The Anointing of Jesus: Why This Waste? | Dreaming Beneath the Spires

I am actually enthralled by this year’s discipline of reading through Scripture slowly, a passage at a time. How can I be so fascinated with this slow reading of passages I have known all my life? Because there is power and depth in the passages, sparkling inner depths that yield themselves to a close and tranquil examination.

Matthew 26 6-12

⁶ While Jesus was in Bethany in the home of Simon the Leper, ⁷ a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, which she poured on his head as he was reclining at the table.

⁸ When the disciples saw this, they were indignant. “Why this waste?” they asked. ⁹ “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor.”

This senseless love that does not count the cost does not make sense to the rational mind (mine included). Sometimes acts of love do not, as shown in the beautiful recent film, Of Gods and Men, see review.

Simon was likely a leper healed by Jesus, since lepers were otherwise required to live apart.
The woman is identified in John as Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus.

Her heart welled with love for Jesus. The best she had to give was not good enough. Mark tells us the perfume was worth a year’s wages for an average worker. Let’s say something like £40,000 in today’s money–lavished on Jesus because of her love for him!

¹⁰ Aware of this, Jesus said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me.

But Jesus sees the beauty in this act of pure, random love, lavished on him without considering the cost.
The Greek word used, Kallos, has an ethical as well as an aesthetic meaning.

¹¹ The poor you will always have with you,^[a] but you will not always have me.

There will always be poverty–because of individual fecklessness, laziness, stupidity, extravagance, bad judgement; bad luck, ill-health, natural disasters, and the villainy and greed of others.

¹² When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. ¹³ Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

The woman may have unconsciously, prophetically known that Jesus’ time on earth was short.

It is likely that he went to his brutal and excruciating death with the precious perfume of her anointing on him.

And that is life. The precious perfume of sweet love anoints us even along with the thorny crown of hatred

And Jesus promises that her act of lavish love will never be forgotten.

Judas Agrees to Betray Jesus

¹⁴ Then one of the Twelve—the one called Judas Iscariot—went to the chief priests ¹⁵ and asked, “What are you willing to give me if I deliver him over to you?” So they counted out for him thirty pieces of silver. ¹⁶ From then on Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over.

The idol of Judas life was love of money. We are elsewhere told that he was a thief, and would help himself to money from the community’s money bags.

It appears that Jesus’s refusal to condemn Mary for her act of lavish and “wasteful” devotion tips Judas in his ultimate betrayal of Christ for–interestingly and significantly–money.

30 silver coins was about 120 denarius, 4 months wages, since a labourer earned about a denarius a day.

What are four months wages for you? Would getting that as a lump sum be sufficient for you to betray a close friend?