Break the Jar

Context

Six days before Passover, Jesus is back at the house in Bethany where he raised Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus is at the table, alive, eating bread. Martha is serving. And Mary has been listening to something nobody else wants to hear.

Jesus keeps saying he is going to die. The disciples keep not hearing it. Mary heard.

Story

She walks in holding a jar of pure nard — a year's wages of perfume, the kind of thing you save for a funeral or a wedding or the crowning of a king.

She breaks it. She pours the whole thing on his feet. Then she unties her hair in public, something a respectable woman simply does not do, and wipes his feet with it. The whole house fills with the smell.

Judas calls it a waste. That money could have fed the poor for a year, he says. It sounds noble. It isn't — he was the one helping himself to the money bag.

"Leave her alone. She kept this for the day of my burial. You'll always have the poor. You won't always have me."

Mary never says a word. She just stays kneeling on a floor that now smells like a year of her life. Six days later his body would be in a tomb, and the perfume would already be doing its work.

What We Learn

Judas had a perfectly good reason to wait. The poor are real. The math was real. Jesus didn't say the math was wrong — he said the timing was. Some things have a window, and once it closes, no amount of correct accounting opens it back up.

There is somebody you could call right now. A jar you could break before the funeral. Don't wait for a more reasonable day.