Hey Everyone,
I am trying out two paid articles this week. I believe I set it up, so there is a week-long free trial. If you need some help, reach out, but I would love to do more of these articles so you can see some of my deeper work. I have also added some interesting audio at the bottom. I recommend going for the second, but you decide which is good for you.
Holy Week Metaphors
Since it’s Holy Week in my tradition, I wanted to extend the concept of “metaphor” into some of the stories my tradition holds dear. So, we will start with the anointing of Jesus today, then the triumphal entry, and finally, we will look at two of the most ancient metaphors for the resurrection of Christ.
To begin, we will look at John Chapter 12:1-11.
The story is called the anointing of Jesus. In the story, Jesus is having dinner at a friend’s house. His sister decides to pour expensive perfume on Jesus’s feet. Like a bath, this perfume would clean his feet, a common Jewish practice, but far more costly than simple water. One of Jesus’s main disciples, Judas Iscariot, decided that using perfume for this function was a wasted expense. To his argument, the perfume could have been sold, and the money could have been given to the poor. Jesus, surprisingly to modern and ancient sensibilities, rebukes the disciple. The Matthew version of this story quotes Jesus, “She has done a beautiful thing to me.” And that is the end of the scene.
So what are the metaphors here? Did Jesus, a homeless Jew, have a taste for the expensive things, or is John’s gospel helping us draw a contrast or a different conclusion?
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