Jesus Anointed at Bethany, Jesus Comes to Jerusalem as King, & Jesus Predicts His Death | John 12:1-36

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

Good morning, friends. Morning. Morning, Alex. If you’re visiting, my name’s Alex. I’m one of the pastors here. And I’d like to start today maybe in an unusual fashion with a note on the art. Of preaching. So many of you who’ve sat in church for many years will have heard more sermons than you can count.

And then a smaller number of us have delivered more sermons than we can count, and then the rest of us may be somewhere in between. One of the interesting things about preaching is this sermons, someone wise said to me once are like love letters. Maybe you’ve written a love letter to someone. You sat down and penned some of the deepest thoughts of your heart, and then this person read those thoughts and knew for this moment how you felt about them.

But we assume that the reason for writing the letter is for the person who receives it, when in actual fact it’s written for the person who writes it. The person who writes it gets to share all of their deepest thoughts, gets to reveal something locked inside them, and just occasionally sermons become like love letters.

They are for the people listening, but sometimes their most for the people giving the sermon. Sometimes God just catches you off guard and suddenly this thing becomes, oh, this hit me in a deeper way. I preach about 40 sermons a year, maybe more. And so sometimes if I’m honest, they breeze over the top of me and then sometimes in the process they catch me off guard and it hits you there deep in the chest.

So today is definitely about you. But it’s also weirdly about me, and we all have to be okay with that. That leads me to a second idea about sermons. That, that is also unusual Sometimes the point of a sermon of a teaching is to tell us something new, to reveal something we haven’t heard before, and then sometimes it’s simply to remind us.

To remind us as followers of Jesus, of the thing that it’s so easy to forget in this world, and so we get to do that today. Today, what I hope this helps you do is it reminds you what it is to follow Jesus and how central that becomes in your life. Yeah. I hope it reminds us that in the midst of all the things that this world might offer, there is this one thing that is central.

And that makes it awfully convenient that today we also come to this table. We come to this table that is called mass. It’s called Eucharist. It’s called the Lord’s Table Communion, but really might be called gratitude. It’s a place where we come and we get to be thankful. So in light of that let’s head into this passage in a way that I hope makes sense.

Have you ever given an extravagant gift, done something that you expected to catch the person’s heart to just be a beautiful moment where they got lost in your brilliance of gift giving? Maybe it was an engagement ring. That you presented. You have this moment where you’d saved up for months and you presented this ring to your hopefully fiance.

Hopefully you got the right answer and maybe you didn’t get this stare and this expectation of, ah, thought the diamond would be bigger. Is the not more you could have done extravagant gifts have a long and glorious history across. Humanity. When you look at the rich and famous people have given yachts to loved ones.

People have given incredibly expensive stones. I learned that from Titanic. I assume it was a true story. People have given buildings in the name of love. This is the Taj Maha, perhaps the most extravagant gift of all time. Something that a man gave to his soon to be wife as a testament to his love. But most of the time gifts have this surprising limit.

They hit the limit that we’re willing to give and I tried to figure out what that might be and I guess the answer might be the one given in scripture in a book called Esther. And then the king asked, what is it? Queen Esther, what is your request? Even up to half the kingdom, it will be given to you.

Not more than half. Not the whole kingdom, but you can half of what I’ve got, which maybe leads to a second question, not just have you given an extravagant gift, but have you ever given a gift you couldn’t afford? I am not talking now about putting it on a credit card. Technically, you can afford that.

You got the line of credit. I’m not talking about that kind of gift, but I’m talking about a gift that wipes out the bank balance that leaves you with zero left. Most of us don’t give gifts like that. We’re too wise, we’re too convinced that we need the security in the future. In fact, amongst us, the only ones that give gifts beyond the level of just extravagant all the way through to a Simply Unaffordable are children.

Children are the ones that are wired to empty. The piggy bank, they take the money, they dump it on the floor, and they say, I’m gonna buy Mom the dream present for her birthday. Now because they don’t have much money. That’s not usually a dream present, but it’s everything that they have. They are wired to be more than extravagant.

They’re wired to just give it all. Today’s story is a passage around generosity. It starts there. At least it starts with a woman who gives a gift that is beyond. Extravagant, a gift that might be described as simply everything that she has. And so to help us, I’ve broken this passage that we just heard into three different scenes.

It will help us hopefully track with where we’re going. And so here we go. Scene one, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. The fact that we get to read that statement with a straight face is extraordinary, right? We follow the guard who walked on Earth and raised people from the dead, and last week we got to hear Diego, our friend from Costa Rica.

Just share beautifully about what this story means and pull the heartbeat out and show it to us. Lazarus now sits at a table with Jesus who raised him from the dead. This surprisingly to us, doesn’t mean that the floodgates open and everybody in the world starts following Jesus. Maybe that would be the natural assumption.

Jesus has pressed, progressed through miracle after miracle. He’s gone from healing the sick. He’s gone from healing a man who was lame for 32 years. He’s now given sight to a man who was born blind and now finally the most exquisite miracle. The most hard miracle to do. He’s raised someone from the dead, but surprisingly, it simply brings more opposition.

John 1149, just before this, we read this than one of them named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, nothing at all. You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than the whole nation. Perish. Now he doesn’t see, he’s not saying what he seems to be saying here.

We might assume that he’s actually talking about the beauty of sacrifice and the fact that Jesus might be the lamb of God that came, that John describes and he might give his life for the world. He’s saying simply, we should get this man out the way. He’s a risk to all of us. Maybe the Romans. These over rulers will come and take everything that we have.

You’d expect a miracle like resurrection to change the game for everybody to begin to come and follow Jesus. But for these guys, it’s simply brings more opposition. Jesus arrives back in the area of Jerusalem and a dinner is given in His honor. This was common practice of the day, or when there was a big festival in town.

The religious leaders in different areas would make their way to Jerusalem for a festival, and people would throw them dinners. But more than just a religious leader. Now, Jesus has done something so incredible that of course there is a dinner in his honor, and we get to read about the people that participate in this dinner and they fall into the actions that we might expect knowing something about them.

We’ve heard about Martha from other stories, in other narratives of Jesus life, and Martha, as we might expect from those stories, is serving. And Lazarus now finds himself reclining at a table with a one who raised him from the dead. What does that conversation look like? What do you say to the one who raised you from the dead?

Thank you. Maybe is on the list, but maybe more awkward questions. Could you not have fixed the knee that made it hard to walk the hip? Could have done with some work as well. Did you have to bring me back exactly as I am now? There’s still some temperament issues going on. Still some character deficiencies that my wife has noticed.

My friends have noticed that you could surely have wiped out in this moment of being raised from the dead. The fact that Lazarus sits there exactly as he was before actually points to a detail. That we often miss. We use the term resurrection for what Lazarus experiences, but it’s not really resurrection.

Not yet. He’s been resuscitated, he’s been returned to life, but this is not what we’ll celebrate just a couple of weeks away in this timeline. Seven or eight weeks away in our timeline. It’s not Easter, it’s not resurrection, but it’s still a miracle beyond anything anyone has experienced. And now Lazarus and Jesus sit at a table and not only can we imagine what he must think, but what does everybody else think and do?

You’re uniquely placed you a sat at a table with a man who was raised from the dead and. The man that did the raising. This is this moment here, Martha serving Lazarus, reclining and Jesus with them. And then the third character enters Mary, who he also heard about in one of the other narratives, took about a pint of pure nard and expensive perfume.

NAR or Spike Ard was a perfume that came from the Himalayas. It was extraordinarily expensive in its day. And to pour it out in one go like this is an extravagant gift in and of itself. She takes it and she pours it and Jesus feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And then we’re told this beautiful last time the house was filled with a fragrance of the perfume.

Needless to say, this gift comes at this incredible cost, but I think there’s something about it that we miss. John is able to cross cultures and is able to share with us that the gift cost an extraordinary amount of money, but we have that today. Hasn’t changed. Thi this is the most expensive retail perfume available.

It’s called, I think I’m pronouncing this right, Chuka. It costs $1.2 million per bottle. We still today have perfumes that are well beyond the average salary in the room, unless I’m mistaken, of course. And there’s a whole bunch of people earning a lot more than I assumed. If you do. Please tithe, but other than that, we will move on.

The gift comes at an incredible cost, but that’s not the heartbeat of this story. The heartbeat of the story is what Mary does after the perfume is poured. She takes her hair and wipes the perfume off Jesus’ feet. In this culture, her hair was a woman’s glory. It was one of the most central parts to her beauty.

It was a status symbol, and Mary takes a status symbol, and she uses it in the act of a servant. Feet were generally considered dirty, even though they would be washed on coming for a dinner, there was still not a particularly clean part of the body. And to come and to anoint someone’s feet was unusual.

People, anointed heads for kings, but feet. This is an act of a servant. And so not only does Mary bring this gift that is extravagant, but she performs a service that is extravagant as well. This gift. A lot of writers, a lot of scholars on this book of John Assume was an inheritance gift. It was money that she’d been given in ancient Judaism.

Often what would happen is that a man’s family would give a gift to the bride’s family when a marriage took place. But by Jesus time, this had changed. By this time, the bride’s family would give a gift to the man. A lot of writers assume that maybe Mary’s dad left to this gift when he died. Maybe it came from some other family member, but it’s a gift that guarantees her security if her brother dies and can no longer care for her.

She’s safe. She has income. If she gets married and then the man divorces her, she’s safe, she has income. Mary doesn’t just give a gift that’s extravagant. She gives her security. She gives everything that she has. Now again, in the wrong church, that would be a moment for you to empty your bank accounts, to give everything that you have.

But that is not what this passage is about, so don’t do that. Let’s move on, as we might expect. But one of his disciples, Judas, carry it, who’s leader to betray him, objected when people give extravagant gifts, as usually people there to say why they can’t do it. But his excuse or his reason is not legitimate.

Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor, it was worth a year’s wages On the surface, his response is, it’s too much. The gift is too generous. But then we get this little narrative piece from John that I think is fascinating. It’s one of the things I love about scripture. I love its honesty.

Check out what John says. He did not say this because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief as a keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it. Think about the honesty there from scripture. If you’re making it up, do you put details? Like that in, you’ve got a person that will be described throughout this book as the son of God.

In fact, more God in human flesh, who is ossian, and this person called disciples like Judas and took them and put them in charge of the money back. If you wanna make it seem like this story is just clean, cut and simple, you don’t write things like that. But the writers of scripture are beautiful and honest in how they present what happened to them, and this story exists in amongst what we read.

Jesus gives a response, leave her alone. Jesus replied, it was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. You will always have the PO amongst you, but you will not always have me. Suddenly the story twists from what we might have expected it to be if we were reading it for the first time.

In a Jewish context, a Jewish reader might assume this is an anointing like you would anoint a king. But now it becomes clear that it’s an anointing for someone who’s about to die. It’s a burial anointing. And let’s go back to the very beginning, ’cause I intentionally left this now ’cause it gives that context to everything that we’ll read Six days before the Passover.

All of this is in the context of this festival, this Passover, where the sacrificial lamb, the lamb God gave, will be sacrificed for the people. John has intentionally cast Jesus as this lamb of God that would die all the way through his story. And now here we are at the Denman. Suddenly things are falling into place.

The whole of the rest of John 12 to John 21 will take place over just eight or nine days. Now the story will move slower and slower. Passover is our context for everything. That we read, and John concludes this little section, this scene with these words. Meanwhile, a large crowd of Jews found out that Jesus was there and came not only because of him, but also to see Lazarus who have been raised from the dead.

So the chief priests made plans to kill Lazarus as well for an account of him. Many of the Jews were going over to Jesus and believing in him. There’s a delicious irony to this passage. Jesus waited until Lazarus was dead so he could raise him. And now, somewhat ironically, Lazarus now raised is more in danger of death than ever.

But think about that from his perspective. Now, do you worry about that? Do you worry about Jewish leaders coming to kill you? You might simply answer, Hey. I know a guy, it’s probably gonna be fine. The someone that can help me even in the worst of situations. So that’s scene one A. A simple story with an extravagant gift, which moves us to scene two, and now things start to get particularly interesting.

Verse 12 the next day. The great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. There’s a lot loaded in that idea of on his way to Jerusalem. Jesus has been avoiding Jerusalem, particularly for the last few days and weeks of his ministry, and now he intentionally begins to journey towards this great city.

In one of the other biographies, Luke, we read. As the time drew near for him to ascend to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. Something begins to happen when Jerusalem becomes the scene of what’s taking place. Of course, this story has examples throughout history as well. This is a film image of Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

This moment when this legendary ruler of the Roman Empire goes from being just a general. To becoming, to be a dictator and possibly an emperor. And this phrase, crossing the Rubicon has become like a epithet or a, sorry, a like a saying that just gets ingrained in history. The moment you cross the Rubicon, things cannot be changed.

That seems to be the case with Jesus’ story. All the way through Jesus has had this internal clock that seems to be ticking. He performs the first miracle. The clock starts moving, and now he arrives in Jerusalem and the clock ticks and ticks. But this entry is not like Caesar’s Caesar comes as a conqueror.

The people come out to meet him and celebrate him as the new king. That’s why it seems Jesus is doing. But soon the story shifts. Verse 13, they took palm branches and went out to meet him shouting Hosanna. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the king of Israel. As Jesus walks in, the crowd begins to swell, and Jesus is left with a choice.

With this crowd behind him, he can either go towards the courts of the Roman rulers. He’s almost got an army with him, they can take over. There’s more people than the Romans can possibly control. In Jerusalem, a city of about a hundred, 150,000, the crowds would swell to over a million in the times of festivals.

And imagine what it is in a nation that has over rulers to walk into a city with that kind of crowd. You could become a king, or he could take a different direction and he could take the path that leads to the temple and he could teach and become something other than a king. That’s the tension that we don’t see in this passage as the crowd enters Jerusalem with Jesus at the center crying.

Blessed is the king of Israel. Imagine what it is to shout. Blessed is the King of Israel. In a country that is not allowed a real king. You guys know some of this history, right? This is my daughter. Proudly waving the flag of Great Britain. She, it goes to a school where they get to occasionally experiment with some fun ideas.

And so every three years or so, they create a scenario where King George turns up at the school, he walks in, dressed in all his finery and demands loyalty from the members of the school. They quickly start to lose privileges if they can’t just bow to the king. And so they have to decide what do we do?

Do we bow to the king? Or do we maintain our rights as free citizens? During the course of this experiment, someone will pull out a Declaration of Independence and they’ll have to decide whether to sign the declaration or not. And as it begins, fewer of them will sign because they lose everything. But as more and more people begin to put their names on this thing, more and more people start to join the flood, and it gets easier and easier to join the crowd as it gets bigger.

And bigger. And Jesus has this giant crowd with him who suddenly long for a king, Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it. As it is written. Do not be afraid, daughter Zion. See your king coming, seated on a donkey’s cult. Suddenly this seems like the moment that these people have been waiting for longer than anybody can remember.

A crowd follows Jesus to a throne. When it looks like that’s his direction, everybody wants to follow, everybody is on board. Imagine that from the perspective as his disciples. What are your hopes and dreams in that moment? Imagine your Peter are the most famous of his disciples. What are they hoping for?

What is he hoping for? Jesus will become ruler. Maybe you don’t get to be a king. But you get to be Secretary of State. You get some kind of permission position that gives you some kind of glory and fame in this moment, in this time. John’s really honest with us. He says in verse 16, at first his disciples did not understand all this.

Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had to be done to him. They go in uncertain about what’s happening, but I suspect hopeful that soon they get to be rulers in this place, in this time with Jesus. But that’s not the story, right?

We know that. Now, the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead, continued to spread the word. Many people, because they had heard that he had performed this sign, went out to meet him. The crowd swells again, gets bigger and bigger again, and now it seems certain right?

Kingship ruling. So the Pharisees said to one another. See, this is getting us nowhere. The actual literal Greek translation of that is, see, we’re not doing any good, which is like a double entendre ’cause they are bad people doing bad things but are unaware of it. Look how the whole world has gone after him.

We’ve lost, everyone’s going with him. It’s all over. But that’s not the story. A crowd follows Jesus to the throne, but in the next few days, the crowd will disappear and it becomes really clear in the story that a crowd will follow Jesus to the throne, but only a few will follow Jesus to the cross. Only a few will follow him There.

Jesus could go and be a king, and he takes the other road. He goes to the temple and he begins to teach, and the path is set towards Good Friday and eventually to Resurrection Sunday. Which brings us to scene three where Jesus talks a little bit about everything that has happened. It’s a fork in the road.

Now, there were some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the festival. They came to Philipp, who was from Beths during Galilee with a request. Sir, they said, we would like to see Jesus. Notice what they say. We would like to see Jesus, not, we would like to follow Jesus. He’s a spectacle. He’s an object, one that they wanna see because he’s capturing the whole world’s attention.

It seems like it’s really easy to look at Jesus. It’s much harder to follow him, and Jesus surprisingly doesn’t really address this situation at all. He makes a statement that seems completely disconnected. The arrows come for the son of man to be glorified. Very truly. I tell you, less a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies.

It remains only a single seed, but if it dies, it produces many seeds. Thes come for the son of man to be glorified. The Greek word there is this word dosa. It means glory. Sure but it means renowned to cause the worth to become known. Somewhere in this story, Jesus is talking about being glorified, and yet that we know what is coming is death.

It’s a strange element to the story one that leaves lots of questions, very truly, I tell you, a kernel of wheat forest to the ground and dies. It remains only a single seed, but if it dies, it produces many seeds. Jesus turns, as he often does to analogy of farming and begins to talk about his mission simply as a death.

A death that will spread and become something much greater than becoming a king of Jerusalem ever could have become. This is where the story goes. It’s one of death. And then it gives a couple of statements that are really the heartbeat of the passage. And so I’m gonna go slowly through them. I’m gonna give you a translation from the message.

’cause on the surface they hit us hard and we live in a culture that cannot imagine this kind of life. Verse 25. Anyone who loves their life will lose it. How many of you would say you love your life? I certainly would. Yeah, just the other day I was sending some photos to my mom for her 70th birthday, which is coming up shortly and it was navigating some of the earliest photos of that I have just on my computer.

I have thousands of them be more than I can count, but I started early on with Laura and I, meaning some of those early photos of our kids at the youngest age, watched as the girls got a little older. I watched the sweet moments between. Me and them. At that time, I watched as the boys joined our family. I watched as the family grew and I had this moment of just gratitude, just God, I’m so glad you let me live this life.

I don’t hate this life. I love my life. So what does Jesus mean when he says, unless you hate your life? You will lose it. Anyone who loves their life will lose it. Anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Do you feel how that rubs up weirdly, against our culture? Where many of us live lives, we value deeply.

The translation, the message gives us maybe some of the undercurrent to this passage in the same way anyone who holds onto life just as it is. Destroys that life. But if you let it go reckless in your love, you’ll have it real forever and eternal somewhere. What Jesus is getting at is the thing that Mary understood from the beginning, the need to live a life that is completely surrender to this Jesus, to call yourself a follower.

And this is one of the reasons that the early church took the idea of following soul Seriously. There was a point in church history around a hundred years after the church began. Where the church leaders, if someone came to ask to be a follower, would say something like this to them. You probably don’t want to follow the teachings of Jesus.

They’re really hard. Really hard to live up to, so why don’t you go and take those teachings, study for them for a year, and after a year, if you’re committed, come back and we’ll baptize you. There’s so much of this. There’s hard for us to grasp. If you let it go reckless in your love, you’ll have it real and eternal forever.

Next pa. Next verse 26. Whoever serves me must follow me, and wherever I am my servant will be. Also, my father honors the one who serves me. This is what Jesus says, a follower of his looks like. And it’s heavy and hard and needs to be taken seriously. Let me translate that part for us. Again, if any of you wants to serve me, then follow me.

Then you’ll be where I am ready to serve. At a moment’s notice, the father will honor and reward anyone who serves me. This is where I think this challenge is for us in this kind of cultural moment we live. One of the great questions you can ask over and over again as you follow Jesus is this. How do we follow Jesus in this particular cultural moment?

I don’t mean how can we adapt the teachings of Jesus to the culture we live in? How can we notice how culture pushes against the teachings of Jesus? How can we decide how to live in light of that? There’s a couple of things in culture that I think we might notice. And this is a quote from Steve Jobs, who I think is one of the great geniuses of our time, but also had some views on life that I probably wouldn’t agree with.

Have the courage to follow your heart and your intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. That’s probably something like a mantra of a day. And it’s probably so true across society that you probably feel this gravitational pull towards it. Maybe that’s got some truth in it, and yet it seems like when you read the teachings of Jesus, this is the opposite of what Jesus says, that there’s an idea in philosophy that looks something like this.

The short term has replaced the long term and made instant. Its ultimate ideal. We are people that are told, don’t wait for everything. Everything is available to you instantly. You can grab it now. You want food, it can be here. Now. You want something, it’s here. Now. You want to watch something on tv, it’s here.

Now. Our frustrations grow as things aren’t available. How many of you have had the experience that I have had? Of going to watch a movie and finding it. It’s not on any of the streaming services that you own, and I own every single streaming service. There’s a deep frustration that starts to develop in us in these moments.

I have friends that send me messages that look like this. Maybe some of you got these messages. It’s people who love to send you audios of their voice so you can hear their message. An audio, this drives me insane. I want the brevity. Of a text message. I don’t want to take 30 seconds to hear someone’s message ’cause I can grab it in one or two seconds if they simply type it out.

I feel this frustration that they have done something that’s quick and easy for them because we live in that culture. And they’ve made me work harder and harder to get the content of their message. This is the culture we live in. When you can grasp that culture is instant and know that the gospel isn’t instant, we start to see some of those differences.

So on one hand it’s instant, and then there’s this other part. That we talked about. We have been led to believe that the self is sacro. Just as in an earlier time it was thought. Never fitting to deny God. Now it feels never right to deny oneself. We have a strange couple that a co-culture that has coupled get what you want, when you want it, and whatever you want is also okay.

That’s no way to live according to Jesus. And so that’s the culture you and I follow Jesus in today. There’s this story in the youth ministry world, which I used to exist in that became legendary for its kind of brutality. It was a story about a goldfish. A youth pastor presented a goldfish in a bowl to its students, and he asked this question, is the goldfish free?

And of course, all the students said, no, it’s not free. And so the youth pastor went and grabbed a bigger bowl and put it on the table and tipped the goldfish into it with all the water and said, is it free now? And the youth, the students said, of course it’s not free. It’s in a bowl. So the youth pastor went and grabbed an even bigger bowl, tipped the water into it with the fish, and said, is the fish free now?

And they said, no, the fish isn’t free. And so finally the youth pastor got the water and tipped it out onto the floor with the fish inside. And as the fish flopped around on the floor, he turned around to the students and said, is the fish free now? Now, of course, they all had to have counseling for a long period of time after this experience, but it’s designed to show this idea.

We assume. The freedom has no boundaries. And yet freedom, it seems according to Jesus, requires boundaries. Jesus describes discipleship as this way in Matthew’s biography, and then Jesus said to his disciples, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Same idea, right? Just Matthew’s way of saying it, for whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life will find it. This is what Jesus wants us to know following him looks like whoever wants to save their life will lose it. Whoever loses their life will find it. Describing discipleship.

Jesus simply says, it’s picking up your cross and following me. What I think is true about following Jesus, and this is one of the hard things to accept about what Jesus says. Following Jesus to a throne, if we could do that, would bring us glory now. That’s why it’s so attractive to that big crowd that follows him.

Following Jesus to the cross, according to him, brings glory later. It’s a delayed thing. Jesus finishes his words with this idea. Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say, father, save me from this hour. No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your. Name. Alright, now I am shaken and what I am going to, what am I going to say?

Father, get me out of this. This is the translation. No, this is why I came in the first place I say, I’ll say, father, put your glory on display for Jesus. His life looks like surrender and he calls us to a life of surrender. I would suggest following Jesus on the journey that he asks to pick up your cross and follow him is to slow down.

If the cross slows you down, how many of you in the room have said no to something because of following Jesus? Perhaps you were offered a business deal and all you had to do was break the rules just a little bit, and he said no, and it slowed you down. How many of you have been offered a move and you felt like the core was to stay where you were and the cross slows you down?

It does this over and over again. It caused us to obey Jesus before any other option that this world might give. And in a world that loves immediacy and a world that loves to follow its heart, this will feel all the more abrasive in the world today. And I think that’s the interesting thing that I took from this.

When we go back to the story of Mary at the beginning, don’t we see that she understood this all along? Mary sacrifices her best for the one. Who means most? She takes what she has and surrenders it. And I think I notice at times in my life, that’s the thing that’s easiest to lose. It’s easiest to not give your best to the one that lives the mo, the one that means the most.

Every Easter, my wife and I have developed a tradition without knowing it. When we get to Good Friday and we do communion here at South. And my wife makes sourdough bread for the communion, and I grab a bottle of wine for the communion off the shelf. And there was this moment, the first moment we did this, I instinctively reached for the cheapest bottle of wine.

So I’m just gonna low ball this. And then I had this moment where suddenly that didn’t feel right. And I picked the best bottle of wine for what we were doing here together. Now this year, I’ll just have to drink all the most expensive wine before we get no, that’s terrible joke.

But there’s something in that metaphor that I feel to be true, and it takes me back to a story about the first time I ever talked about Jesus to a crowd of people. I was writing this message, sat up in my room. I was about 18 years old at the time, and I was trying to figure out what on earth I was supposed to say.

And so I began to write and nothing seemed to fit. I couldn’t make sense of anything, and my mom, who was always a source of wisdom in those moments, happened to walk past and she said, what are you doing? I said, I’m writing a sermon. She said that’s a new thing for you. I said, I don’t know what to say.

And she said to me this, she said, why don’t you just tell people what Jesus means to you? And as I sat there writing this sermon, there was one word that instantly sprung to mind, which was everything. What does he mean? Everything. What does Jesus mean to you? That was the answer. I can definitely say.

There’s been times in my life where that hasn’t been true. I’ve preached a lot of sermons since then. Probably better at doing it than then, but somewhere it’s easy to lose that, which is what this table is all about. This table is a place we come as followers of Jesus to remind ourselves as the of the only thing.

That is central and certain other things will seem that way, but this is the only thing, the life that I love, the one I described is full of some of the most brilliant people, my wife, my kids, my family, you as a community. None of this is certain, but this is certain, and that’s why it’s so important. And that’s why, despite the fact that the culture will feel abrasive when we talk about this, it’s the only thing that matters the most.

And so what we get to do is we get to come to a cion table, a Eucharist place of Thanksgiving, and we get to be grateful. We get to say thank you to the one who didn’t choose a path to being an earthly king, but chose a path to the cross. And said, this is for you. That’s why we do this. And when we come, we get to just simply hold out our hands and say, whatever you want is yours.

Now, the thing is, he leaves us a lot of wonderful things, and sometimes he takes some things, but the point is surrender and saying, God, I choose to follow you. Not to a throne, but to a cross. ’cause you are the one that means the most at Jesus. We come to this table and think of a story 2000 years ago where a woman would come and pour everything she had onto the ground.

She knew who you are before anyone else did,

and now we know who you are and the God who gave his life for the world for us. And so we come to this table with gratitude. Remind us that your story is central, that you mean everything. There’s so much good things you’ve given us, but nothing as important as this. We’ll just stand with me friends.

And the night that he was betrayed, Jesus gathered with his disciples.

And taking the bread. He broke it and handed it to them and said, this is my buddy broken for you. Afterwards, he took the cup, handed it to each of them and said, this is my blood shed for the sins of the world. As long as you gathered together. Do this in remembrance of me. Tomorrow we may forget again today we remember.

Thank you, Jesus, for what you did for us

As we come, would you challenge us? Draw us back to you in a culture that offers so much. Draw our hearts to you, Jesus. Amen.