The Poor will Always be with Us (and You will Always have to Serve Them)
John 12:1-8
John 12:1-8
We’re back in John’s gospel this week, and as always, it’s coming a little bit out of left field. This passage has been used by some to be dismissive of, or even negate, much of the teachings of Jesus about the poor that we have read over the last few months. Rather than giving all we have to the poor, this passage could be read to say that poverty itself is a natural part of God’s plan. I think there is a lot more going on in this passage for us to dig into.
Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’
As the passage starts, we find Jesus preparing for Passover in the days before his death, and he is attending a big dinner with friends. The verses previous to this passage explain that Jesus is currently in hiding because if the authorities found him, they would arrest him. As Jesus was sitting at the dinner table, Mary (not Jesus’s mother) anoints Jesus with some pretty expensive perfume. The reader would have known that this was normal as a part of burial rites, and in the story this functions to remind the reader that Jesus is about to be killed. Judas comes up and says that they should have sold that expensive perfume to give the money to the poor, and Jesus tells him that Mary is doing the right thing. I’m about to be gone, and you’ll always have the poor.
This story is also found in Mark 14:3-9, but there are some crucial differences that are worth reflecting on. First, Judas isn’t even mentioned in the story in Mark’s gospel. The disciple goes unnamed, and there is no side commentary about the disciple’s motives. In John’s gospel, the disciple who is saying to give things to the poor is spotlighted for doing so to line his own pockets. In fact, the word “poor” is only used in John’s gospel three times. The first two are in this passage, and the last is in the next chapter, where again it is used in conjunction with Judas’s duplicitousness. As Judas runs out of the Last Supper early, the gospel writer says that some disciples thought he was leaving early to give things to the poor.
In Mark's gospel it’s implied that the disciple would have been correct in normal circumstances to sell the perfume. In this one instance Mary is doing the right thing because this was all she could do for him before he was about to die. In John’s gospel the only person telling people to give things to the poor is the traitorous thief, and according to the story, he is wrong to do so. That difference in context and tone says a lot about each writer’s intent in telling the story.
John’s gospel is simply more concerned with the theological meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection than anything specific Jesus called the people who followed him to do in his lifetime. The purpose of this commentary is to look at the gospel reading each week, and see what that leads us to do. Holding this up to the light of all the other gospel scriptures, I think it would be quite difficult to take away a sense that Jesus doesn’t want us to give to the poor, but it does give the sense that the Jesus of John’s gospel is less concerned with giving things away than the Jesus of Luke’s gospel.
All four gospels were put together by different people in different contexts. The cynic in me wonders if maybe John’s gospel’s original community was a little richer than that of the other three gospels, so perhaps it got a few of Jesus’s harder economic edges filed off. The truth is that we have four retellings of the same story in the New Testament for a reason. People thought they all had something important to say. You can enjoy John’s theological flourish, and follow Luke’s call to divest of wealth and serve. But, if what you are looking for is a way to brush aside all that “blessed are the poor” and “woe to the rich” stuff, you aren’t going to find it here.