Monday of Holy Week
At the heart of the imagery of light in the Scriptures comes today’s Psalm: The Lord is my light and salvation. Today’s readings help us understand this light through our common experience of darkness.
The Gospel today—of Mary, no doubt feeling overwhelmed with gratitude for her brother’s resurrection, anointing Jesus’ feet with a liter of costly perfume—has Jesus defending Mary’s exorbitant gesture as preparing him for burial. Judas, blindest of who was before Him, complains it could have been sold for 300 days’ wages. The chief priests, in their darkness, plot the death of Jesus.
As Catholics, we celebrate sacraments, the visible forms and gestures of invisible grace. The disciples—reluctant to see what Jesus had foretold—chose to remain in the dark. But grace comes in our darkness. We can’t be a light for the nations if we can’t face the darkness in our lives and see God there, too, the God willing to suffer and die for our blindness, for our own darkness.
God’s people have always suffered. Our understanding of God as light is best understood through this. As Isaiah states, I formed you, and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations, To open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.
St. John notes that “the smell of oil filled the whole house.” Let us, anointed in baptism, smell that fragrance, breathe deep, look within and around us, and offer all we have to the God who desires to save us from our blindness, our confinement, our darkness.
Jesus, our light and our salvation, teach us to fear not; help us to see through our darkness and gaze upon Your face, that we may become a light for the nations.
TJ Bird Matarazzo, ’98, Member of the Worshipping Community
Psalm 27:1-3, 13-14
Gospel: John 12:1-11
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