Mark 14:3
“While he was at Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came having an alabaster jar of ointment of pure nard—very costly. She broke the jar, and poured it over his head.”
What does Mark 14:3 mean?
This moment captures the extravagance of worship and the tension between propriety and devotion. A woman enters Simon's home (where Jesus was dining) and does something shocking: she doesn't just apply expensive perfume carefully, she shatters the container itself, wasting what would have been a year's wages for an ordinary person. The nard, imported from distant regions, represents the absolute best she could offer. What makes this beautiful is that she seems unconcerned with how it looks or what others might think. She's not performing for the room; she's responding to something deep about who Jesus is. Her extravagant, reckless love stands in sharp contrast to the careful calculations people often make about worship and service, asking "Is this practical? What will people think?" She answers those questions by choosing abandon instead.