For this Palm Sunday, I’m backing up the lectionary text John 12:12-19 (the alternate Gospel reading) to the beginning of the chapter to include the day before story of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus, verses 1-8. Then speculating a little, based on verse 17 which mentions the presence of a “crowd that that had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb,” I suppose that Mary was also in the Palm Sunday crowd.
So I’d like to reflect on what might have been the thoughts of Mary and her critic Judas Iscariot, who complained the day before about the waste of the expensive perfume to anoint Jesus. The two of them must have had very different impressions of that donkey ride into Jerusalem, Mary looking on with love and gratitude, Judas watching with resentment and growing dissatisfaction with his master.
To my knowledge, no figure except Jesus is specifically identified in the pre-Raphaelite painting (by William Gale) above, but one might image Mary as either the exuberant woman just to Jesus left (our right) or the more quiet face of utter devotion a little further to His left. Then we might suppose the dark bearded man a little further on to our right as Judas conniving with a member of the Sanhedrin to betray Jesus.
In it all, we might wonder where our place in the crowd might be. Would we be enthusiastically greeting the Lord or worrying about the commotion He was causing? Would we be expressing devoted thankfulness for His work in our lives or would we be concerned with protecting our assets and place in the world?
Mary and Judas certainly do not exhaust the range of possible responses to Jesus, but they do highlight the fact that encountering Jesus demands a response. Will we rise to worship Him or fall back into despair and bitterness over our personal situations?