Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Alabaster Jar
Matthew 26:6-13
6 Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, · WEB
A woman breaks open a fortune over his head and is criticized for it — and he says it was for his burial.
Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came to him having an alabaster jar of very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table Matthew 26:6–7.
The scene is told in the earlier account Mark 14:1–21, which prices the ointment at a year's wages. The house belongs to a man still known by the disease he must no longer have had, since nobody was dining with a leper.
Anointing the head is what is done to a king 1 Samuel 10:1, and it is done here by a woman with no standing to do it, three days before the trial at which the kingship is the charge.
"Why this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much and given to the poor" Matthew 26:8–9. The objection is unanswerable on its own terms, and it is the kind of criticism that is hardest to refuse because it is made in the name of something good.
"Why do you trouble the woman? She has done a good work for me" Matthew 26:10. The defense is of her rather than of the act, and he takes the criticism onto himself.
"For you always have the poor with you, but you don't always have me" Matthew 26:11. The line has been misused to excuse neglect, and it says the opposite of that. It is a quotation from the law's instruction about open-handedness Deuteronomy 15:11, where the permanence of poverty is the reason for permanent generosity. What is scarce is not the opportunity to give; it is the week he has left.
"For in pouring this ointment on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial" Matthew 26:12. She is the only person in the book who acts as though the announcements were true. The men have heard four of them and are arguing about accounting; she has done the one thing that will not be possible later, and the women who come to the tomb with spices on Sunday find they are too late Matthew 28:1.
"Wherever this Good News is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be spoken of as a memorial of her" Matthew 26:13. The promise is kept in the act of recording it, and her name is not given.
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