The Anointing Was the Beginning: Why Holy Week Starts with Mary Magdalene

How the woman with the alabaster jar reframed the cross before a single palm was waved.

Before the spectacle, before the shouting crowds, before the panic in Peter’s eyes or the crack of the whip—before any of it, there was oil. There was a woman. And there was a knowing.

Most churches begin Holy Week with Palm Sunday: waving branches, singing hosannas, a gentle Jesus meekly riding to his doom while people cheer. But that’s not how the Gospel story begins. Not really.

It begins with an anointing. A woman steps forward. She breaks open a jar. And everything changes.

The Passion doesn't begin with betrayal. It begins with recognition. And the person who saw it first—the one who enacted it before a single sword was drawn—was not Peter, not John, not the crowd.

It was her.

What the Gospels Say (That the Liturgy Forgot)

All four canonical Gospels record a scene of anointing. That alone should cause pause.

Mark and Matthew speak of an unnamed woman in Bethany anointing Jesus’ head. John names her as Mary of Bethany, anointing his feet. Luke moves the scene earlier, shifts the setting to the home of a Pharisee, and labels the woman a “sinner.” A teaching moment, he says.

Nowhere is she named Mary Magdalene.

And yet, for 1,500 years, that’s who she became.

In 591 CE, Pope Gregory the Great preached a sermon fusing three women—Mary of Bethany, the anonymous woman with the jar, and the so-called “sinner”—into one: Mary Magdalene, the penitent prostitute. He even claimed that her “seven demons” were a symbol of the seven deadly sins.

That’s how it entered the bloodstream.
Not through Scripture.
Through sermon.

And it stuck.

She was no longer a disciple. No longer a prophet.
Just a reformed whore with great hair and expensive perfume.

The Act That Changed Everything

Names aside, the act itself is what matters.

A woman crosses the boundary of silence. She enters a room of men. She breaks open a vessel. She anoints the body of a man who is still alive.

And the men complain.

This oil is too expensive. This act is too much.
Why waste it? Why her?

Jesus silences them.
“Leave her alone. She has done this for my burial.”
In one version: “Wherever this gospel is preached, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

It wasn’t.

Because the Church never let the story start here.

Anointing is not decoration. It’s consecration.
In the tradition of Israel, it marked kingship, priesthood, and burial.
She anointed him for all three.

And she did it before any crown, cross, or tomb.

She saw what was coming.
And she acted from love—not reaction, not fear, not duty.

Recognition, not panic.
Tenderness, not drama.
Initiation, not sentiment.

This was no gesture of personal devotion.
It was priestly. Prophetic. Apocalyptic.

And it reframes the Passion entirely.

Liturgical Amnesia: How the Church Deleted Her

So why isn’t this the beginning of Holy Week?

Because the Church silenced it.

Not by decree—but by omission. Systematically. Repeatedly.

The story of the anointing is absent from the Palm Sunday liturgy. Maundy Thursday features Jesus washing feet, but not her act of preparing his. Good Friday lingers on Peter’s denial and Judas’ betrayal—but not on the one who never fled. Even Easter morning, when Magdalene appears in every Gospel, her presence is backgrounded or passed over quickly.

The liturgy shaped memory. And it left her out.

Peter’s failure is sung in arias.
Her fidelity is unmentioned.

The drama was rewritten.
The woman who began it was redacted.

Not because the texts forgot her.
Because the Church chose not to see.

Starting Where She Started

To begin Holy Week with the anointing is not to revise a timeline.
It is to restore a center of gravity.

This act reframes Jesus’ path—not as a tragedy driven by betrayal, but as a conscious walk into death, seen and blessed by one who understood.

She did not deny.
She did not flee.
She did not wait until it was safe to act.

She entered the Passion before it began—
And she is the only one who stayed through the end.

A Liturgical Act of Restoration

Cynthia Bourgeault did what bishops would not. She wrote the anointing back in.

In her Holy Week liturgies, the week begins not with hosannas, but with oil.
A chant rises: Slowly blooms the rose within.

A woman comes forward.
She anoints another in silence.
No fanfare. No performance. Just presence.

The room shifts.

Oil on hands. Oil on feet.
Each participant blesses the next.
The chant continues.
Place me as a seal upon your heart, for love is as strong as death.

And this is how the Passion begins.

Not in spectacle. In stillness.
Not in fear. In recognition.

The body is blessed before it breaks.
And love goes ahead of the suffering.

Let the Passion Begin in Love

Let it begin with oil.

Let it begin with her.

Let it begin with the one who saw what the others couldn’t, and did what no one else would.

Because the Passion doesn’t begin with palm branches.
It begins with a jar, broken.
With a woman, unflinching.
With love, poured out on skin.

The one who stayed was the one who started it.
And that’s why Holy Week begins with Mary Magdalene.

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