Have you ever been to an old fashioned southern church? You know the kind of place where you unable to stand still while you are worshiping the Lord. It is truly a full body experience. Billy Blank’s Tae-Bo has nothing on a worship gathering of this sort. Even during the preaching, people are moving and shouting. They would say that they have the anointin’ and that this force has taken over what is happening in the room. Now, I am not mocking church traditions that operate in this fashion and I am certainly not denying the power of the Holy Spirit flooding a church community (I happen to be a ‘closet charismatic’ myself), but simply drawing out the meaning of a word as I have seen it used in some Western contexts. This word would have meant something entirely different for Jesus and his followers in the First Century.

In chapter 1 of Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith, Spangler and Tverberg explain a the word in the following way:

“Anointing a guest with oil was a common, expected act of hospitality (see Luke 7:46). But Mary’s use of a breathtakingly expensive vial of perfumed oil in John 12 made her action hint at the anointing of a king… By anointing him with expensive fragrances, Mary may well have been making a statement about who she believed Jesus was, proclaiming him as Messiah. In fact, the Hebrew word for Messiah is Mashiach, which literally means ‘the Anointed One.’” (16)

In chapter one we find ourselves in Mary and Martha’s home. Martha is busy cooking and preparing a feast when Mary begins to pour expensive oil at the feet of Jesus. The obvious interpretation Jesus clarifies by stating that this action is to prepare for his burial, but there are some actions in Scripture that the original audience would have understood without having been explained with words (do you agree with this statement?). This indicates that Jesus is King!

It reminds us of the anointed kings in the Hebrew Scriptures. Solomon, the authors point out, is placed on King David’s mule and escorted to Gihon when Zadok the priest anoints this King before all the people. This is similar to what happens after our episode in John’s narrative, which leads to Jesus being placed on a donkey and escorted into Jerusalem as Israel’s rightful king (sorry folks, this isn’t a story about how meek and humble Jesus was… it is about him being KING!).

The fragrance of Jesus would have followed him for days, and everyone who would have been in his vicinity would have recognized the scent of royalty. So, who is the one with the anointin’? Well, it is not his followers, at least not directly; it is Jesus himself. He alone can be the Anointed One. He alone is the King of Jerusalem and the Cosmos. According to Paul, we may not be the Anointed Ones, but we are the fragrance of his Messianic anointing (2 Corinthians 2).

Here are the questions at hand: Do you have the Anointed One and are you living as the aroma of his Kingly rule over the world? Also, does this interpretation from Spangler and Tverberg raise any new questions or insights for you? Can we appropriate interpretations like this even if they are not bluntly explained in the text?

Today is the first of several posts in which I will be offering my observations and insights on a book titled, Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith. I owe a debt of gratitude to Lois Tverberg who co-authored this book with Ann Spangler. She not only has been extremely helpful in giving me a better understanding of Messiah Jesus, but she was gracious enough to send me a copy of the book so that I could interact with the content on this site… I am truly honored for such an invitation.

Today, I want to simply cover the introduction and over the course of the next several weeks, I will post my thoughts on each individual chapter.

Here is a quote that I think sums up the introduction pretty well:

“As we tried to place ourselves in Jesus’ Jewish world, layer after layer of history seemed to peel away until we could almost imagine that, for a while we, too, had joined the disciples and were sitting at Jesus’ feet (7).”

This is a book that is the result of two women who have been intrigued with the thought world of Jesus’ time. Some people will be tempted to have critics of this for several reasons. One would be the belief that you simply cannot reconstruct the past enough, and so what the text “says to me” is more than sufficient and the closest access to meaning possible. Others may be weary of searching for the Judaism of Jesus and the Apostles because of the idea that it is almost impossible to designate any kind of monolithic Jewish thought in the first century, so reading observations into the New Testament from particular stands of Judaism is a lost cause. Still others would continue and claim that the Mishnah and other post-Temple sources are represent a radically different form of Judaic thought and practice from that of the first century. (For more on this I commend to you an article written by Lois called, “Dating Jesus’ Jewishness.”) With these and many other perspectives in mind, the authors state: “We have also been careful to place Jesus within his first-century context rather than that of later ages (8).” I tend to think that they attempted to use proper historical methods with all integrity.

What are your thoughts as we approach first-century history and attempt to find a more Jewish Jesus than many Christians have understood? Do any of the above descriptions describe you? Has a new found understanding of a Jewish Jesus transformed your understanding of the New Testament and the whole of the story of God?

I have been asked by author Lois Tverberg to review her forthcoming book, Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus can Transform Your Faith. This is quite the honor to be asked by the author herself, especially in an area that has taken up much of my time in the recent weeks!