When he was in Bethany reclining at table
in the house of Simon the leper,
a woman came with an alabaster jar of perfumed oil,
costly genuine spikenard.
She broke the alabaster jar and poured it on his head.
There were some who were indignant.
“Why has there been this waste of perfumed oil?
It could have been sold for more than three hundred days’ wages
and the money given to the poor.”
They were infuriated with her.
Jesus said, “Let her alone.
Why do you make trouble for her?
She has done a good thing for me.
The poor you will always have with you,
and whenever you wish you can do good to them,
but you will not always have me.
She has done what she could.
She has anticipated anointing my body for burial.
Amen, I say to you,
wherever the gospel is proclaimed to the whole world,
what she has done will be told in memory of her.”
Mark 14
I hoard my treasures, day by day, but all my work will have one wage: All that I hold will go its way by sickness, violence, war, or age. So everything I bring you, Lord— the costly oil and sweet perfume that on your body I have poured— are but the treasures of the tomb. Take, then, my sorrow and my love, as you have taken human flesh and left the riches up above to take our suffering and death, keep them, my love, against the day that you will sink into the ground. My heart goes with you on the way until I go, in linen bound. As if the gift were rich and rare that is the doom of all who're born, I take the excess with my hair against the day I'm left forlorn. I bear the fragrance of your death: The precious airs of myrrh and nard perfume my each remaining breath, all flowing from a broken jar.
Kate Bluett 