Mark 14.1-11: The expensive ointment.

Passover was coming—the Feast of Matzoh in two days—and the head priests and scribes were looking for a way to bait, catch, and maybe kill Jesus. They were saying, “Not during the feast; we don’t want an uprising.”

While Jesus was at Bethany, hanging out at Simon the Leper’s house, a woman came in who had an alabaster box of pure spikenard ointment; very expensive. Breaking the box, she poured it on Jesus’s head. Certain people were angry, telling themselves, “Why has she wasted the ointment? It was possible to sell this ointment for more than 300 denarii, to give to the poor.” They were rebuking her.

Jesus said, “Forgive her. Why are you giving her trouble? She did me a good deed. You always have poor people with you: You can do them good deeds whenever you want. You don’t always have me. What she had, she used. She anointed my body ahead of time for burial. Amen: I promise you wherever the gospel is proclaimed, all over the world, what she did will be spoken of in her memory.”

Judas of Keriot, one of the Twelve, went to the head priests so he could turn Jesus in to them. Hearing this, they rejoiced and promised to give him silver. Judas sought an opportune time to turn him in.

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Different gospels fill in different details to this story. Matthew has it pretty much as Mark does. Luke puts it much earlier in Jesus’s ministry. John states this was a meal given in Jesus’s honor (though in Luke Jesus points out Simon the Leper, the host, didn’t bother to kiss him hello or provide for him to wash his feet). In John, this woman is identified as Mary, Lazarus’s sister. In Luke, she’s called an awful sinner, and is weeping while she does this. Both Luke and John report she poured the ointment on his feet, not his head; and she wiped his feet off with her own hair.

If you’re into inerrancy, likely you’re gonna deal with the contradictions by saying this event happened more than once: The Matthew/Mark incident and the Luke/John incident. Or the Matthew/Mark/Luke incident and the John incident. Whatever floats your boat. I think it more reasonable this is all the same incident.

In all four gospels, the people give the woman grief for doing this, ’cause they were outraged at how expensive this act of devotion was. The ointment was Himalayan spikenard, likely imported from India, and therefore not cheap. The people in the room were appraising it at 300 denarii. That’s about $950 in today’s money, but silver prices fluctuate; some translations render it “a year’s wages,” based on the idea you could hire a day’s labor with a denarius. Figure you’d have to work three weeks for an ounce of this stuff, and she poured out a year’s worth. On his feet.

John states it’s Judas of Keriot who objected, “This could’ve been given to the poor.” (Although John doubted Judas’s motives, since Judas tended to dip his hand in the students’ common purse. ) Christians nowadays still have trouble with the idea of really expensive acts of devotion which do little to nothing for the needy and poor. I myself have ranted from time to time about churches who build expensive statues or steeples or crosses, or put on expensive multimedia presentations, yet have no shelters nor food closet, nor do much at all for the poor.

But Jesus wasn’t saying the poor were irrelevant. What he meant was, the complaint “This could’ve been given to the poor” was rubbish. The people were outraged solely because money was wasted. Not because the poor were deprived. They could give a rip about the poor. The only reason they brought up the poor was because they didn’t want to admit how dumping expensive ointment on Jesus’s feet was a gut-punch to their souls: The part of them which worshiped Mammon was crying out “Blasphemy!” Their god had just been mocked. “This could’ve been given to the poor” was their way of disguising their idolatry as liberal guilt.

So Jesus called them on it. “You always have poor people with you.” Not, as is often mistranslated, “You will always have the poor among you.” He used present tense, not future. Jesus wasn’t predicting that poverty is an unsolvable problem. I’ve heard plenty of preachers say so, but that interpretation is their way of disguising their Mammon-worship. They justify the practice of social Darwinism, of dismissing the poor, by claiming Jesus said we’d always have poor. Jesus said no such thing. His point was that the people in the room always had poor people among them—and hadn’t done anything for them to date. Would they do anything more for them if the woman had donated an extra 300 denarii? No. They’d spend it on themselves, and claim they were helping the poor by letting the money trickle down.

“You can do them good deeds whenever you want.” In other words, you don’t have to wait till you have 300 denarii. That’s most people’s excuse for doing nothing for the needy: “I can’t afford to. I haven’t the money to spare.” As if money is the only way to help the needy. If you have resources you can share, time to spare, and access they lack, you can give what you have. That was these people’s problem: They didn’t give what they had. They hoarded it. The woman, on the other hand, gave what she had: Ointment. Crazy-expensive ointment, but the Kingdom of God doesn’t run on money. It runs entirely on grace.

Jesus correctly predicted that whenever the gospel is taught, this story is included with it. And it is. It’s in all four gospels; whether you pass out a stand-alone Gospel of Mark or Gospel of John, you’re gonna get this story. When people teach on Jesus, inevitably they come round to this story. They don’t always get its point, but they tell it. Sometimes with Luke’s emphasis, on the woman’s sins and God’s great forgiveness. Sometimes with Matthew and Mark and John’s emphasis on the expensive perfume.

And some of us get it. You get it, right?

Oh yeah: Judas.

Both Mark and Matthew bookend this story with the priests’ plot to capture Jesus, and Judas of Keriot’s offer to turn him in. In this way Mark implies this story had something to do with Judas’s decision.

Because the gospels never specifically say why Judas went rogue, Christians tend to speculate. Often without merit. Probably the most popular guess is that Judas was expecting a political Messiah, and Jesus didn’t act at all like the Roman-smiting revolutionary Judas had longed for. I suspect the reason Christians like this interpretation, is because we’re so often tempted to get political, and seize power, whereas the Kingdom of God is about surrender and submission. We’re reading our motives into Judas.

I suspect it’s a lot more basic than that. All the gospels point out Judas turned Jesus in for money; Matthew nails it down at 30 silver coins (probably sheqels). Remember, both Mark and Matthew’s emphasis, in the story about the ointment, was on the value of the ointment, not the sins of the woman. (The emphasis on her sins was a Luke thing.) In John it was Judas who was outraged at the expense. Money was Judas’s weak point.

Likely money was Judas’s motive for following Jesus: When Jesus took his Kingdom, and appointed his Twelve as his closest advisers, Judas figured he’d be set for life. But the more he watched Jesus, the more he realized this wasn’t at all the sort of Kingdom our Lord intended to run. He had his heart set on a jeweled crown and a mansion. And I, and many other American Christians, grew up with many a Sunday School lesson about how God would grant each of us a jeweled crown and a mansion once we got to heaven—despite how “mansion” in King James’s day meant “apartment” and the “crowns of life” are meant to represent victory, not rule, and are more likely leafy than golden. We Americans are so fixated on wealth sometimes; we forget money and possessions aren’t the only blessings God offers us.

This is why we risk making Judas’s mistake. If we’re following Jesus because we’re hoping to get wealth or financial success out of it, we’re following him for the wrong reasons. And our pursuit of wealth is gonna warp all our interpretations of the scriptures to suit our motives. We may not throw up our hands, as Judas did, and figure we’ll get paid another way: We’ll follow Jesus to the end, and expect him to pay us. And we’ll be disappointed. New Jerusalem is going to be paved with gold. Not literally; New Jerusalem is described this way to give us the idea of how valuable it is to God, and how valuable it should be to us. But just as we learned about supply and demand in economics, if gold is so common it’s like sand, it’ll have the value of sand: It’ll be useless as money. If God provides all our needs, money is no longer a need.

Heavenly economics isn’t based on gold. As I said already: It’s based on grace. Judas didn’t get that, and rejected grace in favor of money. Let’s not foolishly do likewise.