoffer who I mentioned before. Because he believed that God had overdone it, so to speak, he felt compelled to overdo it, too. And that’s what I think we have to do. We believe that the God who created this vast universe that we can’t even comprehend came down here as one of us. Out of the millions of planets in the universe, God came to this one. And out of the millions of creatures on this planet, God became one of us. He lived for us. He died for us. He rose for us. God has satisfied our most imminent and pertinent problem. God has overdone it. Now I don’t know what that belief is calling you do to with your life. But I do know this. That’s a very big belief. Sow whatever it’s calling you to do, it has to be something big.
So go out there and overdo it somehow. Do something just completely unheard of, like give you whole life, lock, stock, and barrel to God. Your finances, your profession, your hope, your ambition, your dreams, your worries, your relationships…, all of it. The Good News of Jesus Christ is that God has given himself to us. The challenge of that Good News is for us to give ourselves, too. That’s a lot to ask, I know. And if we’re wrong about the whole thing, then it’s a lot to lose. But we’re not wrong. Well, I don’t guess we are. How much are we willing to bet?
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
