Be Careful What We Judge

Mark 14:3-9 (ESV)

And while he was at Bethany in 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 truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

There are so many directions we could go with this passage. We could talk about how when God calls us to do things, other people might not understand. We could talk about how God will vindicate us when we’ve acted in obedience and been slandered because of it. But what I felt like the Lord wanted us to talk about today is this…

We have to be so careful not to judge what we don’t understand.

We know from John’s gospel that this woman was Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. And we know this wasn’t the first time she had been judged wrongly for her actions (or lack thereof).

So often, because we don’t always understand what someone else has been called to do, our first reaction is to judge it. We judge missions and methods and programs. We judge callings and commitments and endeavors. We pronounce them "wrong," when in fact they are something someone else has been called to do. The disciples were indignant over something the Holy Spirit had obviously led Mary to do. What they called “wasteful,” Jesus called “beautiful.”

We have to be so careful not to judge what we don’t understand. For in doing so, we might just be judging a directive of God.