Pastor Lisa Horst Clark

March 24, 2019

Mark 14: 1-11

It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him; for they said, “Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.” While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her. But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them.  When they heard it, they were greatly pleased, and promised to give him money. So he began to look for an opportunity to betray him.

Spy Wednesday

The artist, Cornelia Parker, created a piece of art called “Thirty Pieces of Silver” that we have been looking at throughout this service.  It is shown here at York St. Mary and here at The Tate as the artist imagines the thirty pieces of silver that one of the Gospels names that Judas was promised at his betrayal.  And she made it like this:  she gathered over a thousand silver objects, cups, plates, things that would have been treasures in your home, and she gathered them all and put them in a line and had them flattened by a steamroller.  She then arranged these objects into thirty circles that were suspended from the ceiling:  a thousand pieces of art, with silver in all, made completely flat.  As the description names:  plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones.  They are still here, it is still silver before us, and most of these objects were decorative anyway: vases, trophies and silver teapots that spend most of their time on the shelf.  And so why does viewing them like this make me have a pit in the bottom of my stomach, as something precious has now been flattened and is now unusable?  And here’s how I know it’s good art, because that pit in the stomach feels a bit like the one that is left when a relationship of trust has been profoundly broken, when something precious has been irreversibly marred.

I look at these thirty silver coins and I feel how the artist is telling a story of betrayal.  But then I also see this:  how some of that brokenness, as those pieces themselves individually are marred beyond measure, when they are gathered together in this art they are transformed again into something beautiful, breathtakingly, that what’s done cannot be undone and yet how it can be transformed into something beautiful, set to beauty on too large of a scale to be set on any shelf and how even this story of betrayal does not end with the destruction, but perhaps starts there, perhaps to tell a story of redemption.

And so, the question we are asking today is: Can even Judas be redeemed?  We have been walking through the last week of Jesus and now we come to Wednesday, Spy Wednesday, by far the best name of Holy Week.  You could, perhaps, call it Holy Wednesday, if you’re a fuddy-duddy, but why when Spy Wednesday is a completely legitimate liturgical option, bro