This week, our gospel reading is John 12.1–8. It's a familiar story: Mary (sister of Martha and Lazarus) anointing Jesus' feet with perfume, Judas objecting, and Jesus setting him right.

Like all familiar stories, though, there's always something new to spot. At our home group last Monday, when we were considering it, an obvious question that I'd never noticed before was put forward: Why did Mary have such an expensive jar of perfume to hand?

It's a reasonable question - Judas acknowledges the cost of the perfume as 300 denarii, roughly one year's wages for an average worker. A little internet searching tells me that the average salary for a labourer in the UK today is around £22,426... that's an expensive bottle of perfume!

This is a question without a definitive answer, of course - maybe it was bought to anoint her until-recently-dead brother Lazarus, and then not needed? But that only leads to the next question: why, if that's the case, wasn't it used to bury him? Was it left over? Or perhaps we might want to question Judas' qualifications as a parfumeur... can he really tell how much this jar was worth just by nose, or is he, perhaps, indulging in a little hyperbole?

My point, really, is not to find answers, but to notice how one question leads to another, and how wonderful they are. Some, of course, are distracting nonsense, but other questions are really important - like the one in the middle of the text:

"Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?"

Let's be more generous than St. John for a moment, give Judas the benefit of the doubt, and assume this was a genuine question. If we do that, we find here a man actively engaged in working out the moral implications of his faith and the trust he's putting in Jesus. We find someone who doesn't want to simply accept what is going on around him, isn't afraid to challenge behaviours that seem to contradict the teachings he's been receiving, and will determinedly hold his leaders to account for their integrity. 'Jesus', he's asking, 'you've been talking the talk about helping the poor and the needy - but now a feast is being given for you, and you're receiving elaborate gifts and attention, you seem happy to forget all that and accept something that could have helped a whole bunch of other people. What gives?'

It's not an unreasonable question, really - and perhaps one we could learn a lot from in terms of being bold in holding authority to account in our own day and age.

What's really important, though, is that it is a question that allows Jesus to respond. By questioning God, Judas learns more about him.

Perhaps that, too, is something we could learn from? If our faith is to be living, active, and dynamic, it can't be a passive assent to a list of received doctrines; it has to be something we work on and work out—in dialogue, and in questions, with each other and with God.  So let's treasure the questions.

So, what do you want to ask?