In the last week of His life, Jesus has a moving encounter in Bethany. Two days before Passover, He is reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper in Bethany, near Jerusalem, where He is staying. Unexpectedly, a woman enters Simon’s home. Uninvited, and unprompted, she comes to Jesus and pours perfume onto His head from an alabaster jar. The perfume is nard—an expensive oil imported from India. Following its use in this symbolic act of anointing, Jesus foretells His coming death to His disciples and to the other guests that are assembled in the house.

Afterward, the woman is rebuked by some of those present—disciples and others—who accuse her of wasting perfume that could have been sold “for more than a year’s wages” (Mark 14:5), raising money to be given to the poor. However, Jesus immediately defends the woman and tells her accusers to leave her alone. He argues that the poor will always be there, and the disciples can help them at any time.

Jesus then adds that He will not be with His disciples for much longer and explains this to the assembled company: “She poured perfume on My body beforehand to prepare for My burial” (Mark 14:8). None of the Gospel authors tell us how the disciples responded to Jesus’s claim.

A woman anoints Jesus with nard as He dines with friends in Bethany, in this illumination from the Codex de Predis by 15th-century Italian miniaturist Cristoforo de Predis.

Mary of Bethany

In the version of this scene in John’s Gospel, the anointing takes place at a dinner held in Jesus’s honor in Bethany. Here, Mary, the sister of Lazarus, whom Jesus had previously resurrected from the dead (John 11:1), anoints Jesus. According to John, she pours oil over His feet and then wipes them with her hair (John 12:3), filling the house with perfume. This action would have been doubly shocking, given that it was against custom for Jewish women to let down their hair when in public.

John’s description echoes another Gospel event (Luke 7:36–50), in which a “sinful woman” weeps at Jesus’s feet, before drying His feet with her hair and anointing them. While Mary of Bethany is sometimes incorrectly confused with this sinful woman, in all the biblical accounts that reference Mary she is generally portrayed as a good and devoted servant of Jesus.

Jesus portrays Mary’s actions as a sign that she knows what is coming: she, unlike the disciples, accepts His imminent death. The Gospels give no other clues to her motives, although some scholars propose it was to show gratitude to Jesus for raising her brother from the dead. Whatever Mary’s reasons, Jesus asks the disciples to remember her act: “wherever this gospel is preached … what she has done will also be told, in memory of her” (Matthew 26:13).

Preface to betrayal

When Mary anoints Jesus, the disciples are taken aback, not by the scale of her devotion, but rather her extravagance. As John notes, the nard cost 300 denarii, or a year’s wages (a laborer at the time would earn one denarius per day). John’s Gospel attributes the objection about wasting money to just one disciple—Judas Iscariot, the group’s treasurer, who, it is implied, wanted the money for himself (John 12:6). The story closes with Judas going to the chief priests, who offer him money in exchange for handing Jesus to them. Scholars have long debated the correlation between the events at Bethany and Judas’s subsequent betrayal. It is not clear if Jesus’s foretelling of His own demise is a trigger for Judas’s actions.

Anointing for burial

A pharaoh is anointed by gods Horus and Thoth in this bas relief from the Temple of Horus and Sobek in Kom Ombo, Upper Egypt.

In the ancient world, anointing corpses for burial was a common practice. This symbolic act consisted of pouring aromatic oil over a person’s head, feet, or entire body. The effect of the ritual was to designate its object as belonging to God. It did not matter whether the consecration took place when the person—or creature—was alive, or after their death. Sometimes, even inanimate objects were anointed in the Bible—Jacob, for example, anointed a rock in Genesis 28:18, to designate a place, Bethel, as the house of God.

These oils were also used as a form of medicine for centuries by many different cultures. They were thought to have special properties that could drive out demons that were believed to cause disease. To this day, European kings and queens are sanctified with oil in ceremonies involving a divine blessing. When Jesus is anointed in Bethany, this simple act represents a symbolic preparation for His death and an affirmation of His holiness.

See also: The Raising of Lazarus • The Last Supper • Betrayal in the Garden • The Crucifixion • The Empty Tomb