Clough John Lesson 47

Pharisees Conspire to Kill Jesus; Mary Anoints Jesus – John 11:45-12:19

John chapters 11-12 deal with the last section of the main force of that Gospel that deals with a presentation of Jesus Christ to the nation Israel. We have stressed before and will stress again and again that as Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry came to a close there’s an atmosphere of foreboding, of doom and of death. It permeates the narrative; just from the raising of Lazarus, the various things that are happening in this section. And so we find that incident after incident is arranged by the Apostle John to get across this point. We see the increased hostility in the temple, the increased hostility in Judea. We find these temple scenes growing gradually more violent with a much more direct confrontation between Christ and the authorities. We find almost stoning occurring in chapter 8 and chapter 10. And then we find the final straw that broke the camel’s back last week when Lazarus was raised from the dead in the very backyard of the capital city of Jerusalem.

So we pick up the narrative at John 11:45, “Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on Him. [46] But some of them went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done.” Now here we find two groups of people, as so often happens in the Gospel of John; John is the Gospel of crisis. In fact, the Greek word looks like that, krisis, it’s crisis, the process of judgment. The “is” ending on a Greek word means not the content of the judgment but the process of the judgment. And so John’s Gospel is interested in present why Jesus Christ divides men from men. Christ unifies within the area of the elect but He divides the world as a whole, and this constant division and judgment is a theme of John. Lightness can have no fellowship with darkness and it divides.

But then again, another theme of John, the theme between the thought of the dark world, the human viewpoint and the thought of the light world, divine viewpoint, as to how they deal with facts and interpretation. John is going to present a series of facts and he’s going to show us how people respond to facts and how people interpret those facts. Now the thing that we want to learn from these kinds of passages is that how men handle Christ and how they respond to Him is the perfect picture of how they respond to any lesser truth. Men are going to do the same thing to any other truth. The facts are that Jesus Christ has raised Lazarus from the dead. The fact of the raising of Lazarus is the same for both human viewpoint and divine viewpoint; no change! The facts are the same; what differs is the interpretation that men hinge upon it. The interpretation of divine viewpoint is that Jesus Christ has raised Lazarus from the dead by God’s Word. The human viewpoint interpretation is that by some demonic force He has raised Lazarus from the dead; same facts, different interpretation. The facts are provided by God, the interpretation is provided by men thinking upon the facts provided by God, some with God’s help, others in rejection of God’s help.

So in John 11:45 those who think in divine viewpoint see the facts and what do they do? They believe. This is why when a person is having problems believing facts are important. Facts alone negative; facts with proper interpretation, yes, but facts nevertheless. And so historic evidences do form a portion of the preaching of the gospel. And when evangelistic operations are grounded on an emotional pitch, do this and you’ll have a nice feeling in your heart, or do something else, and people are sucked into coming forward and making some decision in ignorance. And they have this sweet little feeling in their hearts and it lasts about 72 hours and then there’s no sweet little feeling any longer and they wonder what happened, and they’re up and they’re down. One day they’re up and the next day they’re down; one day they feel great, the next day they feel lousy. One day (quote) “the Lord is with” them; the next day God is mad at them, because they are equating emotion with God’s attitude toward them and that’s wrong. It gets off to the wrong start and so those who are interested in Biblical evangelism will ensure the fact that we present facts along with the interpretation. Both are required. People, men must understand that when God spoke into history it isn’t a matter of your opinion. These are facts that happened.

The empty tomb is as much a historical fact as Augustus Caesar, but you show me one history book in our public schools that teaches or even mentions the empty tomb of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that is obviously human viewpoint history and we have an entire population raised on human viewpoint. This is why so many people hate history; this is why students hate history, they’ve never been taught history correctly. I hated history, I couldn’t stand it until I began to study the Word of God and found out that there’s a purpose and there’s a meaning to history like there’s a purpose and a meaning to my life. And this is the only thing that makes the facts interesting when they all fit together. And this is not being taught and so we have a generation of morons who cannot understand history. The other day when we were at a little demonstration we found out that people didn’t know what the word “Munich” meant, didn’t understand what the “iron curtain” meant, thought Helsinki was somebody instead of a place, by that time I’d become so exasperated when someone asked me who was Helsinki I said she’s a great movie star. And this is ridiculous but this is a product of our fine education system that is seemingly so great that the state wants to impose it on all people. Christians can’t have their own private schools, they must yield to the power of the state because the state has such a phenomenal system of education.

So we find people needing historical facts and that’s the case in verse 45; these people saw a historical fact, after all, it’s not too often that you happen to run by a graveyard and see somebody calling into a tomb and them somebody walks out of the tomb that was buried there a few days before. So this is a very prominent historic fact and it meant something and the people responded to it.

Now in John 11:46 others did not and this is the theme of crisis separation in John’s Gospel. Others who are thinking in human viewpoint categories are not impressed with the facts and you could throw facts at them all day and they’re not impressed because in their heart they still defy the living God and they still defy His final right to interpret all facts, and therefore whether Lazarus is raised from the dead doesn’t matter, they go and they tell the Pharisees so they can “get” Jesus.

Then we come into verse 47, the Pharisees meeting, “Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. [48] If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation. [49] And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, [50] Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. [51] And this spoke he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; [52] And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad. [53] Then from that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death.”

Now at this point there is made officially a death sentence upon Jesus Christ. It is at this point when He officially is declared to be under the death sentence. And this is why John arranges his material the way he does and why certain things are now going to happen in quite rapid succession. Three incidents we are going to study tonight; we’re going to study the council of the Sanhedrin, this informal council mentioned here with an official death sentence. We are going to study the anointing of Jesus’ feet by Mary and we are going to study His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And all these have one theme in common; they are all death themes. Here the official death sentence; the anointing of Jesus’ feet by Mary, the informal recognition of the death sentence, He is shortly going to die and she knows it, even though the disciples don’t. And then finally, the third, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem is a triumphal entry to His death.

Now let’s look at the themes in detail, verse 47, the meeting. Notice that the Bible, both here and in Acts 4 has access to what went on in these meetings. Now some of you may never have thought of this but as you read these passages has it ever dawned on you to ask this question: how does Luke and how did John know what happened in these meetings? Yes, God could have told them directly but I don’t think so because that’s not usually the way the Gospels were written. How do you suppose Luke and John know what was going on? There’s only one answer; there were Christian informants in these meetings. These meetings themselves either were attended by people who believed or people who later became believers and related the content of the meeting to the Gospel writers. We don’t have to go far to know that there’s a mysterious link, scholars have never clarified this, but if you’ll turn to John 18:15 we think there’s a link as to why we know what was going on inside those inner councils.

John 18:15, it’s talking about after Christ had been arrested, “And Simon Peter followed Jesus, and so did another disciple. That disciple was known unto the high priest,” that’s a very small phrase, it’s never repeated again in Scripture, but we know who that “other disciple” was; it’s John. Now the question that men have raised down through church history and frankly I’ve been unable to find the answer to it, and major men who’ve studied the question don’t know why or how this happened, but John, the Apostle, the writer of this Gospel, had some sort of social link with the highest people in the councils of the nation. This is why this Gospel is primarily is written about Jerusalem. Though John was a middle class fisherman from Galilee, whether it was a relative or something, he knew Caiaphas. And apparently it was from Caiaphas that he found out later what happened at the meeting.

Back to John 11, they start the meeting off, they asked a question. Notice what the question is and what it isn’t. They’re not saying oh, what are we going to do with this Jesus; it is not a future tense to the verb. It is a present tense; they’re not asking what are they going to do to Jesus, they’re asking all right men, I want a report, what are we doing. Because you see, before they sent out police, they’re trying to locate Jesus, they’re trying to find out where He is, and they had their informants go all through the mobs and all through the crowds of the city, where is Jesus? Where is Jesus? Have you seen Jesus? And they haven’t been able to find Him. So they’re asking in frustration in verse 47, what are we doing, we can’t stop this man, this man is doing may miracles, the only thing we hear about is every time He shows up there’s this miracle, we can’t have those things going on around here, we’ve got to stop this, it’s a threat to our theology. [47, “Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles.”]

Therefore in John 11:48 they go on and they infer a wrong conclusion. See, that’s the danger of human viewpoint, you can start off with facts and you have a fouled up system of interpretation and you’re going to come to a very wrong conclusion. And that’s exactly what they have done, and not only do the priests and the people who rule come to this conclusion that is false, so the masses on Palm Sunday have come to precisely the same conclusion and precisely the wrong conclusion. Here they argue in verse 48, “If we let Him thus alone, all men will believe on Him, well, that’s true, “and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.” Now that is not true. We know from extra-Biblical materials that the men were very edgy, very jumpy abound this time in history, because if you remember the slides I’ve shown on the temple, you recall what was that four-posted structure on the northwest side of the temple? It’s the fortress of Antonia, and who was guarding from the top of this fortress? Who was looking down? The sentries, looking right down into the Jewish court; the guards of the fortress of Antonia, the Roman police. And so always, no matter where these people prayed they would look up to the northwest, they’d see the tower, and on the tower, 24 hours a day, Roman sentries, walking back and forth. The power of Rome was physically present and they were scared.

So here, when they find that the Romans are a threat, they begin to misinterpret the Messiahship of Jesus; they interpret Jesus’ claims in a purely political way, that Jesus, this mad carpenter from Galilee is going to come down here and the first thing that is going to happen is He’s going to cause a riot and if this riot gets started and the Roman police come down from the fortress of Antonia they’re going to permanently end the situation. The Romans by this time couldn’t stand the Jews, they had their Middle East problem for a century and they were tired of this constant unrest, constant unrest in the Middle East and they were just about at the end of their rope anyway and all they needed to precipitate an invasion of Israel was some Jewish riot in the temple. So they think that Jesus is just a man, mistaken, who is going to cause a riot. Now obviously when Jesus Christ takes over the kingdom they won’t have to worry about the Romans, Jesus will take care of the Romans. But because they have a sloppy interpretation of Jesus to start with, because they have an emaciated Jesus, a human Jesus instead of divine Jesus, because they start off on the wrong foot they wind up with the wrong conclusion and they come out here worrying about the Romans taking over.

Now notice something else; they kind of show their hypocrisy as shortly Judas will show his hypocrisy. It says “the Romans shall come,” now notice what they are most concerned with, “our place,” the establishment, we can’t jeopardize our position, this Jesus is going to make waves; we can’t have waves because we’re going to lose our position, and then incidentally the nation too. But patriotism didn’t come first with this group; this group was simply concerned for their own jobs and Jesus was a threat to their jobs. For an analogous situation today, don’t open your mouth for Christ, it might jeopardize your job, that kind of thing. By the way, verse 48 is one of those great, great ironies. You know how John, the Apostle has treated us to these great ironies time and time again; what’s the irony in verse 48? They say “If” we don’t stop Jesus, Rome will come and invade. What’s the real truth? If you reject Jesus the Romans are going to come and take away your place in your nation. And so once again John sees the irony of unbelief, unbelief stands there and says its own sentence of doom.

John 11:49, “And one of them, named Caiaphas,” this is the son-in-law of Annas, by the way, he’s the same character that we run into in Acts 4, part of the mafia of the day that ripped off the people in the money changing outfit, and they had a group going and Jesus also got in their way about that. So “Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, You don’t know anything, [Ye know nothing at all].” Now Caiaphas is kind of a rude individual and history tells us he was. He’s just gross all the way around. We’d say he’s a slob. And Caiaphas was one of the great religious slobs of history and he shows how much of a slob he is by the way he talks to other men on the council.

So in verse 50 John points out what he says, “Now consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people,” notice the pragmatism of the whole thing, “it’s expedient for us,” not whether it’s right or whether it’s wrong, we don’t ask questions sin terms of whether it’s right or wrong, we ask questions of whether it’s expedient or not, pragmatism. Please notice the role pragmatism plays, that supposedly harmless philosophy that permeates our society today. It was that philosophy that led to Christ’s crucifixion, please notice. So “consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” Now it’s interesting that here again we have irony, and John picks this up because in verse 51 he says that he didn’t speak that out of himself, God put those words into Caiaphas’ mouth. Who was Caiaphas? Caiaphas was high priest. Who was the high priest? One who performed a leadership role for the nation under God’s economy and even an unbeliever prophesies. Now watch that because that’s a theme in the Old Testament. When God wants to speak His Word He can use anything, including Balaam’s ass to do it. Balaam’s ass is the model for a lot of other asses that have been used in history to teach the Word of God. But God can use that and that’s a picture of it and here He is using the most hostile slob of an unbeliever, and this person is actually speaking the inerrant Word of God.

Why is this pointed out in Scripture? To show the dramatic point that God is sovereign over man regardless of the suit of clothes he is wearing, regardless of the status of his soul, regardless of his scintillating personality or lack thereof; that is not the issue. The issue is whether God intends to use him or not and God wants to use Caiaphas so God uses Caiaphas, and if He has to pick out a slob to use He’ll pick out a slob to use. But God will use whom He wishes to use. And so here we have God speaking through Caiaphas again in a very ironical way. Caiaphas thinks that the death is on behalf of the physical salvation of the nation and yet these words are true in another dimension, aren’t they. Christ died for the nation, but for the spiritual nature of the nation. Notice again that He says that if Christ would die for the people, then the entire nation would be saved. Wrong Caiaphas! Jesus is only going to die for some of the people! Who? Some of the people. Who are the “some?” The elect, the faithful remnant, that is the only group for which Christ dies in this sense because the rest of them are going to die a horrible death in 70 AD, they’re going to be slaughtered, they’re not going to be physically saved because they have rejected the Messiah.

Then in John 11:52 John goes on and points out that “not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad.” That’s the Gentiles, and notice that before the Gentiles believe they are called “children of God.” This is analogous to John 10 where he talks about other sheep that I have that are not of this fold. The term “sheep” usually refers just to believers; the term “children of God” usually refers just to believers and yet isn’t it interesting that in both these passages this terminology is applied to elect people before they are saved. It is applied in anticipation of these people who will become Christians. And in verse 52 notice too that even the Church is implicit here; it’s not fully stated, but the bringing together of the Jew and Gentile, isn’t that the great mystery that was later revealed to Paul? Sure was. And then in verse 53, “Then from that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death.”

And so Jesus Christ no longer walked, imperfect tense, John 11:54, “Jesus therefore walked no more openly among the Jews; but went thence unto a country near to the wilderness, into a city called Ephraim, and there continued with his disciples.” Now here is a map of Israel, here’s Jerusalem and Ephraim is located about 40 miles northeast of that spot. Let me show you the kind of area that Jesus spent His last hours outside the city of Jerusalem. It’s to this place where He finally had to retire and you’ll notice that it’s the same kind of place that He retired to a few verses back when it said He left the area of Judea and went into the area across Jordan, into Trans-Jordania. [He’s showing slides] There’s the only place where Jesus could get some peace and quiet away from the city of Jerusalem in the last hours of His life.

That gives you the setting, now what happens. John 11:55, “And the Jews’ Passover was nigh at hand: and many went out of the country up to Jerusalem before the Passover,” remember that hill in the background, that’s going up, so you go up to Jerusalem. And so they went “up to Jerusalem to purify themselves.” Now again John doesn’t include these details just for entertainment, there’s a reason for this and John is going to play on this, so you watch the word “purify” and understand that these people had to go to Jerusalem a couple of days ahead to go through the ritual washings and purify themselves to partake of Passover. It’s like when we had communion, we had a time of self-examination before, I read John 13 and pointed out the purification of confession before you partake of the elements. And so the Jewish people would have to actually ritually bathe before they went through the ceremony of Passover, Passover week. So the theme is the purification. I want you to see and remember that because there’s going to be three shocking little details that come up in the text later on that deliberately undercut this theme of purification.

John 11:56, “Then they were seeking,” imperfect tense, “for Jesus, and spoke among themselves, as they stood in the temple, What do you think, He will not come to the feast?” Those of you with the Greek text will see the ou me construction, and you’ll know that this is a question that expects a negative answer. What they’re saying is oh, He’s never going to come now, never going to come now. Why do you suppose the crowd thinks that Jesus isn’t going to show? Well, because of the tremendous hostility, He was almost stoned the last time. So there’s this atmosphere, this oppressive atmosphere of death and danger. That is what has to be seen as the story unfolds and the tension begins to build.

John 11:57, “Now both the chief priests and the Pharisees had given an order [a commandment], that, if any man knew where he were, he should show it, that they might take Him.” Now that order in verse 57 made any person who did not report Jesus a conspirator with Jesus. Now that is also important for the background of what is about to happen. John gives us these details to help us interpret the text. So two things to notice, you have these masses of people going down all these roads to come to Jerusalem to purify themselves and the second thing, an order has been passed, anybody see Jesus? Anybody see Jesus? You are under obligation to the state to report His presence. So if you knew where Jesus was and you didn’t report Him you were coconspirator with Him. That’s the legal position you were placed in by this order.

John 12:1, “Then Jesus six days before the Passover,” and if Jesus died on a Friday, and that’s debatable, then this was the Saturday before the Shabbat, the Sabbath, and then the next incident is going to happen on Palm Sunday, or the Sunday, “Jesus six days before the Passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead.” Christ is coming here, here’s the little town of Bethany; Mary has her home there and there’s another man who has a house there, John doesn’t tell us this fact, we get this from Mark, there’s another man who lives in Bethany and his name is Simon. Now guess who Simon is, in all this atmosphere of purification? He’s a leper. And it is his home that Jesus goes to. Everybody else is going to get purified, so what’s the house that Jesus picks? The house of a leper, and that’s the first thing, obviously the leper has been cured by this time but still he is a leper, he has that reputation of corruption, of decay. Purified, perhaps, by the Lord Himself in physical healing but nevertheless he has a reputation and is known in Bethany as Simon the leper. They are not in Mary and Martha’s house when this scene occurs.

So He comes to Bethany, where Lazarus had been dead, and raised from the dead, [2] “There they made Him a supper; and Martha was serving,” imperfect, “but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with Him.” That’s to show you it wasn’t in Lazarus and Mary and Martha’s home because it wouldn’t be that Lazarus was sitting at the table, you wouldn’t have to say that, you’d assume that. And meshing this with Mark’s account we know that apparently Simon had a party for Jesus, he invited the disciples in, they all were there, he must have had a large home because there’s at least twelve men, so he had twelve, he said okay, you raised Lazarus from the dead, let’s bring Lazarus to the party and since you like his two sisters we’ll bring Mary and Martha. So we know there were at least 15 plus the Lord Jesus Christ Himself; that’s sixteen, plus this man, seventeen people. So you figure out the size of his home, he had a table large enough to serve 17 people. See, Jesus didn’t just go in the low class, He went in the upper class and the middle class, and this was a festive occasion when he opened his home to a party and Martha again is pictured as the active one.

These two sisters occur again and again in the Gospels and it’s a fascinating study to see the different kinds of women that these girls are, one of them is very active, Martha, and she gets in trouble. Remember the scene where she’s out washing the dishes and she gets hacked at the Lord, why don’t You tell my sister to come out here and help me. Apparently Martha was the aggressive one, always doing something, doing something, doing something, and the result was that occasionally she’d miss out various important doctrines. But she was a great believer and the Lord honored her. But now here sister, Mary, she’s the one in the last scene we saw, it was Mary that stayed in the home mourning the loss of her brother. It was Martha who had to do something, had to do something, take off, go get the Lord, and she met Him. And then she called Mary and Mary went out. Mary is kind of a much more slow, much more relaxed type woman. So it’s Mary, not Martha, that is the star actress in what’s about to happen.

John says in John 12:3, “Therefore took Mary,” it’s not “then,” it’s not a sequence in time but it’s “therefore,” logical, it’s a logical connection. “Therefore Mary took a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odor of the ointment.” Now she took a pound, actually it was twelve ounces, it says twelve ounces of oil or nard, nard came from India, it’s a plant that was imported to Palestine from India so it’s come thousands of miles. The bud on the top of this nard plant would be crushed and out of that you’d get this ointment that was considered tremendous perfume in the ancient world. And so the word after nard, it says “very costly” but actually in the Greek there’s another word there, it says, “oil of nard, the pure stuff.” In other words, this was not some cologne, this was perfume, it wasn’t diluted, very costly, and John puts that in there for a little instance that’s going to happen and then he immediately leaves us with this costly ointment and he goes on to what Mary did with it, she “anointed the feet of Jesus,” now that’s worthy of notice because most cases when the anointing occurred in the Bible it always on the head, not on the feet.

The question we therefore have to ask, why did Mary do this unusual thing of anointing Jesus’ feet? We don’t know exactly because Mary doesn’t tell us and the text doesn’t tell us. We can only guess that she, in light of what’s going to happen in John 13 and the attitude people had toward washing feet that it was a very humiliating thing and that Mary recognized and was assuming her place under Jesus Christ. She was, in effect, doing what John the Baptist said, I am not even worthy to loosen His sandal. And here you have a picture of a great woman, a great believer, who understood, because she was the quiet type who just sat back and she listened, and she listened, and when the men would be talking about the Word of God, and probably this often occurred in her home, Mary would be back there just listening to them talking, taking it in, taking it in, taking it in, thinking about it, taking some more doctrine in, thinking about it some more and when the last hours of Christ’s life come it is Mary who understands and apparently at this point no one else understands what’s about to happen; Mary does. And therefore she understands He is shortly going to die and she is preparing His body and she starts, apparently with His feet to show people that she assumes the attitude of grace to her Lord; Christ is her superior and here’s her way, her private way, her creative way of confessing her subordinancy to her Creator.

But Mary does something else; of course it may seem strange to us that she uses her hair to wipe the feet, but we now from the Bible and from extra-Biblical practices that this had overtones of something else. I told you that you had to be careful when you come to this portion of the text because the theme is that all these thousands of people are going into Jerusalem to purify themselves. The theme is that they must be pure before they partake of Passover. So Jesus comes to Bethany and stops at a leper’s house, the first thing that strikes you as off color. The second thing is that no Jewish woman at this point in history ever let her hair down in public. It was to be reserved for the bed only. It had a definite connotation and in Numbers 5 an adulteress would be spotted because they made her let her hair down.

For example, here’s a rabbinic text and this shows you the attitude toward a woman letting her hair down. “Camissa had seven sons who all performed the office of high priest; they asked of her, Camissa, how come you have this honor? Camissa answered, the rafters of my house never saw the hairs of my head.” So this gives you an idea that the women always kept their hair covered, and for her to take her cloak off and then to let her hair down and to take that hair and wipe the feet of Jesus was something that would have been deeply offensive to any person there with a sense of propriety. So this is the second thing that’s off color about this approach that Christ is using. He goes first, while everybody else is purifying themselves, into the house of a leper. No sooner does He get in the house but a woman lets her hair out and not only lets her hair out but uses it as a towel for His feet, a very unusual situation. And then of course she’s going to take the ointment, and as far as Judas is concerned, waste it.

So you can imagine how this might have generated gossip. Jesus always had this problem, He spoke to the woman at the well in John 4 and no rabbi did that and here He allows a woman to take her hair down in His presence and caress Him with her hair, and this would have… it’s lucky there were no Pharisees there, they would have dropped dead of a heart attack if they had seen this. And it just goes to show you that the Lord Jesus Christ enjoyed women and He treated them as individuals; in the true sense of the word He was the women’s only liberator. He treated the woman as a woman because He created the woman, He personally designed the woman for Adam and He knows, therefore, how they are built and how they are to be treated. And so He responds to them and He let Mary do this. So as she does this the house is filled with the odor of the ointment.

It’s very picturesque because John wants to tell us what gets Judas hacked and he draws a picture, and apparently, if we can infer from the emphasis on the smell, that Judas wasn’t in the room, he didn’t see this hair, apparently John was, and Judas was out some place else. And as Mary takes… it says in Mark she had this… it probably was in a ceramic type dish and she broke it in her hand, very easy to do, and she let all of this pound, twelve ounces, go all over His feet and she also anointed His head. And since this was not cologne, this was the real stuff, perfume, it just permeated immediately. And here’s Judas in the next… what’s going on here, and he comes in, it’s because he smells it that he comes in. That’s why it’s put in this sequence, John is very careful when he describes this to picture it.

John 12:4, “Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, which should betray Him, [5] Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?” Now the three hundred pence is three hundred denarii, which was a day’s wage, equivalent today this is about $10,000 worth of perfume. That’s what Mary did on Jesus here at this point; it gives you a little idea of the love and respect that she probably, it probably represented one of her great holdings in assets, and she used all $10,000 worth of perfume in about five seconds on the Lord Jesus Christ, just smashed the bottle and used every drop on Christ, and it is a picture of her dedication to His person; she is expressing her love to the Lord Jesus Christ and he occupation with Him by this great gift.

So we have the commentary, this, says John to explain, verse 6 is the editorial note, “This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.” A very interesting ministry of Judas Iscariot, he was the treasurer of the first disciples and he was the first crooked treasurer of the church. Now it takes maturity to handle money. I can be very thankful that in this church we’ve always had mature men in charge of the finances but in some religious organizations that’s not the case and the Bible warns us that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil and therefore it is not accidental that Judas Iscariot was linked with money. See, this is one of those, almost subliminal themes that you pick up in Scripture. Here’s another money, watch who has the money? It was Judas.

And Judas was the kind of individual who always had to have his hand in the bag, the word “bare” there means take off, it’s imperfect, he always used to do it. Somebody’s donate money, it’s like they had a box, somebody would put money in the top and he had a little tube that ran right down to his pocket in the bottom. That was Judas; apparently the Lord knew it. And this also suggests a reason for that great mystery that has always surrounded Judas: why did he want to see Christ crucified? Now we can’t answer fully that question but this suggests that one reason why Judas had Christ crucified and made the deal was because Judas, remember, being an unbeliever from the start, never having trusted in Christ at all, was concerned with the materialist view of the kingdom and what he was going to materially gain. And by the time this Bethany incident occurred it became obvious with this atmosphere of impending doom, it became obvious to Judas, this thing isn’t going to go off, and so I am going to make as much as I can off this deal before it tubes out. Judas was a cold, calculating gentleman; Judas did not violate, apparently, any of the overt social standards, he just quietly stole, he quietly took off the money.

John 10:7, “Then said Jesus,” He defends the woman, you “Let her alone,” and it’s strong in the Greek, stop your criticizing, and Christ comes between Mary and Judas and He defends the godly woman, that’s a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ and His concern for women who trust in Him. He wants to protect them and He will protect Him, and here is a sign during His incarnation, His protection for them, He respected what she had done. And then He says something peculiar, “against the day of” or “for the day of My burial has she kept this.” Now the verb “keep” is past tense, “she has kept it.” So the idea, apparently is that for weeks, maybe months, Mary has transferred her funds into this import, $10,000 worth of perfume imported from India, and she has made her investment because she foresaw the death of Christ. And if this the case, that she foresaw the death of Christ for some time before, she becomes the first person in the Gospel accounts that recognized it.

For example, if you’ll look down at John 12:16 you’ll see John is talking about himself, “These things understood not His disciples at the first; but after Jesus was glorified, then….” So you see, the disciples didn’t understand. Who understood? The woman understood. So gentlemen, take notice who was the sharpest student of the Word of God. And Jesus, because He was not laboring under the ERA, didn’t therefore have to say well, Mary, I guess you’ll have to be the thirteenth disciple. Jesus did not believe in that even though… even though Mary spiritually was better qualified than the men. She wasn’t qualified to do what a man only could do, and this is the paradox down through church history; on the mission field it is pathetic, three women to every one man because men are not exercising their leadership. I see it in this congregation, we have a handful of men that are fulfilling their obligations and they are working day and night because they don’t get support. We have a lot of people who like to make appearances but we have few people who are willing to carry on in the background. We’ve a lot of women, a lot of girls responding, a lot of them. We have most of the family training, if it wasn’t for the girls and the wives the family training program would never get off the ground, because as much as I’ve said it’s the man’s job, the men don’t listen, they’re too busy doing something else. They always have time for little league and always have time for something else but never have time for the Word of God, and then their kid becomes a JW some place along the line because he got witnessed to and what happened to my son. Or he turns into a juvenile delinquent, what happened to my son, I thought I was a good father. No you weren’t, you’re a clod. So here it was the same thing, Mary was taking the lead spiritually and all the other dumb butts were standing around wondering what was going on.

So Jesus in John 12:8 says, “For the poor always ye have with you; but Me ye have not always.” And here Christ strikes at the heart of humanism. It is one verse in Scripture that would be hated by the humanists, the welfarists today. Jesus takes a theocentric view of welfare, not an anthropocentric view of welfare. That means Jesus says God matters first in your welfare program, not man. Welfare is not ultimately directed to man, it’s ultimately directed to God’s glory and within that framework and that framework alone ought there be welfare. The doctrine of poverty in the Scripture is a complicated one, we covered it when we went through Deuteronomy 15 and we went into the details of why there is such a thing as poverty in the world. Ultimately it comes about because of degenerate culture. Wherever you have people who reject Bible doctrine and reject the free enterprise system, you are going to have poverty. Wherever you have apostate religion you will have poverty. This is why in India they have extreme poverty because they have extreme apostasy. They have enough beef in India to feed them for five years and so what do we do, go over there to feed them everything, all of our grain and so on because they’re too stupid to eat the food that’s at their front door. And when where we have areas, Mozambique in Africa is a good example; five to ten years ago Mozambique was growing all the grain that they could possibly grow for their people and today people are starving in Mozambique. Do you know why? Because the Chi-coms came in and they took over and they socialized their agriculture. And they ruined the production; Russia under the Czars fed themselves and Russia under communism has never been able to feed themselves. Don’t worry, Russia is not going to let the US go down the drain, we’re the only place they can get grain from. The reason: they have violated God’s laws and that produces poverty and Jesus Christ said you’re always going to have it with you because you’ll always have, this side of the kingdom you’ll always have people that defy God’s law. That’s why in verse 8 He says “the poor you have with you always.” Until the kingdom comes and men submit to the Word in their business as well as in their religious life there is going to be poverty and men are going to get faked out in business deals and people are going to starve; it’s a horrible thing but it’s all brought on by ourselves.

John 12:9, “Much people of the Jews therefore knew that He was there: and they came not for Jesus’ sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom He had raised from the dead.” And here’s another note in verse 10, the order that was passed down including putting Lazarus to death; that’s real smart, get rid of the evidence. Lazarus bothers you, you know, one of these guys called out of the grave, you can’t have that walking around your main streets, get rid of him. Don’t ask why it happened, just kill him. [10, “But the chief priests consulted that they might put Lazarus also to death; [11] Because that by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus.”]

So John 10:12, “On the next day,” the great day, “much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, [13] Took branches of palm trees,” why palm trees? Palm trees were used for a victory celebration. The picture here is a misfired attempt to bring in a political Messiah. This crowd no more knows what they are doing than the man in the moon. They have absolutely no understanding but they are going to stand up and chant Psalm 118 over and over, “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna,” they’re going to shout and they don’t even know what they’re saying. They’re going to take these palm branches because they think now because Jesus… see, He’s coming around the road here from Bethany, He starts here from Bethany and He’s met, He gets a donkey at Bethphage and as He starts to make the turn around the south end of the Mount of Olives another crowd from Jerusalem comes out who have heard that He’s over here at Bethany. And so they meet here and apparently from the south end of the ridge line they come through just north of the Garden of Gethsemane and across the Kidron valley to the temple. It’s this massive crowd and this is what they’re crying for and making the same mistake as the Pharisees. What had they thought, Caiaphas, why, He’s pretending to be a political Messiah, and what does the crowd think? He’s a political Messiah, everybody is completely fouled up and in the midst of this mob, in the midst of this confusion one lone woman understands, that’s all. It’s pretty pathetic, after three years of ministry in His crisis hour the only comfort that the Lord got was from one woman who understood the Word of God. She was an ‘ezer, or a helper, at this crisis hour. And so the people “Took branches of palm trees, and went forth to meet Him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is” it should be “He that cometh in the name of the Lord, that is the King of Israel. It’s a quotation from the same Psalm we studied in Acts 4 but notice they insert “King of Israel,” showing it’s their political dimensions of the Messiah that most concerns them.

John 12:14, “And Jesus, when He had found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is written,” now why did Jesus come into the city on an ass; turn to Zechariah 9:9, what is the significance of the ass? The ass was sort of a Model-T transportation, translated into 1976 language the ass was the Pinto and the horse was the LTD; got the picture. The ass was the common mode of transportation. You still see it, the Arab boys in Jerusalem and Samaria today, they don’t have hot rods, you’d ruin the tires on the rocks, besides, you couldn’t afford the gasoline at $2.00 a gallon. So nobody has cars and so when the little Arab boys get so old that they can do it their father usually buys them a donkey and you’ll see this every once in a while, they’ll be just riding around. In fact, when we went to Bethphage there was an Arab boy that had his donkey that his dad given him and he went out and he was giving people rides on his donkey so he could make some money. Probably thought it was great watching these big American tourists sitting on his little donkey; that was quite a sight to behold, but he made money and that’s probably how he paid for the food to feed it. So the ass was a picture of a humble cheap form of transportation. It was used by the poor.

So in Zechariah 9:9, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem; behold, thy King comes unto thee; He is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and up a colt, the foal of an ass.” Why is Jerusalem to rejoice? Because of verse 10, “And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off,” in other words, the horse, which is the expensive machine that was used in war will be eliminated and the significance of Christ getting and riding on that ass is that He comes in poverty without a human military machine and therefore is bringing peace and that’s why the city is to rejoice. That’s what Christ is telling the people, I come as the prince of peace to you. And what do the people shout back, “the King of Israel who will defy the armies of Rome.” And here’s what you have on Palm Sunday; you have Christ giving them quietly one message and you have the mob insisting that He can’t be the Prince of Peace, He’s got to be, says the palm branches, the One who ruins Rome. And so also Caiaphas thought the same thing. Well, that shows you what John, how he pulls this out and uses the theme of the donkey to show the irony of what’s happening here.

All right, we’ll finish out now with the last few verses of this section of John 12. [15, “Fear not, daughter of Zion: behold, thy King cometh, sitting on an ass’s colt. [16] These things understood not His disciples at the first: but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of Him, and that they had done these things unto Him.”] This is why in verse 16 he says I didn’t understand it, remember, John is part of the disciples in verse 16, I didn’t understand that, it was only after Christ was glorified that they remembered these things had been written of Him. Jesus, when He got on the donkey, didn’t say hey guys, unroll the scroll will you, turn to Zechariah, I want to show you a passage. Jesus didn’t do that. As the mob began to go Jesus just reached over there, He got the donkey, He got on the donkey and it just happened so fast in front of them they didn’t even reflect on what was going on. And then it was after, after Christ died, after He rose, then they said hey, just a minute, you remember that passage in Zechariah 9:9? Do you really realize that day that we were on the road from Bethany around that south end of the Mount of Olives what was happening. Gosh, why didn’t we see that before? Because you’re a bunch of idiots before, you hadn’t responded to the Word. Mary saw it but the men didn’t. Let’s see how He concludes the section.

John 12:17, “The people therefore that was with Him when he called Lazarus out of his grave, and raised him from the dead, were bearing record,” imperfect tense, they were stirring up the city. [18] “For this cause the people also met Him, for that they heard that He had done this miracle. [19] The Pharisees therefore said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing? behold, the world is gone after Him.”

Now look at the irony. How did we start out? The Pharisees say, hey, what are doing, we got somebody, we got to find out where Jesus is. May I humbly suggest to you that by verse 19 the Pharisees knew pretty well where Jesus was. When they looked out over the temple wall and they saw a mob of thousands of people and this one man who must have stood out in the middle of that mob riding a donkey they knew very well where Jesus was. In other words, at this point what John is telling us is the establishment has lost complete control of the situation and in their desperate attempt to regain control now will come the lowering of the ominous boom down upon Jesus and the crucifixion. These men are desperate men and the mob that is surrounding Jesus is just superficial, just skin deep, they have no idea why they’re there. They don’t even know why they’re singing Hosanna. See, Hosanna comes from a Hebrew verb to save, Ho San, it’s actually Ho Sha, it is the imperative save, and with nah on the end, I pray. And what they are thinking is political salvation from Rome.

Yet the final irony of Palm Sunday is this: as that crowd prays save, save, save, thinking in terms of political ideas, what is going to happen. Their prayer will be answered; within a few short hours Jesus will save, but He’s going to save in a completely different way, He’s going to save them spiritually. God will answer Psalm 118, He’s save now, He’ll save, but not the way these men think. Next week we’ll continue the tragedy as it mounts up to the final hours of His arrest.