Holy Week: Holy Monday

Holy Monday:
The day of ANOINTING AND CLEANSING

Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard,

anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.

John 12. 3

Full readings: Isaiah 41. 1-7; Pslam, 27 1-3, 13-4; St. John 12.1-11.

John is explicit this event took place six days for the Passover and before our Lord entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday while Mark placed it within the Passion narrative by having this anointing taking place two days before the Passover, and Luke has it some time earlier in the ministry. John is explicit that it took place in the home of Lazarus and Martha and Mary at Bethany, and it is Mary, the one who sat at our Lord’s feet listening to His words on a previous visit who lavishly anointed her Master in  anticipation of His burial. John’s version also has overtones of Luke’s version of the sinful woman who in breaking her flask of alabaster oil manifested how generous she was to the Master who forgave her sins. Is John then hinting that although Christ is the triumphant Messiah, He is about to die for the sin of mankind? Mark’s version also has the woman anonymous who anoints Christ’s head in the home of Simon of Bethany.

Whoever the woman was, although I like to think it is Mary, she is highly recommended by Christ for her loving deed. Mark recorded “Truly I tell you: wherever the gospel is proclaimed throughout the world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of he” (14.9). Can our Lord commend us by our loving actions to Him, especially in serving others? To-day we should ponder hard on the implications of Mary’s loving deed to her Master.

Once resolved to come to Jerusalem, Jesus is fearless. He knows only one thing, and that is to do God’s business. And God’s business and that of the religious authorities in Jerusalem are not the same. Holy Monday has been linked traditionally with our Lord’s cleansing of the temple. By cleansing the temple of all its cheating and overall corruption, Jesus was directly challenging the hypocrisy of the Jewish religious leaders. The temple was built for God and for His people to come there to be with Him in prayer. “For thither the tribes go up, ... to give thanks unto the name of the Lord.” (Ps.122:4) However it had become “a den of thieves”. In a sense Jesus threw down his gauntlet!

Just as Jesus challenged the hypocrisy of these religious leaders, so does He challenge and confront every kind of hypocrisy and insincerity, all cheating and deceitfulness in our lives and societies. Any act that cannot stand the piercing glare of Christ has to be either purged or extricated from us. Hypocrisy is the direct opposite to purity, and thus we have to remember our Lord’s saying that only the pure in heart will be able to see God, and enter His kingdom.

Put in the form of another of our Lord’s teaching, we cannot serve both God and mammon. In our quest for holiness, all dross must be purified. We need to be cleansed regularly from sin. We have to let the Spirit be like the heavy dew settling on the frosty ground. Bit by bit the dew saturates the ground until the frost begins to melt. Although at first it seems improbable, the soft dew will eventually melt the hard frost.

As Christians we are called to cleanse our lives in the purity of Christ’s teaching. This means we keep our bodies pure as they are the temples of the Holy Spirit. For the latter this means that we do not abuse our bodies sexually or through drugs or by over indulging in eating and drinking, or by being slovenly and lazy. The basis for any Christian relationship is honesty. I know some people say that if one is too honest, then that can hurt others and is therefore more preferable it is to tell a white lie. I cannot accept this. The Pauline tradition tells us very clearly we must speak the truth in love, and in Christ as he did. (Eph.4:15 & 1Tim.2:7) Anything other than the truth is a deception, and any kind of deception immediately forms a barrier. From some of my own experiences when very painful things have had to be said, although the person with whom you are conversing has been upset, most visibly at times, I’ve always known that person in the end to acknowledge truth is kinder than any hedging. The other side of all this is that the person having to speak the truth experiences pain too because she/he knows the immediate suffering of the other. The most important thing is to remember that God is in that situation, and if we are sensitive enough to Him, He will be the Speaker. Another factor to be considered is that quite often people are more resilient than for what we give them credit. Sometimes too people have some kind of premonition of the truth. This is especially true in regards to breaking the news of the death of a loved one.

We are also called to live honest lives where we work: in offices, behind check-outs or computers, retail business etc. That means working to the best of our ability and using the work hours for the company’s work and not for our own. There seems to be the temptation to think that the most important criterion is to sign on each day, and how we spend that day is not of any great consequence. Or there is the attitude that the company’s resources are there for our too, and therefore there is nothing wrong about helping ourselves to stationery, pens, clips and so on. In a sense this would be a bit like picking up the clean cutlery left on a host’s table after having been invited to dinner and going home with it. I don’t think anyone would do this, and would be deeply insulted at the suggestion of such a thing, but why the two standards?

Holy Monday therefore demands us to examine our lives to see whether they glow with Christ’s purity and honesty, and to examine whether we live by Christ’s commandments or our own watered down version of them. After confronting ourselves through Christ’s eyes, the comforting factor of this day is that we can be cleansed of all that is not pure and honest within us.