The Anointing at Bethany

Today we are going to look at Jesus’ anointing at Bethany. This is a story that some skeptics use to show that Jesus was not an all-caring person or an all-loving God. Some Christians have even twisted these verses to claim we don’t need to care about the poor, or that it is pointless to try to help them because we are never going to eradicate poverty.

For some of us, we read these verses and we struggle to understand what Jesus meant. I admit that I had trouble with these verses when I first became a Christian. So let’s take a closer look.

You Will Always Have the Poor With You

About a week before the Passover, and on the eve of his Triumphal Entry, Mary took some expensive perfume and anointed Jesus’ feet with it. Then she wiped his feet with her hair.

This did not sit well with Judas, who claimed they could have sold the perfume and used the money to help the poor. Here is how it plays out from the book of John:

³ Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. ⁴ But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, ⁵ “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” ⁶ He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. ⁷ Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. ⁸ For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”¹

What did Jesus mean by this? It sounds like he was saying you can take care of the poor anytime, but this is all about me right now. He seems to be putting himself above the less fortunate.

This doesn’t sound like Jesus. In fact it seems to go against everything he taught about loving our neighbors and about caring for the poor, so there must be more to this.

Three Takeaways

Rebuking Judas

First, Jesus was rebuking Judas because he knew, as John tells us, that Judas didn’t care about the poor. Judas was being pretentious, trying to show others how much he cared about the poor. We call this virtue signaling today.

Jesus once said that when you give to the poor don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.² You are not to make a big deal about giving to the poor, but to do it quietly and humbly so that you are not seeking glory from man. But Judas wanted everybody around to think that he was a good person who had the needy in mind.

Judas was going against what Jesus taught about giving with humility by making a public spectacle of himself. He was not being sincere. He was really only concerned with the money which he thought was being thrown away. Jesus knew this and called him out on it.

Quoting the Old Testament

At the same time, Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy:

¹⁰ You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him, because for this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. ¹¹ For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’³

This passage in Deuteronomy is telling us how we are to treat the poor. There will always be poor people among us, we need to recognize they are here and we are to give to them freely and cheerfully. We are not to ignore them or cast them aside.

The disciples would have understood that Jesus was quoting this verse and they would have known the context. At this point they didn’t understand Jesus would be leaving them soon, but looking back on this afterwards they would have understood that Jesus was using Judas’ pretentiousness to remind them to be humble and to take care of the poor when he was gone.

Praising God

But this was a unique moment and right then, at that particular time, it was time to worship God because God’s time on this earth was growing short. Mary probably understood Jesus would soon be leaving them more so than the others. Although she probably didn’t fully realize it at the time, this was an act of worship.

As we discussed in the “Counting the Cost” series, God must always come first in our lives. We must live for God and we must live as God would want us to, and part of that means taking care of the less fortunate as described in Deuteronomy. Jesus was NEVER implying that we shouldn’t take care of the poor.

Conclusion

In this one Bible passage Jesus rebukes greed, dishonesty, and pretentiousness; reminds the disciples that we are to humbly take care of the poor when he is gone; and reminds us all that worshiping God is our first priority.

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1. John 12:3-8 ESV ↩︎
2. See Matthew 6:3 ↩︎
3. Deuteronomy 15:10-11 ESV ↩︎