I never lose the sheer wonder of how intricately involved God is in the details of our lives. He is always speaking to us. Just this morning, as I was reading a section of one of the 13 or so books I have going right now (yep, I’m one of them), I read a familiar passage of Scripture and He began to speak truth into my heart. I could hear His whisper all day, “what do you see?”

Matthew 26: 6-13NLT “Meanwhile, Jesus was in Bethany at the home of Simon, a man who had leprosy. During supper, a woman came in with a beautiful jar of expensive perfume and poured it over his head. The disciples were indignant when they saw this. ‘What a waste of money,’ they said. ‘She could have sold it for a fortune and given the money to the poor.’ But Jesus replied, ‘Why berate her for doing such a good thing to me? You will always have the poor among you, but I will not be here with you much longer. She has poured this perfume on me to prepare my body for burial. I assure you, wherever the Good News is preached throughout the world, this woman’s deed will be talked about in her memory.'”

Whether through written word, music, or personal interaction, God is always communicating to us the right things at the right moments. Today He wanted me to learn some new things about this passage. And now, though I have been thwarted from writing this all day by a vast array of distractions, He wants it written out for someone else before I lay my head down to rest tonight.

The first thing I noticed in this soaking of the passage was the juxtaposition between the act of the woman and the response of Jesus’ own guys, His friends, the disciples. Jesus saw it all. He never misses a thing. He saw the lavish, untamed, reckless love of a woman and He saw the short-sighted, indignant, religious hearts of His followers when all they could see was “a waste”. Those two responses to Jesus seem to me opposite ends of a scale of love we could all place ourselves on. Do we slide around on it? Probably. I do. Are we sometimes extravagant with our love for Jesus and His children and at other times wondering why we should even bother? Let’s be honest and agree that when our eyes are on His, we pour the perfume, and when our eyes are on ourselves we are likely to complain and not want to give away what we don’t feel like we have enough of for ourselves.

The next thing I saw was in verse 13. “this woman’s deed will be talked about in her memory”. How strange. Jesus had so many amazing encounters with people that we read about in the Bible. Why didn’t He make statements like this one at the end of all His encounters? To me, those words are like exclamation points or florescent highlighted words meant to make us pause and take a second look and realize that Jesus wants us to linger here a moment and absorb the way we were meant to live. In this short passage we must learn that Jesus has the sweetest, perfumed aroma and it comes from the lavish love poured out by His followers. In other words, I think Jesus is telling us that He is seen, experienced, and literally breathed in when we are breathing Him out in selfless, outrageous, flooding acts of love.

Finally what I saw in this fresh reading of the Word, through my vivid imagination playing out this scene, is that the woman opened the jar and threw the lid away. She poured out the whole jar intentionally. She knew she was going to do it. She didn’t pour a little and save a little. She didn’t pour a lot and save a little for a rainy day, just in case He wasn’t all He said He was. Wow. I want to throw the lid away on love. I want to take everything I have (and that jar can represent so very many things) and pour out every last drop. Heck, I even want to give Him the jar it came in. I want to love like that even when there is a roomful of people watching that think I’m just wasting all that love. I don’t want to care what anyone else thinks except my Jesus.

I really don’t think Jesus wants us to pay close attention to the woman and never forget her because He wants us to buy the most expensive thing ever and give it to Him. I think He wants us to remember this woman because she loved with all she had and didn’t care what anyone else thought. She knew what she was going to do before she ever got to Simon’s house. She threw the lid away on her jar of love and poured it all out. Jesus is spotlighting a key to kingdom living….love was always meant to be extravagant and wild and free. Love was never meant to be measured and stored and given out in meager and manageable doses. We think about love far too long and talk ourselves out of doing it far too much.

I’m not going to forget that woman either. I’m flinging that old lid into the deepest sea and I’m taking that jar with me wherever I go and will just pour and pour and pour. How could love ever be “a waste”? If that love is poured in Jesus’ name, who cares what the complainers say? His sweet aroma will be everywhere!