New Testament · New Testament
Mary of Bethany
“Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus's feet and wiped his feet with her hair.”John 12:3
Biography
Mary of Bethany was the sister of Martha and Lazarus and is portrayed in the Gospels as the one who sat at Jesus's feet to listen (Luke 10), who anointed Jesus's feet with expensive nard and wiped them with her hair (John 12), and whose grief over Lazarus's death moved Jesus to weeping. Jesus defended her extravagant act of anointing against the disciples' criticism: 'Leave her alone. She has done a beautiful thing to me... wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.'
Spiritual Lesson
Mary's act of anointing Jesus was called 'beautiful' by Jesus himself — extravagant, criticized, and immortalized. She gave the most costly thing she had in an act that Judas calculated as waste. Yet Jesus said her act would be remembered wherever the gospel is preached. True worship is always excessive by the world's accounting. Mary understood something about the coming death of Jesus that even the Twelve had not grasped — her love made her perceptive.