Reactions In Discipleship

Good morning and welcome again to Dishman Baptist Church. Whether you are joining us online or in person it is our joy and pleasure to be celebrating and worshipping our Heavenly Father together with you this morning. Please open your Bibles with me to Mark 14, Mark 14. We’ve been studying the life of Christ through the writings of Mark for nearly a year and a half and we are just now coming toward the end. We are approaching the anagnorisis of the story - the revelation of the reason for Christ’s coming. All of the tensions that have been built throughout Mark are about to be played out over the next few chapters - and we get a front seat for all of it.

The conflicts that Jesus had with the religious establishment and specifically with the religious leaders of Isreal are coming to a head. While He has been in Jerusalem for this Passover celebration He has upset their financial operation by cleansing the temple and chasing out the money changers and animal dealers. He has humiliated them in head to head confrontations over issues such as taxes, the resurrection and authority. He has exposed their seamy undersides as He called them out for their love of pomp and circumstance rather than humility and contrasted their love of the best things with the humble offerings of a widow.

The discussions and portrayal of the principles of discipleship - an issue that takes a front seat in this morning’s text. In fact while Mark has been rightly called a Gospel of conflict as he portrays the different conflicts between Jesus and the religious leaders, it has also revealed itself to be a Gospel about the true nature and true character of a disciple of Jesus Christ.

We will discover this morning that this text has quite a bit to teach us about discipleship - and what it means to be a disciple. We’ll also see the unfortunate reaction of one who came to Christ under false pretenses. Read the text with me and then we’ll start to dig in and see what there is for each of us today. Let’s read Mark 14 verses 1 through 11.

Mark 14:1–11 CSB

It was two days before the Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a cunning way to arrest Jesus and kill him. “Not during the festival,” they said, “so that there won’t be a riot among the people.” While he was in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured it on his head. But some were expressing indignation to one another: “Why has this perfume been wasted? For this perfume might have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they began to scold her. Jesus replied, “Leave her alone. Why are you bothering her? She has done a noble thing for me. You always have the poor with you, and you can do what is good for them whenever you want, but you do not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body in advance for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.” Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them. And when they heard this, they were glad and promised to give him money. So he started looking for a good opportunity to betray him.

It is two days before Passover - late on Wednesday evening. The Passover was the annual festival proscribed for all Jews to gather together in Jerusalem and to commemorate the freedom delivered to them by God when they languished in bondage under the rule of the Egyptians. This was a remembrance of the night that the death angel passed through Egypt and killed the first born of every household. Only the households of the Israelites who had followed Moses directions of slaughtering a lamb and painting the doorposts and lintels of their homes with the blood were passed over by the angel.

Exodus 12:22–23 CSB

Take a cluster of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and brush the lintel and the two doorposts with some of the blood in the basin. None of you may go out the door of his house until morning. When the Lord passes through to strike Egypt and sees the blood on the lintel and the two doorposts, he will pass over the door and not let the destroyer enter your houses to strike you.

The next day would begin the feast of unleavened bread which was a commemoration of the Israelites flight from Egypt known as the exodus in which they took unleavened bread because their journey started so hastily. These simultaneous feasts were one of the three major feasts that took place every year in Israel and required every Israelite to travel to Jerusalem for the observance.

This is the backdrop for one of the greatest dramas in all of history to take place. The stage is set - everyone is in place. And now Mark takes this moment to deliver one last lesson on discipleship as he writes and chronicles his Gospel. He reveals to us three categories of feelings that disciples can have toward Christ - the penultimate teacher and the most eminent of mentors in all of history. You either hate Him, or you love Him, or you betray Him. That last one takes a bit of explanation and we’ll get there in a few minutes. But first lets look at the first two as they are presented for us in the text.

Hate Him

If there were previously any doubt, it should be clear as this Wednesday draws to a close that the ideological differences between Jesus and the religious leadership would never be smoothed over. The deep entrenchment that the Pharisees had in legalism made it impossible for them to truly understand and grasp the beauty of what Christ was teaching and it prevented them from recognizing that the Messiah they had been awaiting stood right before them.

As Christ and His disciples as sitting on the Mount of Olives overlooking the Temple and Peter, James, John and Andrew are approaching Jesus with the question of when these things would take place, the Sanhedrin is gathering within the walls of Jerusalem. Think about the implications of that for a moment - the religious establishment of Israel is inside the holy city, probably inside the very Temple grounds themselves and the Savior the nation had been praying and waiting for was outside the city looking in. The Jewish leadership was looked upon favorably by the populace as well as the ruling authorities from Rome. Jesus, while He was popular with the common people, was not in the good graces of the establishment.

Jesus sits on the Mount of Olives as the Temple is backlit by the setting sun to the west. He not only pronounces a judgement and prophecy for the destruction of the Temple but He implicitly reiterates to His disciples the warning that He had given them three times on the journey to Jerusalem from Galilee. That being that He would be handed over to the Jewish leaders and that He would be killed. His prophetic words of a second coming by necessity imply that the first advent would come to an end. So here sits Jesus talking of a trying but glorious future but also condemning the religious structure and establishment that sits before Him.

Simultaneously, within the very walls of that structure, sits the Sanhedrin “looking for a cunning way to arrest Jesus and kill Him.” These men sit plotting how to retain their power over the people and the religious system of Israel. They are plotting how to maintain their control over a doomed system. It’s a bit like the helmsman of the Titanic refusing to let go of the wheel of the ship even as it sinks. It’s a bit like sitting in a burning house and picking out paint colors for the walls - it’s ludicrous. But instead of recognizing their own spiritual depravity and the bankruptcy of the system they held so closely too, they blindly sought to maintain control.

But they were cunning - a word meaning to deceive, to trick into, treachery - you know if you are in a position of religious leadership and you are resorting to cunning, deceitful tricks to accomplish a goal you might want to step back for a moment and evaluate the true nature or purpose of that goal. And that doesn’t just apply to religious leadership - if you are trying to accomplish anything by cunning or treachery or deceitful methodologies you need to evaluate the value and validity of the goal you are pursuing.

These men know the landscape of the environment in which they are navigating and trying to entrap and dispose of Jesus. They say not during the Passover. The city of Jerusalem was normally home to an estimated 60,000 to 120,000 people. The Passover festival would swell that number as an estimated 85,000 to 300,000 visitors would arrive for the festival. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in Jewish War, chronicled one Passover estimating more than two million visitors in Jerusalem. This festival would always make the Roman authorities nervous, somewhat justifiably, as the Jewish hope of salvation being celebrated on the Passover could possibly be attempted to be realized at the same time. The Jewish hope was that the Messiah would arise just as the death angel did in casting off the yoke of Egyptian rule and would cast off the yoke of Roman rule and establish His kingdom in Israel.

The Jewish leadership was rightly worried as well - not about the casting off of Roman rule but that any incitement of riots during the festival could encourage the Romans to be more forceful in their governing practices. Thus far the Romans had been tolerant and permissive of the leadership’s excesses because they had kept the people under control. Riots in Jerusalem could change this outlook and result in the removal of these men from power.

The true motive of these men for preventing the riots is revealed. It is not the care and the preservation of the lives of the Jewish people. Instead it was the preservation of their own status and position. They desired to maintain their power and would protect it at all costs. This is not the first meeting they have convened for these purposes. Following the resurrection of Lazarus, the apostle John informs us of another meeting that took place.

John 11:47–48 CSB

So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and were saying, “What are we going to do since this man is doing many signs? If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”

It was at this meeting that Caiaphas, the high priest, pronounced that it would be “to your advantage that one man should die for the people rather than the whole nation perish.”

Yet we shouldn’t be surprised by any of this - they are only following in the footsteps of their mentor. We must recognize that we are all disciples of something. Everyone is a disciple of someone. These men were disciples of Satan. They are only following his lead as they seek to prevent the plan of God from being fulfilled. Immediately upon Christ’s birth, Herod attempted to kill Him resulting in His family’s flight to Egypt. There have been several times during His ministry that the crowds have risen up and tried to kill Him. The Pharisees have been plotting for several years now as to how to remove Christ from the scene - all in obedience and following the lead of their father the Devil.

They refused to acknowledge Christ for who He was despite the works and words that validated all of His claims. When you refuse to believe Christ what you are revealing about yourself is that you truly hate Him. These men refused to surrender anything to Christ but instead sought to maintain their status, their power and their wealth for themselves. Mark now turns our attention to a very different picture of discipleship.

Love Him

This portion of the text presents a bit of a challenge. The question is when does this dinner at Simon the lepers house take place. The story is given to us in three of the four Gospels. Luke does have a story that is similar but has enough differences (the location is in Galilee, Simon is not a leper but a pharisee, the woman is referred to a sinner) to separate it as a distinct incident. Mark and Matthew in their accounts, which are very similar in language and flow, do not give us a time frame for the meal to take place. In his account John does.

John 12:1–3 CSB

Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany where Lazarus was, the one Jesus had raised from the dead. So they gave a dinner for him there; Martha was serving them, and Lazarus was one of those reclining at the table with him. Then Mary took a pound of perfume, pure and expensive nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped his feet with her hair. So the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

What it appears that Mark is doing here is, just like a master director or author, inserting a flashback that will not only provide an example of discipleship but also help to explain the next scene that takes place in the text. So instead of looking at these three scenes - the meeting of the Sanhedrin, the dinner at Simon the lepers and then Judas - as chronological we need to look at them thematically. Mark is looking to give us a picture of discipleship and so it fit his designs to insert this flashback to this dinner at Simon’s house here.

Jesus is reclining at table the way that is typical in Middle Eastern homes for a banquet. The table would be very low to the ground and guests would arrange themselves around the table on pillows laying with their head towards the table and their feet at an angle out away from them and the table. A woman comes (John tells us that it is Mary the sister of Lazarus and Martha) and anoints Jesus with a very expensive bottle of perfume. John tells us that it is equivalent to one Roman pound which would equate to about twelve ounces. This particular oil comes from a plant found in northern India and was very expensive. The alabaster vial that contained the oil would have been made from Egyptian marble having a long neck that opened. The vial could have simply been opened and poured over Jesus in the same manner that it had been filled but instead Mary breaks the vial adding the ruined vial to the expense of the pure nard.

The fact that this oil is remarked upon as pure would raise the value of the perfume used. Many of our modern day colognes or perfumes have a percentage of alcohol added to them to keep the cost down. The more pure the perfume or cologne the more expensive it is. This perfume was apparently very valuable and fragrant. John’s account tells us that the perfume’s fragrance permeated throughout the whole house. Contemporary uses of the oil were to season food and to prepare bodies for burial. One way that we use this oil today is to ease the anxiety of those who are nearing the end of life. Spikenard, as it is called today, is sometimes given in hospice care to ease a patient’s fear and anxiety.

Mark says that some of the attendees got upset by this extravagant use of the oil. He writes that they are indignant with her - meaning that they are pained or angered. The verb means to snort at her - but more likely they glowered and expressed outrage at the use of the oil in this fashion. John is not so kind in his assessment as he tells us who the instigator of the indignation is - Judas. And he reveals to us the reason for his indignation is not just the value of the oil or its use for the poor but rather that he was pilfering the coffers and lining his own pockets.

Jesus comes to her defense telling them to leave her alone and that they would always have the poor with them but that they would not always have Him. He quotes from Deuteronomy 15:11

Deuteronomy 15:11 CSB

For there will never cease to be poor people in the land; that is why I am commanding you, ‘Open your hand willingly to your poor and needy brother in your land.’

And it would seem on the surface that He is contradicting the teaching in that verse - but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Sometimes even doing the right thing can be wrong when there is a better thing that can be done instead. In this case opening your hand to your brother by selling the nard and giving away the proceeds while being a good thing to do - for a perspective the three hundred denarii that could have been gained by selling the nard surpasses the disciple’s earlier estimate that 200 denarii would be necessary to feed the 5000 - that action is surpassed by the love and devotion demonstrated by anointing Christ.

This is radical discipleship - of the same sort that Mark has been demonstrating throughout this Gospel. Don’t let anyone tell you that radical discipleship means that you have to sell off all you own, give it all away and move into a cardboard box in a third world country or the streets of L.A. or Seattle. Radical discipleship is ruthless discipleship. It is being willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary - sometimes it is metaphorically cutting off your hand or removing something from your life that impedes your ability to serve Christ, sometimes it is giving your last pennies in devotion to the Kingdom and sometimes it is taking your most valuable possession and giving it to the King for His purposes.

Jesus says that wherever the Gospel is proclaimed in the whole world what she has done will also be told in memory of her - not because what she has done is that great of an action in and of itself, or that this particular action has earned her some sort of spiritual credit. Rather this is told as an example of selfless love and devotion for One who has given so much and Who loved us so selfishly and devotedly that He willingly suffered humiliation and death on our behalf.

Charles Spurgeon said “Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.” What a statement. What a summary of this woman’s act. Imagine for a moment - giving up a year’s wages (for context the median annual household income in Spokane was 48,000 in 2017) for a momentary act to bless someone. What love, what devotion we are called to when we are called to be His disciples.

On a side note - it is important in this day to notice that this is a woman who gets it when the men around her do not. Mark highlights several instances of this - the faith of the woman with the bleeding disorder compared to the doubting of Jairus over his daughter’s condition. The lavish extravagance of the scribes compared to the humble gift of the widow’s mites. And now here the disciples, who have been warned and taught regarding the death of Christ repeatedly and yet have missed it, are indignant over this woman’s loving sacrifice and lavish love for Christ when it is they who should have been showing this level of devotion. That is not to say that women should preach - but rather that we should value the contributions of women and we do.

It is also significant to note who it is that leads the outrage against this woman’s gift to our Savior as he will figure prominently over the next 48 hours of Christ’s life.

Betray Him

Snapping back from the flashback to the present Wednesday evening of Passover week we find the Sanhedrin’s statement “Not during the festival so that there wont be a riot among the people” still hanging in the air. A servant comes in - in our modern context there would be a knock at the door - with a man trailing furtively behind him. Actually he probably wouldn’t be all that furtive. Instead he might be a little arrogant but definitely self-confident. Even if there is an edge of exhaustion to him.

Judas Iscariot. One of their hated adversaries disciples. They would have known him on sight. They had been harrying Christ’s path for the last three years, some of them had, and they would have known every single one of His core disciples. His appearance must have taken them aback.

Iscariot means “man of Kerioth” - he was the lone disciple among the twelve that had come from outside of Galilee. He had moved from twenty-five miles south of Jerusalem to Galilee and lived an itinerant lifestyle for three years following Jesus. He must have had some business sense as John tells us that he was in charge of the money for all of the disciples and Christ. He would have been looked at by the disciples as a man of integrity. No one places just anyone in charge of their personal finances. It is one of the reasons that he could lead the group in their indignation over this young woman’s actions. He may not figure as prominently as Peter or James or John or even Andrew but he had the respect of the other disciples.

But it is hard living a lie. It is hard masking integrity when you don’t have any. It is hard following someone when they turn out not to be who you hoped and thought they were.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned is the old parable. But I would also say that Hell hath no fury like a disciple who perceives that he has been misled. There is no greater traitorous example in all of history than Judas Iscariot. Not even Benedict Arnold is on his level. And here he is presenting himself to the Sanhedrin as their man. The Gospels are very silent about his motives. I would hazard an opinion that he had come to Christ expecting something - expecting the Messiah he wanted and when Christ turned out not to be that he turned on Him. How often do we see that in the modern church? We sell someone a bill of goods - come to Christ and you’ll get x, y and z. You’ll get health because of course God wants you to be healthy - then the person is diagnosed with terminal cancer. You’ll get wealth because He owns the cattle on a thousand hilltops and He shares that with you - then the person loses their job. You’ll get your addictions, your relationships, your whatever fixed - the next day they still fight the battle, their relationship is still hard or whatever other situation is still not resolved. How bitter they become against Christ. Bitter enough to turn on Him and say He isn’t real. Bitter enough to leave the church all together and say it is all a fake. The world loves them. The world lavishes all of the praise and wonder on them. The world gives them 30 pieces of silver.

Look back at the text. Judas went to the chief priests to betray Jesus to them. They didn’t sense a chink in his armor or a deficiency in his character. But he sensed it in them. And he exploited it for his own gain. He was a great observer of people and he witnessed Jesus dismantling of these men in the Temple all day. He recognized their hatred and their murderous desires and he acted on them.

Now notice what the text says - when they heard this, they were glad. The word means to rejoice - they rejoiced. All the fear and trepidation of a few minutes ago was gone as their enemy was about to be betrayed into their hands. They were happy to give this man money to deliver Him to them. Their concerns over the crowds had dissipated and now they were joyfully planning their victory.

Luke tells us that Satan entered into Judas - and this introduces us to the silent actor Who has been present throughout this account.

The Silent Actor

Look back with me at verse 1. It was two days before the Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread. This is a seemingly unimportant time report - but it is so important. It tells us that this event is happening on a timeline that has been set by God Himself. That He has orchestrated all of these events so that Christ would be betrayed on the day that He wanted Him to to fulfill His predetermined purposes. Even the statement by Luke that Satan entered into Judas - that permission had to be given by God Himself. Satan is not a free agent capable of entering into people at will - the story of Job demonstrates for us that even the devil is God’s devil - to quote Martin Luther.

God the Father ordained that this specific Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread would be the most significant event in all of history - that it would be during these days that His plans of redemption for His people would be fulfilled. And He would use these various disciples and actors to effect His will - those who hate Christ, one who loved Him extravagantly and one who came to Him under false pretenses, to use Him and when he found out he couldn’t was willing to betray Him.

What kind of disciple are you today? First are you His disciple - really? Or have you come to Christ under your own conditions and your own pretenses hoping that He will fulfill your desires? Or do you love Him and serve Him on His terms? Are you radical in your discipleship? Are you ruthless in your discipleship? Do you willingly sacrifice all things - things that are bad and sometimes things that are good for His benefit?

Conclusion