Who Vetted Judas?

Note: These weekly blogs are prepared as Sunday sermons for the North Baptist Church of Port Chester.

 Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.

The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.)

Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” John 12:1-8

For the past several Sundays, the lectionary has offered Luke’s gospel to tell of Jesus’ preparation for the climax of his mission. Knowing that the fulfillment of his mission will result in his death, Jesus nevertheless “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51) and he will not be deterred.

John picks up the narrative and you can almost hear the fluttering wings of the death angel over Jesus’ head.

The first ominous clue is that Jesus is joined at the dinner table by Lazarus, who until recently has been quite dead himself.

The presence of Lazarus should probably be one of the sermons the passage provokes, but it’s hard to see where you could go with it.

Seasoned Christians have read the passage for so many years they have lost touch with its incipient creepiness. 

Actually, there are many Christian stories and jargons that don’t translate well in secular society or among non-Christians. I remember watching a young Jewish woman as she listened politely to a zealous evangelical insist her only hope of salvation was to “washed in the blood of Jesus.” The woman blanched. “I can’t even imagine that,” she said.

And just as challenging to the imagination, here is Lazarus, who moldered in his grave so long he emitted a stench (Luke 11:39), now noshing with his sisters and Jesus as if he had just returned from a Tiberian spa.

In the absence of guidelines as to how to comport oneself when dining with the formerly dead, one must wonder what the table conversation was like. Does one make a big deal of the man? Does one pretend his presence is perfectly normal?

Does one ask Lazarus the ultimate eschatological questions? What was it like? What kind of accommodations do they have? Do they serve decent wine? Did you see my late Uncle Mordechai?

Or is it bad form to have a private discussion about the afterlife when the Son of God is at the table?

If I had been at the table, I think I would have been uncomfortably silent, hoping Lazarus didn’t ask me to pass the gefilte, and probably diverting my eyes if I thought he was looking at me.

I’ve always thought Lazarus was one of the least fortunate recipients of one of Jesus’ miracles. As unpleasant as his final illness must have been, once he died he had cleared the ultimate hurdle. He was beyond the pains and travails of life, and no longer had to fear death.

Why would anyone who had escaped earth’s trials want to come back and face death all over again? According to John, death could return to Lazarus at any moment because the chief priests planned to kill him “since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.” (John 12:11) There is no record that Lazarus ever thanked Jesus for wresting him from the tomb, and that’s no surprise.

If there is a sermon in Lazarus’ presence at the table, it could be this: once he had raised a man from the dead, Jesus own fate was sealed. Word of the raising of Lazarus had spread widely and large crowds came to see what the ex-dead look like.

Lazarus was living proof that Jesus was a man of no ordinary powers, and the priests had to put a stop to him lest all their best tithers desert them.

If Lazarus’ presence at the meal was not concrete enough a reminder of death, his sister Mary brought fragrant nard to the table, smeared it on Jesus’ feet, and rubbed it in with her hair.

Nard was expensive because it was imported along grueling trade routes from Nepal, China, and India, where it was distilled from the spikenard plant. It was used as a sedative as well as a perfume and had medicinal properties for curing insomnia and easing birth difficulties. 

Mary was using it as a perfume known to have relaxing vapors, but Jesus had death on his mind. “She bought it so she might keep it for the day of my burial,” he explained to the others. (John 12:7)

Mary’s foot massage is striking on a number of levels. It must have scandalized those who witnessed it because they lived in a culture in which men and women who were not married were not supposed to converse, let alone touch each other. And when Mary used her hair to rub the luxurious perfume into Jesus’ feet, the act was personal, not business. It was an intimate, even erotic act. The Jews regarded a woman’s hair as ornamental, an object of beauty to be celebrated by her husband; rabbinic modesty required a woman’s hair to be covered as a sign of her sexual reserve. (See Dr. Leila Leah Bronner’s essay on Jewish hair laws across the ages.) 

Mary must have created consternation among the boys (and possibly arousal and envy) when she pulled the tie from her cascading tresses and used her lucious locks to rub the lavish perfume on the boss’s feet.

Jesus is quick to divert attention from the sensuality of the moment by talking about death. Even so, the passage is one of many reminders that Christianity is not one of those sacrificial sects that require the faithful to deny their bodies to save their souls. Despite his poverty and deprivation, Jesus rarely turned down an invitation to eat, drink, or – as John records – an offer of soothing and fragrant caresses. The central theme of Christianity is the resurrection of the body and all the pleasures that go with it. And that’s another sermon that can be gleaned from this opulent passage of scripture.

And there is yet another sermon that raises some troubling questions.

The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.)

The nard smelled like money to Judas. A lot of money.
According to some sources, the denarii was a day’s pay for most people. It could buy (according to wiki.answers) about 20 loaves of bread, so if you could get by on a few slices of bread a day, there was a lot left over for meat, drink, and assorted creature comforts.

Three hundred denarii was almost a year’s salary. Just where Mary got that kind of money is not known, but it was a pretty penny and more than enough to attract Judas’s attention.

But even more interesting than this rate of exchange is the very presence of Judas in this band of apostles.

From a human resources point of view, the man is a nightmare. Donald Trump would have fired him.

As you may know, human resources directors have their own perspective on these matters.

A few weeks ago, a human resources director of our acquaintance reacted with horror when Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation.

“He can’t do that,” our friend said, her voice rising in alarm. “He’s the CEO! He’s not exempt! He can’t just give three weeks notice!”

Imagine a human resources director’s response to Judas.

“Who vetted this guy? Who hired him? Who made a man with his reputation the office treasurer? Who has the authority to hand him his yarmulke and show him the door?”

The answer to each of these questions, of course, is Jesus.

But scholars and critics across the centuries have raised other questions about Judas.

Among them: was he set up?

Some church historians speculate that if Jesus knew who Judas really was (and it seems impossible that the man who perceived when power surged from him when his robe was tugged in a jostling crowd could not know Judas), then Jesus allowed Judas to betray him.

And for some, it absolves Judas from blame if he carried out a role that was never in his power to evade.
For others, such as Hugh Schonfield, author of The Passover Plot, Jesus may even have conspired with Judas to do the deed in order to fulfill his mission.

The conspiracy claim is also made in an ancient Coptic papyrus traced to the second century that purports to be “The Gospel of Judas.” The document caused a stir when it was discovered in the 1970s, although it may be the same text that was denounced in 180 A.D. as “fictitious” by Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon.

Whether there was a conspiracy or not, it seems likely that Jesus, who was a marked man even before he raised Lazarus from the dead, would have been arrested in Jerusalem with or without Judas’s help.

It is interesting to note that Judas doesn’t even appear in the very earliest Christian writings, namely the epistles of Paul that were written when the apostles who knew both Jesus and Judas were still alive. Paul may not have considered the traitor worthy of mention, or he may have known details about Judas’ role that we don’t have.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that a few hundred years later, gospel writers depicted Judas as a traitorous thief, and his name today is synonymous with betrayal. Jesus said Judas, alone among the twelve disciples, was “destined to be lost,” (John 17:12).

So if Jesus knew that, why did he confound all future Human Resources Directors by keeping Judas around?

Hidden in that question, I think, is the best sermon of all.
Jesus kept Judas around for the same reason he put up with the scribes, the Pharisees, the Romans, the pushy crowds, and the disciples themselves.

He loved him.

Jesus didn’t come to save only good and sinless people or we would all be lost. And most of us would have to admit we are not sufficiently free of sin to cast stones of condemnation against Judas.

Adam Clarke writes: “he [Judas] committed a heinous act of sin...but he repented (Matthew 27:3–5) and did what he could to undo his wicked act: he had committed the sin unto death, i.e. a sin that involves the death of the body; but who can say, (if mercy was offered to Christ's murderers? (Luke 23:34)...) that the same mercy could not be extended to wretched Judas?”

Jesus should have fired Judas’s patootie early on. But he kept him around despite Judas’s pitiful performance record and failing annual evaluations.

Maybe that was careless management, and maybe Donald Trump would have handled it differently.

But it’s good news for the rest of us that Jesus didn’t stop to inventory all our sins before he took them to the Cross of Atonement.