Lyrics
[Intro]
In memoriam eius
She broke it
In memoriam eius
What she could
[Verse]
She came in late. She came alone.
She had one jar. The jar was stone.
(What she could)
She didn't ask. She didn't speak.
She went straight down and found His feet.
(What she could)
[Chorus]
SHE BROKE IT
LET HER ALONE
SHE DID WHAT SHE COULD
(What she could)
(What she could)
[Verse]
She broke the neck. She broke it clean.
No lid. No cap. No in-between.
(What she could)
(What she could)
It was all out. It was all gone.
No taking back. No putting on.
(What she could)
[Chorus]
SHE BROKE IT
LET HER ALONE
SHE DID WHAT SHE COULD
(What she could)
(What she could)
[Verse]
The smell got in. It got in deep.
Our clothes. Our hands. The bread. The meat.
(What she could)
(What she could)
Three hundred pence. A working year.
I said the number. Loud and clear.
(What she could)
(What she could)
[Verse]
I said: the poor. I said it twice.
I never once had paid a price.
(What she could)
(What she could)
She had one thing. She gave it all.
I had the sums. I had the gall.
(What she could)
[Chorus]
SHE BROKE IT
LET HER ALONE
SHE DID WHAT SHE COULD
(What she could)
(What she could)
[Bridge]
Sunday. Spices. Empty tomb.
They took the jars back to the room.
Nobody anointed Him.
Not one of them. Just her. Just her.
She was early. We were late.
She believed Him. We debated.
They brought spices to a hole.
She brought hers while He could smell.
[Chorus]
SHE BROKE IT
LET HER ALONE
SHE DID WHAT SHE COULD
(What she could)
(What she could)
[Bridge]
He said: where this is told, she's told.
Two thousand years. He hasn't missed.
Mark wrote the promise. Left the name.
Her name is Mary. Say it out.
I did the math. She broke the jar.
And every time I tell it, still
The room comes back. The smell comes back.
It never left. It never will.
[Chorus]
SHE BROKE IT
LET HER ALONE
SHE DID WHAT SHE COULD
AND THIS IS BEING TOLD
(What she could)
[Outro]
In memoriam eius
In memoriam eius
She broke it
In memoriam eius
She broke it
What she could
Her name is Mary
She broke it
What she could
Song Meaning
IN MEMORIAM EIUS (She Did What She Could)
Mark 14:3-9 · Matthew 26:6-13 · John 12:1-8
THE WOMAN WITH THE JAR
The full essay
A DINNER IN BETHANY
Two miles east of Jerusalem, on the far slope of the Mount of Olives, there is
a village called Bethany. It is where Jesus stays when He is in the area — He
does not have a house of His own, and He sleeps out there rather than in the
city.
Two days before the Passover that will kill Him, there is a dinner.
The host is named in one line and then never mentioned again in all of
Scripture: Simon the leper. Read that name slowly. He is called by a disease he
plainly does not have anymore, because nobody in first-century Judea holds a
dinner party in a leper's house, and no observant Jew reclines at that table.
Whatever happened to Simon happened before the story starts, and the Gospel
writers do not bother to tell us, because it is not the point. But it means the
room is already a room full of mercy before anything else occurs in it.
Into that room comes a woman with a jar.
The jar is alabaster — a soft, pale stone, carved thin, translucent when you
hold it to a lamp. Inside is nard, sometimes called spikenard: an oil pressed
from the root of a plant that grows in the Himalayas and had to be carried
thousands of miles overland to reach a village outside Jerusalem. John says it
was pure. Mark says it was very precious.
Here is the detail that matters, and most people miss it. Alabaster perfume
flasks of this kind were not corked. They were sealed — the neck drawn out thin
and closed at the manufacture. To open one, you broke it.
There is no way to use a little.
She breaks it.
She pours the entire contents out over Him — Matthew and Mark say on His head,
John says on His feet, which we will come back to — and the smell goes through
the whole house at once. Everyone's clothes. Everyone's hands. The bread on the
table.
And the men at that table begin to do arithmetic.
THREE HUNDRED PENCE
Mark gives the number: three hundred denarii. A denarius was a day's wage for
an agricultural labourer, which means the jar represented roughly a year of a
working man's income, poured onto a floor in about thirty seconds.
Somebody says it out loud. This could have been sold, and the money given to
the poor.
And here is the thing that makes this passage so uncomfortable, and so good:
the objection is not stupid.
It is not a wicked argument on its face. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic
is correct. Three hundred denarii would have fed a great many hungry people in
a city with a great many hungry people in it. Any modern charity board would
have voted with the objectors. Any reasonable person, told the story cold,
would flinch at the number.
Matthew records the word they used for what she had done. In Greek it is
apoleia — ruin, loss, destruction. The King James renders it waste.
That word is the hinge of the entire passage. Hold on to it.
WHO SAID IT
Here the Gospels do something worth noticing.
Mark says "some" had indignation. Matthew says "his disciples" — plural, no
names, the whole table. John names one man: Judas Iscariot, and adds the
devastating footnote that he said it not because he cared about the poor but
because he kept the money bag and helped himself out of it.
All three are true, and they are doing different jobs. John, writing last,
tells you the rot at the centre. Matthew and Mark, writing earlier, refuse to
let the rest of the room off the hook.
The song is narrated by one of the unnamed men, and that is a deliberate
decision. If you make Judas the villain, every listener gets to be one of the
good ones — appalled, but not implicated. Matthew does not give you that exit.
The indignation went round the table, and a man doing correct arithmetic about
somebody else's worship is not a monster. He is ordinary. That is worse.
WASTE
The objection assumes something so basic that nobody at the table would have
thought to say it aloud: that the value of a thing is its usefulness.
By that standard the woman has destroyed a year of wages and produced nothing.
No one was fed. No debt was paid. No sick person was healed. There is a smell
in the room and a broken jar on the floor and that is the entire return on
three hundred denarii.
Christ's answer does not dispute the accounting. He disputes the premise.
"Let her alone... she hath wrought a good work on me."
She has not wasted anything, because He is worth it. That is the whole answer,
and it is the oldest quarrel in religion: the quarrel between usefulness and
worship. Every generation fights it again. Why the building. Why the music. Why
the hours. Why not something practical.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism opens by asking what the chief end of man is,
and answers: to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever. Not to be useful. Not
to optimise. The first purpose of a human being is an act that produces nothing
measurable at all — which means the woman with the jar is not an exception to
the rule of the Christian life. She is the rule, demonstrated once, at scale,
in front of witnesses who could not recognise it.
THE SENTENCE EVERYONE MISQUOTES
"For ye have the poor with you always."
This line gets deployed, with some regularity, as though Christ were shrugging
at poverty. It is not. It is a quotation, and everyone at that table would have
finished it in their heads before He got to the end of the clause.
He is quoting Deuteronomy 15:11. Here is the verse in full:
"For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee,
saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to
thy needy, in thy land."
The first half of that verse exists only to introduce the command in the second
half. The permanence of poverty is the reason for open-handed generosity, not
an excuse from it.
So what Christ is actually saying is: you have the rest of your lives to do
that, and the Scripture commands you to. You have Me for four more days.
He is not ranking the poor below Himself in some general way. He is pointing at
a closing window. This is a unique moment and it is nearly over, and she is the
only person in the building who has noticed.
HEAD OR FEET, TWO DAYS OR SIX
Two questions that come up constantly, and both have honest answers.
Matthew and Mark say she poured it on His head. John says she anointed His feet
and wiped them with her hair. This is not a contradiction. The flask held
roughly a Roman pound of oil — about eleven or twelve ounces — and she emptied
it. There is plenty to run from head to feet, and the accounts are selecting
different parts of one act. Matthew and Mark are interested in the anointing of
a king's head. John is interested in a woman's hair on a man's feet. Both
happened.
The timing is the harder one. John places the dinner six days before the
Passover. Mark introduces it after saying it was two days before. Most careful
readers take Mark and Matthew as arranging this thematically rather than
chronologically — dropping the anointing in beside the plot to kill Him and
Judas's decision to betray, because that is where it belongs in the argument of
the Gospel. Mark does this elsewhere; ancient biography was not obliged to
narrate in strict sequence. John, writing with a chronology in view, gives the
day.
You should know that not everyone is satisfied by that answer, and that a few
have argued for two separate anointings in Bethany. The honest position is that
the harmonisation is reasonable, widely held, and not certain. Nothing in the
passage's meaning depends on which it is.
IS THIS THE WOMAN FROM LUKE 7?
No — and this is the confusion that has done the most damage.
Luke 7 records a different anointing entirely: a different region (Galilee), a
different host (Simon the Pharisee, not Simon the leper), a different point in
the ministry, and a woman described as a sinner in the city who weeps on
Christ's feet. The lesson there is forgiveness and the love of the much-forgiven.
The lesson in Bethany is worship and burial.
Two dinners. Two Simons — an extremely common name. Two women.
The confusion got worse in the West when Pope Gregory the Great, preaching in
591, identified Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman of Luke 7 and with Mary of
Bethany, folding three distinct people into one. That identification stuck in
Western art and preaching for well over a millennium, which is why Mary
Magdalene is popularly imagined as a prostitute. The Bible never says so. It
says seven demons were cast out of her and that she was the first person on
earth to see the risen Christ.
Mary of Bethany is a third person again: the sister of Martha and of Lazarus,
whom Christ raised from the dead in the previous chapter of John. Which means
this woman is pouring burial spices on a man who, weeks earlier, called her
brother out of a tomb. She has watched Him do it. When He says He is going to
die, she believes Him — and she may be the only person in the house who has
grounds to believe He will not stay dead.
THE THING ALMOST NOBODY NOTICES
Turn forward three days in the narrative.
It is the first day of the week. Before dawn, women go out to the tomb carrying
spices they have bought and prepared, to anoint the body. Mark 16:1 says they
bought them. Luke 23:56 says they prepared them and then rested over the
Sabbath, waiting. Luke 24:1 has them arriving with what they made.
There is no body to anoint.
They go home with everything they brought.
Which means that this woman, at a dinner party, two days early, with a jar she
had to break — is the only person in human history who ever actually anointed
the body of Jesus of Nazareth.
Everyone else was late. She was early. And the reason she was early is that she
took Him seriously when He said He was going to die, at a point when the men
who had heard it three times were still arguing about which of them would be
greatest.
He said it Himself: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.
There is one more layer under that. Christ is not a surname. It is the Greek
for Anointed One — the same word as Messiah. Kings of Israel were anointed with
oil. Priests were anointed. It was the ceremony that made the office real.
And in all four Gospels, the only time anybody anoints Jesus of Nazareth with
oil is a woman at a dinner party with a jar she had to snap open.
That was the coronation. The men present thought it was a budgeting error.
"SHE HATH DONE WHAT SHE COULD"
Six words, and it is the tenderest verdict Christ passes on anyone in the
Gospels.
Notice what it does not say. It does not say she did something great, or
sufficient, or impressive. It says she did what she could — which is both a
compliment and a limit, and it is spoken over a gift that everybody else in the
room had just called a waste.
It also quietly makes room for every person who will ever hear the story and
know that they have very little to bring. The measure is not the size of the
jar. It is whether you broke it.
THE PROMISE WITH NO NAME IN IT
Then comes the sentence that made this song necessary.
"Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout
the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial
of her."
Stop and consider the size of that claim, made in a village house, by a man
with days to live, to a room of people who had just been complaining about the
housekeeping. He is asserting that the gospel will go to the whole world — and
that when it does, this will go with it.
He was right. It has, and it did.
But here is the part that is genuinely strange, and it is checkable in ninety
seconds. Mark records the promise that she will be remembered. Matthew records
the promise that she will be remembered.
Neither of them gives her name.
It takes John, writing decades later, to say it: Mary. The sister of Martha and
Lazarus, of Bethany.
There is something almost unbearable about that. Two of the Gospels carry a
memorial with a blank where the name should be. And the promise has been
keeping itself anyway, for two thousand years, in every pulpit and commentary
and Sunday school and — now — three and a half minutes of drums and Latin
chant.
Her name is Mary. Say it out.
FOR THE READER WHO KNOWS THE DOCTRINE
A few notes for those who will be listening for the theology.
On works. A reader may wonder whether commending a woman for what she did sits
awkwardly beside justification by faith alone. It does not. The Reformed
position has never been that good works are unimportant, only that they are not
meritorious — they are the fruit of a justified person, not the root of a
justified standing. Christ commends this act; that is in the text. What the
text never does is make the act the ground of her acceptance. The song follows
the text exactly: her deed is praised, and nowhere is it said to purchase
anything.
On the contrast. Note carefully what the song is not doing. It is not setting
her works against the narrator's lack of works. It sets her extravagance
against his accounting — two different postures toward the same person, not two
different quantities of merit. The objector's sin is not that he gave too
little. It is that he had learned to price something priceless.
On the free offer. This is the one song in the Hatter & Hobbit catalogue with
no resolution for its narrator. He is exposed, and never absolved. He simply
keeps telling the story. That is faithful to the scene — Scripture does not
tell us what became of the men who grumbled, except for the one it does tell us
about, and that ending is terrible. The song leaves the door open by leaving
the man still talking. Anyone still telling this story has not yet stopped
being reachable.
On one line that needs a footnote. The bridge says "Nobody anointed Him. Not
one of them. Just her." In context, "them" refers to the women at the tomb, and
the claim is that none of the Sunday party ever got to use what they brought —
which is exactly right. But to be precise: Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus
did apply spices to the body at the burial on Friday evening, according to John
19:39-40, where Nicodemus brings about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes.
That was a burial preparation performed on a corpse. What Mary did was an
anointing performed on a living man who had told them what was coming. The
distinction is real, and worth knowing.
IF YOU ARE NEW TO ANY OF THIS
Maybe you clicked because the drums were good and most of the above assumed
things you have never been taught. Here it is with nothing assumed.
The claim at the centre of Christianity is not that you should be a better
person. It is that God became one — that the man in this story, at this dinner,
with perfume running into his beard, was God in a human body, and that He was
walking deliberately toward an execution He had predicted repeatedly and that
nobody around Him would accept.
Four days after this dinner He was killed on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem.
Not as a tragedy that overtook Him. As the thing He came to do. On that cross
He took what was owed for the sin of every person who would ever trust Him, and
paid it, and said that it was finished. Three days later He walked out of a
sealed tomb, and was seen by hundreds of people, most of whom subsequently died
badly rather than say they had made it up.
And that is why a woman emptying a year's wages over His head is not a waste.
If He is who He said, no amount of anything is too much, and the men doing sums
at that table were not being prudent. They were being wrong about who was in
the room.
If something in this is landing in a way you did not expect, you do not need a
formula or a special prayer. Turn around and tell Him you are His. Ask Him for
what you cannot manufacture. Then find some actual Christians in an actual
building, get a Bible, and read the Gospel of Mark, which is short and fast, and
where you just were.
She broke the only thing she had, on the only person worth breaking it for.
And He said it would be told wherever the gospel went.
So here it is again.
===========================================================================
SCRIPTURE BEHIND THE SONG
She came in late, she came alone — Mark 14:3
She had one jar, the jar was stone — Mark 14:3, alabaster
She went straight down and found His feet — John 12:3
She broke the neck — Mark 14:3, "she brake the box"
No lid, no cap, no in-between — the flask was sealed at manufacture
The smell got in — John 12:3, the house filled with the odour
Three hundred pence, a working year — Mark 14:5
I said: the poor — Mark 14:5, Matthew 26:9
Let her alone — Mark 14:6
She did what she could — Mark 14:8
She brought hers while He could smell — Mark 14:8, "aforehand"
Sunday, spices, empty tomb — Mark 16:1, Luke 23:56, Luke 24:1
Where this is told, she's told — Mark 14:9, Matthew 26:13
In memoriam eius — the Vulgate of Mark 14:9
Her name is Mary — John 12:3
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.
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