What Servants Do

[This was shared during midweek Lenten worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier this evening.]

Mark 14:3-9
Often, when I read about incidents from Jesus’ life, I try to get a clearer understanding of what’s going on by putting them into a modern context.

Take, for example, tonight’s Bible lesson. What if the honored guest wasn’t Jesus, circa 28 AD, but someone like Jim Tressel, Tom Hanks, or President Obama on a night like tonight in Logan, Ohio? (I’m not equating any of these people to Jesus, mind you. Jesus is true God and true man. But the people of Jesus’ day regarded Him as a celebrity, someone who might become their king. They didn’t know and, as we’ll be reminded during Holy Week, they didn’t want to see Jesus as God. But if He could further their ambitions for freedom from the Romans and material success, they were all for Him.)

So, there you are with Tressel, or Hanks, or the President at Lee’s Banquet Haus when suddenly, uninvited, a woman bursts through the doors. She breaks open a bottle of ointment and then, before anybody knows what to say or do, pours its contents onto the head of the important guest.

At the very least, I think that you and I would be shocked. For the followers of Jesus in that room in first century Judea, the action of the woman who burst upon and poured an expensive ointment called nard onto the head of Jesus was especially shocking. It would have shocked them at several levels.

First, they would have been shocked by the unexpectedness of the woman’s visit.

Second, they would have been taken aback by the unexpectedness of her action, especially in a culture in which woman and men were to have no public contact. (But, of course, if they'd recalled how Jesus constantly violated this social taboo, they would have realized then and there that Jesus upheld the equality of the sexes and disdained the taboos.)

Third, they would have been stunned by the unbelievable extravagance of the woman's gesture. There were no resealable bottles in those days. You could open a bottle of perfume or ointment only once and that was by breaking its stem.

The moment this woman opened the bottle, every person in the room would have caught a whiff of its aroma. Nard was made with a perennial herb imported from India, expensive. Our text says that this single bottle of nard was worth 300 denarii. One denarius was a day's wages for a labor. So, this one bottle would have been the result of a whole year's worth of work. We don't know if the woman who poured the ointment on Jesus' head was wealthy or if, maybe, the nard had come to her down through the generations of her family, a precious heirloom.

Whatever the woman's economic station and however the nard had come to her, some of the disciples sitting around the dinner table thought that if the woman were really devoted to Jesus, she would have sold the ointment and taken care of the poor.

But they got another shock. Jesus repudiates their anger. He sides with the woman with the ointment! One thing that Jesus tells them is commonly misunderstood. He tells the disciples, "You will always have the poor with you." Some think that in saying this Jesus was telling His followers to be insensitive to the needs of the poor, resigned to the needy always being needy. In fact, Jesus was saying that concern for the poor should be a constant of Christians. That's why I'm so excited about the plans our new Servanthood Team is making to bring relief and help to those in need here in our community!

Jesus also tells the angry disciples, “Let the woman alone. She has provided me with a great service. She’s gotten my body ready for burial.”

Right now, our 40-Days to Servanthood devotional readings are addressing the practical question of what servants of Jesus Christ do. In that same vain, what can we learn about what servants do from this woman whose service Jesus complimented?

First: Servants do what they can. Jesus said of the woman, “She has done what she could.” You know the story of the two men walking on a seashore. One man kept stopping to throw starfish that had washed up onto the beach back into the ocean. “Why do you do that?” his friend asked. “If I don’t,” explained the other, “they’ll die.” “But there are hundreds of starfish who wash up here. You can’t make a difference for all of them.” The man threw another starfish into the ocean and said, “Made a difference for that one.” The woman who poured ointment on the head of Jesus provided the service to Him that she could in that moment. In all the moments of our lives, we have the opportunity to do what we can to love God and love neighbor. It may make a difference in only one life. One whole life!

Second: Make honoring Jesus your aim. The woman with her ointment was willing to incur condemnation because she dared to give her first and best to Jesus. May we dare to be that ridiculous!

Third: Point to Jesus, not yourself. The woman with her nard, as we’ve said, was heedless of the opinions of others. She was focused on Jesus. She exemplified humility.

A few weeks ago, our daughter Sarah asked me how I would define humility. I told her that humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking less about yourself. (I even try to practice that preaching.)

A friend of Ann’s, Phil’s, Sarah's, and mine, Karen, pointed to Jesus, not herself. When she was dying of cancer at the age of 38, she volunteered to be our congregation’s vice president. When I asked if she realty wanted to do that, she told me, “I want to spend the rest of my life serving Jesus.” Certain of her place in Christ’s kingdom, Karen pointed to Jesus. That’s what servants do.

Of course, a life like this is only possible for those who belong to Jesus Christ. Living in the daily certainty that God is with us through each day and that He gives us life beyond these days, we can draw on the life and power of the Holy Spirit to help us be the servants of Christ our battered, hurting world so desperately needs.

Like the socially incorrect woman whose servant action Jesus extolled, we can be servants. It happens when we dare to do what we can, make honoring Jesus our aim, and point to Jesus not ourselves. Amen

[A bit of trivia: This just happens to be the 4000th. post on this blog, a bit of a milestone, I guess. Some posts have been nothing more than pointers to other articles or blog posts. But that 4000 number does include a lot of original writing done since my first post here on May 26, 2002. I've enjoyed it a lot, including getting to know so many great people who have visited here through the years. Thanks for dropping by!]