Jesus is a lot like soap

This Sunday, our pastor started a sermon series looking at the Gospels and how grace shines throughout them. He began by going through Luke 7:36-50. The story details Jesus' dinner with a Pharisee, where a sinful woman interrupted the meal to anoint the Messiah with perfume and wash his feet with her tears. It's such a great story, I dare not sully it with my description of it.

However, I'll share a thought I had during the sermon. As I visualized the woman washing Jesus' feet with her hair and tears, I couldn't help but think "Jesus is a lot like soap." Okay, before you gather your torches and pitchforks, hear me out a second.

Imagine the world before soap. People were dirty and grimy, and not too pleasant to smell. But they didn't really notice, because everybody was sullied. People got used to their own stench.

Now, if you read about God, you know that He's perfectly clean. So clean, He can't come in contact with anything dirty, or else He'd be dirty, too.

With a clean God and a dirty people, you have different ways you can relate to God.

• You can avoid all the mud puddles and keep as clean as possible, like the Pharisees. 
• You can hope for a Muddy God like the idolators. 
• You can accept that you'll never be clean enough, and just live in filth like the tax collectors and prostitutes.
• You can search after stuff to make your dirt smell better, like the desparate.
• Or you could scrape off enough dirt to look only mostly disheveled, like normal folk.
• Or... I'm sure you could come up with some more ideas.

Now, imagine that our Clean God has offered us soap. I'm not talking 99.44% pure, but 100% pure soap. And it's cheap, too. All you have to do is let it come in contact with all of you, and let it do it's job of lathering up and washing you clean.

So, would you use it? Judging by our society today, I'd say you would. Now, how would people look at the new, clean you?

• Pharisees would be jealous of your cleanliness, since they used to be the standard for clean before.
• Some people would wonder why you're going on and on about being so clean.
• A few would say that since soap didn't taste good, they wouldn't use it (even though it wasn't meant to go in your mouth).
• Some shysters would try to sell you something that's "better than soap", but costs a lot more and does a lot less.
• But many would want to be clean just like you, and would want to know where you got the soap.

Now, in this analogy, Jesus is the soap, and God's grace and mercy are the soap suds that wash away your sins. Like the soap bar that wears down with use, Jesus sacrificed himself to make you clean and presentable before God. And without soap, you can't get clean enough on your own. Sure, you can roll in a field of daisies, but you're still dirty without the cheap gift of soap.

So, look at how you treat your soap.

• Do you leave it in the cabinet, thinking that will be enough to keep you clean? 
• Do you only take a bath on Christmas and Easter? 
• Have you bought into the lie that you only get one bath, and then you have to avoid dirt for the rest of your life? 
• Do you just wash your hands, and leave the rest of your body dirty?
• Do you avoid washing certain parts of your body, thinking your soap is too good to go anywhere near there? 
• Or maybe you cover up with perfume that smells like soap, just to make people think you're clean?
• Do you like the concept of soap, but think you're going to find your own way to clean up?
• Do you think you need to clean yourself before you can wash with soap?
• Were you so scarred as a kid when someone made you eat soap, and you swore you would never touch the stuff again?

I could go on and on.  Why do we treat our relationship with Jesus any differently?