Washed With Tears

God has been teaching me a lot lately about worship.  (Yes, the word "worship" is in my job title, but that's not what I'm talking about.)

Last night I was reading a Bible story to Jack.  The woman who washes Jesus' feet with her tears and perfume.  It's a story that I have probably heard hundreds of times.  But never like this.  It's from the Jesus Storybook Bible (side note: if you don't have the Jesus Storybook Bible, GET IT.  Whether you have kids or not.  You can find it here or here.)

I always knew that this story was about worship.  About giving what we have to Jesus.  But this time it was different.  I can't really describe what struck me about the story without telling the story.  The way we read it last night.  So here it is.

Excerpt from The Jesus Storybook Bible, by by Sally Lloyd-Jones, Copyright 2007, Zondervan

Washed with tears
A sinful woman anoints Jesus, from Mark 14, Luke 7, and John 12

One night Jesus went to dinner at an Important Leader's house. The Important Leader invited his Important Friends. They were all just sitting down to eat when a woman walked in. She was not invited but everyone knew who she was.

"Who does she think she is?" the guests whispered. "How dare she?" The woman was a big sinner and everyone knew it.  (It was easy to see -- after all, she had broken the rules and done bad things.)

The woman walked straight up to Jesus. She was carrying very expensive perfume.

Now the thing about perfume back then was that it didn't come in bottle, it came in jars. And the jars were made out of precious stone, like alabaster. But here's the catch: the jars didn't have a lid, or a stopper, or anything. So the only way you got the perfume out was if you broke the jar. Once you broke the jar, that was it -- you had no more. Most people didn't use perfume because it was too precious. They just kept it on a shelf and looked at it.

So you see, this perfume was her most precious thing in all the world. It was her treasure.

The woman knelt down before Jesus like he was a king. She held Jesus' feet in her hands and started to cry. Her tears fell onto Jesus' feet, washing them. She kissed his feet and dried them with her long, dark hair. And then she did something strange. She broke the jar and poured the perfume all over his feet.

Everyone gasped. What a waste! Over someone's feet? Such expensive perfume!

It smelled like lilies in a summer field.

Jesus looked at the woman, and he smiled at her. What she had done was the most wonderful thing. Just as Samuel had anointed David, God's true king, all those years before, so this woman had anointed Jesus -- not with oil, but with her tears.

The Important People were cross. They thought Jesus should not be kind to this woman. "That woman is a sinner!" they grumbled. "We're the good ones." (And it's true, they did look good -- from the outside. After all, they were keeping all the rules.)

But Jesus could see inside people. And inside, in their hearts, Jesus saw that they did not love God or other people. They were running away from God and they thought they didn't need a rescuer. They thought they were good enough because they kept the rules. But sin had stopped their hearts from working properly. And their hearts were hard and cold.

"This woman knows she's a sinner," Jesus told them. "She knows she'll never be good enough. She knows she needs me to rescue her. That's why she loves me so much.

"You look down on this woman because you don't look up to God. She is sinful on the outside -- but you are sinful on the inside."

The Important People shook with anger.

Jesus turned to the woman and smiled. "Your sins are forgiven," he said. "You trusted me. And God has rescued you!"