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 traits of writing from the first century that make the translation from Greek to English difficult. First of all, ancient Greek is different from modern Greek. In the same way as Shakespearean English is different from modern English, the meanings of words in the same language change over time. But that is the simplest of the differences. Notating or writing out language was a completely different process back then. It has never been less expensive to write something down than it is today, but in the time during which the Gospel of John was written, there were no notepads. The closest thing you would’ve had to what we would recognize as paper was papyrus, a material similar to thick paper that was made of the pith of the papyrus plant. Your other option, as my New Testament professor would say, was to “get another cow” - writing on animal hide was another option that would last longer than papyrus, but was considerably more expensive. Either way, it was quite the project to access something to write on, and so when you finally obtained the necessary materials you wanted to make the most of it. This led writers to cut out anything that could be superfluous, including spaces between words, most punctuation, and there were certainly no new paragraphs or headings to sections.

And so scholars throughout the centuries have made the best, most informed choices possible. Which brings us to the choices made in today’s text from John. Some translators use commas, some use dashes, and some - like ours - use parentheses. The parentheses tell us what our translators think John is doing - giving us some extra information, almost as an aside. We don’t know if John intended for the comments about Judas to be asides. It appears the translators thought so - that these are extra bits of information. So I’m going to read verses 3-8 without the parentheticals, to offer a different interpretation:

“Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples, said, ‘Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?’ Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’”

It sounds a little different now, doesn’t it? With the notes about Judas, it sets him up as a straw man, encouraging the reader to dismiss or judge him from the first comment that Judas is going to betray Jesus. Even without the notes, like in the Gospel of Mark where Judas isn’t the questioner, just “some who were there” - without the notes found in John, those questioning the woman’s actions and values are told to leave her alone, and Jesus honored her actions which honored him. With or without Judas, Jesus’ response is the same.

If you, like me, have heard this story so many times that you enter into it without needing John’s commentary to know that Judas is wrong, I invite you to imagine you’ve had your memory wiped. That my redacted version, with no notes on Judas’ character nor knowledge that he was going to betray Jesus, is the only version of the story you’ve heard. All you know about Judas is that he’s “one of (Jesus’) disciples” questioning why three hundred denarii, the equivalent to a year’s worth of income at the time - was poured on a man’s feet.

Are we willing to admit that, without those notes, as we pretend to know nothing else about Judas other than that he was a disciple of Jesus’, we might think Judas had a point? That it feels wasteful spending that much on perfume for that purpose. That maybe Mary should’ve used less perfume and given the value of the rest to the poor? I’m not going to shame you for having those thoughts. Judas and Mary in this story are at two ends of a spectrum: Judas, who was so stuck in the practical that he forgot his call to worship the Lord and Mary, a peasant with very limited resources, who was willing to make the sacrifice to give something of significant value to honor Jesus.

So when I read this story, I also think about the other disciple mentioned: Mary, who wiped that perfume with her hair. Without telling too much about myself…I’ve spilled liquids in my hair. Hair is really absorbent. I’ve had my hair save a white blouse from coffee. And, while my blouse is saved, my hair then smells like coffee for the rest of the day. And as my thoughts turn to Mary, who put a Roman pound - which is about 12 oz - of perfume on Jesus’ feet and wiped it with her hair, I wonder how long she carried the scent with her. First century women didn’t have the same bathing habits - or shampoo - as 21st century women. This story happens six days before the Passover, less than a week before the crucifixion. Could she still smell this anointing perfume that filled the house with its fragrance, which prepared Jesus for his death, while he was being crucified? What was it like for Mary, carrying around this physical reminder of the worth of Jesus?

When I was in my 20s, my younger brother died. And in the first weeks after his death, sometimes I would wake up in the morning, and there would be a brief moment where my brain forgot he had died. Where everything felt fine - like it was just another beautiful, crisp November day. And then I would remember, and it would all come crashing back down. Is that what the perfume in Mary’s hair brought back for her? Would she wake up to that scent and realize where it came from, ruining her day before it even began? Could she ever smell that scent again without thinking of what Jesus suffered, and what she suffered in his death? Because the joy of the resurrection doesn’t undo the suffering of the passion. The resurrection isn’t an all’s well that ends well that makes everyone forget the passion. The resurrected body of Jesus bore the scars from the cross.

We are offered, in this story, two people to emulate. Two disciples with two different sets of values. Judas, with his focus on the practical and Mary, with her focus on worship. Sometimes as a church we need to ask the practical question; if an expense is how we choose to live our values. Sometimes we need to remember that we are first and foremost a church that is here to worship our risen Lord and to form disciples.

A common criticism of the church is leveled at some of our finery. At things like silver chalices and expensive vestments. But these fine things are a long-standing means to honor and worship our Lord, as did Mary. One of our breadboxes is engraved as given in honor of the first confirmation class at St. Matthew’s in 1926. Furthermore, as we move beyond the practicalities, the silver chalice which holds the blood of Christ is for everyone. You don’t get a different cup if you give less. You don’t get better wine if you give more. The silver chalice for all serves as a reminder of the precious blood Jesus shed for us - all equal siblings in Christ. And, as we go into the world, we are called to honor Jesus in our heart and actions as Mary chose to do so generously and with complete and humble reverence. Amen.