Going through some old files, I came across this homily for the Monday of Holy Week, written, in my younger and more vulnerable years, when I was a novice in St. Paul, Minnesota.
During the Third Week of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius asks us to contemplate the suffering and death of Our Lord. This week, Holy Week, the Church, liturgically, asks us to do the same. The Third Week is one of the times in the Exercises when we ask for strange graces—shame, sorrow, confusion.
The Church’s liturgy also evokes these troubling graces, and it does so by, among other things, confronting us with today’s passage from John, the Anointing at Bethany. The shock this passage should provoke in us is perhaps diminished by its familiarity, but if we really deeply consider what is happening here, then we should be confused. We should be confused because part of us is tempted to side with Judas.
Three hundred days wages! Put in contemporary terms this must amount to something like $30,000, $40,000, $50,000—enough for college scholarships for one or several years, or private high school scholarships for several students; in some Third World countries that much money could build a school. And instead it is being spent on a jar of ointment. An expensive perfume. An ostentatious toiletry.
And this conspicuous consumption is being sanctioned by a man who has spent the past three years running around Galilee telling people to sell everything they have and give it to the poor. A man who coins such phrases as “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” It’s as if Ralph Nader has been caught driving around in an SUV.
Of course, the evangelist reminds us that Judas doesn’t really care about the poor, that he really wants Mary’s donation in cash so that he can take his cut. The evangelist’s commentary reminds us that we too, especially those of us in our line of work, can sometimes embrace the right cause for the wrong reason, and usually our error is not as dramatic as Judas’ graft. We can embrace poverty, even live poverty, because we want others to look at us and say, “Oh, Frater Lusvardi, he’s so humble.” Sometimes we don’t even need the approval of others; it is enough for us to lean back with satisfaction and say, “I know I am a sinner, but at least I practice poverty better than Fr. So-and-so.” We can use our acts of charity to create a sense of obligation in others—“Do you remember that gift I gave you, four years ago?” We can do this with any of the virtues the Christian life demands: poverty, charity, piety, fidelity to the moral law, obedience. The danger of insincerity is so real that all of us, without exception, should be a little uncomfortable by now.
But even understanding Judas’ sinister motives does not really resolve the difficulty of this passage, for Jesus knows what Judas is thinking. Our Lord could easily have given the responsibility for distributing the money gained by sale of the oil to one of his more trustworthy disciples. He could even have distributed the money himself. Or he might have been willing to tolerate a little graft so long as most of the money got to the poor—wouldn’t even a little waste have been better than seeing all that money spent on history’s most famous pedicure? But Jesus chooses none of these sensible solutions, and on a purely material level we must admit that Judas is right. So there must more to this passage than Judas’ motives or Mary’s expensive oils, something else we are meant to see.
Jesus Christ. It’s Jesus Christ!
This story is not about Ralph Nader. Jesus Christ is not a charismatic man with some good ideas. He is God himself; as our ancient creed affirms, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. He is greater even than his teachings.
Sometimes we are tempted to reduce the Gospel to a rulebook, to a set of ethical guidelines, to a collection of principles. All of these are part of Revelation. They come from God, they point to God, and if freely embraced they will lead us closer to God. But God’s most complete Revelation, his self-revelation, is a man, and the confusion we feel today at the beginning of Holy Week when reading of the Anointing at Bethany is because this man is like other men, but he is God. And there is no one else like him.
Jesus is different than all the prophets who have come before him—Moses, Isaiah, John the Baptist—different than all the other great religious personalities the world has produced—Mohamed, Buddha, Gandhi. The power of all these other great leaders came from the message they preached, whether its origin was divine or otherwise. The power of Christ, however, is Christ, and his most important message is the Incarnation, God made man, and the Resurrection, God renewing his Creation through the suffering of his Son.
Christ matters absolutely. That is, he matters not because of what he says or does, but because of who he is. His absolute importance is not dependent on any principles, things, people, or events in Creation. Mary does not need any other reason to lavish her costly oil on Christ’s feet; he himself is the reason. Judas misses this point, and in doing so, he loses everything.
Perhaps our confusion continues and we feel some sorrow over Judas, for we too, timid and fearful creatures, balk before the absolute. We replace it with other contingent and relative goods, things with which we are familiar, things with which we creatures can relate; we replace the absolute with what the Bible calls idols. Sometimes for those of us who, like Judas, have begun to follow Jesus, the most dangerous idols are those which are closest to Christ—his teachings or the principles we attribute to him. This is particularly dangerous if we choose only some of his teachings or principles to guide us; if we say, “I adore the devotions, but I don’t have time for Catholic social teaching.” Or if we say, “I am so busy helping the poor that I don’t have time for Mass.” But even if we get all the rules right, we must still remember that there is always something more, a person and a relationship at the center of it all. As Pope Benedict tells us, “Christianity is not an ideology, but a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”
Some of this might seem a bit abstract for 7:30 AM, so I will illustrate what I mean about not reducing the Gospel to a principle through a modest but concrete example. One Sunday evening when I was working at St. John’s University I was planning to attend the student liturgy at 9 PM. Beforehand I had dinner with one of my monk friends, who among other things is an excellent cook. I had a lovely meal, but it was 8:57 before I put down my fork. I had not fasted, not by any stretch of the imagination, so on my way out the door I said, “Father, can I still go to communion?” And he replied, “What is the principle behind the fast?”
I thought about that question as I slid in behind the procession. At first I thought, “Well, the principle is obviously respect for God, and I know I have respect for God, so I can still go.” But I felt a little uneasy with that response, so next I thought, “The principle behind the fast is sacrifice, sharing in Christ’s sacrifice, so I shouldn’t go.” Soon I realized that I could go on all night coming up with new principles and different outcomes, but I learned something that night about our liturgy, to which the fast is a prelude. It cannot be reduced to principles; it will always mean more than what we can say about it. And the reason is that at the center of our liturgy, at the center of our faith, is a person, and we participate in the ritual—we fast, we kneel, we sing, we shake hands with our neighbor—because we love that person. If our liturgy were just about principles, then we could read the pamphlet from the comfort of our recliner. But instead we go to encounter Jesus. In the end it does not matter why we fast or sing or kneel; we do it because Christ, through his Church asks us to do it; we do it out of love. And love needs no justification.
How mean and materialistic we would be if we condemned Mary for her actions. We forget that she has either spent her savings on this precious oil or sacrificed what is probably her most valuable possession, and all for the only thing that is worthy of such sacrifice—all for Christ. It is fitting that Christ reveals himself as a person. A person will always be more than a psychological profile, a list of accomplishments, a physical description, a collection of talents and characteristics. Beneath all these things, a person simply is.
So it is with Christ, who later this week, when encountering the High Priest’s guards will declare, “I AM,” just as the Father through the burning bush tells us, “I AM.” He doesn’t need to do or say anything more. Let us pray to overcome our timidity and fear before the absolute and face him as does Mary, kneeling before him and anointing him with oil drying his feet with her hair, offering him the most precious thing she owns and then giving him herself. And let us face him as does Lazarus at the end of today’s reading—Lazarus whom, because of his witness to the divinity of Jesus, the chief priests plot to kill. Like Lazarus, raised to new life in our baptism, putting on the new man Paul speaks of in Ephesians, let our lives too be a gift and a testament to Christ, even if it means we follow him to Holy Week’s conclusion, to Calvary.
Readings: Is 42:1-7; Jn 12:1-11
Jesuit Novitiate of the North American Martyrs
St. Paul, Minnesota
April 2007
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Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 