Table of Contents
I’m a content architect and director, but long before that, I was simply a student of stories.
For most of my life, the Scriptures have been my deepest wellspring of meaning, a landscape of profound narratives that have shaped my understanding of the world.
Yet, for years, one particular story felt less like a wellspring and more like a thorn in my side.
It was the story—or rather, the stories—of the woman who anoints Jesus.
My struggle began, as it does for many, with a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to treat the four Gospels like a single, harmonized police report.
I would line up the accounts from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, trying to iron out the wrinkles and force them into one neat, linear sequence.
Who was the woman? Where did it happen? When? What exactly did she do? The more I tried to smooth over the differences, the more jagged and irreconcilable they seemed.
I remember one particularly humbling evening leading a small Bible study.
Armed with a whiteboard and a set of colored markers, I tried to map it all O.T. “Okay,” I began, “in Matthew and Mark, an unnamed woman anoints Jesus’s head at the house of Simon the Leper, two days before Passover.
But in John, it’s Mary of Bethany, and she anoints his feet at Lazarus’s house, six days before Passover.
And then there’s Luke’s account, which happens way earlier in Jesus’s ministry, where an unnamed ‘sinful woman’ anoints his feet at the house of Simon the Pharisee.”
The result was a chaotic, contradictory mess on the whiteboard.
Instead of clarity, I had created a diagram of confusion.
My friends looked more puzzled than when we started.
I felt a deep sense of failure, not just as a teacher, but as a reader of this sacred text.
It felt like I was holding the shattered pieces of a beautiful vase, unable to see how they could possibly fit together.
The story itself felt broken, and I was failing to see its beauty.
This failure forced me to ask more honest questions.
Was I approaching this all wrong? Are these simply different events, or are some accounts more historically “accurate” than others? Why would the Gospel writers, under divine inspiration, present such a confusing and fragmented picture of a moment Jesus himself declared would be told “in memory of her” wherever the gospel is proclaimed?.1
For years, these questions sat with me, a persistent intellectual and spiritual splinter.
The story remained a collection of beautiful but broken shards.
The Shattered Vase: Why the Standard Explanations Felt Broken
To move forward, I first had to fully acknowledge the problem.
I had to lay out all the pieces of the shattered story on the table and stare at their sharp, contradictory edges without flinching.
Trying to glue them together with simple harmonization wasn’t working; the seams were too obvious, the pieces didn’t align.
Each Gospel account, while sharing a core event, presented a shard with a unique shape and color.
Shard 1: The Woman’s Identity
The central figure is a puzzle.
In Matthew and Mark, she is simply “a woman,” anonymous and powerful in her silent action.3 In Luke, she is also unnamed but given a specific, poignant label: “a woman in the city, which was a sinner”.3 This description has led to centuries of speculation, often assuming she was a prostitute, though the text never explicitly states this.5 Then, in John’s Gospel, she is given a name and a family: Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and the recently resurrected Lazarus.3 To compound the confusion, church tradition has often conflated these figures with yet another woman, Mary Magdalene, from whom Jesus had cast out seven demons.3 This popular but biblically unsupported fusion created the enduring, though likely inaccurate, image of Mary Magdalene as the penitent prostitute anointing Jesus’ feet.9 The identity of the woman, the very heart of the story, was fractured across the narratives.
Shard 2: The Location and Host
The setting is just as inconsistent.
Matthew and Mark place the dinner in Bethany, at the house of a man named “Simon the Leper”.1 This name itself is a curiosity, as a practicing leper would have been an outcast, forbidden from hosting a meal under Jewish law.10 The name likely signifies that he was a man Jesus had previously healed, now bearing the title as a testament to his restoration.
Luke’s account, however, is set much earlier and in a different region, likely Galilee, at the house of a man named “Simon the Pharisee”.3 While they share a common name—Simon was one of the most popular Jewish names of the era—it is highly improbable that a Pharisee, a stickler for ritual purity, would also be known as “the Leper”.10 John’s Gospel presents a third location: the family home of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha, also in Bethany, where a dinner is given in Jesus’s honor.14 Three distinct settings, three different hosts.
Shard 3: The Timing
The chronology is perhaps the most difficult element to reconcile.
Matthew and Mark place the anointing just two days before the Passover, on the cusp of Jesus’s betrayal and crucifixion.1 John sets his account earlier, six days before the Passover, framing the beginning of the final week.3 Luke’s narrative, by contrast, is positioned much earlier in Jesus’s public ministry, long before the final journey to Jerusalem, making it a distinct and separate event in the timeline.3 These aren’t minor discrepancies; they fundamentally alter the story’s context and urgency.
Shard 4: The Action and the Objection
Even the core action and the reaction to it differ in crucial ways.
In Matthew and Mark, the woman anoints Jesus’s head, a gesture rich with royal symbolism.1 The objection from the disciples is pragmatic and economic: “Why this waste?”.14 In Luke and John, she anoints his
feet, an act of profound humility and intimacy.3
Furthermore, in both of these accounts, she lets down her hair—a shocking and deeply personal gesture in that culture—to wipe his feet.3
The objections in these scenes are also different.
In Luke, Simon the Pharisee is offended not by the waste, but by the breach of ritual purity: Jesus is allowing a “sinner” to touch him.3
In John, the objection about waste is voiced specifically by Judas Iscariot, whose motive is revealed not as concern for the poor, but as personal greed.16
These were the shards I had laid out before me.
Trying to force them into a single narrative felt like an act of violence against the text itself.
It required ignoring contradictions and smoothing over details that the Gospel writers clearly thought were important.
The story remained a beautiful but broken mess.
This is what my whiteboard looked like, translated into a more organized format:
| Feature | Matthew 26:6-13 | Mark 14:3-9 | Luke 7:36-50 | John 12:1-8 |
| Time | 2 days before Passover | 2 days before Passover | Earlier in ministry (Galilee) | 6 days before Passover |
| Location | Bethany; Simon the Leper’s house | Bethany; Simon the Leper’s house | Galilee; Simon the Pharisee’s house | Bethany; Lazarus’s house |
| The Woman | Unnamed woman | Unnamed woman | Unnamed “sinful woman” | Mary of Bethany |
| The Action | Pours ointment on Jesus’ head | Pours ointment on Jesus’ head | Wets feet with tears, wipes with hair, kisses, anoints feet | Anoints feet, wipes with hair |
| The Objection | “Why this waste?” (from disciples) | “Why this waste?” (from “some present”) | “If he were a prophet…” (from Simon) | “Why not sell it for the poor?” (from Judas) |
| Jesus’s Focus | “She did it for My burial“ | “She has anointed My body for burial“ | “Her many sins are forgiven“ | “She kept it for the day of My burial“ |
Looking at this table, the problem becomes starkly clear.
These are not four identical photographs of a single event.
They are distinct portraits, each with its own composition, lighting, and focus.
My quest to find a single, “correct” version was doomed from the start.
I was asking the wrong question.
The Kintsugi Epiphany: Finding Gold in the Cracks
For a long time, I was stuck.
I had deconstructed the story into its constituent parts, but I had no framework to put it back together in a way that felt honest.
The breakthrough came from a place I never expected: not from a dense theological commentary or an ancient manuscript, but from an article about Japanese Art.
I stumbled upon the concept of Kintsugi, which literally means “golden joinery”.21
It is the centuries-old Japanese art of repairing broken pottery.
But unlike modern methods that try to hide the damage, Kintsugi does the exact opposite.
The artisans mend the broken pieces with a special lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.21
The result is that the lines of breakage are not concealed; they are illuminated, emphasized, and transformed into a beautiful part of the object’s design.
The “scars” become golden seams.
Underlying Kintsugi is the philosophy of wabi-sabi, a worldview that finds beauty in imperfection and accepts the transient nature of all things.23
In this mindset, an object is not ruined when it breaks.
Instead, the breakage and the subsequent repair become part of its unique history, a story to be honored.
The repaired piece is considered more beautiful, more valuable, and even stronger than it was before it was broken.26
As I read about this, something shifted deep within me.
It was a genuine “aha!” moment, a paradigm shift that re-framed my entire struggle.
I had been treating the Gospel accounts like a shattered vase that needed to be perfectly restored, with the cracks hidden and the seams invisible.
I was frustrated because the pieces wouldn’t fit seamlessly.
But what if that was the wrong goal?
What if the Gospel writers weren’t trying to hide the “cracks” between their accounts? What if, like Kintsugi masters, they were intentionally illuminating them with theological gold? What if the story is meant to be seen through its seemingly fragmented pieces, with each “crack” revealing a different facet of a single, stunning truth?
This new paradigm was liberating.
The problem of contradiction dissolved and was replaced by a vision of complementary beauty.
The four gospels were not four competing, flawed reports.
They were four master artisans, each using the same core event to mend a different kind of brokenness, each highlighting a different golden seam of theological truth.
The story wasn’t broken; it was a Kintsugi masterpiece, and I had been looking at it all wrong.
A New Framework: The Three Golden Seams of the Anointing
With this new lens, I returned to the texts, no longer searching for a single timeline but for the golden seams of repair.
I realized the different accounts weren’t just variations; they were clustered around distinct theological themes.
I saw not four random shards, but three magnificent, interconnected repairs, each revealing a different dimension of this profound act of worship.
First Golden Seam: The Gold of Repentance — Mending the Broken Sinner
This first, shimmering seam is most brilliantly illuminated in Luke’s account of the “sinful woman” at the house of Simon the Pharisee.5
Here, the focus is not on Jesus’s impending death, but on the restoration of a broken human soul.
The act itself is a masterclass in radical humility.
In first-century Jewish culture, providing water for a guest to wash their dusty feet was a basic act of hospitality, a duty often performed by the lowest-ranking servant or slave.29
Simon the Pharisee, in his arrogance or neglect, fails to offer Jesus even this basic courtesy.5
This woman, however, goes far beyond.
She washes Jesus’s feet not with water from a basin, but with a flood of her own tears.
She doesn’t use a servant’s towel; she uses her own hair.
This gesture with her hair cannot be overstated.
For a woman in that society to let down her hair in public, especially in a room full of men, was a shocking breach of decorum.
A woman’s hair was considered her “glory,” a deeply private and intimate part of her being, often veiled or tied up to signify modesty.32
To let it down was an act of immense vulnerability, an expression of deep grief or abandon.6
She was, in essence, taking her own glory and laying it in the dust at Jesus’s feet.
This is the art of Kintsugi applied to the human soul.
The woman does not try to hide her brokenness—her reputation as a “sinner” precedes her into the room.
She brings her shattered life, her shame, and her repentance and pours it all O.T. Her tears are the cleansing agent, and her act of wiping his feet with her hair is the ultimate expression of self-abasement.
And in response, Jesus applies the gold.
He doesn’t just accept her scandalous act; he defends it and proclaims its meaning: “Her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown”.12
His forgiveness is the precious lacquer that mends her shattered past, and her extravagant love is the beautiful, shimmering proof of the repair.
But there is a deeper layer to this repair.
The story is a deliberate and radical inversion of the honor-shame culture that structured their world.
Simon, the host, seeks honor by inviting a famous rabbi to his home, yet he behaves dishonorably by neglecting the basic customs of hospitality.
The woman, who enters the scene already bearing the full weight of public shame, performs an act that should, by all cultural standards, increase her shame.
Yet Jesus holds her up as the exemplar of true honor.
He forces Simon to “see” her not as a sinner, but as a person whose actions outshine his own.
The golden seam of repentance doesn’t just fix the woman; it redefines the very meaning of honor and shame in the Kingdom of God.
True honor is found not in social standing or religious purity, but in humble, broken, self-forgetful devotion.
Second Golden Seam: The Gold of Kingship — Mending the Broken King
The second seam emerges when we look at the accounts in Matthew, Mark, and John, all of which place this event in Bethany in the final, fateful week before the crucifixion.1
Here, the anointing takes on a different, majestic, and paradoxical meaning.
It is a coronation.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, the act of pouring oil on someone’s head was the primary ritual for consecrating a king.2
The prophet Samuel anointed Saul and David in this way, marking them as God’s chosen rulers.2
The very titles “Messiah” (from the Hebrew
mashiach) and “Christ” (from the Greek christos) literally mean “Anointed One”.2
When the woman in Matthew and Mark’s gospels pours the expensive nard over Jesus’s
head, she is performing a prophetic sign-act of immense significance.
In a moment of stunning spiritual insight that completely eluded the male disciples, she is proclaiming him King.
Yet, no sooner is this royal act performed than Jesus reinterprets it with a shocking twist.
When the disciples complain about the waste, he doesn’t say, “She is right, for I am the King.” Instead, he says, “She has done it to prepare me for burial”.14
This is the central, breathtaking paradox of his kingdom: his path to the throne is through the tomb.
His coronation and his funeral preparation are one and the same act.
Here again, the Kintsugi metaphor is perfect.
Jesus’s kingship is a broken concept in the eyes of the world and even his own disciples, who expected a military conqueror.
His body itself will soon be broken on the cross.
The woman’s anointing is the golden lacquer that joins these two seemingly contradictory realities—kingship and suffering, glory and death.
It mends the disciples’ broken understanding of what the Messiah must be.
The kingdom is not established despite the cross, but through it.
The anointing is the moment this broken, paradoxical truth is made whole and beautiful.
And just as with the first seam, there is a deeper subversion at play.
The authority to anoint a king in Israel was a sacred trust, reserved for major prophetic figures like Samuel—men of immense spiritual and political standing.2
Yet in this pivotal moment, the only literal, physical anointing Jesus receives in his entire ministry is performed by a woman.35
While she acts, the chosen male apostles are blind to the moment’s significance.
They see only the balance sheet, calculating the perfume’s value in denarii.14
They rebuke her for her “waste,” completely missing the profound theological declaration she is making.
God, through this event, radically subverts the patriarchal expectations of the day.
He chooses a woman to perform the key prophetic act that reveals the nature of Jesus’s unique messiahship.
Her spiritual perception far surpasses that of the Twelve.
Jesus’s powerful defense of her—”Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her”—is not merely a commendation of her love.1
It is an eternal validation of her prophetic office and a foundational statement on the vital role of women in the new covenant.
Third Golden Seam: The Gold of Worship — Mending Our Broken Values
The third golden seam focuses on the object at the center of the drama: the alabaster flask of pure nard.
This is where we see the story mending our own broken and transactional ideas about worship.
The perfume was not merely expensive; it was extravagantly so.
John and Mark both note the disciples’ appraisal that it was worth more than 300 denarii—the equivalent of a full year’s wages for a common laborer.14
This was likely a woman’s entire inheritance or life savings, her most precious material possession.
The nard itself was a rare, fragrant oil imported all the way from the Himalayan mountains of India and Nepal.39
Mark’s detail that she “broke the flask” is crucial.1
This wasn’t a vial with a stopper that could be re-sealed.
Breaking the neck of the alabaster jar was an irreversible, all-or-nothing act.
She held nothing back.
This act of total, sacrificial devotion stands in stark contrast to the worldview of Judas Iscariot, who John singles out as the chief objector.16
Judas sees the world through a lens of utility and monetary value.
For him, the perfume is a commodity, an asset to be liquidated.
His feigned concern for the poor is a cynical mask for his own greed, as John reveals he was the keeper of the moneybag and a thief.20
Judas values what can be counted and controlled; Mary values the one who is priceless.
The breaking of the jar is a Kintsugi act of the highest order.
The woman shatters an object of immense worldly value to release a greater, spiritual value: a fragrance so powerful that John notes “the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume”.15
This single act mends our broken, utilitarian view of worship.
It teaches us that true worship is not about what is practical, efficient, or sensible.
It is about extravagant, sacrificial, all-in devotion to the one who is worthy of it all.
This contrast is made even more powerful through the sensory details.
John’s narrative deliberately juxtaposes the beautiful, all-encompassing fragrance of Mary’s selfless worship with the inner stench of Judas’s greed and betrayal.
The anointing acts as a spiritual catalyst in the room.
It forces a choice.
For Mary, it is the ultimate expression of love and devotion.
For Judas, it appears to be the final straw, the act of “waste” that solidifies his decision to betray Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.42
The scene is not just about Mary’s beautiful act; it is a pivot point for the entire Passion narrative, a moment where the aroma of life and the stench of death occupy the very same space, and everyone present must choose which one they will follow.
Conclusion: More Beautiful for Having Been Broken
My long journey with this “broken” story had brought me to a place of unexpected wholeness.
The Kintsugi paradigm didn’t just solve a biblical puzzle for me; it transformed my understanding of Scripture and of God himself.
The apparent contradictions in the Gospels were not flaws in the text to be explained away.
They are the very seams where the inspired authors inlaid their theological gold, inviting us to look closer and marvel at the multifaceted beauty of the story.
Luke shows us the golden seam of repentance, revealing how a life shattered by sin can be mended into something beautiful by grace.
Matthew and Mark show us the golden seam of a paradoxical kingship, revealing a Messiah who is crowned for his burial.
And John shows us the golden seam of extravagant worship, revealing a love that shatters worldly value systems.
Seen together, they do not contradict.
They form a single, breathtaking Kintsugi masterpiece, richer and more profound for its complexity.
Now, when I teach this story, I no longer bring out a whiteboard to create a confusing chart.
Instead, I talk about a broken vase.
I celebrate the cracks.
I show how each perspective adds a new layer of beauty, a new line of gold.
The story is no longer a source of frustration but a deep well of worship.
It has become, for me, a model for how to read all of Scripture—not as a flat, flawless text, but as a divinely repaired story, where God’s grace shines most brightly in the places of our deepest brokenness.
The ultimate message of the anointing, like Kintsugi, is one of redemption.
It is a story about how God takes our brokenness—our sin, our flawed understanding, our misplaced values—and through the broken body of the Anointed One, mends us with the gold of His grace, making us stronger and more beautiful than we ever were before.
The image of Mary wiping Jesus’s feet with her hair is the perfect, final brushstroke of this masterpiece.
It is an act of beautiful, golden repair, where the glory of a woman’s hair meets the dust of a servant-king’s feet, and in that humble space, the whole house is filled with the fragrance of worship.
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