Monday of Holy Week
April 14, 2014 8:30am
There is one detail that I want
to comment on in today’s gospel.
We are told that Jesus’ friend
Mary anoints his feet with some expensive perfumed oil.
This is an act of courtesy and of
love.
But Judas complains that the
money spent on the oil should have been given to the poor.
Jesus responds to Judas and his
response is really a quote from the Book of Deuteronomy.
He says, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
We might be tempted to interpret
this as meaning that praying, showing acts of love and devotion to Jesus, or
even building expensive churches to show our love for God is more important
than caring for the poor.
However, the very next sentence
of the passage from Deuteronomy that Jesus quotes is: “I command you, therefore, always be open-handed with anyone who is in
need.”
So, Jesus has already made our
care of the poor and hurting the number one criterion for entrance into God’s kingdom.
Now, here he defends the
attention being paid to himself.
But the context leads us to
conclude that Jesus is also saying that our faith in him and love for him must
lead us to care for those in need.
And, in turn, our care for those
in need leads us to Jesus because we are to see him in them.
This is also the message conveyed
a few days after today’s incident when Jesus’ washes the feet of the apostles’ at
the Last Supper.
Maybe we can say that love of
Jesus and love of neighbor are just two different dimensions of the One Love.
And the One Love is God.
Maybe another way to say this is
that it is a both/and and not an either/or.
