Lesson: John 12:1-8

The Lazarus story just before this chapter is a turning point. When the news about Lazarus gets around, people will think Jesus is some sort of savior, and the Romans will wreak havoc on everyone. The authorities decide “better to have one man die than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:50). They plan to grab Jesus when he shows up in Jerusalem for Passover. Jesus’ days are numbered, and he knows it.

With this backdrop, Jesus is just outside of Jerusalem, having dinner with friends: Lazarus, his sisters Mary and Martha, and a few disciples. Without explanation, Mary breaks open a bottle of nard, an incredibly expensive perfumed ointment. Mary lets her hair down in a room full of men, which an honorable woman never does. Normally you’d anoint someone’s head, but Mary pours the nard on Jesus’ feet, and then she, a single woman, touches him, a single man; also just not done. Then in the oddest move of all she wipes off the perfume with her hair.

Just exactly what’s going on isn’t clear, but Mary has stepped far outside the bounds of convention, teetering on the edge of scandal. That’s why Judas reacts so strongly. He attacks Mary for wasting 300 denarii on nard. A typical worker earned 300 denarii in an entire year. Doesn’t Judas have a point? But Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” Jim Wallis writes that somehow this verse has been translated, “There is nothing we can do about poverty, the poor will always be there, so why bother?” But what Jesus meant was, “You’ll always have the poor with you because you’re my disciples. You know who we spend time with. You’ll always be near the poor.” Jesus is quoting the Torah here, and the context is important. In Deuteronomy, God tells Moses: “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward those of your people who are poor and needy in your land” (Deuteronomy 15:11).

We’re told Judas isn’t being altruistic. The gospel writer is telling us to keep our eyes on this guy. But Jesus says, “Let it go, because my time is running out.” Whatever Mary’s original motivations, Jesus knows what waits for him in Jerusalem. He says she’s saved the nard for the day of his burial. In other words, he’s as good as dead, right now.

So, leave her alone, Jesus says, because her kind of love is what Jesus needs, and what the world needs. Mid-twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich sums up the story: “[Mary] has performed an act of holy waste growing out of the abundance of her heart. . . . Jesus (alone) knows that without the abundance of heart nothing great can happen … . He knows that calculating love is not love at all.” “The history of humankind,” Tillich continues, “is the history of men and women who wasted themselves and were not afraid to do so. They did not fear to waste themselves in the service of a new creation. They wasted out of the fullness of their hearts.”

The only other time we encounter Mary in John’s gospel is right after Lazarus has died. When Jesus saw her and the others weeping, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” The Greek words are unusually powerful; Jesus is really bent out of shape by the sorrow he witnesses. His extravagantly compassionate response is to bring Lazarus back from the dead. Maybe he can’t heal every leper and paralytic; maybe he can’t bring back every friend from the dead, but it doesn’t stop him from helping this time. It ended up getting him in hot water with the authorities, but he did not fear to waste himself in service of a new creation.

In today’s passage, Mary echoes Jesus’ “holy waste,” his extravagant compassion, by anointing him with costly perfume. Perhaps what this story is reminding us is that extravagant compassion is what Jesus offered and it’s exactly what this world needs. We can’t right every injustice; we can’t heal every hatred, but that shouldn’t stop us from stepping in with extravagant compassion, with radical love and acceptance, when and where we can.

The extravagant, radical compassion approved and exhibited by Jesus himself stands in opposition to a growing movement among some conservatives, including Christians, pushing back against traditional Christian notions of empathy and compassion. In a New York Times op-ed, David French writes, “These attacks are rooted in the idea that progressives emotionally manipulate evangelicals into supporting causes they would otherwise reject. For example, if people respond to the foreign aid shutdown and the stop-work orders by talking about how children might suffer or die, then they’re exhibiting toxic empathy.” But as French points out, “So, yes, you say that children might die without a certain program when the very purpose of the program is to prevent children from dying. That’s not manipulation. It’s confronting individuals with facts. It’s making them understand exactly what they are choosing to do.”

Jesus chooses empathy. Jesus choose compassion. He chooses them because they are in fact what can save us, save our civilization, save our species, save our planet, save the world that God so loves.

Resources:
Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Prophet Mary,” http://day1.org/1760-the_prophet_mary.
Herman C. Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (New York: T & T Clark, 2005).
Jim Wallis, God’s Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
Paul Tillich, “Holy Waste,” in The New Being: Existential Sermons (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, originally published in 1955; 2005 paperback edition).
David French, “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy,” New York Times, February 13, 2025