Jesus was back in Jerusalem for another Passover. According to John’s gospel, this was the third time Jesus and the disciples attended the Passover festival and each time they were there they got in trouble. The first two times they somehow got out of town and made it back up north to Galilee to continue their ministry. It would be much more difficult to accomplish that this time. Everywhere Jesus went he drew a big crowd. People had heard about this teacher from Galilee, and the things he was saying. More importantly, they had heard about some of the miracles Jesus had performed, and people have always been more impressed with miracles and magic than with teaching, so anytime he was around they wanted to be there to see what he might do next.
For this visit, Jesus was staying with his friends in Bethany, the little town just on the other side of the Mount of Olives from Jerusalem. It was a risky place to stay if Jesus was trying to stay off the radar with the crowds and the leaders in Jerusalem. Bethany was the home of Lazarus, and it had been just a short time since Lazarus had died and Jesus had brought him back to life. That’s the kind of miracle that draws a crowd. But apparently Jesus and the disciples had slipped into town unnoticed, and John tells us they had all gotten together for dinner with friends, including Lazarus.
If we can get the picture in our minds of what that dinner was like back then, it will help us make sense of what was about to happen. Let’s begin by taking the legs off of the tables and placing the tabletops on the floor, in kind of a horseshoe formation or an upside down letter “u.” Everyone sat around the outside of the table, leaving the inside space open for those serving the food. Take away the chairs. Everyone would have been lying on cushions around the table, everyone reclining on their left sides and leaning on their left arms, eating and drinking with their right hands, with their legs and feet extending out behind them, away from the table. This was the common way of eating a meal and most certainly how it was done during Passover. So we can picture Jesus reclining at the table, surrounded by the disciples and their friends, with Martha scurrying around serving the meal. There is a good chance there were others in the room as well, though we’re not told about them. It was tradition that before a special meal was served, the door to the house would be opened and any poor or hungry be allowed to enter the room and stand around the walls behind the table. As the people at the table ate their meal, any scraps they did not want were thrown over their shoulders to the poor, who then gathered up the crumbs and had their meal as well.
It is helpful to understand one other thing as well. At some point during the meal, it was customary for one of the servants to take a bowl of water and wash the feet of each of the guests, drying them with a towel. It actually served two purposes. First, since everyone wore sandals and spent most of their time walking through the dirt and dust outside, it just made things a bit tidier with all of those feet sticking out around the table as everyone ate their meal. In addition, it was an act of kindness, intended to make the guests feel welcomed in the house, a sign of respect from the host whose servants did the washing.
While Mary was busy serving, one of the servants was making his way around the table with a bowl of water and towel, washing the feet of the guests. I don’t know if she had thought about it and planned it, or if it just struck her at the moment and she reacted, but when the servant came to Jesus, Mary went over and took the servant’s place. Instead of using the bowl of water, Mary took a small vial from around her neck and poured the expensive perfume from it onto Jesus’ feet. Rather than use the dirty towel, she wiped off the oil using her own hair. As the aroma of the perfume spread through the room, it would have stopped any conversation taking place and every eye in the place would have been on either Mary or Jesus. Apparently Judas was the first to speak, accusing Mary of wasting the valuable perfume that might have been sold and the money given to the poor. Knowing Judas, he probably gave a sympathetic nod to those actual poor people standing around the walls just to make his point more dramatic. I wonder what was going through Mary’s head at that point? Others would probably have picked up Judas’ argument, and the glares from the wall standers were probably pretty intense as well. It was probably one of those rather tense moments. I wonder if she braced herself for a scolding from Jesus as well.
But Jesus understood something the others were too distracted to understand. He remembered that all Jewish women carried a vial of perfume on a cord around their neck, as expensive as they could afford. For many women, it was the most valuable item they ever owned. That small vial carried the perfumes that were used to anoint the dead, and they carried it to make sure that their family could give her the proper burial she should have as a good Jewish woman. In the heat of the moment, although the disciples had been with Jesus for three years, none of them understood the message that Mary understood.
How word got out that Jesus was in town we don’t know. Perhaps it was one of the people standing around the walls during dinner that went home and told people, but the next morning the crowds had begun to gather after hearing that Jesus was in town. We’re told that other big crowds came just to see Lazarus too. The authorities were just as intent on getting rid of Lazarus as they were of getting rid of Jesus.
Having a dead man come back to life was pretty hard to refute, and many people had left the temple to follow Jesus just because of Lazarus. Everyone came hoping to see more miracles, to have some proof, to know for certain that Jesus was the one who was going to turn everything around. As the crowds grew, things became more and more volatile. We’re not really told what Jesus wanted to have happen that day, but as it began to unfold, it seems that things began to get out of control.
As Jesus began to walk up the hill toward Jerusalem, some in the group grabbed branches of palm trees and started waving them around in the air. This looks to us like a great celebration and something Jesus would appreciate. But again, it helps to understand a bit more about the situation. While it is true that we look at the palm branch as a symbol of peace, the odds are that was not the message the palm wavers were wanting to communicate and was absolutely not the message that was heard by the people watching from the temple. In Jewish history, there had been at least two major Jewish revolts against the authorities that every school boy would know all about: the Bar Kochba Revolt and the first Jewish War. What is important to know is that those revolts used the same symbol to represent the dream of Jewish independence. It was such a well-known symbol it was actually printed on the shekel, one of the common coins of the day. That symbol was the palm branch.
As the group grew and came to the top of the hill where they could easily be seen by the temple authorities and the Roman soldiers, they were yelling and waving the banner of independence, the symbol of revolution against the government and the temple. Adding to the confusion, some in the crowd began shouting and singing the words from Psalm 118, the words to be spoken as a new king entered the city, to drive out the enemies of the faith and to reclaim the temple and the land.
Was all of this part of Jesus’ plan? Did he actually intend after three years of preaching and teaching that the kingdom of heaven was more important than any earthly kingdom, did he actually intend to end his ministry with a military parade?
This is where our passage of scripture begins this morning. In the middle of all that was happening on that hillside near Bethany, Philip, one of the disciples, was approached by a couple of Greeks who asked to speak with Jesus. These may have been Greek-speaking Jews who had come to town for the Passover, or they may have been non-Jewish Greeks who had heard about Jesus and wanted to speak with him. We just don’t know. We do know that, as in the past, the disciples were still struggling. Philip didn’t know what to do, so he went and found Andrew. Finally, at some point they told Jesus about the Greeks wanting to speak with him.
Suppose we could see Jesus’ face as he responded. It would help to know if he smiled a bit when he heard about the Greeks, or if there was a hint of sadness in his eyes. Either everything was coming together as he had planned, and the stage was set for his grand finale, or he realized that things had gotten a bit out of control because people did not really understand him yet, and even his disciples were not ready for what was about to happen.
In my imagination, when he was told about the Greeks, Jesus took a deep breath and said, “The hour has come” (v. 23). I hear kind of a surrender, a recognition on his part that he had done everything he could do to prepare but it was now time for the big test. He said, “The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” His ministry had come to its end and the final step was to give up his life to help people understand. That was the only way they would grasp that he was not interested in being ruler of a temple or a country but was really talking about something beyond that. The fact that the Greeks had come to him showed that his message had taken seed and had begun to spread.
It probably got rather quiet as the guy everyone thought was leading the revolution lowered his head in prayer and asked his Father to save him from this hour. But, as in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus ended his prayer by saying, “But it is for this reason that I have come to this hour, so let it glorify your name” (vv. 27-28).
And as if God was making one final attempt to help the disciples understand, and to help everyone understand what Jesus was really all about, just then God spoke. John tells us that the crowd standing there actually heard it. The voice said: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” (v. 28). It had to be an amazing moment when God actually spoke in order to help them understand.
And the result? Within a few minutes there was a huge argument taking place as people disagreed over what they had heard. Some said they heard God, others said it was just thunder. Jesus tried a few more times to explain what was going to happen but it was clear he understood that it was over. He had done what he could do. Just a few verses after our story today we’re told that Jesus departed and hid from them all.
Jesus’ public ministry ended on that hillside near Bethany. After all of his teaching, all his miracles, and all of his efforts to teach the disciples what was in his heart, it ended with him walking away and hiding. In what may be some of the saddest words in the gospel, John ended this story by saying: “Although he had performed so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in him” (v. 37).
I must say that there are many people who believe that Jesus was fully aware of what was going on and was not at all disappointed in what happened. Many people believe that he had actually planned everything to take place just as it did to fulfill a long list of prophesies from the Old Testament.
While this is possible, something else may be the case. It’s possible that Jesus struggled with his ministry just as we constantly struggle with ours. Sometimes we just don’t know if we’ve accomplished anything or not. Sometimes we are completely misunderstood and end up with things spiraling completely out of control, as people take something we say or do and use it for their own reasons. Sometimes we just want to walk away and hide from it all. That is the more preferable version of the story.
Because if it is true, and if God ended up taking what Jesus did and used it to change the world, then maybe there is still hope for what we’re doing here today.