Mark 14: All or Nothing, Breaking the Alabaster Jar for Jesus

Introduction

Hannah Miller is one of the two lay leaders (church wardens) of Gas Street Church in Birmingham. She and her husband have been part of the church since its beginnings. This message opens a two-week series that the church devotes, twice a year, to generosity and vision. She talks about money, and she admits right away that the conversation is uncomfortable.

Her starting point is a little phrase everyone knows: “mine.” My time, my plans, my house, my future, my children, my life. Facing that reflex, she opens Mark 14 and the story of a woman who breaks an alabaster jar over the head of Jesus.

Her message fits in one sentence: worship is “all or nothing.” Not because God demands every last penny, but because no part of your life should escape his lordship. Along the way, she names three obstacles to a fully surrendered life: fear, control and comfort.

Message outline

1. “Mine, mine, mine”

Hannah Miller begins with a famous scene from the British series Gavin and Stacey: a family orders a takeaway and suggests putting everything in the middle of the table to share. The character Smithy is horrified: he chose his dish, and he wants to eat his dish.
She admits she has a lot of sympathy for him. Others in her family, “far more mature” than she is, agree to share. She does not. And it often backfires on her: someone ordered something better, but since she refuses to share, she cannot taste what the others have.
She compares herself to the seagulls in Finding Nemo who keep repeating: “Mine, mine, mine!” That, she says, is her natural stance toward what she owns.
“It's funny when we're talking about curry,” but this attitude may not be so different from the one many people, herself included, have toward the rest of their lives.

2. A life woven into worship

In the early days of the church, Ken Costa spoke a word over this community: it would be “woven into worship.” If the church is, then the people who make it up are too.
What is woven into a fabric is part of it. It is not a pocket or a button added on top; it is present in every thread. Worship is not an extra.
Romans 12:1 says it: offering your body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, is your worship. Your whole life is an act of worship: your time, your gifts, your relationships, your influence and, “quite uncomfortably,” your finances. If worship runs through everything, it eventually reaches your bank account.
“Worship says ‘yours’ where instinctively I want to say ‘mine.’” Jesus never stopped being on the throne, but when I worship, I am the one I bring down from the throne.
“Money is never just money.” It is tied to our security, our freedom, our status, the image we have of ourselves, our comfort, what we want to guarantee for our children, and the idea that everything will be fine. That is often where we discover how hard it is for us to say “yours.”

3. The broken alabaster jar

The story is told in all four Gospels, just before the death of Jesus. In Bethany, at the house of Simon the leper, a woman comes in with an alabaster jar filled with very costly perfume of pure nard, breaks it and pours the perfume over the head of Jesus (Mark 14:3-6).
This was no ordinary perfume, “not an imitation, not even a very good bottle.” It was worth more than a year's wages, which today, at the UK living wage, comes to between £26,000 and £30,000. Nothing suggests she was giving out of her surplus: it may have been everything she had.
She breaks the jar. She does not take off the stopper to pour out “2%” and close it again. There is no turning back, no spare bottle.
Meanwhile, everyone around her is calculating. “I probably would have done the same,” Hannah Miller confesses. They call it a waste. Jesus calls it beautiful.
She does not ask what the acceptable minimum is, or how little she can give and still have it count. “She is completely all or nothing.”
The point is not to go home and empty every account. It is the principle: saying “you are the Lord of my life” means holding nothing back. “It's not: you can have my Sunday, but not my Monday. You can have my relationships, but not my ambitions. You can have my worship, but not my money.”
No locked little rooms in your life, no alabaster jars on the shelf labelled “mine.” Everything is surrendered, everything is his.

4. First obstacle: fear

The fear that there won't be enough. “What if I give, and then I don't have what I need?” The news and the podcasts offer little hope, and everything around us keeps saying: be careful, protect yourself.
Not long ago, Hannah Miller and her husband sensed that God was asking them to give an amount on top of their regular giving, an amount she did not think she had set aside. She would have liked to keep it. “I'm not telling you this to be heroic, I'm telling you this to be honest.” She was afraid; she did not want to break her alabaster jar for fear there would be no other.
Psychologists speak of a “scarcity mindset”: it has nothing to do with what you own, whether or not you are a millionaire. It is the conviction that there won't be enough for you, so you have to hold everything tight.
Being generous does not mean being irresponsible. You have to pay your bills, get rid of your debts, think about the future. The Bible is full of wisdom about money. But “wisdom and fear are not the same thing,” and a wise decision and a decision driven by fear can look alike from the outside.
Sometimes, after giving, her family has experienced extraordinary, unexpected provision that no one could have orchestrated without God stepping in. Other times, she has gone through more financial difficulty. Generosity is not a slot machine: “if I give £10, he'll give me back £100” is not what happens.
Giving is saying: “I don't need to cling to this, because God is holding me.” It is “a small act of resistance,” an act of faith, even when the emotions still have to catch up.
“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). The more convinced you are of God's love, the less hold fear has. Your security is no longer in what you hold back, but in the one who holds you.

5. Second obstacle: control

“It's mine.” My salary, my house, my savings, my things. Back to the curry.
Yet “the earth is Yahweh's, with its fullness” (Psalm 24:1). While preparing this message, Hannah Miller asked herself: “Do I really believe it? Do I live as if everything I have belongs to him?”
She gives an example: if she hands £20 to one of the worship leaders and asks her to give £5 to one person and £5 to another, the worship leader will not be offended. It was Hannah's money, entrusted to be shared. That is how God entrusts our resources to us.
The question then changes: no longer “how much do I have to give to God?” but “God, what do you want me to do with what is already yours?” A life woven into worship does not say “this percentage belongs to God,” because 100% belongs to him.
When you break the jar, you dethrone your need for control.

6. Third obstacle: comfort

“I deserve it. Haven't I earned it?” Hannah Miller speaks especially to the younger people: what we consider enough has an extraordinary ability to move as we get older.
You are perfectly happy with beans on toast, then the beans move onto sourdough from a trendy bakery, then every outing becomes a brunch. Nobody wakes up one morning thinking their lifestyle has slipped. You just slide. What was a luxury becomes the norm, and when you earn more, the lifestyle goes up a notch.
She has lived in her house for about fourteen years. In recent years, both of her neighbours have had an extension built. Her house has not changed, but she started thinking that an extension would be nice. “My house is wonderful,” but the comparison shifted what she considered enough.
When Peter asks Jesus about another disciple's life, Jesus answers: “What is that to you? You follow me” (John 21:22). God has often reminded her of this verse: “But they have this, they were able to go on holiday there... What is that to you, Hannah? You follow me.”
She tells the story of Rick Warren, an American pastor for about twenty-five years who became wealthy through the royalties of his book The Purpose Driven Life. With his wife Kay, he decided not to change house or car, to stop drawing a salary from his church, to repay everything it had paid him over twenty-five years, and then to set up a foundation. Their percentage of giving rose until they were giving away 90% and keeping 10%.
Most of us will never be in that situation. But their question remains ours: “Lord, what are you asking us to do with what you have entrusted to us?” Noticing the silence in the room, she adds: “Yes, I know. It's not easy.”

7. What Jesus is worth to you, and a life with open hands

Hannah Miller returns to the takeaway: she almost always shares with her sons. When one of them asks to “try a little” of a dish he already knows, she rolls her eyes, but she gives. “It's not just the question, it's the one asking.”
When money is talked about at church, we think it is the church asking. In reality, it is a conversation with the Lord. If the woman in Mark 14 could act as she did, it was because of the one she was worshipping. “The question is not: what is this perfume worth? It's: what is he worth?”
A woman from the church shares her testimony in a video. As a child, she could hardly wait for the moment she could bring, like everyone else, her offering envelope. At ten, with her first pocket money and then her first small job, she set up a system of pouches to set aside the tithe before any spending: giving the firstfruits, not what is left over. More than twenty years later, she sees God reminding her: “I am your Father, I take care of you.” Carrying the responsibility for your future alone is crushing, and God relieves us of it.
First principle: decide to give in advance, rather than seeing what is left, because often nothing is left. The tithe, 10%, is a biblical safeguard to help us decide well. It is “neither a law, nor a floor, nor a ceiling.” If you have never given, perhaps start with 1 or 2%. If you already give 10%, God may be inviting you to move to 11%.
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). We think money follows the heart; Jesus says the heart follows the treasure. You don't need to feel like it: the act of giving shapes a worshipper in you.
Second principle: take stock regularly. Married for twenty-seven years, Hannah Miller sits down with her husband every year to set a giving goal and see what could be a “stretching challenge.” She acknowledges the cost-of-living crisis and invites those overwhelmed by debt to get help: the church works with the charity Christians Against Poverty.
Third principle: keep room for spontaneous generosity, for example a pot set aside so you can give without calculating.
In John's account, “the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment” (John 12:3). Hannah Miller dreams of a church whose generosity would carry that fragrance through the city: feeding families, funding missionaries, paying an electricity bill, to the point that people in Birmingham say: “You should see what's going on around that church.”
She concludes: following Jesus does not begin with what we do for him. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only born Son” (John 3:16). It is not about proving our generosity: we pour out because he first poured out everything for us.

Key takeaways

Worship is not an extra: it is woven into the whole of life, right down to your bank account.
“All or nothing” does not mean giving everything away, but leaving nothing outside the lordship of Jesus.
Breaking the alabaster jar means dethroning fear, control and comfort, and stepping down from the throne yourself.
Generosity is not a transaction: it is an act of faith in the one who holds you, not in what you hold back.
The real question is not “how much do I have to give?” but “what is Jesus worth to me?”

Personal application

What alabaster jar are you keeping on the shelf because it seems too precious?
Which of the three obstacles holds you back the most today: fear, control or comfort?
Do your financial decisions come from wisdom or from fear, even when they seem reasonable?
Who are you comparing yourself to right now, and what would Jesus answer you: “What is that to you? You follow me”?
What first concrete step can you take this week: decide on a percentage, take stock of your finances, or plan a reserve for giving spontaneously?

Verses cited

Frequently asked questions

What does the broken alabaster jar represent in Mark 14?

For Hannah Miller, it is an image of worship. The perfume was worth about a year's wages, and the woman does not simply take off the stopper: she breaks the jar, with no way back. She is not looking for the acceptable minimum; she is “all or nothing.” Others call it a waste, and Jesus calls it beautiful.

Do you have to give everything to worship God?

No. Hannah Miller makes clear that the goal is not to empty your accounts on the way home. “All or nothing” does not mean giving everything away, but handing everything over to God: no room of your life should stay outside his lordship. She also reminds us that we need to pay our bills, get out of debt and plan for the future wisely.

What is a scarcity mindset?

It is a psychology concept the speaker draws on. It has nothing to do with what you actually own: it is the deep conviction that there won't be enough for you, so you have to hold everything tight. Hannah Miller answers it with 1 John 4:18: perfect love casts out fear. The more convinced you are of God's love, the less hold fear has.