While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.
Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.
“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “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. She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” Mark 14.3-9
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are like good storytellers everywhere. They may start with the same material, but they shape it and tell it differently, with the little touches and flourishes that make each of their Gospels unique. It’s not unusual for one of them to include a detail the others don’t. This story about the woman who anointed Jesus is a prime example. It’s in all four Gospels, with the same basic plot we read above (dinner table interruption, extravagant act, spluttering men, protective Jesus), but Mark is the only one with the nerve to let the woman make a scene and a mess.
In Mark 14, the woman takes her alabaster jar and breaks it, right there at the table, before she pours out the oil. In fact, she smashes it to pieces, that’s what the word means. It’s as much commotion as if she’d walked into the dining room with an enormous jar of applesauce and flung it with great ceremony to the floor. Immediate chaos, jar shattering, broken pieces flying, shards of applesauce-coated alabaster in everyone’s food. A big, sticky, splintery mess that’s hideous to clean up. And while the oil in this scene would cost ten thousand times more than a kilogram jar of applesauce, no exaggeration, the mess is the point, and the intentional nature of breaking open the jar. Maybe adding splatter to the splutter was a little too much for Matthew, Luke, and John, who keep the jars in their Gospels whole and intact. But Mark emphasises the woman’s act of breaking, and he wants us to reflect on it. What does it mean, to her and to Jesus, that she breaks open that alabaster jar?
A jar like this, in Jesus' day, was steeped in meaning to begin with. Alabaster is a delicate, translucent stone that was often used in antiquity for carved ornamental vases and bottles for precious oils, like the hard this one contained. An alabaster jar was expensive enough. The ointment inside was outrageous. It cost as much as a person might earn in a year, and those who could afford it saved it for their funerals. An alabaster jar of pure hard might sit on a shelf for years until it was needed to anoint a body for burial. Then it would be broken open, the jars were typically sealed, and the ointment used ceremonially. All of which is to say, this was not the oil for back rubs or babies or hairstyling. It was not the sort of thing a person offered around casually, as if it were a plate of hors d'oeuvres. The oil in this jar had a serious, sacred function. It wasn’t to be broken into to serve the living, but the dead.
This explains why the dinner guests are so disoriented, and then shocked, and then outraged by the woman’s behaviour, to them, it’s an ungodly scene and a mess. Who on earth takes an alabaster jar from the vault where it’s supposed to sit from the day you buy it until the day you die, and then breaks it open before its time and pours it all out when crashing a dinner that isn’t even a funeral!
Scholars have thought long and hard about why the woman does what she does and why it creates such a scene. Most of them conclude that she’s not just making trouble. She’s making good trouble, and for very good reasons. Her act might be a mysterious identification ritual, anointing Jesus in the manner of kings, because she’s worked out who He is, truly the Messiah. Or it might be a dangerous act of resistance, anointing Jesus in defiance of Caesar, since Roman law declared Caesar to be a god and king. Or it might be a prophetic act, anointing Jesus for death, because He is about to suffer and die, since this is the kind of king He is. Whatever this act is, and whatever it means, the woman isn’t doing it for shock value. She’s doing it out of deep conviction.
This helps us understand more about the woman’s character. She is bold. And brave. And confident. And daring. And ready to risk everything. And longing to give everything. And prepared to spend everything, in one holy, extravagant gesture. And she is the only one in the room who understands who Jesus is and what that understanding requires of her, urgently, in this moment, that she anoint Him with the finest oil a human being can offer up to God. What she does with this oil tells us who Jesus is.
But what she does with the jar tells us something too, about what she must do first, before she can anoint Jesus. She has to smash that jar to pieces. Her jar, the one with her name on it. The alabaster jar she is never supposed to open, because the oil it contains is marked for one use. It isn’t an oil of life at all in that alabaster jar. It’s the oil of death, her death. Stoppered up and waiting. Stuffed away in a corner, like all the other painful secrets that bleed away life.
Yet the woman takes her alabaster jar and brings it to Jesus, and she breaks it open!, which is the detail Mark is determined we see. He chooses the same word for ‘breaking open’ that’s used for breaking chains and bones and, on one occasion, stone tablets (because the surprise party centrepiece that night was a golden calf). With those echoes from other stories in Scripture, we get the message loud and clear. Breaking open an alabaster jar is like smashing stone tablets over the backs of idols. Breaking chains that bind us. Crushing bones that haunt us. And it’s not an accident, this kind of smashing. We need to mean it. We need to want it.
Jesus saw that the woman was breaking open her own jar of death. Offering Him the oil in the purest way she knew how. He called it beautiful, what she’d done, which isn’t anything like what the dinner guests called it. They watched this scene unfold with something akin to horror, because to them it just looked like waste. It looked like money down the drain. It looked like a woman making trouble, with nothing good about it. And since she was an easy target and their rage was on a roll, they lit into her with relish, howling about lost hypothetical profits. All they could do was shout about how profligate she was, and how virtuous they would be, if they’d had charge of that alabaster jar. Why, they would have sold it! And made a sweet deal off it too! And then they’d have given the money to the poor!
Jesus had to point out that they did have charge of at least one alabaster jar, their own, which was probably at home in the vault. If they wanted, they could sell it and help the poor, because God knows, as long as there are men hoarding alabaster jars in vaults, there will be economic disparities that create rich and poor. That wasn’t the issue here, He said. The issue was that we do with the oil that is ours and what we do when we see who Jesus truly is. Can we claim our place in the room and give with extravagant joy? Can we smash open the deathly things that hold us back? That’s exactly what this woman did so beautifully, Jesus exclaimed. And from now on, you can’t preach the gospel without telling her story. What she has done will be told in memory of her.
He might have added, ‘Go and do likewise.’ Crash a dinner. Smash a jar. Pour out all the love you have to give, and don’t hold a drop of it back.
