Perfume Poured Out at Bethany

A small sound at a dinner party. The snap of a stone jar breaking. And then, a scent. Rich and sweet, it fills the room, and every head turns.

It is two days before the Passover festival. Jerusalem is crowded with pilgrims, and behind closed doors the chief priests are looking for a quiet way to arrest Jesus and put him to death. Jesus is staying just outside the city, in the village of Bethany, on the slope of the Mount of Olives. This evening he is a guest at the home of a man called Simon the leper. We aren't told more about Simon, but perhaps Jesus had healed him. The guests are reclining around a low table, sharing a meal, as people did at special dinners.

Then a woman comes in. Mark doesn't tell us her name. She is carrying an alabaster jar, a flask made of smooth, pale stone, sealed tight. Inside is perfume made from pure nard, and it is very expensive. She does not open it carefully and pour out a few drops. She breaks the jar. And she pours the whole thing over Jesus' head. The perfume runs into his hair. The fragrance spreads through the house. There is no going back. Whatever that jar was worth, it is all poured out now.

Some of the guests are not impressed. They mutter to each other. “Why this waste? That perfume could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor!” Three hundred denarii. That is close to a whole year's pay for a working man. And they turn on her. Mark says they scolded her harshly. You can picture her standing there, the broken jar in her hands, while the room fills with angry voices and the smell of the perfume she has just given away.

Then Jesus speaks. “Leave her alone. Why are you troubling her? She has done a beautiful thing to me.” He does not dismiss the poor. “You will always have the poor with you,” he says, “and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me.” Then he says something the guests don't yet understand. “She has done what she could. She has anointed my body beforehand for burial.” In a few days, Jesus will die. This woman, perhaps without fully knowing it, has prepared him.

And Jesus makes her a promise. “Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is preached throughout the whole world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” Think about that. The guests that night are mostly forgotten. We don't know what they ate or what else they said. But here we are, two thousand years later, in every corner of the world, telling the story of a woman with a broken jar. Jesus kept his promise.

So what was nard, and why did it cost so much? Spikenard comes from a plant that grows high in the Himalayan mountains, thousands of miles from Judea. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, living in the first century, described nard as one of the most prized and costly perfumes of his day. It had to travel by trade routes across mountains, deserts and seas. And a denarius was the usual daily wage of a labourer, as Jesus' own parable of the vineyard workers shows. So three hundred denarii was the kind of sum a family might save for years and never reach.

Perfume Poured Out at Bethany. You'll find it in Mark chapter 14, verses 3 to 9. The guests counted the cost. The woman counted Jesus worth it. So here's the question to carry with you. What could you pour out for Jesus this week, even if others don't understand?