Mark 14: She Did What She Could, the Perfume of Nard

Introduction

"She has done what she could." On Sunday, October 25, 2026, at Numazu Zion Christian Church in Japan, Pastor Masuhiro Ogino preaches on Mark 14:1-9 under the title "The Perfume of Nard." That same afternoon, the church opens its doors for its annual festival with the families of the neighborhood, in the rain.

The story is short. Two days before the Passover, while the chief priests and the scribes are looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth, a woman enters the house of Simon the leper in Bethany. She breaks a small jar of very expensive, pure nard perfume and pours it on Jesus' head. Some are indignant. Jesus defends her.

Before getting there, the pastor takes a long detour through history, as he admits himself. That detour serves the message: you are precious in God's eyes, and the Word of God is in your hands. Then he draws three lessons from Mary's act: look for what Jesus desires from you, know that he looks at the heart more than at the result, and believe that he turns a small broken jar into a testimony that crosses the centuries.

Outline of the Message

1. You Are Precious in God's Eyes

The Bible often describes God and people through images. The best known: we are the sheep, and Jesus is the good shepherd (Psalm 23, John 10:11).
Another image: God is the potter, and we are the clay he shapes into a vessel (Jeremiah 18). Paul says we are jars of clay, but that God, through faith in Jesus, enters our hearts and shows his glory through our weaknesses and our chips and cracks (2 Corinthians 4:7). Each of us is therefore precious.
Yet the pastor observes that people, in every age, stick labels on others. To prop up a pride as fragile as a glass object, a person looks for someone to place beneath himself.
The Japanese thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi wrote that heaven does not create one man above another. Perhaps he was not a Christian, but he had come into contact with the Bible through missionaries. The pastor gives one sign of this: a bell now installed on the grounds of the YMCA Tozanso center in Gotemba was once, before the war and according to one version of its history, in the chapel of Keio University.
Without the gospel, he says, people do not arrive at the idea that every person has dignity and that their very existence has value. In Jesus' time, a philosopher of the Roman era could say that cattle are slaves who cannot speak, and that slaves are cattle who can.
Against that, the gospel declares that man is created in the image of God and that his existence is precious. This message was so revolutionary that it was persecuted, and then it spread throughout the Roman Empire until it laid the foundations of European culture.

2. A Lesson from History: The Word in Your Hands

When did Japan have the most Christians? Not after the war, and not in the Meiji era of great names like Uchimura Kanzo or Nitobe Inazo. Historians answer with one voice: the Momoyama period, in the time of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
With Francis Xavier at their head, Jesuits and Franciscans evangelized the country. Several warlords became Christians, such as Takayama Ukon. Of the seven famous disciples of the tea master Sen no Rikyu, five were Christians, Takayama Ukon being the first.
The pastor, who admits he knows nothing about the tea ceremony, points out that the small, low door of the tea house, which one can only pass through by stooping, recalls the call to enter by the narrow gate. Certain gestures of the ceremony would also resemble the handling of the chalice in the Mass of that time.
Between the death of Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu's rise to power, about one tenth of the population is said to have been Christian. Then came the persecutions under Hidetada and Iemitsu, the Shimabara Rebellion, and a total repression lasting until the Meiji era.
Why did these Christians, so numerous, almost disappear, while the persecuted church of Rome survived? The pastor sees a decisive weakness: they were taught the teaching of Jesus, but they were not made to read the Bible. Doctrinal texts were translated, but not the Word itself, which was kept in Latin for fear of erroneous interpretations. It was only in the mid-1900s that the Catholic Church authorized the Bible and the liturgy in each country's own language.
Without the Word, these Christians withered "like a plant without roots." Being able to read the Bible in your own language, at home, on the way to work or school, at any moment, and to know God's will directly, is an immense grace.

3. The Head or the Feet: What Really Matters

The woman is not named in Mark 14, but the same story appears in Matthew 26 and John 12, where we learn that she is Mary of Bethany. The pastor encourages us to read the three texts at home and compare them.
Matthew and Mark say the perfume is poured on Jesus' head. John 12:3 says she anoints Jesus' feet and wipes them with her hair.
The pastor jokes that once he is in heaven, rather than bother Jesus himself, he will go and ask Mary whether it was the head or the feet. She surely will not answer, "Actually, it was the shoulders!"
The essential is not the place. It is that Mary, with gratitude, with the joy of salvation and a consecrated heart, expressed her faith by pouring out this pure and costly nard, and that Jesus received this act with joy.

4. Look for What Jesus Desires from You

Often, when we want to do something, we do not first ask whether it will please Jesus. We ask what people will think of us, how we will be judged, and even, as the pastor confesses about himself, whether we will "draw the short straw."
Mary did it differently: "She has done what she could. She has anointed my body beforehand for the burying" (Mark 14:8). Jesus knew he would soon be crucified. Shortly after come the last meal, the prayer in Gethsemane, the arrest, an unjust trial, and the cross in chapter 15.
Peter, John and the other disciples had not yet understood. Mary, who lived in Bethany, had welcomed him, and even before Jesus arrived, she was looking for what she could do for him.
Making Jesus' heart our own is less a matter of asking what we are capable of than of seeking what he desires from you today. He loved you to the cross to forgive you and give you eternal life. He rose on the third day, stayed forty days with his disciples, ascended to heaven from the Mount of Olives, and ten days later came to dwell in the hearts of believers through the Holy Spirit, whom the Bible often compares to oil.
Seated at the right hand of God, he intercedes for you, and through the Spirit he encourages you, comforts you and leads you. "What is the best thing I can do today for this Jesus?" For the pastor, this question is the foundation of the Christian life.
You will not always know the answer, and that is normal: you are not God. That is why there is the Word. Start with the Gospels; one chapter a day is enough. Even if it is like stacking thin sheets of paper one by one, day after day, your heart is encouraged, and in the end it is others who tell you, "You have changed."
In three or six months, you may see nothing. Give yourself three years, five years: the change will be clear. Between those who persevere for ten or twenty years and those who do not, there is, he says, a difference like that between heaven and earth.
The pastor shares a memory. He was led to the Lord at the church in Chigasaki and was baptized by a woman pastor. Before her conversion, she was a nurse in Numazu. An older nurse had come to reinforce her unit for a few weeks: always smiling, efficient, answering "thank you" to the doctors' most difficult requests. During night shifts, she would disappear in the early morning. She was found in a storeroom, off to the side, reading the Bible and praying.
The future woman pastor told herself, "The secret of her strength is here." Hearing this testimony in his youth, the pastor was struck: people see, even when we think they are not looking. Since then he strives to keep his morning prayer time. The Lord works through people, and he begins by reaching you in your heart through the Word and prayer.

5. The Lord Looks at the Motive More Than the Result

Imagine the atmosphere of the meal (Mark 14:3). We picture a warm table. The pastor, on the contrary, thinks of a tense atmosphere, where conversation does not flow.
First, Jesus' life was under threat (verses 1 and 2). Men sent by the chief priests and the scribes may have been present, watching for a word to turn against him.
Next, it was the house of Simon the leper. In that time, lepers were not only set apart: their very existence was held in horror. Near cities like Jerusalem or Jericho, they lived outside the walls. If they had to enter the city, they had to ring a small bell while crying out, "I am unclean! I am unclean!", and the streets emptied, everyone hiding at home holding their breath. The disciples themselves may have thought there was no need to go and eat at the house of such a man.
It is in this icy atmosphere that Mary breaks the jar. She "pulled the trigger," says the pastor. Reproaches burst out (verses 4 and 5): this perfume could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii.
A denarius was the wage of a day's work for a skilled craftsman, today between 10,000 and 30,000 yen. The perfume was therefore worth more than three million yen. The critics attack Mary, and also Jesus, who let her do it.
Mary wanted to do something good for Jesus, and the result is the opposite: it looks as though she covered him with shame. "In her place, I would have wanted to disappear," the pastor confides.
Jesus, for his part, welcomes her: "Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a good work for me" (Mark 14:6). The Lord looks at the motive more than the result.
We are weak, we often fail, we make mistakes. The pastor acknowledges that he himself has hurt people or damaged relationships by words or actions he thought were good. Then the Lord asks, "Where was your motive?" If you need to ask forgiveness, ask forgiveness simply. But if it was for him, he receives your act, your word and your intention.
Without forgetting, he adds, that all of this is lived at the foot of the cross, the Lord looks at how much zeal, gratitude and faith you acted with, more than at the success obtained. "For man looks at the outward appearance, but Yahweh looks at the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). The pastor recalls that this word also warns the one who does fine things for God without following the way God wanted, like Saul.

6. A Small Jar for an Eternal Testimony

We often lament the smallness and the little fruit of our actions. But the Lord uses your service, small and chipped, and your very person, to raise up an eternal testimony.
The text specifies that the perfume was in a small jar. Pure and costly, no doubt, but not large. And yet: "Wherever this Good News may be preached throughout the whole world, that which this woman has done will also be spoken of for a memorial of her" (Mark 14:9).
Two thousand years later, this act is told in a small town of a small country of the Far East. "Well, maybe not so small," the pastor corrects himself with a burst of laughter.
The testimony and the service you carry out in the Lord's name are also a precious perfume that delights Jesus.
For the afternoon festival, the pastor names things concretely: selling toilet paper, selling donated goods, offering all kinds of services. Each of these acts is an oil that delights the Lord.
In his closing prayer, he asks that each person, in the place where they are sent, be used as a pure oil that spreads the fragrance of Christ, until the day when the Lord says, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

Key Takeaways

You are precious in God's eyes: he shows his glory through the fragile jar of clay that you are.
Having the Bible in your own language is a grace. One chapter a day, over years, deeply changes a life.
Making Jesus' heart your own means asking what he desires from you today, rather than what people will think of you.
The Lord looks at the motive of the heart more than the result. If you have hurt someone, ask forgiveness, but do not doubt that he receives what you do for him.
A small broken jar becomes a testimony told around the world: no service done for Jesus is too small.

Personal Application

When you hesitate to serve, do you first think of what would please Jesus, or of what people will think of you?
What is the best thing you can do for the Lord today, within your means?
Can you start this week reading one chapter of a Gospel a day, at a fixed time?
Is there an act done with a good motive that went wrong, and for which you need to ask forgiveness without condemning yourself?
Which service seems too small to count, and could you offer it to Jesus as Mary offered her jar?

Verses Cited

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "she has done what she could" mean in Mark 14:8?

For Masuhiro Ogino, Mary of Bethany had understood what the disciples did not yet grasp: Jesus was going to die. Even before his arrival, she had asked herself what she could do for him. Doing what you can means seeking what Jesus desires from us today, and offering him our best.

Did Mary pour the perfume on Jesus' head or on his feet?

Mark 14 and Matthew 26 speak of the head, while John 12 speaks of the feet wiped with her hair. The pastor invites us to read the three accounts, but stresses that the essential is not the place: it is Mary's love and gratitude, and the fact that Jesus received her act with joy.

Why does Jesus defend Mary when the perfume was worth three hundred denarii?

A denarius was the wage of a day's work for a skilled craftsman: the perfume was therefore worth a fortune, and the act provoked the anger of the guests. Jesus nevertheless answers, "Leave her alone." According to the pastor, the Lord looks at the motive of the heart more than the visible result, as it is written in 1 Samuel 16:7.