Passion Week - Spy Wednesday

 

Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money. And he sought an opportunity to betray him. (Mark 14:10-11 ESV).

 

Wednesday finds Jesus at the apex of his unpopularity with the religious leaders of Jerusalem. In our reading today we see the betrayal of Judas begin to climax. At a house in Bethany, just a couple miles east of Jerusalem, Simon the leper was hosting a meal. Jesus, the disciples, and some others were reclining around the dinner table. And then she came. John 12:3 tells us that the woman was Mary the sister of Lazarus, even though Mark is content to leave her nameless (v. 3). The emphasis is on very costly in reference to the ointment Mary brought to anoint Jesus. In fact, it was actually worth a year’s worth of wages (vv. 4-5). The truth was more sinister than the extravagance of such a gift. Selling the ointment would give Judas a fresh stash of funds from which to draw (cf. John 12:6). Jesus rebuked the murmuring, much like he had the Sea of Galilee.

 

Here Mark shifts his narrative focus from Bethany back to the chief priests. Judas, found the religious leaders in their lair. Maybe he was seething from the shame he had received back at Simon’s house. Maybe his love for money had so muddied his thinking that he couldn’t get over the waste he had just seen. And not just waste, but waste that Jesus praised vv. 6,8). And so, Judas offered the chief priests the solution they had been waiting for: He would betray his master, but not without something in return. Mark simply records that the chief priests promised to give Judas money (v. 11). The word “promise” suggests that Judas wasn’t surprised by the offer. It appears that he had pressed the priests for payment (cf. Matthew 26:14-15). The drama of Mark 14 revolves around two characters, the woman and Judas and their opposing reactions to Jesus. But there is a third character, an antagonist both sinister and stealthy: money. Notice how quickly Judas and his fellow grumblers are able to appraise the value of the ointment at Simon’s house. Like veteran pawnbrokers, they could intuit at a glance how much something was worth. The nard had barely left the flask before they were calculating, “This ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii” (Mark 14:5).

 

And yet, the irony of Mark 14 is that Judas could see the value of the ointment, but he couldn’t see the value of Jesus. The woman, on the other hand, could see both the value of the ointment and the value of Jesus. That’s why she broke the flask. Spy Wednesday is a tragic reminder of the danger of the pursuit of money for money’s sake (cf. 1 Timothy 6:10). But Spy Wednesday is also full of hope, because it shows us that the beauty of Jesus can break the spell of financial gain. This is the woman’s message to us, a message that Jesus wanted us to hear again and again: “Truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (Mark 14:9).