Monday of Holy Week

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus visits the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus.  Mary anoints Jesus' feet with pure nard, a very costly ointment.  It is an extravagant gesture of devotion, gratitude and love.  Judas Iscariot regards this gesture as irresponsible, wasteful and reckless.  He criticises Mary's action on the spurious ground that the money could have been better used, for the benefit of the poor - or so he said.  But Jesus defends Mary's action and accepts it in the spirit in which it is offered.  It is a free gesture of love and devotion; it is, in a way, a reflection of the extravagance of the love of God for each one of us; a love which is free and unbounded.

Whenever we love, truly love, we share - participate - in something of the love of God, whose love is the prototype of all loving.  The marriage rite makes this clear, but there are other contexts, too, in which human beings love and become capable of the extravagant, almost reckless giving of the self which we see in today's Gospel.  And because God's love is deeper, stronger and infinitely more extravagant than our own, it follows (because our love is a participation in the love of God) that our potentiality to love is without limit.

This week, we are brought into the closest possible contact with the love of God which reaches out to every person on earth.  We see the full extent of his love shown forth in the death of Christ, and we are invited to respond in love.  Like God's love for us, and like the nard in the Gospel reading, this love is always going to be costly.  The way of love is never the easy way; it is always the harder and more-demanding way.  But it is a purifying way, a way which leads through the cross to a new manner of existence in which all suffering, cruelty and death is overcome.  This is what Holy Week is about, and it is what being a companion of Christ is about.

This week, we re-enact, sacramentally, the loving events of our Redemption.  But we do more than simply re-enact them.  We re-enact in order to participate in the movement out from ourselves and into the life of the God who is love.