Devotional from Pastor Dave March 27, 2024

Today is the Wednesday of Holy Week. Today isn’t one of those days in Holy Week that gets its own special adjective, like Palm Sunday or Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. But according to Mark’s telling of the story, something rather significant happened on this day that Jesus wanted the world to remember—a woman anointed him with expensive perfume (Mark 14:3–9).

Jesus is at the home of a man named Simon who had leprosy. Because of Simon’s condition, he probably was supposed to be quarantined, but he was having company over for a dinner party. In the middle of the meal, a woman—we don’t know her name—brings out an alabaster jar full of an expensive imported perfume called nard. She breaks open the jar and pours the perfume on Jesus’ head.

Some of the others who are there take offense at the wastefulness of this extravagance. The perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor, they say, and they scold her (literally, they “snort” at her). But Jesus tells them to leave her alone, that they’ll always have the poor with them, but they won’t always have him. “She has done what she could,” he tells them. “She has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” (Mark 14:8–9).

That’s pretty high praise! But what was so special about what she did that is worthy of the church’s perpetual remembrance of her?

We call Jesus the Christ, the Messiah. And both of those words mean the same thing—anointed. And the thing is, this story is Jesus’ anointing. It’s his christening.

Early in each of the four Gospels, Jesus is baptized, but it’s not clear that he is being anointed. Jesus himself uses that term in his sermon in his hometown synagogue when he quotes from the prophet Isaiah who wrote that “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19). But Jesus himself is not actually anointed by anyone until this moment, by this anonymous woman, in the home of a leper, on the day before the day before he dies and is buried. She is the one who anoints him, christens him as the Christ, the Messiah. “She has anointed my body beforehand,” Jesus says, “for its burial.”

I wonder if she knew, if she really knew, what she was doing. Had she heard Jesus talk about how he was going to be betrayed, arrested, tried and condemned to death, and then rise again on the third day? He’d told his disciples all that. But none of them did what she did. None of them anointed him like she did. And she did it without being told to do it. She just did it.

Jesus also says that “she has done what she could.” She’s certainly done a lot more than some others maybe could have done. That jar of perfume was worth a year’s wages. But it’s not the dollar amount that matters. The day before this, Jesus watched a widow drop two copper coins worth a penny into the offering at the Temple, and he knew she’d “put in everything she had, all she had to live on” (Mark 12:44). She did what she could, too.

I wonder: Will Jesus be able to say the same of each of us, that we have done what we could?