Leave Her Alone
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My upcoming book, the Edge of the Inside, comes out on March 31st, 2026. I wrote this book about my journey, leaving my dream job as a multi-site megachurch pastor in 2020, and how I learned to see both the church and God differently from the edge. If you've ever felt like the Christianity you were handed doesn't match the Jesus you read about, this book is for you.
If you'd like to read a copy before it comes out, we'd love to have you join our book launch team. You can find out more in the link in the show notes.
jeremy_2_01-02-2026_131537: Welcome to another episode of Rebuilding Faith.
These are 10 minute Bible messages for people with questions and doubts, and today we're kicking off John chapter 12. This is gonna be a story that you. Have likely heard before, if you've ever studied, the New Testament or you've been in church in your life. If not, you're gonna see an incredible story for the first time. This is a story that's got a lot of different angles to it,
But wait, there's more.
jeremy_2_01-02-2026_131537: And I wanna explore a few of them today.
This is John chapter 12, beginning in verse one. [00:01:00] Says, six days before the Passover celebration began, Jesus arrived in Bethany, the home of Lazarus, the man he had raised from the dead.
This is what we talked about at length in the last few weeks going through chapter 11. A dinner was prepared in Jesus's honor. Martha served, and Lazarus was among those who ate with him. Then Mary took a 12 ounce jar of expensive perfume made from the essence of Nard, and she anointed Jesus' feet with it, wiping his feet with her hair.
The house was filled with the fragrance. Now we need to understand a few culturally, contextual details here to really understand what this moment represents. Now in Judaism, as in a lot of cultures, but in particular in this culture, a woman's hair was associated with her self respect. There's a connection there, and we see this elsewhere throughout even the New Testament in one [00:02:00] Corinthians 1115, we read this and isn't long hair.
A woman's pride and joy for it has been given to her as a covering and so there was a lot of association with hair. So, not only did Mary pour a very expensive bottle of perfume, as we'll see in a moment, but she used her hair to wipe the oil. This would be symbolically placing self-worth. At the feet of Jesus.
This is an act of worshipful extravagant devotion. It likely made everybody very uncomfortable to watch this intimate gesture of love and adoration given in front of this environment of everyone else to see and to try to make sense of what is going on here. Now notice the firsthand detail that John includes here, that the house was filled with the fragrance.
This is someone who was there, who smelled it, who remembered [00:03:00] looking around and going, wow, the entire house smells of this fragrance now, because all of it has been dumped out onto Jesus, verse four. But Judas Iscariot, the disciple who would soon betray him, said. That perfume was worth a year's wages. It should have been sold in the money given to the poor.
Now, not that he cared for the poor, he was a thief, and since he was in charge of the disciples money, he often stole some for himself. John's just letting us know in case we, we didn't know. Jesus replied, leave her alone. She did this in preparation for my burial. You'll always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.
Now the objection that Judas raises here has a superficial plausibility to it, right? We can understand the argument, we can understand where [00:04:00] he's coming from. This perfume was the equivalent of a year's wages. Now to bring this into modern terms, I looked it up. What was the average salary in the US last year, and it was $66,622.
If you saw someone put a perfume worth $66,000 onto someone in one extravagant motion, if they dumped that out, you would have a reaction. You would go, wow, I have never seen anything like it. The sum of this gift was enormous. Which means either Mary and her family were very wealthy in order to afford this, or perhaps this was some family heirloom that had been passed down to her.
Either way, this is an extremely, lavish gift for her to give, but Judas argument, even though it might sound credible, does not reflect reality. See a lot of Christian arguments today sound like this. [00:05:00] At first glance, if you don't really look under the hood, you go, oh yeah, that sounds like it makes a lot of sense. But the moment you begin to find out there's more going on, you realize this argument doesn't sound quite as good anymore.
You give using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
jeremy_2_01-02-2026_131537: And so we see the hypocrisy of Judas on full display that he's been stealing money for himself. And now he publicly tries to shame this woman with a financial argument because he wanted a cut of what that perfume could have been sold for.
Now, I've always loved Jesus's three words to Judas. Here, leave her alone. You can just imagine the room going quiet when Jesus said this, and I suspect that maybe Jesus might wanna say this to a few Christians today. Who are obsessed with other people's issues, leave [00:06:00] them alone. And Jesus says She did this for my burial, which as we know is literally going to be true that this will still be on him when his body is buried.
The fragrance of this act will extend far beyond the event itself. This is a remarkable gift. Lemme get to verse nine. When all the people heard of Jesus' arrival, they flocked to see him and also to see Lazarus, the man that had been raised from the dead. Then the leading priest decided to kill Lazarus.
Two for it was because of him that many of the people had deserted them and believed in Jesus. Verse 10 is one of the most bizarrely funny verses in the entire Bible. Jesus brings Lazarus back to life and the religious leaders don't have any response to it other than [00:07:00] we should kill him again. Like the guy that just got brought back to life, we should kill him because we gotta destroy the evidence.
I mean, this guy's walking around, he's like a billboard for Jesus everywhere he goes, because everybody knows he was dead and Jesus brought him back to life. So the only solution we have. Is to kill him. So only are they plotting to kill Jesus as we saw last week, but now they want to kill Lazarus again.
This poor guy that just happens to be friends with the wrong guy clearly, as he's now on the hit list of these religious leaders. Now I want to close this episode by returning to just the simple act of how Jesus responds to Judas because I think a lot of us have these kind of moments where. You see something happen or you want to do something, and then there's that voice of Judas, that critique voice, that always has a spiritual sounding argument.
And I wanna just point out that Jesus doesn't [00:08:00] debate Judas logic. He doesn't correct the math. He doesn't say, yeah, I mean, technically we could have got a lot for this and let's think about what we, all the things we could have done. Judas, he doesn't do any of that instead. He protects the person.
And I just think that's worth noting, that instead of getting into the nitty gritty, instead of logically breaking out, Hey, let's go back and forth, let's debate the merits of how this money could have been used.
Jesus sees the person and that is who he protects. And so he doesn't get into any of these nitty gritty details with Judas at all, and I just wonder, who would Jesus say this about today? Who would be the person or the group of people that Jesus would do this for today? Who is being policed, corrected, shamed, or audited in the name of perhaps good stewardship or spiritual responsibility?
Who has the [00:09:00] church pointed out and said, we've got to deal with them, and maybe Jesus might say, leave them alone. Leave them alone. What would it look like for us to model Jesus's response in our setting today? I'll see you next week on Rebuilding Faith.
