1 Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished all these sayings, that He said to His disciples, 2 “You know that after two days is the Passover, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.”
3 Then the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders of the people assembled at the palace of the high priest, who was called Caiaphas, 4 and plotted to take Jesus by trickery and kill Him. 5 But they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the people.”
6 And when Jesus was in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, 7 a woman came to Him having an alabaster flask of very costly fragrant oil, and she poured it on His head as He sat at the table. 8 But when His disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, “Why this waste? 9 For this fragrant oil might have been sold for much and given to the poor.”
10 But when Jesus was aware of it, He said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a good work for Me. 11 For you have the poor with you always, but Me you do not have always. 12 For in pouring this fragrant oil on My body, she did it for My burial. 13 Assuredly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be told as a memorial to her.”
14 Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests 15 and said, “What are you willing to give me if I deliver Him to you?” And they counted out to him thirty pieces of silver. 16 So from that time he sought opportunity to betray Him.
Introduction
In the last two months, we have looked at Jesus’s conflict with the leaders of Israel, the chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees when He went into the temple, the very heart of Israel. The very people who ought to have received Him gladly and with open arms despised Him and sought to discredit Him in front of all Israel. But they could not. Every trap they set for Him they fell into themselves. And at the end of this encounter, having been thoroughly defeated by Jesus in every way in front of all Israel gathered in Jerusalem for Passover, He curses them with woes, and prophesies the destruction of that place to His disciples. And now, the time for talking is over. Jesus has finished speaking.
I Have Spoken (v. 1)
It is easy to read right past verse one here and think it just means that Jesus finished the Olivet Discourse. It does mean that, of course, but there is even deeper meaning than that. From Matthew 1-25, if you have a red-letter Bible, most of the ink in those chapters is red. Jesus was sent to preach to Israel. And preach to Israel, He did. That was the whole point of His ministry. He came to preach to the lost sheep of Israel, the miracles He performed were done to confirm that His words are God’s words. He came so that Israel would repent and believe. Some did, but Israel as a whole, as evidenced and represented by her leaders, did not. And now, Jesus’ ministry of preaching has concluded. There is nothing left to say. Even at His trial, though He has proven Himself quite capable of making the chief priests look like the contemptible fools they were, as He did in the temple, at His trial He says nothing. He has already spoken to Israel. He is not going to repeat Himself. Jesus has finished speaking and that, too, is a judgment upon Israel. Israel had their chance. God sent His own son right to them in the flesh to plead with them to listen. And they would not. Now, their judgment has begun.
And Israel killing her God is itself judgment upon them. Jesus reiterates, now as clearly as ever to His disciples that He has come to die. In two days the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified. Someone is going to deliver Him into the hands of the chief priests, scribes, and elders. He tells them He is going to be betrayed. He came for the lost sheep of Israel, but He himself becomes the lamb that lays down its life for them.
Conspiracy (v. 2-5)
The leaders of Israel are irate with Jesus so much so that they want Him dead. There is no one in Israel in better position to understand God’s Word and recognize that Jesus is the promised Messiah. No one in Israel knew the Bible better than these men. These guys each had doctorates from the best seminaries, they were the authorities and experts on what the Bible says. They knew the Book of Daniel. They knew the timeframe he laid out and when to expect Jesus. They had every reason to believe in Him that anyone who has ever lived has had.
And they wanted Him dead.
They all gathered at the palace of the high priest, Caiaphas. The place where the priest who would enter the holiest of holies and go directly into the presence of the Living God on behalf of His people, has become the place where they plot to put that God to death. They plan out exactly how they want to kill Jesus. They are, of course, cowardly men. They seek to kill Him by means of trickery and do not want to do it during Passover while the crowds could oppose them. They are afraid the people would riot against them. They are too cowardly to do confront Jesus openly. They did that once and saw how it turned out for them. They are cowardly and deceitful men. And cowardly and deceitful men are capable of the greatest of evils.
A Woman Prepares Jesus for Burial (v. 6-13)
While the chief priests plotted Jesus’s destruction, Jesus and His men have arrived in the village of Bethany, and they make it to the house of Simon the leper. You would assume that Jesus has cleansed Simon of his leprosy (otherwise he wouldn’t be able to host anyone), but you could also assume that Simon was afflicted with leprosy so long that Simon the leper is the name he was known by. And as Jesus is eating at the table a woman comes in and pours perfumed oil on Jesus head. It was really expensive perfume. In John’s gospel we are told it cost 300 Denarii. A Denarius was the going rate for a day’s work, and if in today’s money a day laborer makes $150, that’d be $45,000. I have never even smelled $45,000 perfume, and I imagine you have not either. I also cannot imagine what it would be like to see someone dump the entire bottle on someone’s head. If you saw this, you might think, “Wow, what a waste!” And that is exactly what the disciples said. They were furious about it. Why wasn’t this sold and given to the poor? You can feed a lot of people with the 300 days wages.
But what does Jesus say? He rebukes the disciples. He says why do you trouble this woman for doing a good thing? The poor will still be around after Jesus is gone. But Jesus is here right now. Unlike the disciples, who consistently refused to believe Jesus when He said He was going to Jerusalem to die, this woman heard what He said and believed Him. She believed Him so much that she anointed His head with the most costly oil she could buy. We are not told if she is wealthy or not but she poured a year’s worth of life onto Jesus head because she believed Him in a way that even those closest to Him did not. All of them abandoned Him and denied Him, rather than be crucified with Him. Instead, He went to the cross alone, surrounded by criminals. But this woman, whose name we are not even told, believed Him in a way that Peter, James, and John did not. And because of this, Jesus commends her, and not only that, He tells His disciples that wherever the gospel is preached in the entire world (not just the oikoumene, the known world or Greco-Roman world), what this unnamed woman has done will be a memorial to her. You cannot praise someone more than that!
Judas Prepares Jesus Body For Burial (v. 14-16)
It is no accident that immediately after this woman poured tens of thousands of dollars of perfume on Jesus’s head that now Judas, a man consumed by his love for mammon, decides that Jesus must die. He has seen the extravagant waste, and in John’s gospel it is revealed that Judas is the one demanding to know why the oil was not sold and given to the poor, of which he, of course, would be in charge of the careful administration of it, because we are told he kept Jesus’s purse and sometimes helped himself to it. John’s gospel makes explicit what is implied here in Matthew. Judas is greedy and knows he has something he can leverage for some easy cash. Jesus has already said that he is going to be betrayed (delivered up) to the chief priests. Any of the other disciples could be the one to betray Him, so Judas takes the opportunity to meet with the chief priests before anyone else can. And he asks them what they will give him for Jesus. And they count out 30 pieces of silver.
There’s a couple layers of irony to this. To start, that is only 1/10th the amount that Judas was irate over. As well, in Exodus 21, we are told that if an ox gores someone to death, the person is to negotiate an amount to pay the family. But if that person is a slave, it is set at 30 pieces of silver. Judas and the chief priests value Jesus life as that of a slave. Further, if we think about Psalm 22, the Psalm that prophetically describes Jesus’ crucifixion, Jesus is surrounded by “bulls of Bashan.” All throughout the Old Testament, the priestly people of Israel were represented by bulls, treading out the grain, and the priests specifically. But this bull that is Israel is about to gore Jesus to death.
Conclusion
Jesus has stopped speaking and now goes to His death. His body is prepared in two different ways. He is anointed with oil, anointed to suffer and die, anointed to deliver His people. The anointing is costly because the death is costly. His body is also prepared in another way. He is being betrayed, delivered over to the chief priests for the cost of a slave. He is being sold out cheaply. What Matthew shows us is fairly simple, expressed in monetary terms: Those who believe him value Him the most, those who do not believe sell Him for whatever they can get.
There are a few additional points we can take away from this, first, is that envy and covetousness drives a tremendous amount of sinful behavior. Whenever you see an absolutely gorgeous cathedral, that took decades to build and hundreds of millions of dollars in today’s money, and you remark upon the beauty of the building, someone will scoff and say “just think how much that cost. All that money could have been given to the poor.” Such people are like Judas. They do not care about the poor. They just hate Jesus. You don’t need a beautiful, glorious architectural wonder to worship Jesus. This is absolutely true. But when a society begins to believe in Jesus, and experiences the blessings of worshiping Him faithfully, they want to build beautiful things to glorify Him. Every society builds costly monuments to the thing they worship. The same people who look at Notre Dame or Chartres and say “what a waste of money” don’t bat an eye that the hideous monstrosity, US Bank Stadium, cost one billion dollars to make. Or see that Avengers: Endgame make nearly 3 billion dollars and say “All that for some pixels on a screen? Why wasn’t that money given to the poor?” Where your treasure is, your heart will be also. It is okay to have beautiful structures that glorify God. God wanted His people to spend a lot of money building the tabernacle and then the temple, and He wanted those buildings to be beautiful. God is not a gnostic. God cares about earth as much as He does heaven. He cares about the material just as He does the spiritual.
The question is one of timing. If you have a family in your congregation with a desperate need, if dad is diagnosed with terminal cancer and cannot work to support his ten kids, that would not be the time to start the building campaign for a gothic cathedral. But there is nothing wrong with building a church that doesn’t look like a shopping mall or movie theater, if you can afford to do it. Sometimes you anoint Jesus head with expensive oil, other times you sell it and give it to the poor. When that is is not to be decided by envious, greedy Judases.
The point to remember here is that this woman is commended because she believed Jesus. And how do we know she really believed Jesus? Not just because she said so, but because of what she did. Her actions proved it. That is what Jesus wants from us. He wants us to value Him more than everything we have. He wants us to devote ourselves to Him. He doesn’t want lip service. He wants obedience. The woman showed her faithfulness in a way even the disciples were not yet ready to demonstrate. That is the kind of faith that Jesus wants us to have. A costly faith. A prodigal faith. A faith that trusts Jesus so fully we do things that will be seen as scandalous and outrageous to those who do not believe. So go, and believe in Jesus Christ. In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.