Mark 14:6
“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me.”

Lots of things are beautiful for the moment. The color of leaves in the fall, the potential go-ahead score late in a game, the celebrities we watch daily on TV and in the movies (I offer the accompanying picture of Ashley Tisdale as Exhibit A). So the fact that Jesus said something was beautiful in this verse doesn’t surprise me. We see beautiful things all the time. What blows my mind is that just 3 verses later He said that it would be beauty that would last forever. Now that gets my attention.

I want to be someone who does the beautiful thing, who worships Jesus in such a way that other people – including Jesus – take notice of it. I want my worship to be a topic of conversation, not because I am the object of it, but because my passion for Him is the subject of it. It is interesting to note that when we worship in this beautiful way, our worship will bother people. I guess it’s kind of naive to believe that we can worship passionately without being noticed, pointed to, whispered about, and gawked at. I think I’m growing to a place where I’m okay with that, and if nothing else, I want to make the choice to accept that how He sees me is a whole lot more important than how any one person, group, or religious establishment sees me.

He saw it as beautiful, timeless, epic. He saw this woman’s outrageous worship and made sure He hit the pause button on the remote long enough to add His divine flashing neon arrow to it. “LOOK! LOOK! TRUE WORSHIP! ETERNAL BEAUTY!” He made it a point to, well, point. What religion had pointed to and gawked at moments earlier, He also pointed to as an eternal example of beauty that would last. He said her act would be mentioned everywhere and every time the gospel was preached in the world.

If we’re honest, our worship is forgettable, but her worship was unforgettable. Our passion is momentary, but hers was eternal. Our sacrifice is cheap, but hers was costly. And while our beauty fades under the hot lights of criticism, hers did not.

It would be nice if this story ended with everyone grabbing expensive perfume and pouring it on Jesus’ feet. That is what we expect when we passionately worship, isn’t it? We expect everyone to be so moved by us that they can’t help but respond with the same level of intensity. But that’s not what we see here. Instead we find that this type of passionate, costly, unforgettable and un-hide-able worship did just the opposite: it was the tipping point for Judas. If he had been on the fence about whether or not to betray Jesus, this woman’s worship is what pushed him off. He went straight from this outrageous display of passion to the religious leaders and offered Jesus to them.

Beautiful worship does that. It draws a line in the sand and people find themselves on one side or the other, and when they find themselves on the wrong side of it, things can often turn out quite ugly. This woman was okay with that, because, well, she was on the same side as Jesus.

I want to be, too.

John 11:39
Jesus said, “Move the stone away.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said, “But, Lord, it has been four days since he died. There will be a bad smell.” (NCV)

I have an ugly yard. I guess I can say that and not hurt anyone’s feelings because I’m the guy who takes care of it (and I use that phrase loosely). Our yard is the final resting place for the bad plants, kind of like The Green Mile except that, well, there’s not a lot of green. Bushes last only a few seasons, there are rocks embedded in the lawn, and the only things that seem to flourish are weeds. It is, as I said, ugly.

But every now and then I look at my yard and see beauty. Typically it happens once a year, on the day of the first mowing of the season. I start with a yard full of sticks and leftover leaves from the fall and end with a yard that is clean and a little more green than the brown it was before I mowed. I edge and trim it and then blow the clippings away and it always strikes me how much just cleaning away the junk can make even my ugly yard look good.

Our faith is like that, and Easter is the perfect reminder of it. We spend so much effort and energy trying to keep covered up what we feel is ugly, and yet our Lord knows that the first step towards beauty is the uncovering of the ugly. Martha knew that, and tried to warn Jesus that moving the stone would release a bad smell, but Jesus wasn’t buying it. If He really is the resurrection and the life, then not only can He bring life where there was death, but He can handle all the old smells that try to linger around, too. He told Martha that if she truly believed, she would see the glory of God.

What shows His glory? The dead live, the old is new, and there is no longer any hint of the previous ugly condition. Hope springs eternal and in a moment, the uncovering of what we fear is the most ugly gives way to a beauty and a hope that we could never have imagined.

On this Resurrection Day, know that He has uncovered the myth behind the enemy’s greatest tactic: the ugliness of death is no longer to be feared because even in that, our Lord brings life. He is the victor, and finally, I am made new.

Now, if I could just sprinkle some of that on my lawn…