Before his entry into Jerusalem, Jesus was anointed with oil as the royal Messiah. Yet the act is almost forgotten, and the person who performed it - Mary of Bethany – is usually left unnamed

On Palm Sunday we will celebrate the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem as the Messiah-king. In a normal year, it is done with pomp: a ­procession, the waving of palms, and the ­reading of the Passion, which reinterprets the kind of king that Jesus will be – a Messiah who is to die. But there is another event at the start of Holy Week that proclaims Jesus as the Messiah who is to die: the anointing at Bethany. Yet we do not celebrate it. It is systematically ignored, and some theologians even dispute its importance. Why?

Was it because it was the act of a woman? This is what the US feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza maintained in the famous introduction to In Memory of Her, back in 1983: “Even her name is lost to us … forgotten because she was a woman.” It set us all thinking.

The anointing at Bethany was enormously significant according to Jesus, and was to form part of the core proclamation of the Gospel – what theologians call the kerygma: “Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” The words are similar to what he said about the Eucharist: “Do this in memory of me.” We celebrate the Eucharist daily, Palm Sunday annually – but the anointing at Bethany? Never.
Messiah (Hebrew) and Christ (Greek) simply mean “the Anointed One”, and, in the Psalms, “the Lord’s Anointed” is used as a synonym for the king. If challenged about when Jesus was anointed, commentators tend to refer to his baptism, although that could only be metaphorical. But the moment when Jesus actually was anointed is in all four gospels – something that can only be said of the most crucial events: his baptism, the miraculous feeding, his Passion and Resurrection.