Anointing at Bethany

At the house of Simon the Leper in Bethany, during a meal, a woman comes in with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, breaks it open and pours it over Jesus' head.

The host's name preserves something. Simon is called the leper, so he had carried that status at some point and was clearly not carrying it now, since a man with an active skin disease could not have hosted a dinner at all.

The perfume is identified as pure nard, an oil pressed from the root of a plant grown in the Himalayas and traded the whole length of Asia to reach the Mediterranean. Pliny discusses its price and the ways it was adulterated. Alabaster jars for it were sealed at the neck, and using any of it meant breaking the jar.

The objection comes immediately and it is put in terms nobody could dismiss. Why this waste? This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor. The valuation offered is three hundred denarii, close to a year's wages for a labourer, and one account attributes the complaint to Judas and adds that he was in charge of the money bag and used to help himself to what was put into it.

The defence given is not that the poor do not matter. Leave her alone, why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.

That first clause is a quotation from the law, and the sentence it comes from continues: therefore I command you to be openhanded towards your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy. It is not a shrug about poverty; it is a reminder that the obligation is permanent and this occasion is not.

She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial.

Bodies were anointed with spices at burial, and within four days two men would be doing exactly that with about thirty kilograms of myrrh and aloes. What she did without knowing it, she did while he could still be told about it.

Wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.

Immediately afterwards, Judas goes to the chief priests.

Whether this is the same event as the anointing by a woman in Galilee some time earlier, at the house of another Simon, has been discussed since antiquity. The details differ in almost every respect except the name of the host and the perfume: that one was a sinful woman in a Pharisee's house who wet his feet with her tears, and the point made afterwards was about forgiveness rather than burial.

Mary of Bethany is named as the woman here in only one of the accounts, and the same source is the one that names Judas as the objector.

Nard reached the Mediterranean overland from the Himalayas through Persia, and its price reflected the distance. Pliny gives figures for the best grade that put a jar of it well beyond a labouring household, and he devotes several paragraphs to how it was cut with cheaper oils.