Spy Wednesday

Introduction

I don’t know if any of you actually follow along with what happens during the Holy Week or the Passion Week. Like I said on Sunday, those of us that didn’t grow up in a liturgical church, more than likely didn’t follow the events of this week as closely as those that did grow up in liturgical churches. So, let me give a brief rundown of the tradition of this week and what are liturgical friends have already done and will continue to do by the end of this week:

Sunday - Palm Sunday, celebration of the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ

Monday - Is called Holy Monday, and it is typically the day that is utilized to reflect on Jesus cleansing the temple in Jerusalem

Tuesday - Is called Holy Tuesday, is typically the day that is utilized to reflect on Jesus’ challenges against the Sadducees and Pharisees. It also happens to be when people reflect on his claim of authority, the widow’s donation, and its typically the day that people would reflect on the Olivet Discourse, which is Jesus’ extended teaching on particularly the coming end times.

By the time Wednesday roles around, the emphasis is now on the last few days that Jesus is alive prior to his crucifixion. On Wednesday, what we’re doing today, there would be a reflection on the woman that anoints Jesus with perfume and there is a shift to reflecting on Judas’ betrayal.

Thursday - Maundy Thursday, is typically a reflection of the Lord’s Supper

And Friday - Good Friday, is typically a reflection of Jesus’ crucifixion.

And Saturday - Holy Saturday, is typically a reflection of the time in between His death, burial, and resurrection on Sunday morning.

And I do want to point out, that up until Thursday’s celebration of the Lord’s Supper, none of the rest of these celebrations and reflections are actually in chronological order in Scripture. In fact, the passage that we’re celebrating tonight, when taking into account what John says and where he places the event, this passage probably actually happened before Palm Sunday, but let me assure you that this is not an error—Matthew is organizing the events by theme rather than chronologically and like I said, the approach I’ve taken this week is simply the traditional approach in order for us to reflect on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Again, all of this is to get us into the right mindset to celebrate the resurrection—in other words, so that the day that we set aside for the celebration of His resurrection doesn’t get drowned out by superficial activities.

If you have a Bible, turn it to .

Matthew 26:6–16 ESV

6 Now when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, 7 a woman came up to him with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head as he reclined at table. 8 And when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, “Why this waste? 9 For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.” 10 But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me. 11 For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. 12 In pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial. 13 Truly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.” 14 Then one of the twelve, whose name was Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests 15 and said, “What will you give me if I deliver him over to you?” And they paid him thirty pieces of silver. 16 And from that moment he sought an opportunity to betray him.

Let’s Pray.

As we study through this passage, I’m breaking it down into three sections: Vs. 6-7, is focusing on the woman and the alabaster flask; Vs. 8-13, will focus on Jesus confronting the disciples; and Vs. 14-16, will focus on Judas and his betrayal. All of this will cause us to do a number of this, it will cause us to look at the object of our worship, how we ought to worship, and how we ought to prioritize our worship.

Let’s Pray.

Exposition

Vs. 6-7: The Woman and the Flask

This passage starts with this statement, “Now when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came up to him with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head as he reclined at table.”

There are a handful of thoughts that I have about this one statement, it does tell us where this happened.

The Bible tells us that this happened at Bethany, which combined with what John states in , which is one of the parallel passages to the Matthew passage (the other parallel being ) that this event happened six days before Passover, is how we get the rough timeline that this had to have occured prior to Palm Sunday.

And this tells us that it happened at Simon the leper’s house—which by the way, if you know Jewish law, you know that someone with leprosy was to be quarantined, so the general assumption is that Simon used to have leprosy and that quite possibly, either Jesus healed him prior to this event or it wouldn’t be too surprising for Jesus and his disciples to be ignoring traditional social boundaries. Remember, it was common for Jesus to eat with sinners or talk to people that the Jews considered unclean.

All of this really is just here to help set the stage as to when and where this happened—it adds validity to the account because it allows us to trace the order of events.

I do have to point out one other thing, if you’re familiar with the gospels, you’ll realize that this account sounds familiar and it isn’t just because its mentioned in Matthew, Mark, and John.

records a story of a woman of the city described as a sinner came with an alabaster flask of ointment to Jesus while Jesus was dining at a Pharisee’s house.

And in the account in Luke, we’re told that the Pharisee’s name was Simon, the woman in tears, wet his feet with her tears and wiped them up with the hair of her head and anointed his feet with ointment.

So obviously, it sounds like the same story, but let me explain how we know that it isn’t, Matthew, Mark, and John all tell their story of a woman anointing Jesus with ointment all right before his crucifixion in order to prepare him for burial. We’re also told of the woman’s name, that her name is Mary and she is from Bethany.

The story in Luke, while very similar, happened much earlier in Jesus’ ministry. Luke, places this story pretty soon after the Sermon on the Mount. The story of the woman in Matthew, Mark, and John places that story about a week before the crucifixion.

Not to mention, we’re told in Luke, that the woman in did those things because of her desire to express gratitude for forgiveness. The woman in Bethany, while she may not have entirely understood her purpose in anointing Jesus, did it to prepare him for burial.

So, we know Jesus is in Bethany at Simon’s house and a woman (who according to is named Mary) comes up to Jesus with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment.

tells us that this ointment is “pure nard.” Nard, is an aromatic oil that is extracted from a root found in India and it is the fact that the oil comes from India and how it is extracted that explains just how expensive the ointment is.

Nard is an oil that Mark says is worth 300 denarii, which since we don’t utilize the denarii anymore, means almost nothing to us, but we know that a denarius was valued at a days’ wage for unskilled labor. So, this small amount of oil that Mary pours on Jesus is actually worth 300 days worth of labor, if we were to try and place a dollar amount to it (and this example breaks down a little bit):

It’s currently estimated that a denarius was worth $3.62, which at that rate means that the oil was worth $1,086. If we were to think of it purely in the terms of one denarius being worth a day’s wage, today, if you were to work an 8 hour shift at the current federal minimum wage, you’re looking at $58. So, 300 days worth of wages today, would be equivalent to $17,400.

Which, if you take into account inflation and the overall value of money, it seems more probable to me that the oil was only worth $1,086, but when you consider the lower cost of living at the time, that is still a significant amount of money.

In addition, alabaster flasks during that time period

So, we know that Mary is pouring this over Jesus and we have to ask why? Why exactly is she doing this?

And we can make a guess and in order for us to consider different reasons as to why this could possibly be happening, we do have to ignore Vs. 12 for a moment.

Anointing with oil throughout the Bible is utilized for a number of reasons: (1) a lot of ancient eastern cultures practiced anointing with oil as a sign of respect, (2) officials like the high priests, some of the prophets, and kings were anointed— in fact, King David was anointed three times. (3) James talks about anointing the spiritually sick with oil.

So, Mary could’ve done this out of recognition that Jesus was to be respected; she could’ve done it out of an understanding that Jesus is the Messiah, I doubt she would’ve done it out of concern for him being spiritually ill. If it were for any of these reasons, my assumption would be that she did it primarily out of an understanding that Jesus is the Messiah and that it is a form of respect and reverence to anoint someone with oil.

But regardless of what Mary’s intent was, Jesus states in Vs. 12, “that in pouring this ointment on [his] body, she has done it to prepare [him] for burial.” Whether she knew that was what she was doing is debatable, but Jesus has stated that in doing that act, his purposes have been accomplished.

Judging from the account that has been given to us and just taking a rough estimate of the high cost of ointment that Mary utilizes, we gain a little bit of an understanding of who this woman is.

She had some knowledge of who Jesus is—otherwise, she wouldn’t have wasted the ointment on him

She had some desire to express respect and honor to Jesus.

And she had the want to give the best she possibly could to Him—which is seen in the high cost of the ointment that she used.

Which put altogether, gives us a strong image of what worship ought to be like and I’ll talk about that more in the application.

Vs. 8-13: Jesus’ Response to the Disciples

Matthew 26:8–13 ESV

8 And when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, “Why this waste? 9 For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.” 10 But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me. 11 For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. 12 In pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial. 13 Truly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”

Vs. 8-9, shows that the disciples are upset in the amount of waste that they just witnessed.

And it might actually seem a little absurd to us, because we see what the woman did and we understand that Jesus is God and that none of that was wasteful, but I want to take a moment to try and understand why the disciples acted in this way:

Jesus and his disciples were not wealthy—while, we don’t know what all of the disciples did prior to following Jesus, the ones that we do know, we know that most of them were fisherman. One of them was a tax collector, which with the exception of the tax collector, those types of careers weren’t known for being particularly wealthy.

Not to mention, by this point in time, they’ve spent the better part of three years following Jesus, so if they had the financial means in the beginning, more than likely, they no longer had the money they once did.

Not to mention, the Bible teaches us to be wise with our money. We are to be good stewards of what God has given us and part of being good stewards of what God has given us is to give to those that aren’t as fortunate.

Now, this passage has been misused and abused like crazy in the argument about what exactly our responsibility is when it come to those who are less fortunate than us.

There are some who read this passage without taking into account the full context and they’ll stop at Vs. 9. “Why this waste? For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor” and they would utilize that to condemn those that have what they would consider excess.

The issue with that, is the Bible mentions multiple people who are financially and materialistically blessed (think of Abraham and Lot, who when they separated from each other, the purpose was because their flocks were too large or think of King David, who was a king and would thus have more than plenty). Not to mention, after Job’s life was torn apart by Satan, God blesses him with material wealth.

That’s not to say that people who love God more, will be financially more well off and that isn’t to say that people who aren’t wealthy, don’t love God. This is really just to state that financial success doesn’t constitute godliness or godlessness.

Now, there are other people who would get to Vs. 10, and end the whole thought with “you always have the poor with you,” which seems like a very nihilistic way of viewing life and they would utilize that phrase to justify not helping others whatsoever

Again, the issue is that there is a context here, and Vs. 10 doesn’t exist to nullify the requirement that we are to care for those that are less fortunate than us—think of , “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” , says: “What good is . . . if someone says that he has faith, but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving him the things needed for the body, what good is that?”

We’re still required to care for those that are in need and biblically, we ought to care for those that are in need.

And this really isn’t a conversation about what constitutes someone actually being in need, but I do want to point out that when the Bible speaks about people being in need, its typically a little different compared to what we think of someone being in need. When we think of poverty in the US, we typically think of people who simply have less compared to others or have less opportunity than others.

When the Bible speaks of those that are in need, the prime examples from , are orphans and widows—and we might not understand how difficult it was during that time to be an orphan or widow, because we’re looking at our modern-day system where orphans are taken in my governmental or religious organizations that try to help and widows are typically cared for by social security or their spouse’s retirement plan if it continues past their spouse’s death. During biblical times, orphans and widows weren’t cared for by the government and during this time, there aren’t organizations set up to help orphans or widows

So in Bible times, orphans and widows are typically neglected, living on the streets, begging for sustenance. In other words, they’re missing basic necessities like food, water, shelter, and clothing and they typically don’t have the means to meet those necessities.

Which means that in situations in which people actually need help, we don’t hesitate to help—we might need to take people out for dinner, provide shelter, give them water, or we might just need to point them in the direction of someone who can help—like the Salvation Army, Miracle Hill, etc.

All of that, both issues of interpretation in which people either utilize this as a rebuke towards helping others as well as those who may misuse this passage that indicates that we need to help others more, fail to understand the context of what is actually happening in this passage.

So, while the disciples are making this statement, “Why the waste? For this could’ve been sold for a large sum and given to the poor” and Jesus makes this statement, “For you always have the poor with you” the point isn’t to get caught up in whether we should give to the poor or not, the point is in Vs. 11b, “but you will not always have me.”

Jesus is pointing to the fact that the disciples will always have to poor people to help—which is how I know that this isn’t an indictment against helping the poor, that isn’t Jesus’ point. His point is that while there will always be poor people, he will not always be on earth in a bodily form.

It isn’t that Jesus is saying that we shouldn’t care for the poor, it’s actually just him stating that the priority is to worship Him first and then help the poor.

Which if we think about that in our modern era, I can assure you we can parallel this on almost every level:

If you’re a student, the tendency is to assume that your schooling is more important than anything else and I’ve seen a number of students who neglect their spiritual life in order to study. While school is important, our priority ought to always be towards God first.

If you’re working, hopefully, your tendency is to do your work well, but how easily is it to neglect our spiritual lives in order to work? And you might think, well, “I don’t skip spiritual things in order to work,” but how frequently do we allow ourselves to come home and sort of “veg out” because we had worked so hard during the day? Work is good, but we can’t allow work to stop us in our worship of God.

Even if you’re working in some form of ministry—you’re a pastor, you’re a Sunday School teacher, or whatever it might be—we have to be careful not to elevate ministry above God. In other words, the ministry is never as important as God is and if we happen to find ourselves so busy in ministry, but not spending time seeking God, than we need to readjust our priorities.

This isn’t a statement in against helping poor people, its a statement about keeping our priorities straight.

So much so, that while the disciples are concerned about helping the poor—which is a good thing to be concerned about, Jesus commends this woman for prioritizing worship.

So, we’ve seen this woman prioritizing worship and I actually utilized the term proper worship and we’ve studied the disciples reaction and Jesus’ reaction to them, which emphasizes this concept of priorities. Now let’s look at the last three verses:

Vs. 14-16: Judas and his Betrayal

Matthew 26:14–16 ESV

14 Then one of the twelve, whose name was Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests 15 and said, “What will you give me if I deliver him over to you?” And they paid him thirty pieces of silver. 16 And from that moment he sought an opportunity to betray him.

Now, a lot of Bibles actually have these three verses separated from Vs. 6-13, which is an entirely legitimate way to study this passage, but I’m actually utilizing it to contrast what true worship is compared to what Judas actually wanted.

Judas goes to the chief priests and essentially sells information and sells Jesus to the chief priests. He sells all of this for thirty pieces of silver, which is significant in that it fulfills yet another prophecy and then Vs. 16, tells us that from that moment on, he sought an opportunity to betray Jesus.

But the Bible doesn’t really tell us what motivates Judas to do this.

And there have been suggestions for the past 2,000 years as to why exactly he might’ve done this and it ranges from:

30 silver coins is a fair sum of money—and maybe Judas is just that selfish of a person

Or maybe, Judas was trying to force Jesus’ hand—remember, a lot of the Jews at this time assumed that Jesus was going to overthrow the government and establish a new kingdom.

I like what Craig Blomberg has to say about this:

The New American Commentary: Matthew 1. Passion and Crucifixion (26:1–27:66)

Perhaps most plausible is an intermediate view, which sees Judas as growing increasingly disenchanted with the type of Messiah Jesus is proving to be, a far cry from the nationalistic, military liberator the Jews hoped would free them from Roman tyranny.

And the Bible actually doesn’t tell us much about the spiritual state of Judas

We don’t know if Judas was actually a believer, which is why we can’t determine whether he was trying to force Jesus’ hand or if he just sold Jesus for the money

All we know is that Judas sold Jesus off, that he ended up feeling extraordinarily guilty for doing it, and that he hanged himself because of it.

We don’t have a ton of facts here, but from what we do have, we can contrast how the woman worshiped Jesus and quite frankly, how Judas worshiped himself.

So, we have this woman named Mary who comes to Jesus with a very expensive ointment and just pours it on Jesus’ head.

We don’t know much about the woman, but we do know that this woman must have had some concept of who Jesus is because she’s willing to utilize a bottle of ointment worth 300 day worth of wages.

She comes to Jesus and doesn’t pour just a little bit over him, she pours the whole bottle’s worth of ointment on him, which expresses just how much she actually believed in who he is, it wasn’t just a little bit, she was all in.

Now, we don’t necessarily know how well Mary knew Jesus, but we at least know that Judas, who followed Jesus as one of his disciples, probably knew Jesus at least a little more than Mary did (from a human standpoint)

And yet, when Jesus commends this woman for honoring him in the way that she did, Judas is among the disciples who speak out against the waste. Which shows us that the disciples had a different idea of what was about to happen and the disciples had different expectations of Jesus.

And in the case of Judas, whether or not he was motivated by greed or if he was motivated by the idea that he might be able to force Jesus’ hand—part of the reason why he would’ve betrayed Jesus would’ve been because Jesus didn’t conform to the idea of the Messiah that Judas had in mind.

In other words, Mary worshiped Jesus because she understood that Jesus was the Messiah; Judas rejects Jesus for the same reason the Pharisees did, Jesus didn’t fit their idea or concept of what the Messiah should’ve been.

Application

I explained at the beginning that we would look at the passage in three sections:

The Woman and the Alabaster Flask

Jesus’ condemnation of the Disciples

Judas’ betrayal of Jesus

All of which was meant to get us to reflect on proper worship, to reflect on our priorities, and to reflect on Judas betraying Jesus—so let me give you some ideas on how to apply this to your lives:

We need to worship Jesus and not our concept of Jesus or what we think God is supposed to be like.

Judas had a concept of what he thought the Messiah ought to be like and when Jesus didn’t meet that concept, Judas acted in sin and betrayed Jesus to the chief priests.

In a similar way, we all have an idea of who Jesus is and who God is.

A lot of our idea of who God is comes from the church that we grew up in, our family’s concept of God, and our schooling.

And just like Judas, we actually could have a wrong concept of who God is.

And the only way that we can fix that is by taking a balanced approach at studying Scripture—and I say balanced, because if you aren’t balanced in your study of Scripture, you’ll have a warped idea of what Scripture says and you’ll have a warped idea of who God is because of it.

The only way we can actually understand who God is, is by taking the time to understand who God claims He is in His word.

I had a professor who retired a few years ago, that used to say that God left all of mankind one love letter; the least we can do is take the time to read it.

We need to worship Jesus in accordance with how God’s Word teaches us to worship Jesus

And I want to be clear, that this isn’t a statement about worship style or what style the church you attend is—quite frankly, it doesn’t matter if your church is the most traditional church in the world, or if you’re at a church with fog machines and neon lights—none of that really matters and to assume that traditional or contemporary styles of worship and of music is all there is to worship is to have a very shallow idea of what worship really is.

If we just take a basic definition of what worship is—which I think we could just look at the word that is most frequently translated as worship—the Greek word is proskuneo and it essentially means “to fall down before,” or “to bow down before”

In other words, worship is a state of mind or an attitude of your spirit. It doesn’t matter if you’re at church singing songs or at the grocery store buying food because the concept of worship transcends space- which is how can tell us that we need to worship God in spirit and truth.

So whether or not your church is traditional or contemporary doesn’t matter, because true worship transcends our stylistic preferences.

We know from that true worship involves presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice that is holy and acceptable to God. In order to present your body as a living sacrifice that’s holy and acceptable, we’re told to not be conformed to this world (or the manner of living according to this world), but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

True worship involves learning to think like God thinks—which means that we learn to love what God loves and hate what God hates

True worship involves being transformed by Jesus—to be conformed into his image.

This all means, that regardless of what we think is worship, the Bible has already told us what worship is:

And we need to put aside our notions of what worship is and worship Jesus according to what his word says it is

Otherwise, if we refuse to do this, we’re being like Judas and worshiping a false idea of who God is and worshiping what we think God should be like—which ultimately means that we’re worshiping idols and false gods.

We need to prioritize our worship of Jesus Christ.

And I know that in our modern era, where there are distractions left and right, that this can be difficult, but we must remember two things:

This life is but a vapor, despite how we feel now, eternity is much longer—which means that we need to keep our minds on eternal things, including Jesus and worshiping Jesus.

The distractions of this life are exactly what it says it is, they are distractions

Our prioritizing of worship means that occasionally, we’ll have to say no to otherwise good things

We might have to say no to our children wanting to play sports if it regularly gets in the way of worship

We might have to say no to working overtime

We might have to say no to taking extra credits at school

Because we have to prioritize our worship of Jesus.

Our prioritizing of worship will help us to grow

Certain people might try to distance themselves from us

True worship requires us being transformed by the renewal of our minds

Our minds cannot be renewed if we don’t prioritize Jesus

We cannot worship Jesus if we’re constantly being distracted by the things around us.

All of that to say: as believers, we have a responsibility to actually learn and know what we believe first-hand—we shouldn’t rely just on what other people have told us; we need to make sure that we are actually worshiping Jesus in truth and in spirit and not just our preconceived notion of Jesus; and we need to make our worship of Jesus a priority in our lives.

Prayer requests.