Based on Pastor David Jang’s sermon on the anointing with
perfume in Mark 14, this spiritual essay offers a multi-layered
meditation—through theology, art, music, and the classics—on the mystery of
love that appears wasteful, the tragedy of Judas Iscariot, and the devotion of
the woman of Bethany who prepared Jesus’ burial. Beginning from the house of
Simon the leper in Bethany, this story becomes a profound exploration of our
worship, our devotion, and the very nature of love today.
Pastor David Jang’s sermons have a distinctive appeal in
that they invite us to revisit familiar passages from unexpected angles. The
story of the alabaster jar in Mark 14, too, ceases to be just a short anecdote
in his hands. It is transformed into a drama in which time and space, human
psychology and the spiritual realm are densely interwoven. The house of Simon
the leper in Bethany, the unnamed woman who quietly enters that house and
breaks her alabaster jar, the disciples and Judas who watch the scene with
anger and calculation, and finally Jesus, who declares this apparent waste to
be preparation for his burial—these voices cross and overlap until the sermon
naturally turns to pierce the faith and lives of those of us who live today.
The stage is a small village called Bethany, only a few
days before the crucifixion events in Jerusalem. Scripture is careful to
describe it as “the house of Simon the leper,” deliberately attaching the mark
of his past wound. At the time, leprosy symbolized social and religious
exclusion. Such a person had to be pushed to the margins of the community, cut
off from touch and from love. But Jesus himself comes to this man, and sits at
his table to share a meal. In this brief phrase Pastor David Jang sees the very
heart of the gospel. A soul that knew nothing of love has encountered healing,
and now the place of shame has turned into a feast of gratitude. Simon’s house
is no longer the space of an unclean outcast; it has become a holy place where
a grace-received man sets a table of thanksgiving.
Into the midst of that table, an unnamed woman walks in.
Mark leaves her anonymous, but John’s Gospel tells us that this woman is Mary,
the sister of Lazarus. All four Gospels tell the story of a woman who pours
perfume on Jesus from slightly different angles. Matthew and Mark recount a
woman in the house of Simon in Bethany pouring perfume on Jesus’ head; Luke
tells of a sinful woman who weeps and pours perfume on Jesus’ feet in the house
of a Pharisee; John describes Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus’ feet with
perfume and wiping them with her hair. The times and places differ, but at the
center in every case lie “costly perfume” and “love that looks like waste.”
With this multi-voiced Gospel background, Pastor David Jang examines the event
of Mark 14 in careful detail.
The woman has brought an alabaster jar of pure nard. Nard
was an expensive perfume imported from the region of the Himalayas—an item so
costly that an ordinary household would hardly dare to touch it, something
close to a luxury commodity. According to the Gospel, this perfume was worth
more than three hundred denarii, and since a denarius was the typical day’s
wage for a laborer, it is generally understood to have been the equivalent of
nearly a year’s wages, once Sabbaths and feast days are taken into account. The
woman does not take a little out to use. She breaks the jar itself and pours
the entire content over Jesus’ head and feet in one act. It is a decision that
cannot be taken back, an irreversible choice—the costliest single act of her
entire life.
Pastor David Jang reads this alabaster jar not merely as a
luxury cosmetic, but as a symbol of the woman’s entire existence—her security,
her future, all she has clutched for a lifetime. In the culture of Palestine,
it was customary hospitality to sprinkle a little perfume on an honored guest.
But this woman goes far beyond courtesy. She steps into a realm that social
convention and economic logic cannot control—the realm of love’s excess.
Because of that excess, her love immediately acquires the label “waste.” The
disciples’ indignant words sound familiar even to our ears: “Why this waste of
perfume? It could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and the
money given to the poor.” Their language sounds righteous, ethical, financially
sensible. Yet the preacher diagnoses in this very moment the numbing of the
disciples’ spiritual senses. Their eyes were more drawn to the price tag on the
perfume than to the depth of love poured out on Jesus, more sensitive to the
calculation of loss and gain than to the fragrance of devotion.
The Gospel of John tells us that the one who voiced this
complaint was Judas Iscariot. He says, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the
money given to the poor?” but the Gospel sharply interprets his motives,
explaining that he did not say this because he cared about the poor, but
because he was a thief who kept the money bag. Here the sharp divide appears
between the woman’s love and Judas’ calculation. Pastor David Jang brings to
mind John 13:2: “The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot
to betray Jesus,” and points out that the place where true love is revealed,
yet we feel disturbed and begin to criticize it, becomes precisely the gap
through which Satan works. A heart that cannot receive love as love, that can
see devotion only as waste—that heart finally pushes Judas all the way to
betrayal.
This dramatic contrast has been endlessly reinterpreted not
only in theology but also in the worlds of art and music. For instance, in a
seventeenth-century drawing titled “Mary Magdalen at the Feet of Christ” in the
Prado Museum, a woman who appears to be Mary Magdalene kneels on the floor,
kissing the feet of Christ. Next to the seated Christ at the table, another
figure gestures with a mixture of shock and displeasure on his face. This
visualization of Luke’s story—of a sinful woman pouring tears and perfume on
Jesus’ feet—captures with striking density the posture of devotion that fixes
its gaze on the Lord alone, pushing through contempt and rebuke. In modern
Christian paintings that depict “Mary anointing the feet of Jesus,” the image
of a woman clinging to Jesus’ feet in tears is repeatedly set against Judas
standing in the background with a scowling face. Love and greed, worship and
calculation, collide in a vivid contrast.
The passage also carries special weight in music. Johann
Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion follows Matthew’s passion narrative,
weaving together the Gospel story and the congregation’s inner response in a
grand sacred oratorio. Early in the work, the scene of anointing at Bethany is
placed, and the following chorus, “Wozu dienet dieser Unrat?” (“To what purpose
is this waste?”), has the choir give voice to the disciples’ complaint in their
indignation. Immediately afterward, the Evangelist and Jesus sing a recitative
in which Jesus responds that the woman has done this to prepare him for burial.
As Pastor David Jang emphasizes in his sermon, what the world and even the
disciples see as waste, Jesus reinterprets as beautiful devotion that
anticipates his death. Bach expresses this theological re-reading through
musical tension and resolution, while the preacher draws that same re-reading
into our worship and our daily lives, making us ask again what we call waste
and what we call worship.
Pastor David Jang refuses to treat the woman’s act as a
momentary burst of emotion. He understands it as a display of spiritual
intuition that sensed Jesus’ death and burial. In Jesus’ words, “She has
anointed my body beforehand for burial,” his entire life is compressed as a
journey of love for us—a journey whose final destination is the cross. Perfume
was used to wash and honor the body of the dead, to show final respect with
fragrance. Before the cross has even taken place, the woman—perhaps sensing that
this might be her last opportunity—takes out what is most precious to her and
pours it over the Lord’s body. It is a daring act that only someone who has
felt the approaching death of the beloved could choose. Her wasteful love, in
turn, becomes a prophetic gesture that dimly foreshadows Jesus himself, whose
body and blood will soon be “broken and poured out” as love on the cross.
At this point the sermon naturally flows into Luke 15, the
parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son. A shepherd who
leaves ninety-nine sheep in the open field to search for one that is lost, a
woman who finds one coin and calls her neighbors together to celebrate, a
father who runs to embrace a son who squandered his wealth and returns home,
and who gives him the best robe, a ring, and the fattened calf—none of this can
be justified by economic logic. Everything is irrational and inefficient in
human terms. Yet Jesus unhesitatingly points to God standing at the very peak
of this inefficiency. Love always exceeds calculation, and that excess looks
like “waste.” Pastor David Jang notes that those who try to cut out this waste
were the disciples—and may well be us today. The problem is not responsibility
or efficiency in themselves, but the moment they become the primary standard,
ahead of love.
He also soberly exposes how easily our faith is captured by
a “Judas-like rationality.” When we talk about the time we give to worship, the
effort of our service, the way money is spent, the fruit of ministry, we almost
instinctively reach for the language of “efficiency,” “results,” and “return on
investment.” Such language may be necessary to run organizations and projects,
but when we begin to apply the same metrics to love, worship quickly turns cold
and evaluative. Pastor David Jang says, “As love grows cold, we become smarter
and more calculating,” and warns that intelligence without love can be deadly.
The woman’s act is certainly irrational. Yet precisely because of that
irrationality, Jesus declares, “She has done a beautiful thing to me,” and promises
that wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done
will also be told in memory of her.
In another sense, Pastor David Jang’s life itself embodies
the tension between love and structure, devotion and institution. A Korean-born
theologian and pastor, he founded various Christian educational and mission
institutions and media ministries, including Olivet University in the United
States. This record shows that he has not allowed love to remain a passing
emotion, but has sought to organize it into sustainable devotion through
education, media, and mission structures. Yet in this sermon, the point he
keeps returning to is unmistakable: the moment any institution or ministry
loses the heart of that unconditional, reckless love displayed by the woman of
Bethany, it becomes little more than an empty shell, no different from Judas’
calculations.
In today’s culture, the story of the woman of Bethany
continues to be reinterpreted through various works of art and spiritual
traditions. In icons and paintings of the anointing of Jesus, a small alabaster
jar is often painted beside Mary Magdalene kneeling at the foot of the cross,
as her identifying symbol. In contemporary worship music, songs such as
“Alabaster Jar” and “Alabaster Box” repeat the confession, “I will pour out my
all before the Lord.” Classical spiritual writers and preachers have long compared
the fragrance of the perfume to the grace that flows from a life that has been
broken. It is not when life remains intact, but when the jar is shattered that
the deepest fragrance spreads. Pastor David Jang’s sermon resonates with this
tradition, yet he refuses to leave the image at the level of abstraction. He
brings that fragrance back into the concrete relationship between Jesus and us.
Ultimately this passage poses a question to each of us:
Whom do I resemble in this story? Am I like the woman who breaks her jar and
pours out the perfume, or like the disciples standing beside her, calculating
and asking, “Why this waste?” Or am I perhaps like Judas, troubled deep down by
the scene of love and eventually walking away from the Lord altogether? Pastor
David Jang does not pose this as a simple moral test. It is a spiritual
diagnosis of how deeply we have received the gospel, and whether we have
experienced Jesus’ love as a real event rather than as an abstract doctrine. As
long as the love of Christ remains only an idea in our heads, other people’s
devotion will always look excessive, even dangerous. But when the love that
pursued us all the way to the cross begins to take root in us as a lived
reality, we gradually gain the courage to become foolish. We gain the courage
to stop calculating, and to break our own alabaster jars.
In the end the sermon circles back to where it began. Jesus
goes to the house of Simon the leper in love. He embraces and defends the
sinful woman in love. He keeps the seats of his disciples open to the end in
love. From the perspective of cold reason, everything about the Lord’s love
looks like waste. He prays in tears for disciples who will betray him, sheds
blood for crowds who will scatter, and waits patiently for people who will turn
their backs on him. Yet without this seemingly wasteful love, there would be no
way for us to know the gospel at all. And so the question naturally changes
shape: “If the Lord has ‘wasted’ himself for me to that extent, what am I still
clutching as too precious to give?” Is it my time, my money, my reputation and
safe future? The story of the woman of Bethany is a quiet yet unavoidable
invitation for each of us to ask what alabaster jar we are holding—and when we
will break it before the Lord.
Jesus said, “Wherever the gospel is preached throughout the
world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” This promise is
still being fulfilled today through preachers like Pastor David Jang, and
through the lives of those who read reflections like this one. The fragrance of
the perfume once filled the house of Simon in Bethany; now it waits to fill our
daily lives and relationships, our worship and our devotion. Those who refuse
to call love a waste, who instead choose wastefulness with joy—where such
people gather, there is the true church, and their very lives become the most
compelling testimony of the gospel to the world.
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