The Gospel passage Matthew 26:6–16, read at the Presanctified Liturgy on Holy and Great Wednesday, presents two different dispositions of the heart: repentance that becomes salvation, and love of money that ends in betrayal. The Church does not read it simply as a historical episode shortly before the Passion, but as a mirror of our inner person during Holy Week.
Christ is in “Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper.” Bethany is a place of friendship and rest for the Lord, but also a place where the human wound (the “leper”) meets His healing presence. Salvation is not offered to “clean” people who have no need, but to those who acknowledge their need and weakness. There, the woman appears with an “alabaster flask of very costly myrrh” and pours it “upon His head.” Her act is not a display, but an offering of repentance: whatever she has that is precious, she turns into doxology. Repentance is not psychological guilt, but a change in one’s mode of existence; it becomes an act that turns the human person from self-love to communion with God.
The disciples are indignant: “To what purpose is this waste?” Here a tempting “logic” is revealed, one that can dress itself in charitable clothing: measuring love in economic terms. The argument “it could have been… given to the poor” sounds pious; yet Christ clarifies the matter: first comes worship as relationship, and from it true philanthropy springs forth. Love for the poor is not set against honor shown to Christ; rather, it is shown that the heart that does not know how to love God easily uses the poor as an alibi. The Church trains us to see Christ as the first “Poor One,” who accepted voluntary self-emptying, and thus philanthropy becomes the fruit of a Eucharistic life.
The Lord defends the woman: “She has done a good work toward Me.” Here “good” does not mean merely “morally correct,” but beautiful, luminous, pleasing to God—an act that anoints creation with the fragrance of the Kingdom. And immediately He gives its eschatological dimension: “For in pouring this myrrh on My body, she did it for My burial.” The woman—consciously or unconsciously—becomes a prophetess of the Passion. Love, when it is selfless, “sees” more deeply than cold calculation. The myrrh becomes a foretaste of burial, just as later the myrrh of the myrrh-bearing women will become a foretaste of the Resurrection. In this way the Church reads her act as liturgical: a kind of offering that accompanies Christ into His voluntary sacrifice.
Then, the passage shifts abruptly to Judas: “Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, ‘What will you give me, and I will deliver Him to you?’” The dramatic contrast is a theological lesson. On the one hand, the woman “pours out” precious myrrh without bargaining; on the other, Judas bargains the Christ of infinite worth for “thirty pieces of silver.” Betrayal does not appear suddenly; it ripens through small agreements with passion, through the logic of profit, through the loss of thanksgiving. For this reason, Holy Wednesday is not a day for the “condemnation” of one person, but a day of watchfulness: to see whether our heart loves the “cost” more than the Person.
In the liturgical consciousness of the Church, the woman is identified in hymnography with the sinful woman who offers tears and myrrh, and Judas with the dark side of discipleship without repentance. Holy Wednesday calls us to stand before Christ as the woman did: with compunction that becomes worship, with an offering that keeps no “change” back, with faith that anoints the Lord shortly before His Passion. And it warns us that faith without love easily becomes a transaction.
+ Metropolitan Nektarios of Hong Kong and South East Asia
