Why Jesus's followers need to believe again

Judas saw the power dynamics of the world as fixed and simply wanted to trade a Roman emperor for a Jewish king. Mary saw a new world entirely.

Ezra Klein (The New York Times) and Derek Thompson’s (The Atlantic) new co-authored book Abundance sheds light on what makes the political situation in the United States of America so fraught and thus susceptible to abuse and extremism. It’s a nostalgic book, suggesting the America of the mid-20th century possessed a hope for the future that began to wane with a stagnating economy and increasing wealth disparities. It can no longer be assumed that future generations will be better off economically than the ones who’ve come before. Klein and Thompson argue that the solutions we developed to address challenges a generation ago are producing new challenges. At the same time, our ability to collectively harness our shared vision for the future seems at a nadir. It’s a book written by political progressives for political progressives, but it speaks more broadly to the human condition. Klein and Thompson suggest that as a country, “we’ve lost our faith in the future that once powered our optimism. We fight instead over what we have or what we had. Our era features too little utopian thinking… The world we want requires more than redistribution. We aspire to more than parceling out the present.”

We can see the difference between parceling out the present and embracing God’s future now in the two competing visions of Jesus’s ministry in the story of Mary washing the feet of Jesus in John 12. When Jesus emerges in the Gospel stories speaking about the nearness of the Kingdom of God, part of what he is doing is reminding his audience, primarily Jews living under centuries of imperial occupation, of the true location of their deepest hopes: God. When we sacrifice the allegiance that rightly belongs to God to the idols of political expediency, fear, and greed, all that remains is scarcity and a “Mad Max” race to hoard all we can to assure our survival and that of our tribe.

In John 11, Jesus performs the miracle that results in his crucifixion: the raising of Lazarus. This miracle demonstrated God’s abundance more than any other. Jesus embodied the God who had power over life and death itself. It also caused so many people to believe in Jesus, and thus reject the false scarcity of Rome, that the religious leaders began to fear imperial retribution. Their solution was to offer Jesus to the Romans, calculating that “it is better… to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” Their concern was for the survival of their nation. Jesus always calls us to draw the circle wider. He was concerned about the survival of humanity.

The raising of Lazarus begins with a long-standing friendship between Jesus and the three siblings: Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. When Lazarus falls ill, his two sisters send word to Jesus to come to Bethany to heal him. Jesus, sensing an opportunity to expand the theological imagination of his disciples and followers, delays his departure to Bethany long enough for Lazarus to die. By the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus had been buried for four days. In other words, he was dead dead. Jesus comes to a Bethany full of grief and mourning. He first encounters Martha, who runs out to meet him and accuses him of bringing on Lazarus’s demise by delaying his arrival. After a bit of dialogue, Martha eventually affirms, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

While all this is occurring, Mary is at home. When she meets Jesus on his way to Lazarus’s tomb, she makes an accusation similar to that of her sister, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” The story does not record Jesus ever actually responding to Mary. When Martha accuses Jesus of neglect, Jesus tells her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Mary doesn’t hear this because she remains at home. Instead, overwhelmed with the grief of his friends and the wider community, Jesus weeps. A few verses later, Jesus calls Lazarus forth from his tomb and tells the community to remove his grave clothes, “and let him go.”

It seems that Mary represents those whose belief in Jesus and the world he embodies develops over time. In contrast, Martha seems eager and ready to believe in Jesus. Luke’s Gospel includes a story where Jesus visits the sisters at their Bethany home. During the visit, Martha, the one John frames as eager to believe, is busy with chores while Mary, the one John frames as reluctant or slow to believe, sits at Jesus’s feet, absorbing his teaching. In this story, Jesus tells Martha, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken from her.”

This background—the Raising of Lazarus in John and the Visit to Bethany in Luke—makes our Gospel lesson all the more powerful. While Lazarus reclines at the table and Martha serves the meal, Mary, the one who was slow to believe, anoints Jesus’s feet with perfume worth almost a year’s daily wages for the average worker in ancient Roman Judaea. This was a costly act of devotion by someone who finally understood who Jesus was and what he came into the world to do. At what might have been the lowest moment of her life, the death of her brother, a veil was removed, and she saw Jesus in all of his glory. Without saying a word, Mary’s act of intimate devotion, anointing Jesus’s feet with perfume and wiping them with her hair, affirms the faith of her sister from a few verses prior: “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” She demonstrates that she understands Jesus better than many of his disciples did, certainly better than Judas.

If Mary represents those who believe in Jesus and the world he embodies and enacts, Judas represents those who are kept from seeing him because they are too sure that their own conceptualization of Jesus or outlook on the world is the only one. Judas reacts to Mary’s devotion with jealousy and anger. “Why was this perfume not sold… and the money given to the poor?” Apart from John's accusation about Judas’s character (“He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief”), this is not a bad question. The Gospel stories occur amid a backdrop of dire economic and political realities. Poverty, hunger, exploitation, and injustice are everywhere. When John’s Gospel records Jesus feeding 5,000 people by the Sea of Galilee, it is tempting to see them merely as people who went out to see Jesus as if he were a roadside attraction. In reality, they followed him because they were desperate, and sick, and hungry. It was not uncommon for the peasants in the Roman Empire to starve so that the elite and wealthy could feast. Jesus’s miracles highlight the incredible generosity of God and God’s kingdom over and against the incredible inhumanity of humans and our earthly empires.

Jesus’s response to Judas’s criticism, “You always have the poor with you,” is a quote from Deuteronomy 15:11. Jesus reminds Judas that he has a perpetual responsibility to care for the most vulnerable in society, but to accuse Mary of waste misses the point entirely. Mary’s perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor, but her act of devotion affirmed her desire for a better world and her belief that Jesus was the way to it. Judas saw the power dynamics of the world as fixed and simply wanted to trade a Roman emperor for a Jewish king. Judas simply wanted a reallocation of wealth and power. Mary saw a new world entirely, one where emperors and kings cast their diadems at the throne of God’s eternal majesty. The world she yearned for requires more than redistribution. She aspired to more than parceling out the present, and in Jesus, she, more than Judas, more than the other disciples, glimpsed God’s kingdom in him. Furthermore, she knew that the only way to this new world was through suffering and death. Less than two weeks later, Jesus would be crucified, having been betrayed by Judas, who finally saw that Jesus was not the revolutionary king he wanted. He betrayed his teacher for 30 pieces of silver, a sum worth far less than Mary’s perfume.

As a college chaplain, people often inquire about the state of religion and young people. More specifically, people want me to divine the state of the Christian faith and young people. They want to know how what I see on my campus speaks to the church's future. I am a daily witness to the hunger people have for God. I am also a daily witness to people's despair about the church, namely, that it offers nothing novel, innovative, or imaginative to our search for liberation and freedom. Despite the call of all Christian people to be witnesses of the resurrection and thus the new world God has already brought into being, too often people experience the church as merely interested in redistributing the present rather than pointing toward God’s abundant future. Nearly two millennia after the resurrection, maybe we too have lost the belief in God’s future that ought to power and inform any engagement in our present. Without this belief, we become merely one more group in our society fighting over the power to parcel out scarce resources to increasingly angry people.

Mary shows us another way. Mary shows us that we must recover a firm and unshakable faith in the God who “makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters,” the One who promises to “make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” This is not a God with an infrastructure policy. This is a God of a new creation. It is the mission of the church to help people believe that a new world is not only possible, but it is necessary and inevitable. All history is bringing us ever closer to God’s kingdom, and it is breaking through to our world all the time. It might’ve taken Mary some time to get it. Maybe her grief at her brother’s death or the general malaise and hopelessness that permeated her world prevented her from seeing it. Regardless, once she saw it, she could not unsee it. Mary knows what each Christian must know, and must remember, if we are to speak a word of hope to the prevailing hopelessness that permeates our world: Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.

This affirmation shapes God’s people in unique and important ways. Those who truly know that Jesus is the Messiah are those who can love their enemies into the Age to Come, those who can serve the poor with God’s abundance regardless of the markets, those who can stand up for the marginalized and oppressed with God’s strength regardless of those who claim temporal power, those who can sit with the brokenhearted with God’s grace. Those who truly know that Jesus is the Messiah are those whose ultimate allegiance lies in that land toward which we are journeying, not to any earthly political leader or movement. Those who truly know that Jesus is the Messiah are those who know that only by dying to self, to ego, to prejudice, to hatred, to greed, to inhumanity, can be ever hope to attain to the resurrected life of Jesus and live his divine life now and forever in the Age to Come.

The world we want, the world Jesus promises us, is more than a redistribution of what we already have. Jesus doesn’t merely parcel out the present. His resurrection, the core claim of the Christian tradition, inaugurated God’s new creation. His is a world of renewed human relationships based on mutuality, love, and communion, centered around a renewed allegiance to God. Jesus invites us to believe again, because only by believing in the world about which he taught, the world for which he died, the world toward which his resurrection points, can we embody and speak a word to our neighbors that brings them real hope.