Expediency and Extravagance (John 11:45–12:8)

0:00 We're going to continue with our study of the gospel according to St. John. And today we're going to be looking at chapter 11, verse 45 through chapter 12, verse 8. So I would ask the congregation to stand at this point for the reading of the word.

4:02 He who has ears to hear the word of God, let them hear it. Let us pray. Father, open now to our understanding and to our instruction the words of this text that we have just heard. For we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Please be seated. When I was in graduate school in the decade of the 60s, one of the books that troubled the theological world was a small book published by a Harvard professor entitled, The Secular City. It put Harvey Cox's name on the map at that time. And in that book, The Secular City, Harvey Cox gave a sociological and theological analysis for the decline of America into its present form of secularization, and he talked about the shape of the American culture.

5:28 And he defined the shape of American culture as being determined by America's really only indigenous philosophical system called pragmatism. And pragmatism as a philosophical system is born in a certain skepticism towards our ability to understand ultimate truth. And so the philosophers and pioneers of pragmatism, who ironically belong to the metaphysical club at Harvard, disowned any hope of discovering metaphysical truth. so address themselves to how do we live in a world where we can't discern ultimate truth. And in this system, the good and the true was defined by what works.

6:33 Of course, the American version of pragmatism was nothing new. In our class this morning, we looked at some of the things that had taken place in the ancient world in the intertestamental period, one of which was the advent of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and I mentioned that Socrates was provoked towards his campaign in Athens by the philosophy of sophism, which in that day was a school of pragmatism equally skeptical of attaining ultimate truth. And so this kind of skeptical philosophy has been around for ages, and I only mention this by way of introduction today because in terms of the New Testament encounter with the pragmatism of the first century, we meet in the text today Caiaphas, the king of the pragmatists of the first century.

7:33 Notice that in the narrative that after Jesus performed the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, that Jesus departed from that area and the people were divided. Some who were witnesses of that became disciples of Christ, but others went back to Jerusalem and reported Jesus to the authorities, and the authorities now begin to lay their plans for the arrest and the elimination of Jesus. And in the discussions there at the council, we read this argument that was set forth. The question was this, what shall we do? The man is working these signs, these wonders all around us. If we let them alone like this, everyone will believe in him.

8:33 And these people couldn't imagine any worse calamity to befall those people than that the whole nation would come to faith in Jesus Christ. and then the secondary reason of their concern, and the Romans will come, and the Romans will come and take away our place, our positions of power, our positions of influence, because I remind you that the Romans allowed a certain measure of home rule to the nations they conquered, and despite Roman occupation, the Sadducees and the Pharisees enjoyed certain positions of authority on the council and certain levels of rulership there in the city, and certainly a high level of popular esteem and prestige. And Jesus now threatened their situation.

9:40 Just this past week, I was asked to write an essay on the question of contemporary persecution in the Christian church. We have heard ghastly reports coming to this nation from the Sudan and from other places around the world where routinely Christians are being persecuted. we've been praying for our own missionary to Iran because of the fact that his life is in danger while he's on Iranian soil.

10:15 And the question I was asked, why don't we have to suffer the same level of persecution here in the United States? And obviously there are many explanations for that. We can speculate for long periods as to why we don't suffer to the degree other Christians do. And part of it is obviously that this country was founded by refugees from religious persecution and tried to do everything in their power to put in the basis of our own culture and in our law, laws that would guarantee religious freedom and the free exercise of religion being included in the very First Amendment. But we've seen a subtle shift away from toleration towards Christianity and a growing hostility from the secular world to the Christian faith in general and to Christians in particular. But that's not the whole story.

11:09 Another part of the story is this, that we have become very artful in learning conflict avoidance. If you look at the pages of the New Testament and you see the passion by which the Apostle Paul went on his missionary journeys and proclaimed the exclusive saviorhood of Jesus Christ, and who in the midst of paganism declared monotheism unabashedly that the response of people such as in Ephesus and elsewhere was to throw Paul and his compatriots into jail and to beat him and so on.

11:52 But we've learned to avoid that sort of thing because it's not practical to be too bold in the proclamation of the gospel in our society today. And so we have embraced in many ways the politics of expediency. and this is what had happened in Israel. Those ones to whom God had entrusted the ministry of the truth of His Word,

12:32 instead of singing the Lord's song in a foreign land, began to sing the song of the foreign nations in God's own land. And they compromised again and again and again that they might protect their positions of prestige, their positions of esteem, and that they make sure no one would upset the Romans. Donald Rumsfeld said recently about the city of Washington, he said, Washington, D.C. is a place where your friends stab you in the chest. And it's also been said that in the United States of America, the church has become placed upon a reservation. We're still allowed to exist. We're still allowed to practice our faith.

13:26 We're still allowed to pray in our churches. But God forbid that we ever move off the reservation and into the public square. If we ever become public with our proclamations of faith. Just recently, Billy Graham's son, Franklin Graham, was asked to give an invocation at a national event, and he closed that prayer by saying, we're praying in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. And he was excoriated as this outrage, a deluge of hostility was poured upon him for having the audacity to pray publicly in the name of Jesus Christ. if you ask a Christian to pray. how can you get mad when he prays in the name of Christ but we're not allowed to do that in polite company today now when that sort of thing happens and the anger arises from the secular community who is most likely to injure the people like Franklin Graham, the Christians. Because if one person wanders off the reservation and proclaims the gospel in the public square, then everybody who's enjoying the peace of the reservation becomes frightened that they're going to become targets of the enemy. And that's exactly what happens here in Jerusalem. If we let this man alone, we're going to lose our position, and the Romans are going to come down on us, and then our place and our whole nation will be lost, and that's not a very good thing. That's not a very wise thing. So what are we going to do?

15:21 Well, what are you going to do? We turn to Caiaphas, and Caiaphas, what should we do? so you guys aren't very smart the answer to this question is simple it is expedient for the good of the nation that one man dies.

15:48 Do you ever wonder why Pontius Pilate's name ever crept into the Apostles' Creed? What was it about Pontius Pilate that made him so important as to be a part of the Christian's historic confession of faith? Caesar Augustus didn't make it. Ananias didn't make it. Caiaphas didn't make it. But Pontius Pilate made it. Historians say that he made it because of the office that he performed as the procurator there in giving judgment over Jesus. Both in his saying, behold the man. And in his saying, I find no fault in this man. And the idea historically is that the church said that in spite of himself, Pontius Pilate was declaring the truth of God in his judgment of Christ.

16:44 Not because he intended to be a prophet, but God can speak through a donkey as we've seen in the Old Testament. We've seen it through Cyrus' decree. we've seen in other words, where God brings His Word to pass even through unwilling spokesmen. I don't think it was ever in Caiaphas' mind to be speaking prophetically here. He's a pragmatist. He's not going to ask the question, what's the right thing to do, which is what a godly Jew should be asking and what a high priest should certainly be asking. But his question was, what's the expedient thing to do? I was at a church meeting several years ago where a church was in danger of being split, and a presbytery commission was sent, and I was on that commission to investigate it.

17:43 And the chairman of the committee said, well, now let's see. Let's interview the pastor, the assistant pastor, the session members, and some people from the congregation. So we did all of that. And when we were all done, he said, well, now let's see. Let's look at our notes. He says, there's real conflict in this church. And what we're going to have to do is, first of all, come up with a solution that will help the pastor protect him, and one that will also protect the associate pastors, and one that will protect all of the members of the session, and one that will protect these members of the congregation. And when he went through that list, he said, is there anything else we're supposed to do? And I raised my hand, and I said, yes. Our primary task is to administer justice according to truth and according to grace here. Not just make a decision trying to keep everybody happy because that's not going to happen anyway.

18:47 But see, that was the spirit of pragmatism and expediency that has been in the heart of human beings from the beginning. And in the very real sense, politically speaking, humanly speaking, that's why the only sinless person in the history of this world was executed.

19:11 Because it was expedient. Do you realize how much like Caiaphas we are? How many times we make decisions out of fear, how we don't want to be nonconformist, we don't want to have people think that we're marching to a different drummer, we don't want to provoke the hostility of the world, and so we remain silent. I received a letter this week from the president of a national coalition for decency in which he reported that the number one company that distributes pornography on cable is owned by General Motors.

20:03 baseball, apple pie, and pornography. And he was saying, will the people of America accept that from General Motors? The second largest purveyor of pornography in the United States is a subsidiary owned by AT&T. And these are icons in our culture, but yet they are making unbelievable billions of dollars in profit with this kind of enterprise. And who wants to holler, thou? it's not expedient to haul or foul. It's expedient to keep our mouths shut and remain safe.

21:05 See, every time the gospel's been proclaimed boldly and accurately in church history, there has been persecution. I have no desire to go looking for it. But the fact that I live so free of it makes me question my own commitment to the things of God. Because I don't like conflict either.

21:34 But I hate to stand in the line of people like Caiaphas. Now, in the second part of the text, and time is running out, I want to show you the stark contrast between Caiaphas, who was willing to have Jesus executed to keep the peace.

21:55 And over against that figure of Caiaphas, we see Mary, the sister of Lazarus, who comes while Jesus is having dinner at Lazarus' home, and comes with this precious ointment that is worth about one year's salary for people at that time. And in a reckless manifestation of extravagant love and worship, she anoints the feet of Jesus with this precious fragrance.

22:32 Talk about love. Talk about extravagant love. and Judas watches this and has apoplexy. What are you doing? Don't you realize how much that's worth? Why, we should keep that money and give it to the poor, as if he was being driven by humanitarian concerns, when in fact the Scriptures tell us what was in the heart of Judas. He wanted that money to stay in the treasury because he had the key to the treasury. He was the keeper of the purse. He was the treasurer of the 12 disciples. and had been a liar and an embezzler from the beginning, and now he sees his profits leaking all over the floor because of this emotional woman extravagantly wasting all this money pouring out these precious things on the feet of Jesus. There are times, beloved, for extravagance. And it is always time for an extravagant manifestation of adoration to Christ.

23:47 What could we do? What could you and I possibly do that would be too extravagant in honoring Jesus, too extravagant in praising Him, too extravagant in giving Him glory? Thank you. everybody in this room who's ever been in love at some point has made an extravagant gift to the one that they love. And the only justification they had for it was the love that they felt. And so you do this when it's time to do it. I knew a minister who labored for decades in the inner city ghetto of Cleveland, Ohio. He worked among the poor and the oppressed, those who were afflicted with addiction to drugs and all kinds of violence on a daily basis.

24:47 And he had one associate pastor after another associate pastor, and the expectancy of the tenure of the ministers that came alongside to help him was two years. No one ever lasted after two years, and I asked him, why didn't they last? And he said, they were disillusioned. They came out of seminary, and they came to the ghetto because they wanted to labor for Christ and to be where people were hurting, and they worked for two years trying to help the poor, trying to help those who were overcome by drugs and so on. He said, and they got depressed. They were defeated, and they left. And I said, well, how come you've been able to stay all this time? He said, because of the words of Jesus. I said, what? Remember when Jesus said, the poor you always have with you? I said, yes. But every time I've ever heard anybody quote that, it's as an excuse to neglect the poor, not to minister to the poor. And he said, well, what I understood Jesus to say was, I, when I came here, had no expectation that I was going to eliminate poverty.

26:03 I never thought that I'd get rid of the drug traffic here in Cleveland. I never thought that I would end unemployment among my parishioners. I realized coming in that every person that is brought out of this ghetto situation, there are more that are brought in standing in line to take their place. If we get one person off drugs, five more get hooked here in the ghetto. but my mission isn't to get rid of the poor my mission isn't to get rid of all these problems my mission is to minister to people who are suffering from these things while they are here and while i'm here what a tremendous testimony and i thought that's the way mary was mary said i saved this thing for your burial but you know i'm going to give this gift now Thank you.

26:54 I can minister to the poor tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and day after tomorrow, but every day is not my opportunity to manifest my affection for Christ. After all, this was the man who had restored her brother to life. she's pouring this fragrance on the feet of Jesus while he's sitting next to Lazarus at a dining room table having dinner where just recently that same Lazarus was rotting in the tomb. Was it too extravagant? You know who should have been in there at that feast with ten times the fragrance that Mary brought was Caiaphas. Caiaphas should have been there saying, I know who you are, and we've seen your signs, and I don't care if the Romans come. We recognize you as our Lord, and we're going to pour out our love to you. Well, you know, it wasn't expedient for Caiaphas to do that. But guess what? It wasn't expedient for Mary to do it either.

28:11 But even today, 2,000 years after that extravagant event, if nobody else is talking about it, I am, and you're hearing about it this morning, because this act of love, this act of worship, this act of exaltation and glorification has been memorialized in the Word of God forever. Jesus himself gave the death blow to any philosophy of pragmatism and expediency when he told people that a philosophy of pragmatism ultimately is not practical. For he said, what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world? but loses his own soul.

29:11 What do you give in exchange for your soul? how much is your soul worth? Your prestige? Your comfort? A year's wages? Safety. in Jesus' mind, there is nothing in this world, including the whole world itself, that can be given in exchange for the value of your soul to him.

29:50 Let's pray. Our Father and our God, we rejoice in the testimony of Mary. We repent from the example of Caiaphas. For so often, O Lord, out of fear, out of pride, we take the expedient approach. Father, give us the courage that marked the saints of the first century who refused to be pragmatists and were extravagant in their devotion to You. For I ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.