Thursday 20 March 2008

Monday in Holy Week: "Mary...wiped His feet with her hair"

"Mary took a pound of ointment of right spikenard of great price and anointed the feet of Jesus..."


Henryk Siemiradzki. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. 1886.

"With regard to the chastisement that is to befall Jerusalem, He gives this...answer: 'Amen, I say to you this generation shall not pass 'til all these things are done' [Matt.xiv.34]. History tells us how the prophecy of Jesus was fulfilled: forty years had scarcely elapsed after His Ascension, when the Roman army encamped on this very place [Mount Olivet] where He is now speaking to His disciples and laid siege to the ungrateful and wicked city".
[Rt Rev Abbot Dom Prosper Gueranger OSB, L'Annee liturgique, vol VI "Passiontide and Holy Week".]

"Lo, they shall all be destroyed as a garment, the moth shall eat them up."
[Isaias 50:9]

"Mary...wiped his feet with her hair and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. Then one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, he that was about to betray Him, said: 'Why was not this ointment sold...and given to the poor?'...Jesus therefore said: 'Let her alone, that she may keep it against the day of my burial; for the poor you have always with you, but me you have not always with you...' ".
[John 12:3-9]


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