Lent 5 Year C 2025: John 12:1-8
My oldest daughter is currently learning to read and write. It’s one of her favorite things about kindergarten. And her spelling is a little…suspect. It’s not fair to expect kindergartners to learn to write English, where the rules are inconsistent and can feel arbitrary - she’s offended by the “e” at the end of “love” which I understand. So when she writes things, it sometimes takes some deciphering to figure out what she means. But, more often than not, I can figure it out because she and I both speak the same language, more or less fluently. Not just English, but a very specific English - 21st century American Midwestern English. And if someone - anyone - were to write, say, a sentence with no spaces between the words in 21st century American English, most of us here could at least figure out what they meant, even if we couldn’t get all of the words completely deciphered. In the oldest manuscripts of any of our New Testament texts that have been discovered, there are a number of tra...