Why Context Really Is Important After All
There’s a line in the NT when Jesus tells his followers “the poor will always be with you.” Many Christian denominations and individual leaders have spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out just what he meant by “the poor will always be with you”. I am not about to start claiming that I’ve discovered something no one else ever has but it might help if they remembered the line that comes after “the poor will always be with you.” The next part is basically “but I won’t be here much longer.”

People concentrate so much on the first part that they forget what story that verse actually comes from. It’s from the story in which Mary Magdalene smashes that jar of perfume and uses it to annoint Jesus’s feet. The disciples were upset because they thought she could have sold the perfume and used the profits to help the poor. So Jesus dismisses that with “the poor will always be with you.”

The focus of the story is not the poor, or what we should do with the poor or why they will always be with us. That's important to discuss, sure, but the Bible gives us many other opportunities to do so. By obsessing over what that one line means, you’re kind of ignoring the whole point of the scene. In context that line is about Jesus saying “look, forget about the poor for a second, something amazing is happening and I need you to be watching.”

You can debate about what the amazing thing was that was happening. Was MM performing an ancient, sacred ritual designed to formally announce Jesus as their king? Or was she symbolically annointing him prior to his death? Or was it important because she was a worldly sinner who is so overwhelmed by her religious experience that she smashes her most prized possession? Did she know why she did it, or was it just a coincidence?

All of those questions are more important here than "why did he say the poor would always be with us?"