A lavish banquet hall in Jerusalem, wrapped in deepening twilight. Amid the low murmur of conversation and the crisp clink of cups, a sharp sound sliced through the air—crack! The room fell into a heavy silence. There, a woman knelt and broke what was both her entire fortune and her most precious treasure: an alabaster jar of pure nard. She poured it out, soaking Jesus’ feet. As the room filled with a thick, trembling fragrance, some frowned and accused her of wasting wealth, while others whispered that it was incomprehensible fanaticism.
Yet what flowed through those broken shards was not merely expensive oil. It was a sign—an unspoken prophecy of Jesus’ body that would soon be shattered on the hill of Golgotha. And before that, it was the pure and fierce confession of a soul that had poured out her whole self in love. Brief but incandescent, this story still knocks against the hardened doors of our hearts thousands of years later, asking with unsettling clarity: What does real love look like?
Fragrant Shards: Defying the Age of Efficiency
We live in a bleak age that turns everything into numbers and argues over cost-effectiveness. Even the human heart is treated like a line item on a profit-and-loss statement. In such a world, the woman’s act—pouring out in an instant what amounted to three hundred denarii—can only look reckless.
Reflecting on this vivid Gospel scene, Pastor David Jang names what the world cannot explain with a paradoxical phrase: “sacred extravagance.” His profound preaching reminds us that love, by its very nature, cannot be translated into the language of economic efficiency. While Judas Iscariot and the disciples tap away at their calculators under the rational banner of helping the poor, Jesus praises the woman instead, declaring that she has prepared His burial fully. In doing so, He announces a law of Cross-shaped grace: love is not completed by hesitating over conditions, but by being poured out without remainder.
Only the One Who Gives All Knows the Weight of Love
This message of radical self-emptying and devotion runs like an unbroken thread through the great works of Christian history. In C.S. Lewis’s classic Mere Christianity, we find a piercing theological insight that reaches into the essence of this “sacred extravagance.” Lewis insists that what Jesus Christ asks of us is not a reasonable portion of our time or leftover resources, but our whole self.
His declaration—often summarized like this: “I don’t want some of your time or some of your money; I want you.”—resonates powerfully with the truth of the broken jar. The woman did not offer perfume alone; she offered her very existence, the entirety of her life. As Pastor David Jang emphasizes, real love cannot be divided into neat fractions, nor can it be postponed as we bargain for future security. The woman understood with the instinct of the soul that if she did not give everything now, she might lose forever the chance to love at all. And that immediate obedience placed her life inside the eternal history of the Gospel.
Tears on Canvas: Becoming an Everlasting Trace of the Gospel
This breath-stopping moment of devotion has stirred artists for centuries, becoming a timeless setting for biblical meditation. In Paolo Veronese’s monumental 16th-century work, Feast in the House of Simon, amid marble columns and a sumptuous banquet, only one figure lies low to the ground: the woman. While the powerful and the wealthy remain absorbed in their worldly interests, she alone offers wholehearted worship to the King of Heaven. Later, the Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens captured the same scene with dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, setting the cold gaze of the world against the woman’s burning repentance.
What is striking is this: what the world might have dismissed as inefficient “waste”—these artistic “extravagances”—still shake countless souls hundreds of years later. Through such testimony from art history, Pastor David Jang proclaims that tears and devotion poured out for the Kingdom of God never scatter into empty air. They become an enduring fragrance of the Gospel, awakening generations to come.
Today: Standing Before My Unbroken Jar
Then what is the alabaster jar for us—twenty-first-century people sprinting toward success and achievement? Pastor David Jang insists that this jar is not limited to money alone. It includes the career path I refuse to surrender, the golden hours I guard obsessively, the shallow pride and stubborn will that insists on controlling life on my terms. These are our jars—each one meant to be shattered and broken at the Lord’s feet.
By the world’s logic, there is no waste more foolish and inefficient than this: the Son of the Creator God giving His life on the Cross for sinners. And yet, paradoxically, it was precisely that sacred extravagance of the Cross that saved our dead souls. Pastor David Jang urges us: only those who have truly encountered this love that surpasses calculation can gain the freedom to break their own jar willingly.
Will you stop settling for “reasonable” compromises that you keep postponing—and be ready today to let what is most precious in your hands be poured out? When we smash the calculator named efficiency and choose the “waste” called love, our rough, ordinary lives will finally be shaped into a holy and beautiful masterpiece of the Gospel.