Pure Nard, Very Costly
John 12:2-11, Mark 14:3-9, Matthew 14:3-9
It was Jesus’ last Sunday on earth when he and the twelve disciples arrived at Bethany, to the home of Simon the leper. (“Six days before the Passover,” John 12:1. That would be Sunday, six days before the Passover feast the following Saturday.) It is thought likely Simon the leper had died, and his heirs lived there: Martha, Mary, and their brother Lazarus.
Martha was serving the meal to the guests and Lazarus at the table. The normally-quiet Mary came in among them with an alabaster box of pure-nard ointment, containing perhaps twelve fluid ounces of it, very costly. She went to Jesus and poured it first on his head, and then on his feet. She let down her hair to rub it in gently. It was gratitude of the highest order!
Mary, anointing the feet of Jesus
But there was another way someone could look at it. Judas assessed the value of the nard at 300 days’ wages of a day- laborer — a full year’s wages. Perhaps three thousand hours near minimum wage would be around $20,000 in modern U.S. money. Could that have fed two hundred poor people for a week?
But Mary viewed things differently. Three hundred days’ minimum wage might be the cost today of going to a hospital for an appendectomy. But her brother did not have an appendectomy. Lazarus was dead! Jesus brought him back from the dead. And the great physician Jesus asked for nothing in return. “She hath done what she could”
— Bro. James Parkinson