Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money. And he sought an opportunity to betray him.

Judas loved money. We may suppose that earlier he had hoped to make himself rich as Messiah Yeshu’s Chief Minister for Finance in Jerusalem.

But now he sees no hope for gain save in a small betrayal price.

When we firmly choose our own desires instead of Yeshu’s, he does not stop us from acting in a self-interested way. Rebellion against God causes bad karma of a kind from which there will be no escape unless we repent. (Read on for the meditation on verses 17-21)

And while he was at Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her.  But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. And I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

Some said, ‘So wasteful an act!’

Yeshu knew what they were muttering. ‘No, it is not. Such an act of worship while I am still alive is just lovely, and it is so heartfelt as to be without care for either expense or public opinion. Moreover what you say about the poor is different from what some of you are actually thinking!’

Read on to discover how one of them wanted money for himself, not for the poor.

It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, for they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.”

Passover was a festival when the Jews sacrificed lambs. It was a way of remembering with thanks their liberation by God from their suffering in ancient Egypt, and how they escaped from slavery carrying just travelling food for the journey.

Yeshu gave the Jews the opportunity to kill him at Passover time as a sacrifice to clear our sins. In this way we believers are liberated from the slavery and suffering of samsara and are invited into the unfading life of God’s heaven. (Because Yeshu is the Lamb of God, the sacrifice of those lambs for the sins of men is no longer necessary)

In the next two chapters we learn about Yeshu’s arrest and how he died on a cross.