Anointed

Mark 14:1-15:47

We are all familiar with the Last Supper, the final meal that Jesus shared with his friends the night he was betrayed, the meal we remember on Maundy Thursday and every time we share the Eucharist. But did you ever notice that there’s also a First Supper? Our Lenten study group spent an entire session talking about the First Supper, the meal at which Jesus is anointed by an unnamed woman in the Gospel of Mark. Two days before that fateful night that changed everything, Jesus was at a different table, in the home of someone he had healed of a painful and isolating illness. In the home of Simon the leper, in the same town where Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave, a woman arrives with a jar of expensive and richly perfumed oil. In an act of shocking extravagance, this woman breaks open the jar and pours its contents over Jesus’s head.

To anoint someone in antiquity was no small thing. Priests were anointed with oil as they ascended and began their service in the Temple. Kings were anointed as they ascended their thrones. King David was anointed in secret as a young man, a rebellious and dangerous act by a priest who foresaw the downfall of King Saul. And in the ancient world, in a final act of devotion and grief, the bodies of the dead were anointed by their families. This wasn’t a typical activity for a dinner party.

There are some among the dinner guests who are made uncomfortable by the woman’s choice to make such a scene. They criticize her for what they deem as waste- why pour out this oil on the head of a living man? Why not sell it and give the money to the poor, as Jesus has counselled some of his wealthy followers to do? The woman either had significant personal wealth to purchase such a thing, or else it was a sacrificial expense, purchased and saved for the burial of herself or a loved one. In either case, her critics scold her for her extravagance.

But why did she do it? According to Jesus, she is anointing him for his burial, an event that is coming much sooner than anyone in the room can understand. Perhaps she had taken Jesus at his word when he predicted the kind of death that awaits him in Jerusalem. Perhaps she cannot go with him, so she offers what honor and comfort she can while he is near at hand. Maybe, just maybe, she had been listening much closer than the disciples, and knew that there would be no body to anoint, that the tomb might turn up empty in the end. It wouldn’t be the first time, or the last, that a woman understood Jesus while his male followers stumbled around in the dark.

Whatever her motives, whatever the reactions of her peers in the moment, Jesus affirms her good service and promises that wherever the Gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, she will be remembered for her devotion. And here she is, remembered two thousand years and multiple languages and continents later. Her name might have been lost to the sands of time, but the way she loved Jesus cannot be erased.

Next week, during the Easter liturgy, the Church will welcome a newly baptized member into the Body of Christ. But first, after the water and before the welcome, I will mark the forehead of one of the newest Christians in the world with oil. This oil, called chrism, is a combination of very fine olive oil grown and pressed in Palestine and an essential oil distilled and bottled in the Holy Land. Our bishop has blessed this oil on the altar, and vials and jars of the same oil will be used to anoint the newly baptized all over our diocese. Just as the woman poured costly oil over the head of Jesus, we pour oil over the heads of every person who is reborn in Christ.

The anointing of the newly baptized is tied to the giving of the Holy Spirit, a practice carried forward from the early church and shown in the Book of Acts. But I wonder if it is also another way we fulfill the promise Jesus made, that the unnamed woman’s anointing would never be forgotten. A way we remember that first supper, when Jesus enjoyed one last glimpse of the life he was about to lose, surrounded by friends who had not yet abandoned him, cared for by a member of his chosen family in the only way she knew how. This is our reminder of all Jesus loved and lost for our sake. This is the kind of kingship he chose so that we might one day see his kingdom come. May that kingdom come.