Monday in Holy Week, 6th April 2020
Let beauty emerge. What Mary does here is a beautiful action significant of death. It’s not that we spend our lives preparing for death, as if death were our ultimate and final end, but that death is a marker for who we were from our very beginning; it is, in a sense, part of us, a defining characteristic. And Rahner talks of ‘befriending death’; that is, accepting it as part of who we are, defining each moment of our lives and so giving them their true value. What we may see in Judas’s supposed concern for the poor and criticism of Mary’s action, is a denial of death, both his own and that of the Christ he has been called to follow. The irony perhaps being, that the flip side to this denial is an idolisation of Christ to the point where both lose their humanity. There will be many more denials to come as Jesus journeys ever closer to the Cross but no denial from himself, even of who he truly is: fully human and Son of God. In accepting death in this way we too may come to be divine and allow beauty to emerge.