Biblion Bible Commentary
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A Pound of Pure Nard
John 12:1-11
1 Then, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, who had been dead, whom he raised from the dead. · WEB
Mary empties a fortune over his feet, Judas objects on behalf of the poor, and the account says what he really was.
Then, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, who had been dead, whom he raised from the dead John 12:1.
The week begins at a dinner in a house where a man who had been buried is at the table. Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those who sat at the table with him John 12:2 — both sisters exactly as before.
Therefore Mary took a pound of ointment of pure nard, very precious, and anointed Jesus\x27 feet and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment John 12:3.
Nard was imported from the far side of the Himalayas, and a pound of it was worth a laborer's year. It came sealed, and the whole of it goes.
The detail about the smell is a witness's. Everyone at that table would afterward have associated the perfume with the week that followed — and Judas is about to price it.
And the hair is the extravagance inside the extravagance. A woman's hair was covered in public; she takes it down in a room full of men and uses it as a towel on his feet, which is the lowest place at any table.
"Why wasn't this ointment sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?" John 12:5.
The objection is unanswerable on its own terms and that is what makes it dangerous. Three hundred days' wages could have fed a great many people, and nothing about the arithmetic is wrong.
Now he said this, not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and having the money box, used to steal what was put into it John 12:6.
The writer's note is unsparing and it is the sharpest thing in the chapter. The most compassionate sentence in the room was said by the one man there who did not mean it.
That is worth sitting with rather than reading past. Concern for the poor is genuine and this Gospel does not disparage it; what is exposed is a use of it — a real good invoked to attack somebody, by a man with his hand in the bag. It is the oldest way of dressing an interest as a principle.
"Leave her alone. She has kept this for the day of my burial" John 12:7.
He defends her and does not defend the act on its economics. And he tells the room what she has done, which she may not have known herself: bodies were anointed for burial, and his will be prepared in a hurry six days from now by men working against sundown John 19:40. She is the only person in the book who acts as if the announcements were true.
"For you always have the poor with you, but you don't always have me" John 12:8.
The line has been misused to excuse indifference and says the opposite. It is a quotation from the law's instruction about open-handedness, where the permanence of poverty is given as the reason for permanent generosity Deuteronomy 15:11. What is scarce is not the opportunity to give. It is the week he has left.
The chief priests conspired to put Lazarus to death also, because on account of him many of the Jews went away and believed in Jesus John 12:10–11.
The last note is almost comic in its desperation. A man raised from the dead is inconvenient evidence, and the proposed remedy is to put him back.
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