Monday of Holy Week

Mary took a liter of costly perfumed oil

made from genuine aromatic nard
and anointed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair;
the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil. 

After Jesus preached to a huge crowd of people in the wilderness, far from any town or marketplace, he directed his disciples to feed them. But they had only a few barley loaves and a couple of fish, barely enough to feed a few people. What good is that in the face of such hunger? It’s almost an insult, a laughably pitiful donation.

In today’s gospel story, we find the opposite: a surplus, “a liter of costly perfumed oil made from genuine aromatic nard.” But even that is not enough to stave off impending doom.

The money might have been used to feed some poor people, as Judas Iscariot points out. The needs of the poor are another bottomless abyss. His complaint is transparently hypocritical as everyone knows, but it is repeated whenever we build a church. Jesus insists the oil is not wasted; it must be kept for the day of his burial.

Often our gestures seem pitifully small. What can we do in the face of such overwhelming need all around us – the sick, the homeless, the imprisoned, the drug-addicted, the illiterate and abandoned? What can we do in the face of a tsunami of evil that is certain to fall upon us?

For that matter, what is our prayer in the light of heaven? It is a candle against the dark night, a smoldering wick. We can barely see anything by it. It barely lights our faces, much less the spectacular temple of God's presence all around us. 

Sometimes people say there is no time for prayer when there is so much work to be done. This has been called the gospel of social justice.

Sometimes they say the opposite, there’s nothing to be done but pray. This might be called the gospel of piety.

Neither is right because both suppose we know what to do. Rather we must be directed by the Holy Spirit to pray at all times, and never cease doing good. Mary’s impulse was right as Jesus affirmed.

After we have done everything we can to serve God, and seen that it amounts to nothing, we stand back and watch God complete the work which He began:

Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not;

See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In the desert I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers.

Wild beasts honor me, jackals and ostriches, for I put water in the desert and rivers in the wasteland for my chosen people to drink,

The people whom I formed for myself, that they might announce my praise.