Matthew 26:10

The Text

Jesus notices what is happening around the table in Simon's house. The disciples have turned on the woman with the alabaster jar, calling her extravagance a waste, and Jesus cuts across their arithmetic with a question of his own: why are you making trouble for her? Then comes the verdict that overturns theirs. What they call waste, he calls a good work, and he adds two words that change everything about how we read the scene: for me. Not a good work in the abstract, not charity in general, but something done to him, on his body, in the days before his death. The indignation in the room is real. So is the rebuke.

The Core

The disciples are not wrong about the poor; they are wrong about the hour. Their objection sounds like obedience, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. Scripture is full of commands to open your hand to the needy, and the disciples have clearly absorbed them. But a principle held without discernment of the moment becomes a weapon against a person. Jesus does not say that the ointment was well spent because it produced some greater good. He says it was good because it was for him, and because he is about to die. Here is the uncomfortable center: Christ claims a devotion that cannot be converted into social utility and does not need to justify itself in those terms. He is not one cause among others. He is the one the causes were always pointing toward.

The Common Thread

Oil poured on a head is not a private gesture in Israel; it is how kings are made. Samuel poured oil over David while his brothers watched, and the Spirit came. The title Messiah means nothing more exotic than "anointed one." So this woman, unnamed and uninvited, does with her jar what prophets did with their horns, and she does it two days before the man she anoints is enthroned on a cross with a charge nailed above his head. Jesus himself redirects the meaning one step further: "she did it to prepare me for burial." Coronation and funeral collapse into one act. That double meaning is the whole gospel in miniature, and she performed it without knowing she had.

The Mirror

We are rarely indignant about stinginess. We get indignant about extravagance, especially other people's. The mother who quits a good salary to be home. The couple who give to a cause you consider sentimental. The friend who spends an hour a day praying when the church roof needs fixing. Notice how quickly the language of stewardship arrives to dress up what is really irritation, and how satisfying it is to have the poor on your side of an argument. Jesus hears that tone and calls it what it is: trouble made for a woman who was not asking anyone's permission. Today, think of one person whose generosity or devotion you privately called excessive, and send them a short message naming the thing you dismissed and telling them you see it differently now.

The Main Character

"Knowing this, Jesus said to them." He sees the muttering before it reaches him, and he steps between the woman and the room. This is a man forty-eight hours from arrest, sorrowful to the point of death in the garden soon after, and what occupies him here is that someone small is being shamed at a dinner table. He also does something stranger: he receives. Through Matthew he has healed, fed, taught, washed the crowds with mercy, and now he sits still and lets himself be served, lets expensive oil run down his hair. The one who is about to give everything accepts a gift he cannot repay, and defends the giver's honor while he does it.

The Question

Does "you always have the poor with you" let us off the hook? The sentence has been used that way for centuries, usually by comfortable people. But the line comes from Deuteronomy 15, where God says the poor will never cease from the land and therefore commands an open hand, wide open, to your needy brother. Jesus is quoting a command, not shrugging. Still, the asymmetry stands and he does not soften it: for this one hour, the ointment belongs on his body, not in the collection box. He claims a priority that no cause may override. That claim is either the truth about who he is, or it is monstrous. Matthew leaves us with no third option.

The Intertext

Watch what Matthew puts immediately next. The woman breaks open something worth a year's wages and pours it out; four verses later Judas asks what they are willing to give him, and "they weighed out for him thirty pieces of silver." Poured out against weighed out. One transaction has no calculation in it at all, the other is nothing but calculation, and the price is the compensation Exodus sets for a gored slave. Matthew has arranged the two so that you cannot miss it. The sharper tension is with his own chapter 25, where Jesus identifies himself with the hungry and imprisoned, the least of these. Both are true, and the difference is the hour: while his body was among us it could be anointed, and now it is found among the poor he said we would always have.

Reflection

Where have you used a good principle, correctly stated, to shame someone whose devotion embarrassed you?

If Jesus is not one worthy cause among others, what does that change about the things you refuse to spend on him?

Go deeper in Matthew

Hand picked books that unpack this Bible book further.

Matthew For Everyone, Part 1

N.T. Wright

Short, fresh readings that make Matthew feel newly written.

Read on Kobo →

The Message of Matthew

Michael Green

The King and his kingdom, traced through the whole Gospel.

Read on Kobo →

Matthew

Michael Wilkins

Explains what it meant then, and bridges it honestly to life now.

Read on Kobo →

The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

John Stott

Stott's classic on Matthew 5-7, the charter of the kingdom.

Read on Kobo →

Matthew: An Introduction and Commentary

R.T. France

A trusted Tyndale commentary: compact, careful and clear on every passage.

Read on Kobo →

Faith.network earns a small commission on Kobo purchases made through these links, at no extra cost to you. It helps keep the studies free.