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# Anointed: What the Word Actually Means and Why It Matters
A footballer scores a hat-trick and the commentator calls him "anointed." A gospel singer releases an album and the reviews say it's "heavily anointed." A megachurch pastor tells his congregation that their business ventures are anointed by God. I've heard the word used to describe a sermon, a sourdough starter, and — I am not making this up — a particularly good penalty shootout. Somewhere between the Old Testament and Instagram, a word that meant something precise and costly and political has become a vague intensifier for "really good."
This isn't just a linguist's complaint. Words carry theology, and when we lose the weight of a word, we usually lose the weight of what it pointed to. The drift of "anointed" away from its biblical meaning isn't semantic slippage. It reflects a deeper confusion about power, identity, and what kind of Messiah we actually want.
## Oil, Kings, and the Smell of Politics
Let's start with what anointing actually looked like. When Samuel anoints David in 1 Samuel 16, he doesn't whisper an encouragement or post a flattering review. He takes a horn of oil — physical, fragrant, dripping — and pours it on the boy's head in front of his brothers. Olive oil, not metaphorical oil. The kind that runs down your face and into your beard and onto your clothes. The kind people could smell on you afterwards.
This matters because anointing in the Old Testament was never private piety. It was public, material, and politically loaded. Saul was still the king when David was anointed. To pour oil on someone's head was, in effect, to commit treason against the current order in the name of a future one. Samuel knew this, which is why he was afraid to go: "How can I go? If Saul hears it, he will kill me" (1 Samuel 16:2).
The same logic runs through the anointing of priests. Aaron is anointed in Exodus 29, consecrated and set apart, the oil running down his beard and onto the collar of his robes (Psalm 133 lingers lovingly on this image). The anointing physically marks him as someone who now belongs to God in a particular way, with particular access and particular responsibilities. He cannot un-anoint himself. The oil dries but the office doesn't.
Three offices in Israel received anointing: prophet, priest, and king. Each was a public commission into a vocation that involved confrontation with the powers of the day — speaking truth to a wayward people, mediating between a holy God and a sinful nation, governing under the gaze of the covenant. The oil wasn't a reward. It was an assignment.
## Mashiach: The Word Before the Word
The Hebrew word for "anointed one" is *mashiach*. Translated into Greek, it becomes *christos*. Translated into English, it becomes "Christ." Which means — and this is the bit that should give us pause — every time we use the word "anointed," we are using the same word that the New Testament uses for Jesus. "Christ" is not Jesus' surname. It is a title: Jesus the Anointed One.
So when a Christian rapper is described as having an "anointed flow," what's being said, etymologically and theologically, is that he has a Christ-flow. When a leader claims their venture is anointed, they are claiming it shares in the consecration that scripture reserves for the Messiah. This is not necessarily wrong — Paul tells the Corinthians they have an anointing from the Holy One (1 John 2:20 says the same to a different audience) — but it is much weightier than the casual usage suggests.
The early church did not stumble into this language. They chose it because they believed Jesus had inhabited and transformed the office. He was the prophet greater than Moses, the priest greater than Aaron, the king greater than David. Every anointed figure in the Old Testament had been a partial, often broken, foreshadowing of the one whose anointing would not dry up. To call someone or something "anointed" without reference to that fulfilment is, theologically speaking, to write a cheque on an account you may not have access to.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I am trying to say: this word is loaded. We should at least know what we're carrying when we throw it around.
## The Anointed One Who Got Crucified
Here's where it gets uncomfortable. If we trace what anointing means in the life of Jesus, we find a pattern that should permanently unsettle any triumphalist use of the word.
Jesus is anointed first at his baptism. The Spirit descends, and Luke is careful to record what comes next: "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil" (Luke 4:1-2). The anointing leads immediately into wilderness, hunger, and confrontation with evil. When Jesus emerges, his first sermon in Nazareth takes Isaiah 61 as its text: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor." The people are initially impressed, then enraged, and try to throw him off a cliff. The anointing has a recognisable trajectory: Spirit, then wilderness, then proclamation, then opposition.
Jesus is anointed a second time, in a way the church has often struggled to know what to do with. A woman comes to him in Bethany with an alabaster jar of expensive perfume, breaks it open, and pours it on his head. The disciples object — it could have been sold, the money given to the poor, the standard utilitarian objection that we are all good at making about extravagance we didn't think of ourselves. Jesus stops them: "She has done a beautiful thing to me... When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial" (Matthew 26:10-12).
Read that again. The anointing is for burial. The royal oil and the burial spices have collapsed into the same gesture. Jesus is being consecrated as king at the precise moment he is being prepared as a corpse. This is what Christian anointing fundamentally is: the king who is the sacrifice, the priest who is the offering, the prophet who is killed by the people he is sent to.
If we are going to use the word "anointed" with anything like its biblical weight, we have to reckon with this. The Anointed One got crucified — not despite his anointing, but because of it. The pattern is not Spirit, then success. It is Spirit, then suffering, then, eventually, but not before, resurrection.
## How a Costly Word Became a Compliment
So how did we get from there to here? How did a word that meant "commissioned-toward-suffering-on-behalf-of-others" become a word that means "this song slaps"?
Part of the answer is historical. The charismatic and Pentecostal renewals of the twentieth century recovered, gloriously, a sense that the Spirit is still active and that ordinary believers can be filled with him. That was a needed correction to a desiccated cessationism. But somewhere along the way the language of anointing got attached primarily to performance, preaching that moves people, worship that produces tingles, leaders with magnetic gifts. The category began to drift from commission to capacity.
Then came the prosperity gospel, which married this drift to North Atlantic consumer logic, and the result was predictable. If anointing equals capacity, and capacity equals success, then success becomes the evidence of anointing. The footballer's hat-trick, the album sales, the megachurch numbers, these become not just impressive achievements but proofs of divine favour. The word is now doing work it was never meant to do.
Nietzsche, who saw through most things, would have recognised what's happening. He spent a lot of his energy diagnosing what he called *ressentiment*, the way we sacralise what we already want, dress our preferences in moral language, and call our envies and ambitions by holier names than they deserve. I don't agree with Nietzsche about much, but he is uncomfortably useful here. When we call a thing "anointed" because we already liked it, we are not really making a theological claim. We are dressing up an aesthetic preference in borrowed robes. The oil is our own.
This isn't restricted to one wing of the church. The cessationist who would never use the word "anointed" can still effectively do the same thing under different vocabulary, calling a sermon "faithful" or a ministry "blessed" in ways that simply baptise the things their tribe was always going to approve of. The mechanism is the same. The temptation is the same. We want to put God's signature underneath our own opinions.
## Augustine on Signs and the Things They Point To
Augustine, in *De Doctrina Christiana*, makes a distinction that helps here. He distinguishes between signs (*signa*) and the things they signify (*res*). A sign points to something beyond itself. Smoke points to fire. A word points to a meaning. The problem comes when we get attached to the sign and forget what it was pointing at, or, worse, when we use the sign in a way that no longer connects to its referent at all.
When "anointed" loses its biblical referent, the suffering, appointed, sacrificial Christ, it becomes what Augustine would call an empty sign. It still has emotional force, because the word carries cultural weight from its proper use. But it no longer points anywhere. It just hovers, vaguely sacralising whatever it's attached to. The word flatters us instead of forming us.
This matters because the way we use religious language shapes the way we think about God. If "anointed" comes to mean "successful," then the unsuccessful are, by implication, unanointed. The faithful pastor of a small struggling church on an outer London estate is not anointed; the celebrity preacher with the book deal is. The single mother holding her family together on benefits is not anointed; the entrepreneur who tithes a percentage of his eight-figure exit is. We end up with a theology that mirrors the world's ranking systems and calls it the Spirit's verdict.
Augustine would tell us, I think, that to honour a word is to honour what it points to. And to use a word loosely is, eventually, to lose the thing itself.
## What Anointing Actually Costs the Anointed
Look at every anointed figure in scripture and you will find a pattern. David is anointed in 1 Samuel 16 and spends most of the next book running from Saul, hiding in caves, pretending to be mad in front of Philistine kings, watching his men nearly stone him. His anointing does not lift him above difficulty; it propels him into it. The crown he was promised at sixteen does not sit on his head until he is about thirty. There are fifteen years of wilderness between the oil and the throne.
The Suffering Servant of Isaiah, whom Jesus identifies himself with in Luke 4, is described in Isaiah 53 as despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering. Isaiah 61, which Jesus reads in the synagogue, talks about being anointed to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for captives. The anointing is *for* something, and that something puts the anointed one squarely in the path of the broken, the imprisoned, the grieving. You do not get to do that work and stay clean.
Paul, who calls himself a slave of Christ Jesus, lists what his ministry has cost him: imprisonments, beatings, shipwrecks, sleepless nights, hunger, the daily pressure of concern for the churches (2 Corinthians 11). He is not boasting in the modern sense. He is establishing the credentials of authentic apostolic ministry, and those credentials are, almost entirely, marks of suffering.
This is the consistent biblical witness. Anointing is a commission into difficulty. It is the Spirit's "yes" to a vocation that the flesh would not choose. The oil flows downward, into wilderness places, toward the people no one else wants to be near. If our use of the word "anointed" has nothing to do with this, if it just means "really gifted" or "really blessed", then we are talking about something else and using the wrong word for it.
## Recovering the Word for the Church
So what do we do? I don't think the answer is to ban the word, or to start correcting people every time they use it loosely. That would be the kind of pedantry that wins arguments and loses friends. But pastors, teachers, and ordinary believers can do some patient work to recover what the word actually means, both in our preaching and in our daily speech.
A few suggestions, offered in the hope of being useful rather than scolding.
First, when we use the word about people, let's let the biblical pattern govern our expectations. If a leader is genuinely anointed, we should expect to see them in the wilderness as well as on the platform, and we should not be scandalised by the wilderness when it comes. We should be more sceptical, not less, of leaders whose ministries seem to be all platform and no cost. The pattern in scripture is not "anointing equals exemption from suffering." It is closer to the opposite.
Second, let's notice where the Spirit's anointing actually shows up in the New Testament. In Acts, the Spirit comes upon ordinary believers, Galilean fishermen, Ethiopian eunuchs, Roman centurions, jailers, slave girls, and produces boldness, generosity, and willingness to suffer for the name. The anointing distributes itself across the body. It is not the property of the gifted few. Every Christian, John says, has an anointing from the Holy One (1 John 2:20, 27). This should make us much slower to use "anointed" as a way of marking out a spiritual elite, and much quicker to recognise the Spirit's work in unspectacular places.
Third, let's be honest about our own motives when we reach for the word. Am I calling this thing anointed because it bears the marks of the crucified Christ, sacrificial love, costly truth-telling, care for the poor, faithfulness in obscurity? Or am I calling it anointed because I enjoyed it, or because the speaker is from my tribe, or because I want to baptise a preference? These are different things. The first honours the word. The second hollows it out.
Fourth, and this is the pastoral heart of it, recovering the word is an act of love toward the people who feel themselves to be on the underside of the church's success metrics. The lay member who has prayed faithfully for thirty years without notice. The pastor of the congregation that never grew past forty. The worship leader who serves week after week in a hall that smells of damp. If "anointed" only means "successful," these people are functionally written out of the story. If "anointed" means what scripture says it means, commissioned, consecrated, configured to the pattern of the suffering Christ, then they may, in fact, be the most anointed people in the room.
The Anointed One we follow had oil poured on him twice: once at his baptism by the Spirit, once at Bethany by a woman preparing him for burial. He carried both anointings into a cross. If we use the word about anyone or anything else, we should at least know whose pattern we are invoking.
"To this you were called," Peter writes, "because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps" (1 Peter 2:21).
Walk carefully. The oil is heavier than it looks.