True Discipleship (Mary Anoints Jesus)

On November 16, 2018, a young missionary named John Allen Chau was killed on a remote island in the Indian Ocean. He was attempting to take the gospel to the North Sentinelese people, a group well known for their hostility towards outsiders. In fact, they are so well known for their hostility that the Indian government has outlawed outside contact with the people both out of concern for the safety of those who might wander into their territory and be killed, and out of concern for the Sentinelese people, for fear of spreading diseases amongst the small group and out of concern to prevent greedy foreigners from trying to take advantage of the primitive people.

In the days and weeks following John Chau’s death, a media firestorm erupted. Some Christians praised him as a martyr, while many other people decried him as a foolish neo-colonialist who just couldn’t leave well enough alone.

His own father blames the American missionary movement and what he calls “extreme” Christianity for his son’s death. Others said, “John Allen Chau is not a martyr, just a dumb American who though the tribals needed ‘Jesus’ when the tribals already lived in harmony with God and nature for years without outside interference.” Another person said, ““I’m sorry, but what a deluded idiot.”

Most Christians were, naturally, more sympathetic. But many Christians preferred to distance themselves from what they saw as a backwards view of Christianity bent on saving people from the fires of a Hell that doesn’t exist.

John Allen Chau’s death sparked a firestorm of controversy, even amongst evangelical Christians, and at the root of the issue is the question: “What does it mean to be a disciple of Christ?”

Transition: In John 12, we see a picture of true discipleship contrasted with false discipleship. We see true discipleship embodied in Mary while we get a very clear picture of false discipleship embodied in Judas.

FCF: Our hearts are naturally inclined to idolatry—to the love of self, comfort, and all the world has to offer. This naturally leads us to dilute Christ’s call to discipleship to its bare minimums.

Main Idea: But in John chapter 12, we will see that one whose heart has been truly changed by Christ doesn’t hesitate to give everything he has to follow Christ.

Scripture Introduction: Let’s begin reading in John 12:1-11.

John 12:1–11 ESV

1 Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 2 So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table. 3 Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4 But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, 5 “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” 6 He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. 7 Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. 8 For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.” 9 When the large crowd of the Jews learned that Jesus was there, they came, not only on account of him but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. 10 So the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well, 11 because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus.

Prayer for Illumination

Discipleship is like a weeping woman before her savior—it’s prompted by a grateful heart. (vv. 1-3)

Her love for her brother was so great that there was no price too great for his life.

Mary is expressing a profound, deep thankfulness and gratitude for her brother’s life.

Her love for the Savior was so great that there was no sacrifice she was unwilling to make.

Mary could have chosen to just say “Thank you,” but her gratitude was so deep that she had to show it. Words couldn’t suffice!

And that love prompted her to give the most precious and valuable thing she owned.

Her gratitude to Christ was so great that there was no humiliation she wouldn’t endure to bring him glory.

Mary takes the role of a hired servant, anointing the feet of Christ.

More than that, she debases herself even further by using her own hair to wipe his feet.

Those who are in love with the world’s praise and what people think of them can never do this. The indignity and humiliation of debasing themselves like this is just too much.

But we serve a savior who took on the ultimate humiliation and shame for our sake. He left heaven where he was praised as King and took on a frail human body. He left his throne above to become a lowly carpenter and then be executed like a common criminal. While we often depict Christ as wearing a loincloth on the cross, in all likelihood, he was naked. Even as Christians, we cannot bear to portray our Savior with the indignity and humiliation that he truly endured.

Christ endured all of this to save your soul.

True discipleship is like a weeping woman at the feet of her Savior--it happens when the wonder of what Christ has done for us seizes our hearts and we overflow with thanksgiving from a grateful heart.

Discipleship is like expensive perfume—it’s extremely costly. (vv. 4-6)

This ointment that Mary used was worth almost a year’s salary.

If this story was set in modern America, that would be somewhere in the neighborhood of a $40-50,000 bottle of perfume.

Feel Jesus and his disciples could have done a lot with money like that.

Fed the hungry

Built homes for the homeless

etc.

Being a follower of Christ means realizing the infinite worth of Christ, and the relative worthlessness of anything else in comparison.

It’s like finding a buried treasure in a field, then selling everything you own so you can buy that field.

Being a disciple of Christ may cost you the praise of men.

We can debate the missiological strategy that John Chau used, but that is for the realm of missiologists. John Chau wasn’t perfect, and his strategy wasn’t perfect.

But when we peel back the cleverly disguised ‘concern’ that the media had for the Sentinelese people, what we find are these basic assumptions:

“There is no Hell.”

Like Patrick Chau, Justin Graves, a pastor and a friend of John’s from linguistics school, has blamed evangelical culture for enabling Chau’s death. “John Chau was a good man,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “He was a loving, passionate individual I was blessed to befriend, and the loss of his light on this earth was devastating. But it cannot be left as a mere tragedy. His death brings to light a multitude of issues with Evangelical views” and “hell-based ethics”.

“If you believe in heaven and hell then what he did was the most loving thing anyone could do.” John Middleton Ramsey, friend to Chau

“There are many ways to God.”

“Just a dumb American who thought the tribals needed ‘Jesus’ when the tribals already lived in harmony with God and nature for years without outside interference.”

Like his son, Dr Patrick Chau is a graduate of Oral Roberts, an evangelical university in Oklahoma. I had thought he might want to defend evangelical doctrines against the unsympathetic media coverage sparked by his son’s death. In an email, however, he called religion “the opium of the mass[es]”. “If you have [anything] positive to say about religion,” he told me, “l wish not to see or hear” it. He said his son’s zeal was a longstanding point of contention and that they’d agreed not to talk about John’s missionary work. “John is gone because the Western ideology overpowered my [Confucian] influence,” he said. He blamed evangelicals’ “extreme Christianity” for pushing his child to a “not unexpected end”, and he referred with particular bitterness to the Great Commission, Jesus’s injunction that Christians spread the gospel to all peoples.

1 Corinthians 4:9–13 ESV

9 For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. 10 We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. 11 To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, 12 and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; 13 when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.

1 Corinthians 3:18–20 ESV

18 Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. 19 For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” 20 and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.”

Mark 8:35 ESV

35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

Discipleship is like an alabaster jar—it’s all or nothing. (vv. 4-6 & Mk. 14:3)

This type of expensive perfume was kept in a sealed alabaster flask. The contents could only be used when the neck of the flask was broken.

You cannot “hold some back” if you want to be a true disciple of Christ. It’s all or nothing.

"[John] also attended a program at the Canada Institute of Linguistics, a missionary language school. There he befriended another student, Ben S, who was struck by his “quiet determination” and “confidence”.

“Was it his faith?” Ben wondered in a post remembering his friend. “Was it his years of mountaineering and extensive emergency medical training? Probably all of this factored in” – Chau “was just the kind of person who inspires your confidence and trust”.

One night in the computer lab, Chau told Ben of “his burden” to save the Sentinelese.

“I was impressed immediately that this was something no one but God alone could relieve him of,” Ben writes. “He had already heard all the arguments of why this was a fool’s errand and would jeopardize any mission associated with it, let alone the [lives] of the individuals involved.” This “was a sacred trust for him that no amount of reasoning would wrest from his grasp”.

In October, Chau traveled on a tourist visa to Port Blair, the Andaman islands’ regional capital, and took up residence in what he described as a “safe house”.

There he assembled an “initial contact response kit” – including picture cards for communication, bandages and dental forceps for removing arrows – and gifts for the Sentinelese: tweezers, scissors, cord, safety pins, fish hooks.

He carefully documented his activities in a handwritten diary. The resulting, 13-page testament – written with the earnestness and self-consciousness of someone who had digested many missionary and anthropologist accounts of indigenous contact and knew he might be writing for posterity – recounts his final days in fascinating and tragic detail.

Hoping it would lessen the risk of accidentally infecting the Sentinelese, he entered a self-imposed quarantine. For 11 days he went without direct sunlight. He prayed, exercised, and read The Lives of the Three Mrs Judsons, a 19th-century missionary account.

On the night of 14 November, he and some fishermen – Christians who had agreed to help – set out in darkness for North Sentinel, carefully avoiding coastguard vessels. Their journey was illuminated by glowing plankton, Chau wrote, and around them fish jumped “like darting mermaids”. They reached North Sentinel late at night and anchored nearby.

The next morning, 15 November, he made his first approach. The fishermen refused to go any closer to the island, so he stripped to his underwear – he thought it would make the Sentinelese more at ease, the fishermen later said – and paddled a kayak toward the shore.

He saw a hut and some dugout canoes. As he paddled up to the beach, several Sentinelese, faces painted yellow and speaking a language of “high-pitched sounds”, came rushing out.

“My name is John,” he shouted from his kayak. “I love you, and Jesus loves you.”

When the islanders began stringing their bows, he panicked. He threw toward them some fish he had brought as a gift, then, according to his diary, “turned and paddled like I never have in my life”.

Later that day he made another attempt, this time landing on the island.

He laid out more gifts, then approached the hut he was chased from earlier, staying out of arrow range. About half a dozen Sentinelese emerged and began to “whoop and shout”. He walked closer to try to hear what they were saying. He tried to “parrot their words back to them”, and the Sentinelese burst out laughing. They were probably “saying bad words or insulting me”, he concluded. He sang worship songs and preached from Genesis. For a while the Sentinelese seemed to tolerate his presence.

Then a boy shot an arrow at him. The arrow struck the waterproof Bible he was holding. He pulled it out, gave it back to the boy, and hastily retreated. The Sentinelese had taken his kayak, so he was forced to swim almost a mile to the fishing boat.

“I‘m scared,” he wrote that night in his diary. “Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful.” He was “crying a bit” and “wondering if it’ll be the last sunset I see before being in the place where the sun never sets”.

“You guys might think I’m crazy in all this,” he wrote to his family, “but I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people.”

Is this “Satan’s last stronghold”, he asked God – a place “where none have heard or even had a chance to hear your name?”

He decided he would make his next attempt without the fishing vessel floating nearby. Appearing alone might make the Sentinelese more comfortable, he thought. And if the approach went “badly”, this would spare the fishermen from having to “bear witness to my death”.

His diary makes it clear that he didn’t want to die, but accepted the possibility. “I think I could be more useful alive,” he wrote, “but to you, God, I give all the glory of whatever happens.” He asked God to forgive “any of the people on this island who try to kill me” – especially “if they succeed”.

Shortly after dawn on 16 November, the last day he was seen alive, John Chau asked the fishermen to drop him off alone. He knew the risks; but the people of North Sentinel were damned, and he was determined to save them.

He struck out once more for the shore.

Conclusion

God probably hasn’t called you to die a martyr’s death at the hands of an unreached people group.

But he does call you to live your life in a way that looks foolish to the world.