“For those who want to save their life will waste it..."

Mary knows Jesus is not a means to some other end.

For Monday of Holy Week, the assigned lectionary Gospel is from John 12 where Mary, sister of the recently four-days-dead Lazarus, anoints Jesus with a couple of tuition payments’s worth of Chanel No. 5.

Judas et al recoil at the waste.

In Matthew’s version of the anointing, Jesus tells his disciples:

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

The specific audience for this comment is Peter, whom Jesus has called “Satan” for tempting Jesus with a future other than a cruciform destiny.

Perhaps because Jesus’s statement about our needing to lose our lives in order to gain them occurs within the context of Peter balking at the notion of a crucified Messiah we mishear Jesus as suggesting that we too must seek a cross if the Kingdom is to be added unto us.

But the Risen Christ is no nihilist.

When Jesus says we must lose our lives to gain them, he’s not recruiting kamikaze Kingdom warriors, for the word “lose” in Matthew is the same word Matthew uses just after Jesus tells us about the sheep and the goats.

The word “lose” is the same word in Greek for “waste.”

ἡ ἀπώλεια αὕτη

apoleia

“For those who want to save their life will waste it, and those who waste their life for my sake will find it.”