The Cost of Following Christ - Luke 7:36 - 8:3

As I was preparing for this sermon I was batting around two different ideas so I asked some of my friends which sermon topic they would choose. One friend responded “We all know that the cost of following Christ is our lives, completely, but you need to preach on what that actually looks like.” As I toyed around with his words, agreeing with him at first, but then wondering if we really do know the high cost of following Christ.

In the first few verses from the passage in Luke we meet an unlikely guest at the Pharisees house. The gospel writer describes her as “a woman who lived a sinful life”. This is the last person that you expect to be at the home of a Pharisee. You have to wonder how she even got into the home. She had to have known that the Pharisees looked down upon her and considered her to be unclean. She was not allowed to be at the table with them, and could have probably been stoned for even entering. Yet, she made it through the door of the home and knelt before Jesus.

As she knelt at the feet of Christ she began to weep. When I imagine this scene, I see a woman so broken by her sin that she is lamenting her very presence before the Lord. She knows that she is not worthy to be before the Messiah, but she feels indebted to him. The tears are a mixture of shame, guilt, and pain.

So we have this weeping woman who is risking her very life by being in a home that she should not be in. She has made herself completely vulnerable to Jesus by kneeling and crying before him. And then she has the aduaticity to take down her hair and whip his feet, kissing them. All too often, as we have removed ourselves 21 centuries from this scene, we get a mixed up image of what the washing of feet actually looked like. Yes, people generally washed their feet when they entered a home, but they usually did this for themselves. Once in a while a person of high status would have a servant whip their feet, but it would be someone of the same gender. This woman has broken all of the cultural rules as to how a woman should approach a man. This would be equivalent to a Muslim woman unveiling her face to a stranger. This woman is intimately showing her love for Christ.

Could things get any stranger? Of course. She then takes the alabaster jar of perfume and poured it all over the feet. I don’t know about you, but I don’t handle the smell of perfume very well. The potency of even a few drops makes me cough, and this woman poured an entire jar over Jesus. The smell would have overtaken the entire house and the cost of this small token of love was just as overwhelming.

At this point the Pharisee standing off to the side had to have been in shock. A sinner has touched Jesus in an intimate way and has expressed love to him by offering this lavish, expensive gift. Why isn’t Jesus saying something to reprimand this woman?

And in Jesus’ style he told the Pharisee a parable of two men owing two different sized debts. One man was behind paying about 50 days worth of wages, but the other was behind 500 days worth of wages. Both couldn’t pay back the moneylender, but he canceled both of their debts. While both would have expressed gratitude the one with the larger debt would have been elated. Especially considering what would have happened if the moneylender wouldn’t had been forgiving; they would have been in debtors prison until they could pay off the debt. The chances of the person who owed 500 denari ever getting out did not look good.

At this point you can just imagine Jesus turning towards the woman still whipping his feet and acknowledging her debt, but also praising her for having enough strength for being in the presence of her very brokenness. Her love for Christ consumed her to act in ways that put her life at the mercy of Christ and all of the rest of the people in the room. She was truly grateful for the gift of being in Jesus’ presence. And there stood the Pharisee dumbstruck.

Fast forward to today and the intriguing comment my friend made. We very flippantly say today that the cost of following Christ is giving our entire lives, but do we really mean it? Do we have the genuine faith of this woman to put ourselves at the mercy of Christ?

I think this woman’s faith was best expressed not in her strong self-sufficient power, but her utter brokenness before Christ. When is the last time you were vulnerable before Christ? When was the last time you were vulnerable before other Christians? We are called to be the communal body of Christ, supporting each other when we have weaknesses. It takes the broken heart of Christ towards this woman to look favorably upon her shattered life. And it takes us being honest about our brokenness with others to be healed. It takes brokenness to heal brokenness. Ponder that statement for a few seconds. It took the broken body of Christ to heal us of our sins. But even on a very human level, we connect and can positively impact the lives of people who are struggling with things that we have struggled with. When we are working towards being healed, we offer hope to someone who only sees tears of frustration and pain. We offer much needed in sights to the people who are trying to hide from the tears by not acknowledging that anything is even wrong. But even knowing that it takes the broken to heal the broken, all too often we adopt the stance that we can make it on our own. We don’t need others. And we can’t bother Christ with our requests and ask for forgiveness unless things are really bad. And then we often feel too guilty to approach the throne of God. Somewhere between the word of God and today we have created this mis-construed idea that it is selfish to be broken before God. We may sing songs and pay lip service to being set free from our chains of our wrecked lives, but we don’t really know what it feels like to be recreated by God because we want to be in control of our own lives.

The cost of following Christ is giving up complete control to him. It is the hardest price that humans can pay – being vulnerable. We have been hurt so many times by other people and disappointed that we don’t want to give control to the Creator. And with every inch of our lives that we reclaim we are blocking God from turning our ashes into beauty. We fear that he will change us and we won’t like who we have become.

Here is the cost. Here is why it is hard. And because it is hard we often don’t pay the full price. We yearn for complete restoration in our lives, but we turn to God and say “not yet – let me have one more try”. And God lets us have “one more try” time after time after time. Today is the day to tell God that you don’t want to have one more try. Today is the day to look at the woman crying out to God and whipping his feet with her hair and pouring costly oil on him and say I want to be like her. And we need to pour out of ourselves the costly oil of pride. The gospel has good news for all immoral sinners, but it has nothing good to say to the prideful. The tricky thing about pride is that society epitomizes it. We need to achieve everything on our own so we can say that we climbed up the ladder by ourselves. This is antithetical to the teachings of Christ. He wants to make our yokes light, but our pride stands between us and him. So step one to following Christ is laying aside our pride.

Step two is to actually acknowledge our brokenness. God knows that we are broken already. He knows us intimately. And as the Christian community we know cognitively that we all are broken in one way or another. Yet, because we do not acknowledge our struggles with one another because of pride we are hindering each other and creating this feeling that we are alone in our sin. We are perpetuating the idea that we have to hide our sin. The church is where we come because our hearts our sick with sin. Hiding that does not make us righteous. If anything it just pollutes the entire concept of what the church is. When we acknowledge our sin with one another and to God we are letting it go and emptying ourselves so we can be filled with the things God wants for us.

And three, we need to claim who we are in the eyes of Christ. Shane Claiborne, a Christian author and activist, quoted one of his friends as saying “Listen, Jesus never talked to a prostitute because he didn’t see a prostitute. He just saw a child of God he was madly in love with.” There was no doubt in the woman mind from Luke’s gospel story today that God was madly in love with her as he forgave her of all of her sins, even when others labeled her as “a woman who lived a sinful life”. We need to start affirming that love within our body. We, the Church, are the tangible expression of the love of Christ and if that’s true we need to not look past labels and defining people by their sins ourselves, but we need to help others see that they are a child of God. We need to open up our eyes and hearts and see as God sees, see the beauty in the ashes. People who do not even know God have been created by him and have a piece of him inside of them that is waiting to be called out and acknowledged as God’s. Are we going to be the body of Christ that does that or are we going to be another organization that condemns in order to make ourselves look more holy?

Maybe the question in the sermon today should have been what is the reward for following Christ. But in order to be rewarded we must first pay the price. The price of laying aside our pride, acknowledging our brokenness, and seeing ourselves as God sees us. The cost of following Christ is high, but the rewards are higher. The reward of being redeemed and made beautiful and whole in the eyes of God. The cost is high and the road is hard, but God daily gives us the grace to take one step at a time.
Amen.