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This is perhaps the greatest moral challenge Jesus left us: We all do pretty well in love when the persons we are loving are warm and gracious, but can we be
gracious and mellow in the face of bitterness, jealousy, hatred, withdrawal? That's the litmus test of love.
- Ronald Rolheiser (Indeed it is! Where are you experiencing this testing at this time? Ask the Spirit to help you love difficult people and
situations.) |
Is 42:1-7; Ps 27:1, 2, 3, 13-14
Jn 12:1-11 Six days before Passover Jesus came to Bethany,
where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.
They gave a dinner for him there, and Martha served,
while Lazarus was one of those reclining at table with him.
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.
Then Judas the Iscariot, one of his disciples,
and the one who would betray him, said,
"Why was this oil not sold for
three hundred days' wages
and given to the poor?"
He said this not because he cared about the poor
but because he was a thief and held the money bag
and used to steal the
contributions.
So Jesus said, "Leave her alone.
Let her keep this for the day of my burial.
You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me." The
large crowd of the Jews found out that he was there and came,
not only because of him, but also to see Lazarus,
whom he had raised from the dead.
And the chief priests plotted to kill Lazarus too,
because many of the Jews were turning away
and believing in Jesus because of him.
Praying the Daily Gospels: A Guide to Meditation, by Philip St. Romain, 2018 (3rd ed.) John 12: 1-11 (Mary anoints Jesus)
We begin Holy Week with a reading that anticipates Jesus’ death and burial. Earlier in John’s GospeI, Mary had chosen to sit at the feet of Jesus while Martha, her sister, criticized her for not helping with housework. In today’s passage Judas criticizes Mary for her extravagant expression of love for Jesus, but Jesus rebukes him and affirms her
display as prophetic of his burial. • Do you believe that money and time spent on Christian art and on church worship space are scandalous in a world where so many are poor? • Resolve to demonstrate your love for another person in an extravagant way for
the glory of God.
Treatise on the Love of God, by St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) ____________ BOOK III: OF THE PROGRESS AND PERFECTION OF LOVE Chapter 9: A preparation for the discourse on the union of the blessed with God.
The Queen of Saba, who at the greatness of Solomon's renown had left all to go and see him, having arrived in his presence, and having heard the wonders of the wisdom which he poured out in his speeches, as one astonished and lost in admiration, cried out that what she had learnt by hearsay of this heavenly wisdom was not half the knowledge which sight and experience gave her.
Ah! how beautiful and dear are the truths which faith discovers unto us by hearing! But when having arrived in the heavenly Jerusalem, we shall see the great Solomon, the King of Glory, seated upon the thrown of his wisdom, manifesting by an incomprehensible brightness the wonders and eternal secrets of his sovereign truth, with such light that our understanding will actually see what it had believed here below--Ah! then, dearest Theotimus, what raptures! what
ecstasies! what admiration! what love! what sweetness! No, never (shall we say in this excess of sweetness) never could we have conceived that we should see truths so delightsome. We believed indeed all the glorious things that were said of thee, O great city of God, but we could not conceive the infinite greatness of the abysses of thy delights.
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