The First Christian
April 2, 2023 (Palm Sunday) • Mount Pleasant UMC
Three days ago…it seemed like a lifetime ago. But it had only been three days since Jesus had ridden that donkey down the side of the Mount of Olives and into the city of Jerusalem through the Sheep Gate. So much had happened in those three days, so much that the cries from that day, the “Hosannas” and the “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”s, have faded. The disciples can barely remember what that day was like because everything has changed so much in just three short days. The conflict, the tension, the challenges, the disagreements—it all hangs heavy in the air on this Wednesday of what they don’t know yet will be Jesus’ last week with them.
I wonder if she was in the crowd on Sunday. Mark doesn’t tell us her name, nor does Matthew. And there’s a slight difference between the Gospels on the chronology and the details, which you would expect when people are telling a story thirty or forty years later. But John does tell us her name: it’s Mary, sister to Martha and Lazarus. Now, we know Jesus and the disciples have been staying in Bethany on the eastern side of the Mount of Olives with this family, so some speculate that the home they are in on Wednesday night belongs to the family. In other words, it’s possible this “Simon the Leper” might have been the patriarch of the family. Of course, he’s not a leper anymore if he has a home and lives in town. Apparently at some point Jesus healed him and now he is showing his gratitude to his healer with what is, in reality, the next-to-last supper (cf. Card, Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pgs. 164-165).
This morning we are continuing our journey through Holy Week and watching the ways Jesus was fighting for peace, the ways he was preparing to bring peace with God and peace with each other to the whole earth. And this morning, we have arrived at Wednesday of Holy Week, a day that is strangely quiet. The Gospels don’t report much of anything happening during the day; it seems that Jesus may have stayed out of Jerusalem on Wednesday, probably knowing that once he left Bethany tomorrow he would not return. The only thing we know about what happened in the city that day is that the chief priests and the teachers of the law were still scheming and trying to decide when the right time would be to get rid of Jesus. “Not during the festival,” they decide, “or the people may riot” (14:2). So religious leaders are plotting, and Jesus is resting.
That evening, he is taking part in a formal meal at Simon’s house. We know it’s a formal meal because they are reclining at the table (cf. Card 165). And at some point in the midst of the meal, we don’t know exactly when, this woman enters. I’m going to go with John and call her Mary, but her identity isn’t as important to the Gospel writers as what she is carrying. Mark says she had “an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard” (14:3). Nard was indeed very expensive. It was an extract of a plant grown in India, a long way from Israel, and Mark says this bottle alone was worth a year’s wages. Imagine that. Most bottles of nard contained a single ounce; this one was a pint, probably twelve ounces. How someone like Mary came into possession of such a treasure is hard to imagine. Some speculate it might have been her wedding dowry, or her life’s savings, but whatever it was, it’s an amazingly extravagant offering. The Gospels say she “broke” the jar, which means it would never be used again. Every drop of the contents was poured out on Jesus (cf. Tenney, “The Gospel of John,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 9, pg. 125; Keener, IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, pg. 294).
As the sound of the breaking jar rings out through the room, I imagine the eyes of everyone in the room turn toward Mary. She doesn’t say a word, but she upends the container and pours every drop out on Jesus’ head. The amber-colored liquid would have run down over his face, splashed off his nose, soaked his clothes, maybe running all the way down to his feet. John says, “The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” (John 12:3). You can almost smell it, can’t you? I have a small bottle of nard here, and I thought about sprinkling it all over everyone today, but instead I decided you can come and smell it after worship if you like. This is the smell that filled the house.
And then someone complains. There’s always at least one in the group, isn’t there? Mark just says it was “some of those present,” but John zeroes in on Judas as “the one.” We’ll come back to Judas in a few moments, but here is the complaint: “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages”—there’s the value statement—“and the money given to the poor” (14:5). Mark says, “And they rebuked her harshly.” The original language there means “to snort with anger.” In other words, they are (or at least Judas is) looking down on her hard. Mary, who was once a friend, is now the target of their scorn. They rush to judgment: she is wasteful. She has done a wasteful thing.
Jesus wastes no time in defending Mary. In fact, he sounds quite harsh when he says, “Leave her alone. Why are you bothering her?” (14:6). And, with the smell of the perfume still hanging in the air, Jesus goes on to explain what has happened. “She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial” (14:8). Nard was, in fact, “a spice often used in funeral preparations” (Kernaghan, Mark [IVPNTC], pg. 276). She has done “a beautiful thing,” Jesus says, or literally “a good work” (14:6). The rabbis taught that caring for the dead was a highly important work, and because of its immediacy, it took priority over everything else (cf. Porterfield, Fight Like Jesus, pg. 107). Mary is doing a good thing, and because of that, Jesus says something about her that he says about no one else. He says, “Wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her” (14:9). He doesn’t say that about the disciples. He doesn’t say that about this mother. He doesn’t say it even about those who financially supported his ministry. He only says this about Mary. Why?
There is some sense in which her actions themselves communicate the gospel. She is serving. She is accentuating Jesus’ death. She is extravagant in her love. And she is devoted to Jesus. And I think this is a huge part of what is going on here, of how on this Wednesday Jesus is contending for peace. Mary sets an example for all of us in being people devoted to the cause of Jesus. She is an uncalculated giver; whatever she had she was willing to give for his cause. Can we say the same? She does an unimaginable thing in the interest of serving God and others; she “wastes” her life’s savings on a single act of selfless love. One author puts it this way: these people “have such a level of self-awareness of their gratitude that they become self-forgetful about their own needs. They are the ones whose life makes no sense apart from Jesus. He is their only explanation and, because of him, their lives are arresting. They are the unlikely holy ones, whose lives may seem small and inconsequential at the time, but who will never be forgotten. They are the worshippers” (Walt, The Gospel of the Holy Spirit, pg. 248). This night, in the midst of a formal dinner, Mary is the first person to really “get” who Jesus is. Peter may have earlier confessed that Jesus was the Son of God (cf. Mark 8:29), but Mary is the first one to understand what that means. She knows that following Jesus means giving it all and because of that, her story will be told forever. Because of that, she is a role model to all who bear Jesus’ name. She is, in many ways, the first Christian, the first to see this faith as more than a head belief, but a way of living (cf. Porterfield 109).
There’s another angle on this, though, and that’s where Jesus is coming from. Once again, as he does throughout the Gospels, Jesus is again affirming someone who is on the margins, someone who has no power as the world understands power. He affirms Mary, who has no standing and no influence in the world she lives in. She is nobody to all the people gathered in that room—except for Jesus. To him, she is the one who best embodies the Gospel. She gets it. That’s why her story will be told; that’s why we’re still talking about her. Throughout his ministry, Jesus constantly saw those that others couldn’t or wouldn’t see. I think of the way he welcomed children. Do you remember the story? Because of his increasing fame as a teacher, as a religious man, parents began bringing their children to Jesus for a blessing. And the disciples, Jesus’ self-appointed bodyguards, start shooing them away. Jesus is too busy, too important, too something to spend time with children because, in that culture, children had no value. But it’s not the kids Jesus is upset with; it’s the disciples. “Let the little children come to me,” he said, “and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matthew 19:14). And he blessed them. He saw tax collectors and lepers, he spoke with beggars and widows. He had time for all the people no one else had time for, those on the margins, those that respectable culture ignored. Seeing Mary, welcoming Mary, treating her as a real person was not an unusual occurrence for Jesus. It was who he is.
And Judas doesn’t understand it. Unfortunately, from the way the story is told, our view of Judas is tainted because we know from the beginning that he is the one who is going to betray Jesus (cf. 3:19). But I don’t believe he was planning to betray Jesus from the very beginning. I believe Judas was an earnest and faithful disciple, preaching the Gospel right alongside the other eleven. He believed Jesus was the savior, the one they had been waiting for. He was trusted enough to be their treasurer. But something happened along the way, and John, near the end of Jesus’ earthly life, gives us a little insight into Judas’ character when he whispers to us that Judas “was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it” (John 12:6). The Gospels never tell us directly why Judas betrayed Jesus (cf. Kernaghan 279), but it certainly wasn’t for money. The thirty pieces of silver offered to him by the religious leaders was a joke. That was the amount you paid for a slave who had been gored by an ox (cf. Exodus 21:32). The religious leaders were basically saying, “Jesus is worth about the price of a dead slave.” Like I said, it was a joke. He didn’t do it for that money. Some think that perhaps Judas was upset at this waste of perfume because he thought by selling it, he could steal the profits and get out of this disciple gig. I don’t know if any of that is true or if we will ever know. But I do know this: “The only reason you betray a friend for a few days’ pay is because you believe that friend first betrayed you” (Porterfield 114). Judas is a man deeply disappointed; Jesus is not who he thought he was and being a disciple of a peacemaker is not what he signed up for. Judas has seen Jesus weep over the city rather than conquer it. Judas has watched as Jesus ran Jews out of the Temple and showed kindness to the Gentiles. Judas has watched as Jesus pronounced woe on the religious leaders and waited in vain for Jesus to tell his disciples to fight to protect the Temple. Nothing Jesus has said or done this week has been in line with Judas’ expectations. Some think maybe Judas was trying to force Jesus’ hand by betraying him. That’s possible, but at the very least what I see in Judas on this Wednesday is a man whose expectations have been crushed, a man who is deeply disappointed and feels betrayed by one he counted as a friend, as the only hope for Israel.
Here, on this Wednesday evening, at a dinner thrown by a former leper, there is a choice clearly laid out for all who have gathered. And it’s the same choice that is before us at the beginning of this Holy Week. The choice is between Mary—broken and spilled out in the presence of Jesus, worshipping him with her life—and Judas—focused on himself and his own disappointments. Judas is on a path that leads away from Jesus, while Mary is on a path that leads toward him. Judas tosses aside, betrays, the one who fails to meet his expectations, while Mary embraces the one who refuses to strike back and yet was willing to be killed for the sake of us all. The choice is pretty stark (cf. Porterfield 116).
The poet Robert Frost described such a choice. Listen and hear his words perhaps in a new way this morning.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Two roads—Judas or Mary. Either choice will change your life—one for the better and one for the worse. Which path are you on? Which path do you want to be on this Holy Week? Let’s pray and prepare our hearts for Holy Communion.
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