Wednesday of Holy Week, April 1, 2026
Isaiah 50:4–9a | Christopher Ingram
Two things happen in Jerusalem this week that the church has long remembered together, even though they feel like they belong to different stories.
A woman breaks open a jar of perfume worth nearly a year’s wages and pours it over Jesus’s head (Matt 26:6–7). The room objects. In fact, when Mark tells this story, he says she shattered it. There was no saving the rest. It was everything, all at once, irreversible. And somewhere across town, Judas goes to the chief priests and asks what they’ll give him to hand Jesus over (Matt 26:14–15). He walks out with thirty pieces of silver and a plan.
One person gives everything. One person calculates the exchange rate. Both of them are responding to the same Jesus. What explains the difference?
Isaiah describes a servant whose whole life is organized around the daily practice of listening, an ear opened every morning like a student before a teacher (Isa 50:4). From that attentiveness comes the word that sustains the weary, the posture that doesn’t break under opposition, the face set like flint toward what is coming (Isa 50:7). Morning by morning, the servant’s strength is received from God: “The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward” (Isa 50:5).
Wednesday asks a simple question: which of these two do you resemble? The woman with the jar had clearly been paying attention to Jesus, more than the disciples had. Her extravagance was born from knowing who was in the room and what was about to happen. Judas had been in the same room. He walked with Jesus for years and kept counting costs.
What we attend to, slowly and steadily, makes us who we are. The woman attended to Jesus. The servant in Isaiah attended to the Lord God. Jesus himself, in the quiet before the week broke open, attended to his Father.
What, and who, will you attend to today, right now, before the noise picks back up?
Prayer:God of Space and Silence, you made a servant who listened before speaking, and that listening was the sustaining thread through everything. I spend most of my mornings talking, planning, filling the space. Forgive me. Your Son moved toward Friday sustained by mornings like this one. Send your Spirit to teach me the same. I want to attend to you the way that woman attended to Jesus, all the way and holding nothing back. Amen.