Thoughts on Today’s Text
At some point, we may all have to admit we’re Judas — making “holy excuses” for not joining what God’s actually up to here and now.
Mary, a close friend of Jesus, has anointed Jesus with the contents of a large alabaster jar of perfume. Did Mary know that Jesus was about to be killed? Is that why she anointed him? We are not told. This may simply have been more of a spontaneous expression of love for Jesus in gratitude for him raising Lazarus from the dead (in chapter 11). She wanted to bless him. And this was a way she could do that.
But Judas would have none of that. He not only criticized it, he condemned it. And he did so with a “holy excuse,” a principle that Jesus had probably articulated himself. Shouldn’t this have been sold and the money given to the poor? How could she do something like this? And how could Jesus have allowed it?
Jesus rebuked Judas’s condemnation with a more important principle. “You do not always have me with you, but you do always have the poor. You have constant opportunities to act lavishly toward them.”
It’s a sharp rebuke that cuts to the quick of Judas, especially as John’s gospel presents him. In John, Judas cares only about money, and he’s skimming it off the top of the group’s common treasury for himself. He could care less about the poor. So his excuse is hypocritical. Jesus calls him on it, and Judas knows it.
But Jesus did more than rebuke Judas for his greed. He also rebuked him for his inability to appreciate what this lavish outpouring by Mary could mean. Judas saw waste. Jesus saw anointing for burial. Judas was looking at his own soul. Jesus was looking at what all was going on around him. Judas pulled out a past teaching to justify his disgust. Jesus embraced the lavishness of the moment — the Presence in the present — as a gift and invited everyone around him to see it as a sign.
How do we join what God is doing in the here and now? How do we Practice the Presence in the Present?
Jesus shows us here. We appreciate what is happening looking for signs of the love and kingdom of God at work, expecting to see them.
Or in other words, we allow the Spirit to retune our senses and our awareness to detect the signals of what God is doing more strongly than what “the powers” or our own sinful preoccupations may transmit.
When Jesus confronts Judas, we might say he reveals Judas is tuned in to the wrong channel. And he shows him the excuses he might claim were holy were instead a form of self-justification.
So who in your midst has heard the confrontation of Jesus and become more tuned to the channel of God’s kingdom than the powers or their sinful desires? How has this happened for them? And how has it led them to become more attentive to and ready to join up with what God is doing in the here and now?