The scene here is a banquet, signaled in the text by the fact that Lazarus was “reclining” with Jesus; people usually only reclined on a couch during a special occasion—a banquet. At parties like this, it was common for hosts to anoint the head of their guest of honor, but they would typically only provide water for their feet. And customarily, only servants would touch someone’s feet. It would have been unheard-of for anyone to touch a person’s feet with their hair.

But we live in an intensely perfumed world. It’s important to realize that for these people, the unsavory smells, the sour and the bitter and the pungent smells, the animal odors and the body odors—these were far more common in their experience. The experience of a powerful perfume filling a house would have been, possibly, once in a lifetime for these people. It would certainly have been an event worth remembering.

Recall that, in 11:39, when Jesus told them to roll away the stone, Martha said, “By now there will be an odor.” Death is a stench, and if they unsealed a freshly used tomb at the wrong time, the whole town could have been filled with that smell. But there is a corresponding sweet smell, and it is life. This was literally a moment of beauty that you could smell.

Judas is implying that someone with the resources to spend tens of thousands of dollars on Jesus in this way could just as well choose to be a massive blessing to the poor people in the community. This hyper-pious line of reasoning actually places Mary, Martha and Lazarus under judgment for being wealthy.

Judas knows offhand how much money the perfume would have fetched at the market: 300 days’ wages. When you exclude the Sabbaths and the feasts, that’s almost exactly how many working days there were in a year for a Jewish man, so this perfume is worth (in our terms) something like $50,000 or $75,000. This is an absurdly valuable jar of ointment—and an extravagant thing to do, by any standard. They could have fed a few thousand poor people with that kind of money.

Judas’ real mistake was thinking that lavishing this worship on Jesus and caring for the poor were mutually exclusive. He completely misunderstood the most basic fact of discipleship, which is that worshiping Jesus is what drives all true and acceptable piety. God doesn’t accept “good works ” that are done for any other reason than love.

The household that Jesus is in is still charged, at this point, with the reality of Jesus having raised a dead man, having called him out of his tomb. Now Jesus says, “I am going to my tomb, and she has done for me more than she knows.”

I think it’s possible that, as a result of this beautiful gesture, Jesus would go to the grave with traces of Mary’s adoration on his skin. 

Thomas Chalmers, in a sermon entitled, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” said that you can’t just tell people to turn away from sin without giving them something better to turn to. And Chalmers says that’s because we are creatures who will always express by our actions, our lives, whatever our hearts really cherish. If you want to change people’s behavior, you have to give them something new and beautiful to love.

In other words, everyone is doing what they think is best for themselves. When that strong of a desire is fixed on Jesus—when He is what we want the most—then everything starts to work the way it’s supposed to.