This week we are going to talk about the Greek word paradidomi, translated as handed over, betrayed, delivered over, etc. in both the Gospels and in the Greek OT, the Septuagint. What does the way paradidomi was used in translating the prophets teach us about Yeshua’s/Jesus’s betrayal?

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14 It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, ² for they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.” ³ And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. ⁴ There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? ⁵ For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her. ⁶ But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. ⁷ For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. ⁸ She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. ⁹ And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” ¹⁰ Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. ¹¹ And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money. And he sought an opportunity to betray him.  

Mark chapter 14 is twice as long as many of the other chapters in this Gospel and about twenty verses longer than some of the bigger ones. But the subject matter is vital to understand and it is difficult to go through when we are reading it as it would have originally been heard, as a letter, out loud, in congregations, as a whole. It was likely originally read to a congregation of believers in Rome or at least in a Roman colony, and we have discussed why—the number of Latin words and concepts just doesn’t line up with this having been written for a Jewish audience, as Matthew was. To the original hearers, this was recent news historically, as we would talk about the events from the ’80s or ’90s today. And if you were old enough to have been alive at that time, the memories have a very visceral feel to them. This wasn’t ancient history. This wasn’t read to an audience who didn’t understand life in the first century—and especially among the Jews in the congregation, of which there would have been many because Rome had a very vibrant Jewish community—usually, excepting of course when they were expelled by Claudius for a while. For this crowd, injustice is a real daily event. A crucifixion is a real event. The horror of betraying someone you have shared a meal with would have shaken them to the core. They didn’t read this with first-century values and living conditions in the rearview mirror and although they were probably city people, this chapter happens in and around a city. The Jewish congregants understood the Passover and would have been providing context, and they would have understood the travesty of justice from a uniquely Jewish point of view even though most or maybe none had ever set foot in the Holy Land. As we go through this Chapter, I want you to imagine this scene of Jews and Gentiles, already believers—living through this together as part of a listening experience and a conversation.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have six years’ worth of blogs at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.

14 It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

The debate here is whether Mark went with the Roman or Jewish reckoning of time. If the reckoning was Jewish, where days begin and end at sunset, then this was Nisan 13 but if this was by the Roman reckoning of time with days beginning and ending at midnight, then this would have been Nisan 12—because they wouldn’t have been talking about the day that the lambs were sacrificed but about the timing of the actual meal because that was the main event and during this time period, “Passover” had really morphed into the week of Unleavened Bread and the entire thing was called “Passover”—that they are listed separately is another indicator that the audience was not primarily Jewish. We see this in Josephus Ant. 14.2.1, where he was writing to a Roman audience about the Jewish civil war during the time of the First Triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, before Rome stepped in and took over the mess, “As this happened at the time when the feast of unleavened bread was celebrated, which we call the passover, the principal men among the Jews left the country, and fled into Egypt.” So Josephus is calling the entire celebration, from beginning to end, the Passover and not just Nisan 14 on the Biblical Calendar. If that was clear as mud, don’t worry about it! If you missed last week’s episode, it was all about the Biblical festival calendar so if you need to, you can check out my archives and listen to it or read it.

And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, 

Now, there is a lot to say about this partial verse. First of all, we have another Markan sandwich here. Remember that this is a literary device that the author of Mark likes to use where you have a story within a story and the first and last few verses tell the same story but they are broken up by another story inserted into the middle, like a sandwich—but it is also called a sandwich because the insides are important to understanding the outsides, and vice-versa. The bread of this sandwich will be the actual outworking of the plot to kill Yeshua/Jesus by an insider and the inside of the sandwich will be the honoring of Him by an outsider. But all of it has to do with His death. And we have the chief priests and scribes mentioned here. The scribes are, at least in Mark, portrayed as the top adversaries of Yeshua—being featured in more challenges of His authority than anyone else. These were the legal professionals of the day. They were the experts in both Torah and Jewish Law, which weren’t entirely the same. The chief priests, of course, would be the formal and permanent Temple staff. So, this would be the high priest and all former high priests (so, Annas and his sons and son in law Caiaphas) as well as the commander of the Temple Guard and the three Treasurers of the Temple.  And these would be Sadducees. Who we will never see mentioned again are the Pharisees—they weren’t part of the Temple elite although there were undoubtedly Pharisees sitting on the Sanhedrin court if that was indeed who ended up trying Yeshua. We will debate that when the time comes.

Now, ancient commentators like Josephus, the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the later Rabbis in Talmudic materials, all described the chief priests as bullies. So, their involvement with anything underhanded was not outside of what other Jewish writings were already saying, as in the DSS, and would later say, in Josephus and the Talmud. And the verse says that they were seeking, which means they were actively looking for a way to arrest Him, and by stealth, which is the Greek word dolos, which is a word that is associated not just with being discreet but with actual deception. And not just to arrest but to kill. This is an agenda—not an arrest leading to an investigation to find out the truth, as Torah demands and as the later Mishnah Tractate Sanhedrin would lay down as standard operating procedure and—I ought to say this. I read Sanhedrin years ago and according to their records, a typical trial really bent over backward to exonerate and be merciful to people. The Rabbis who authored it did not want people executed lightly or illegitimately and the hoops you had to jump through in order to do so were maddening. In light of later Jewish writings, then, and we just don’t know how much was in play during the first century and how much was formulated later as “how things should be done” what happened should never have happened—it was going to be a miscarriage of justice and Mark gives us a forewarning with the statement that they were seeking for ways to arrest Him, in stealth, for the purpose of killing Him and not on account of justice or righteousness. This cannot be separated from the telling of the Parable of the Tenants and the Vineyard—that was the final straw for them.

² for they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.”

And they were right about that. During the Passover, the population of Jerusalem, which was generally 25-30,000 people, swelled by somewhere between 85-300,000 more. According to Josephus, who really likes to exaggerate his numbers, one year a brouhaha resulted in 30,000 pilgrims being trampled. I am not going to quote from it because there is too much of it but Josephus’s Antiquities 17, chapter 9 (Loebs 17.213-15) talks about the dangers of riling up Passover crowds and so the concerns of the chief priests were not unwarranted—if they did what they wanted but weren’t careful, there could be massive rioting and bloodshed. The word for people here is laos, with the meaning of not only some people but a multitude. In fact, it shows up in the Septuagint of Exodus 156 times, referring to the people group in Egypt and the wilderness but not when the mixed multitude is referred to in Ex 12:38 so this is an insider term—they are afraid of their own people and their festival proclivity for rioting when outraged. But they were also in a pickle—because after the festival, Yeshua would go back to Galilee and who knows how much more popular He might become? So, they were needing to act now, and yet acting now would almost certainly lead to disaster and a clash with the Roman authorities. But now, we have the bottom piece of bread in our Markan sandwich and the theme of it is treachery from outsiders. Remember that this will be important for interpreting the next two portions of the story. It only seems misplaced.

³ And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. 

The first bit of business, this is not the woman referred to in Luke 7. Although there is the surface-level similarity of a woman at a feast with nard, that’s where the similarities end. This woman is not portrayed as a sinner. Yeshua is not judged to be lacking in discernment. His head here, and not his feet are anointed. In Luke, she was only at his feet as he was reclining and therefore could not have reached his head. No mention of wiping his feet with her hair or wetting them with her tears. Although both hosts are named Simon, it was also the most popular Jewish man’s name of the time as evidenced in first-century documents. And nothing in Luke is said of her being wasteful or anointing Him for burial. So, when we conflate them, as chronological Gospel accounts often do (and I am not a fan of them because they destroy the narrative in favor of something with a more modern but less meaningful feel)—when we bring them together and make them the same event, we have to ignore a lot of reasons not to do so. Just because Yeshua said that wherever the Gospel account would be proclaimed, what she did would also be proclaimed, doesn’t mean that every Gospel will mention her—this is idiomatic of the honor due to this woman here in Mark. We’ve got to stop holding the Gospels to modern standards of accuracy because they didn’t talk or think in those terms. Just because we do doesn’t mean we have it right. Luke is a very different sort of document than Mark or Matthew, which tell the same story, and so Luke presents things in a very different manner—usually to facilitate the recording of Yeshua’s parables.

So, they are in Bethany, presumably where they have been staying all this time, and maybe Simon is a relative of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha whom Yeshua healed of a skin disease—certain not leprosy as we see it today—Hansen’s disease. But this designation of “Simon the Leper” suggests that this man was known among believers and as there were so many men named Simon, nicknames were probably not uncommon—like, oh, Peter maybe lol. Yeshua was reclining at table and so this was a banquet setting and an unnamed woman comes to the banquet that was likely an all-male affair, crossing the gender boundaries of the day, carrying an alabastron (that link was Greek but this one is Roman) which is the shape and not the materials—despite how this is translated. Now, if you have ever been to a good museum, they will have these little bottles on display and I saw a lot of them when I was at the St Louis Art Museum but evidently, I took no pictures because I was on an Egyptology kick at the time and I have a ton of pics of that stuff.

The ointment inside was incredibly expensive, pure nard being from the root of the spikenard plant harvested in India and was used in both perfumes and medicines. Although the root came from India, manufacturing was an important industry in Italy and in Corinth. One of the reasons why it was popular in Jerusalem was because of the stench of the blood of the sacrifices because despite the incense used continually, it was evidently not enough to satisfy sensitive upper-class nostrils. Now, I linked pictures of these alabastra in the transcript that will go up on Friday but the alabastron was usually stoppered and sealed but they were narrow enough that they could also be snapped—if you actually wanted to do that which very rarely happened because they find a lot of these little flasks still intact. The reason why no one broke them is that these ointments were fragile and would spoil rather quickly if allowed to be continually exposed to the air. Such a flask of nard might have even been a family heirloom or an ingenious way for a city dweller to invest their life savings when they would be unable to invest in land or animals. Much easier to carry and hide one of these small flasks than 300 denarii, an entire year’s wage for a laborer! Or sheep!

Unlike the woman in Luke 7, this unnamed woman promptly empties out the entire volume onto his head. It probably happened so quickly that everyone in attendance was shocked. The woman barges in, pulls out the flask, snaps it, and pours the contents out onto Yeshua. And as is often the case when someone is extravagant in their devotion, other people rush to condemn—some silently and some not so silently. But either way, it is a great lesson for us because we do this too. Outpourings of love (literally an outpouring in this case) make everyone else feel like they have been one-upped and so the need to defend ourselves often shows up in mock-righteousness. And we just very discreetly had a theme word for chapter 14 pop up—didomi—which is related to the word paradidomi that we saw in the Passion predictions. She gave, didomi, to Yeshua and the chief priests, elders, and scribes will paradidomi, give him over. Remember how we began this chapter? With the scribes and the chief priests plotting how they would do it? Hold on to your hats—we aren’t done with this word yet.

⁴ There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? ⁵ For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her. 

When studying logical fallacies, this one is often referred to as “Think of the children!” It is an appeal to the emotions that has squat to do with anything even remotely applicable to the situation. An appeal to emotion is what debaters do when they have nothing useful to say, when they are trying to get the audience on their side but don’t have anything other than emotions to appeal to. It is intrinsically up to the owner of something to decide what they will do with what belongs to them. If she had applied it to herself, they wouldn’t have said anything. If she had held onto it, they wouldn’t have known of its existence. But she took her property and lavished it on Yeshua. How dare she! And not only did they think these self-serving thoughts but some of them actually shamed her publicly, right there. Maybe it was easier because she is not one of the Twelve, not a man, or maybe her gift made them uncomfortable. Gifts can do that. But she asked nothing in return. We find such actions personally threatening because they challenge us to up our own game and generally we don’t want to. I remember once, God rebuked me and this was years ago. I was watching one of those guys who carries a heavy cross from place to place. I was scoffing at him and his (I presumed) empty actions. Well, God doesn’t see the actions so much as the reason behind them and He let me know that with at least one of these guys, and undoubtedly more than that, this was an extravagant and costly act of devotion. One that no one can ignore, many scoff at, and comparatively few probably admire or aspire to. So, when we see the acts of devotion of others, we need to back off because our motives might need some serious checking. We would do well to measure up our devotion compared to that of those we scoff at. We may not understand, we may not approve, we may find it silly—but we don’t know everything. And Yeshua will respond to them the way I was responded to when I was being an overly-sensitive, self-righteous goober head over the guy carrying the cross.

I want you to notice that though she is unnamed here, so are the identities of those who are thinking evil thoughts about her and rebuking her unnamed. They aren’t even identified here as being among the Twelve and so it’s almost as though they aren’t even worth mentioning, which is insulting in and of itself. Also, there are people who claim that this anointing was a Messianic activity and she was anointing Him as High Priest or King but there is nothing about this that is like that kind of anointing and if it was perceived that way—then everyone failed to see it. I have written elsewhere that it was indeed a culturally recognized form of honoring a king, however, but not in the formal sense of inaugurating a reign or consecrating someone for formal service. But, no one saw this as Messianic or subversive, they objected to the extravagance and this ties us to another account in Mark.

⁶ But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 

Extravagant worship is, by its very nature, impossible to ignore. When genuine, it is a beautiful thing and when all for a show, it sometimes is at the expense of the poor—but usually because they are being forced to pay for it out of their own pockets! But no one was being oppressed here. This was the Passover and a great many pilgrims were blessing the poor and including them in their festival dinners, as Torah demands. So, it is unlikely that anyone was starving on this particular day because of her not selling that and giving the money to the poor anyway. Yeshua rebukes them for even going there and messing with her. But, something else here—we are only one chapter removed from the widow who put the two lepta into the Temple coffers as an act of worship. That account directly preceded the Olivet Discourse, and then we had the account of the plotting elites and now this. Likely, this unnamed woman—this was probably the only thing of immense value she had because she wasn’t described as being wealthy so we cannot assume she was. Nor can we assume she is poor because if she was then she would have sold the nard long before this. This was a significant action on more than one level, as was the widow’s offering.

The “some” who judged and rebuked her, shamed her publicly, thereby exalting themselves with empty words about supporting the poor. Yeshua, always a lover of the honor reversal, turns their argument on its head and honors her action on His behalf. Not only that, but He is going to call their bluff because people who are screaming at others to help the poor are generally not the same people who are out there actually doing it. Most folks are just using emotional appeals as a form of posturing. Which is to be despised because it’s nothing but a cheap shot. But Yeshua isn’t fooled and He is going to issue an honor challenge of His own in response to theirs at her expense.

⁷ For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. 

Yeah, I love this—like, “Yeah, you guys can follow up on your own suggestion every day for the rest of your lives *cough*” and I like the addition of “whenever you want.” So, they are at a banquet, which is not a regular meal but a formal one because they are actually reclining. A banquet. Probably eating more than their fair share. And they are pitching a fit about extravagance. You’ve seriously got to be kidding me. It’s like someone with their own private Island and jet lecturing people about their carbon footprint when everything required to build their “green” home had to be flown in or shipped in from the mainland. No matter how green their house is, they will never end up even on the resource expenditure on that. Their carbon footprint will always probably be bigger than their private island. So, these guys who are banqueting and rebuking—how many poor people did they invite? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

But I also want to go back to an earlier parable—the parable of the wineskin and the cloak because it comes into play in a big way here. Chapter 2—^“20 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. ²¹ No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. ²² And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.” This parable is about doing what is appropriate when it is appropriate to do it and for that, there are rarely any hard and fast rules. Is fasting bad or forbidden? No, sometimes it is commanded but to fast at the wedding feast is a grave dishonor to the bridegroom. Is it wrong to patch a garment or fill a wineskin? Of course not, but to do it with the wrong materials or without the proper preparation (ie. soaking the old wineskin to soften it), is foolishness. When we are in the presence of the Master, we must act appropriately and nothing is too wonderful to do for Him or to Him. If there were poor at the feast, they should be fed. If there were no poor at the feast, they should be invited, right? So, He has called them out on their hypocrisy. Love God. Love your neighbor. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it is one or the other.

⁸ She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. 

So, obviously not an anointing for the priesthood or kingship. Not saying that He isn’t our King and High Priest, but that isn’t what this was. Yeshua right here says that this is an anointing for burial. It’s really the first act of vindication we are going to see related to His wrongful death and it happens right before His betrayal by Judas. Was she the first to get it or was this simply the case of someone being sensitive to the Spirit and suddenly finding herself compelled to do this and she was obedient to it? No way to know. However, the divine purpose for this action has been defined right here for us. And sometimes we try to get cute but we also have to listen when Yeshua says “this is this.” And this is huge. This is a lot of money to spend anointing someone for burial but it also foreshadows the fact that no one present at that dinner (ie. His disciples) would be performing that service for Him as they would all be in hiding, pretty much. Or dead.

I also love the phrase “She has done what she could.” And aren’t our lives as believers all about doing what we can and how we all have a different role to play? Perhaps she was born for that moment. Perhaps that flask had been handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter because each one of them had been given that task. Who knows? I imagine we all of us have an alabastron of our own—a purpose. We just have to be listening when it is time to pour it out.

⁹ And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

Something here—one, this is a prophecy that the Gospel will be proclaimed in the whole world and we haven’t gotten there yet. And this is also the last time Yeshua will speak the word gospel in this Gospel.  I have this book of all the people groups in China and another one about Buddhists all over the world and similar books could be written about Muslims. And you would be astonished how many places and how many people groups have never heard the Gospel. I know people are looking for His return but we haven’t preached enough yet for me to be willing to look for it yet. Way too much work still needs to be done. But, wherever missionaries travel and wherever the Word is preached, this account is in the Bibles. And her name is not mentioned but maybe at this point, it was dangerous to do so. Who knows? Whoever wrote John’s Gospel equates her with Mary, the sister of Lazarus. But then, his account occurs before the triumphal entry and was by far the last written and is telling the story from an entirely different vantage point. Remember that these reflect the compilation of oral histories. That’s how ancient documents came to be. Authors gathered together the reflections and memories of the early participants and put them into a certain order based on the story that Yahweh inspired them to tell—with Mark, they are put together in such a way as to present Yeshua as the Yahweh-Warrior, Arm of the Lord and the suffering servant of Isaiah, whereas Matthew is much more about Yeshua the greater Moses, Luke is more focused on Yeshua the storyteller and John focuses on Yeshua as the embodiment of Yahweh on earth. And this is all done in a very kosher ancient Jewish manner. Even if it bothers our boring focus on the facts modern sensibilities.

And that ends the meat portion of our Markan sandwich. The first slice of bread concerned the desires and plotting of the elites to arrest Him in stealth and kill Him. The middle of the sandwich is about the virtuous actions of an unnamed woman to didomi, give Him her extravagant love. So we have behavior to avoid and behavior to adopt in our own lives and the final piece of bread will be an utterly abhorrent example to avoid—the betrayal of Yeshua by someone who had every reason to be far more extravagant with Him than an unnamed admirer. Really, by not naming her, the irony becomes all the more poignant.

¹⁰ Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. 

So, why now? Why did he do this? First of all, he went to them. Although they were seeking a way to arrest Yeshua, Judas was the one who sought them out personally. We have no indication that the Temple elites reached out to any of the disciples and it would have been stupid to even try because the ancient world was a lot more loyalty based than ours. Disciples didn’t turn on their teachers—their honor was all bound up in the honor of that teacher and you didn’t jeopardize it. It’s why they only asked questions in private and not in front of everyone else—you didn’t want to run the risk of (1) shaming your teacher if he couldn’t answer or (2) looking stupid in public. But Judas decides to throw all that away and the word translated betray is, no shock–paradidomi. It carries the specific meaning in Scripture of handing someone over and almost always to the Gentiles for the pouring out of God’s wrath on them. As I said before, we saw it in the Passion Predictions of 9:31 and twice in 10:33. It translates into English as betray, hand over, give over, deliver over—it’s not a positive word. We will see it throughout chapter 14 as the whole didomi/paradidomi dichotomy is the major theme for the rest of the Gospel of Mark. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the OT, paradidomi shows up three times with reference to the suffering servant in Isaiah 53:6, 12:

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him (pagah) the iniquity of us all… Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out (‘arah eh-rah) his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for (pagah) the transgressors.

The translators of the Septuagint chose paradidomi for the translation of all of these words, making it the logical choice for the author of Mark to use as well. In fact, he uses it a lot—it will show up again in verses 18, 21, 41, 44, and in chapters 15: 1, 10, and 15.

But again, why now? Was this announcement of his burial the last straw for Judas who was now seeing that there would be no earthly power, honor, position, or wealth involved and he decided to get on the other side of this before everything went upside down? The author of John says that he was a thief but what does that even mean? Was it just that he stole from the money bag or had he always been a spy—being possibly the only Judean in the lot? Was he getting out while he could with what he could after seemingly wasting his life for all this time? We just don’t know for sure because his motives are never discussed. I suppose that in light of the enormity of what he did not only in personal but in cosmic terms and social ones as well, it doesn’t matter. If it did, the text would say something.

¹¹ And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money. And he sought an opportunity to betray Him.

When they, the chief priests—so the permanent Temple staff and not the normal priests who did their two weeks and festivals and then went home—got this offer, they wouldn’t have hardly been able to believe their luck. This had to be unforeseen. And they promised to didomi, give, Judas money and Judas sought a chance to paradidomi, betray, Yeshua. And again, as the chief priests and scribes were seeking, zeteo, how to do this in verse one, here in verse 11, at the end of the sandwich, Judas began seeking, zeteo, an opportunity for betrayal. This sandwich begins and ends with seeking, and is filled throughout with the opposing verbs of giving and giving over, didomi and paradidomi. Judas is going to give Yeshua over for relatively little given in return. The unnamed woman gave an incredible treasure to Yeshua and she was rebuked for having not given it to the poor. The chief priests and scribes were seeking to do evil. Judas sought them out and then went seeking an opportunity to do evil.

This account functions from beginning to end as a cautionary tale. No one who seeks an opportunity to do evil will fail to find it and they will likely feel as though they are perfectly justified. No one here likely thought of themselves as villains, okay? Not the chief priests, scribes, Judas, or the people rebuking the unnamed woman. Conversely, no one seeking an opportunity to do good will fail to find it either. We also have this choice throughout life between giving and giving over, loyalty and betrayal, love and hate, self-sacrifice, and personal gain.

Okay, next week we tackle the Passover and the controversy surrounding the differences between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John, a subject which I have changed my mind on in recent years based on more study and a letting go of some popular but tenuous and unsupportable Hebrew Roots theories. Oh, if only everything that sounded more Jewish or novel was actually the right answer.