If we define the beginning of Jesus’ ministry as the first time that disciples started to follow Him, then we know exactly when that happened. It is recorded in the gospel of John as the day that John the baptizer told His disciples, as Jesus was walking by: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” That day, John and Andrew met Jesus.

The baptizer’s reference to a sacrificial lamb hid nothing. He knew what the mission of the Messiah would require: how it would end. But I wonder what Andrew and John thought about that expression; how deeply they analyzed it. I wonder if, as the time of the cross drew inexorably close, those words ever came back to their minds.

Even if they did, I don’t know if they could have made the connection between the lamb the baptizer mentioned and the lamb of the Passover celebration. You see, the Passover is, above all, a celebration of victory. God, the God of Justice, intervened to set His people free.

It was through mighty works of power that their God defeated all the gods of Egypt and then drowned Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea. If any Messiah comes to mind as they recount that story during the Passover Seder, it is the Conquering Messiah.

I don’t think any of them ever thought that the way the Messiah really enters that story is not as the Conquering LORD but as the lamb that they all had to sacrifice?

As we go on to Mark’s chapter 14, it seems to me that only one person made that connection.

Doing nothing is not an option

Knowing who Jesus is, or who He might be, or even who He claimed to be, is not enough.

It could be enough if He were just a notable figure of the history of the world.

If that were all He had been, honesty in the face of all the historical evidence still would require that we accept what is written in the gospel. After all, no person in their right mind today denies that Homer wrote The Iliad or that Thucydides wrote his History. Yet, the manuscript evidence for those, and many of the other ancient texts that we accept as part of our human history, falls woefully short of the evidence we have for the writings of the New Testament.

As the table below shows, the New Testament’s earliest extant copy that we have found, dates at worst to 85 years from the date the original was written; and we have 24,000 copies as evidence that that original record existed. Compared to that, Homer’s Iliad comes closest with 643 copies dating to about 500 years after the original was written.

It is pure prejudice (or ignorance) to claim that the New Testament record we have today is not a reliable record of what the eyewitnesses to those events actually reported. We might as well rewrite the history books to note that Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars is probably a work of fiction given that the earliest copy we have found dates to almost 1000 years after the events reported there supposedly happened.

So, if we want to know anything about this Jesus of Nazareth, we are forced to consult the gospels. We cannot dismiss them. But whether or not we want to believe that all that is reported there actually happened, is another question. We were not there.

The writers testifying to it were there, or they verified the report by interviewing people who were there. But we were not there…

If we choose to claim that, maybe, they were deluded, that is our prerogative. But we cannot deny that they recorded what they said happened.

We cannot deny what they said that Jesus said about Himself.

It is impossible because we were not there, and, therefore, we cannot invalidate these witnesses’ presumption of truthfulness.

If Jesus were just a notable figure of the history of the world, recognizing the validity of the documentary evidence argument above is all that honesty requires. After that, we are free to go on with our lives, study other historical figures if we want, maybe even hold them up as examples to be followed.

But if Jesus was who he said He was, then He is not just a notable figure of the history of the world. He is the center of the history of humanity. He is not a figure that we can choose (or not choose) to admire. If He is indeed the Son of God, the Creator of the Universe, the very reason we all exist, then the facts of His Life will demand…

…not that we recognize Him but that we respond to it.

That is the effect He had on those who met Him.

Mark 14:1-2 Now the passover and the [feast of] unleavened bread was after two days. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how they might seize him by subtlety and kill him.  For they said, Not in the feast, lest perhaps there be a tumult of the people.

The religious leaders knew what they had to do. They had to find a way to kill Him. Yet, His popularity with the crowds could not be denied. We already talked about the mob that flooded Jerusalem’s gates on what we call Palm Sunday. How to get around that mob was going to take subtlety. Actually, the word translated here “subtlety” means by trickery, by deceit.

It is interesting that the religious leaders of the people of God, fully versed in the Law of Moses, hear themselves considering how to murder someone and conclude that to accomplish it they must deceive the people. That they are planning to break two of the ten commandments never crosses their minds because, after all, this is for the good of the people.

The ends justify the means. For the people under the power of the kingdom of the world, absolute right and wrong do not exist. Even if they claim to believe in such, they will find a way to justify whatever they choose to do, as right. This is not a surprise: Self-interest is the ultimate driving force of the kingdom of the world. But murder and deceit…?

The reason for the extremeness of the response is simple: When that kingdom is faced with the Kingdom of God, self-interest devolves into a fight for survival. The kingdom of the world cannot just ignore the Kingdom of God because they cannot co-exist. This is why Jesus repeatedly warns His followers that they will eventually be persecuted.

And it is one of the reasons you find posts on social media ridiculing people who believe in the Bible or who believe in Christianity. I mean, think about it: If believing the Bible, if being a follower of Jesus, is simply a choice any person living in the world can make, then what danger does that choice present to someone who chooses to believe otherwise? Why not spend as much time (and acrimony) lambasting people who claim to believe the Earth is flat?

Evidently, the choice to follow Jesus is dangerous.

May that danger be evidence of the power of the Holy Spirit.

May it never be evidence of citizens of the Kingdom of God trying to seize worldly power.

Such is the response of the powers of the world. But there is a completely different kind of response.

Mark 14:3-5 And when he was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, as he lay at table, there came a woman having an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly; and having broken the alabaster flask, she poured it out upon his head.

And there were some indignant in themselves, and saying, Why has this waste been made of the ointment? for this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor. And they spoke very angrily at her.

To Mary of Bethany (sister of Martha and Lazarus, as she is identified in the other gospels), the facts of the Life of Jesus, as she has come to understand them, demand only one response: Worship.

This is one of my favorite stories in the gospel. It seems to me that of all the disciples and all the followers of Jesus, she was the only one to “get it.”

Maybe she took His words at face value: When He said that He was headed to Jerusalem, and there His enemies would capture Him and kill Him, she believed it. She didn’t try to find some other possible meaning in those words. And she appears to have refused to keep going along confused, not understanding, like the twelve:

Mark 9:31-32 for he (Jesus) taught his disciples and said to them, The Son of man is delivered into men’s hands, and they shall kill him; and having been killed, after three days he shall rise again. But they understood not the saying, and feared to ask him.

Or maybe the Holy Spirit revealed it to her heart… a heart that was ready to accept that truth.

To her the only possible response was to give to Jesus the most precious treasure she possessed, worth a year’s wages. (John tells us it was a pound.) Just for the sake of understanding the scale, if we assume Mary’s family was a middle-class family, today in the US, the median income of such a middle-class family is of the order of $100,000. That would be a year’s wages today.

It was an extravagant expression of Love.

(Dare I say it?) An expression only a woman could have come up with… Nothing held back, nothing reserved against any possible future, no regard for any possible consequences… no care for what anyone could possibly say. This is what Love demanded, and Mary responded.

And now note the contrast with the angry words that followed. The other gospels fill in the details: the one to first blurt out his outrage was Judas Iscariot. John tells us that that reaction was purely selfish because he, as the one that carried their money bag, used to help himself to its contents.

That may seem like a petty comment from John, but he had to make it because, first, Judas tried to cast his reaction in terms of caring for the poor and, second, because that reaction immediately spread to many of the other disciples… As Mark tells us they spoke angrily at her.

One heart responds to the Messiah with unconditional surrender while other hearts at the same table, at the exact same moment, in the presence of exactly the same Life, get derailed by worldly values and emotions.

The disciples are not subjects of the kingdom of the world (with the obvious possible exception of Judas Iscariot)… So, Why are they so easy to distract?

Maybe it is precisely because they were resisting the need to respond. They had heard the very same words of Jesus that Mary had heard, maybe much more, in their travels with Him. And yet, here is the last chance they will ever have to spend a “normal day” with Him, and they miss it.

Even though His Life demands response, it is still our choice.

Jesus does not miss the opportunity to show them which is the right choice:

Mark 14:6-9 But Jesus said, Let her alone; why do ye trouble her? she has wrought a good work as to me; for ye have the poor always with you, and whenever ye would ye can do them good; but me ye have not always.

What *she* could she has done. She has beforehand anointed my body for the burial. And verily I say unto you, Wheresoever these glad tidings may be preached in the whole world, what this [woman] has done shall be also spoken of for a memorial of her.

Ouch!

How do we respond to correction? It is never easy for anyone to be told that they are wrong. But there is good news in it: It gives us one more opportunity to choose how we respond. For Judas Iscariot that was the tipping point:

Mark 14:10-11 And Judas Iscariote, one of the twelve, went away to the chief priests that he might deliver him up to them; and they, when they heard it, rejoiced, and promised him to give money. And he sought how he could opportunely deliver him up.

This is the beginning of the end for Judas because he has chosen to serve the kingdom of the world. And, from now on, he is going to find himself on a slippery downward slope. He may remember things he learned while he was walking in the Kingdom of God, but they will no longer have the power to direct his life. At every point he will find himself making choices as if Jesus were just another Rabbi, with good things to say in this world… but whose choices were setting him at odds with the “real” powers of his world.

We don ‘t know what was going through Judas’ mind. But we know that Peter didn’t understand why Jesus chose the path of the Suffering Servant, why He seemed determined to “crash and burn”. It would not be a stretch of the imagination to think that Judas too was faced with that contradiction. Judas could rightly say: “All this idealism is fine and good but this is not how things work in actuality. We need to accept reality the way it is, the way the world works…”

And his response did precisely that: help the world work the way it likes to work. The religious leaders no longer had to rack their brains to figure out how to catch Jesus by trickery. There is no better trick than to have a man on the inside. No wonder they rejoiced.

How will we respond?

Even though I strongly agree with Kierkegaard that there is no essential difference between us today and the people that lived contemporary with Jesus, it is still true that we will never have a chance like that dinner at the home of Simon the leper.

The Life of Jesus doesn’t have the same physically palpable reality for us as it did for them.

How then can we respond the same way?

Mary is the answer.

She knew no more about Jesus, and maybe less, than the twelve; and yet she was able to respond without hesitation while they hovered in uncertainty. Why? Because the Life of Jesus is not about physically palpable reality. It is real… but it is real to the highest order, more real than anything in this world could ever be, because it is anchored in the Reality of the Kingdom of God.

The Life of Jesus was and is a supernatural event.

There is no way to get around that. And that is the good news because then it has the same power to move us today as it did to move Mary that day.

How do you want to respond?

That is the bottom-line question. When faced with this question, I guarantee that the voice of the world will be echoing what I imagined was going through Judas’ mind:

“All this idealism is fine and good… but we have to live in the real world. In the real world you have to be strong, it is dog eat dog. If you don’t do whatever it takes to get to the top, someone else will… and then where will your dreams be? How could any reasonable person think that helping the poor, feeding the hungry, caring for prisoners, would ever help to put food on my table?

“Besides, why are they more important than me. Let them work, let them pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I did it. If I could do it, they could too…”

Sounds almost reasonable. In fact, it is perfectly logical if the only reality that exists is this physical world. BUT if there is another reality, a greater reality, a Reality that is so immense that it puts this world to shame, a Reality called the Kingdom of God… then the world’s response is pitifully short sighted.

The Life of Jesus reveals that other Reality; and it does so supernaturally.

Give it a chance.

You see, that’s the problem with the raving atheists and those that ridicule believers on social media. They have not given it a chance. They may have read the words, maybe some of the words or maybe most of the words, but they have chosen not to believe. And when that choice is made (ahead of time) their hearts cannot receive the Word…

Mark 4:14-15 The sower sows the Word: and these are they by the wayside where the Word is sown, and when they hear, immediately Satan comes and takes away the Word that was sown in them.

This is the hard soil of the oft-trodden path. The seed just bounces off. You hear someone preaching the Word but instead of trying to see if it makes sense, before you can even engage your brain, all sorts of objections pop up in your mind: anything from suspecting the sincerity of the preacher, all the way to remembering someone else that claimed they had sound scientific reasons to prove that all this religion talk was just baloney.

Mark 4:16-17 And these are they in like manner who are sown upon the rocky places, who when they hear the Word, immediately receive it with joy, and they have no root in themselves, but are for a time: then, tribulation arising, or persecution on account of the Word, immediately they are offended.

The rocky soil doesn’t realize (or care) that he is rocky soil. Otherwise, he would get to work on trying to break that ground with a hoe, a plough, or a pick… whatever it takes; because the Word needs to be able to grow in our hearts. To this soil, the message of the Word sounds just fine but it ends there. It demands no work from you, no effort to think it through or try to verify it or ask questions about it. Under those conditions the seed (the Word) cannot grow deep roots in your soul. And we become “easy pickings” for the world.

Mark 4:18-19 And others are they who are sown among the thorns: these are they who have heard the Word, and the cares of life, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things, entering in, choke the Word, and it becomes unfruitful.

The soil overrun by thorns has a chance. It must be fertile enough if weeds are growing all over it. But that is precisely the problem. I indiscriminately let anything that wants to grow in my heart, grow. I am an equal opportunity consumer: Whatever the world wants to tell me, whatever it wants to tell me to do, I am willing to listen. And then comes the Word, with its own requirements, and I think, “OK, I can do that too.” But that is a fallacy. First of all, none of us has infinite bandwidth.

And second, the requirements of the world and those of the Word are the opposite of each other. What is fertilizer, food, to the world is poison to the Word. And vice versa. Guess which one is going to win out. Because we live in the world, we eventually give it the first priority. And the Word becomes unfruitful in our lives.

Mark 4:20 And these are they who have been sown on the good ground, such as hear the Word and receive it, and bear fruit; one thirty, and one sixty, and one a hundred [fold].

It is possible to receive the Word, that is: accept it, believe it.

It may not be likely; after all, this is one of four soils; but it is possible. Regardless of all the evidence that our senses may give us that we live in the physical reality of this world, there is inside every one of us something that can see beyond those senses. That is our spirit, put there by the Creator of the Universe precisely to allow us to see beyond this reality.

And it is when that spirit hears the story of the Life of Jesus that the real Reality of the Kingdom of God begins to be revealed to us. It is a supernatural thing. It has to be, because this world will fight tooth and nail to convince us that it is all a fairy tale; and it will use every physical sense we have to try to convince us of this and try to lead us away.

But there is no way the world can succeed if we but choose to believe.

That is all it takes. That is the key response that the Life requires. And once we choose that response, we start tapping the supernatural power of that Life.

Giving up the security of a treasure worth a year’s wages is suddenly nothing when compared to what God has for us in His Plan. Just ask Mary.