Holy Monday: Mary’s gesture of Thanksgiving

Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair (John 12:3). This gesture touches Christ’s heart. By her gesture, she thanks Jesus for having answered her prayer and responded to her request. Each time we experience the mercy of Jesus for us, each time we are clothed freely by his mercy, our soul must give thanks and exult with joy. The Virgin Mary’s Magnificat is a song of thanksgiving. And the act of thanksgiving of Mary, the sister of Lazarus, is this costly perfume. Nothing is too beautiful for Christ, nothing is too great, when it is truly for him and him alone. (…)

When we have a soul of thanksgiving, we accept to be defenseless. If we still have our costly perfume, we can say to ourselves, “I can still sell it and so I can be rich.” But the day we pour it out on the feet of Jesus, we will have nothing left and we will accept to not have anything, to be disarmed.  Thanksgiving disarms us because it puts us in the gratuitousness of love.  Mary thus could not say anything in answer to Judas, whose reasoning appeared to be one of justice; Jesus therefore comes to her defense.  From Jesus’ perspective, it was not an initiative, it was a response:  he took the defense of the poor one.  The true poor one is the one who gives everything, who does not keep anything for himself. Mary was very poor in this gesture; she had nothing for herself and she accepted to be completely disarmed.  She did it spontaneously without worrying about the judgment of the Apostles.  She was looking only at Jesus. 

(…) When we accept to be completely defenceless for Christ, when we give him everything in a gesture of thanksgiving and keep nothing back for ourselves, and if someone next to us looks at us with pitiless hardness and judges us as having made a mistake, let us never forget that Jesus is the one who responds to us. When our neighbour does not respond, Jesus himself responds, and he responds wonderfully, and unveils the depth of his heart, the vulnerability of his heart. (…) Heaven will be nothing but thanksgiving. Eternally, we will thank God for being God, thank the Father for being the Father, the Word for being the Word made flesh, offered even to the point of the wounded heart of the Lamb and in the mystery of the Eucharist.  We will thank the Holy Spirit for being the Spirit of love and for having given us the Immaculate heart of Mary.  There will be nothing but thanksgiving. As the Book of Revelation tells us, we will be clothed in “white robes,” and we must never forget that white is the color of the white horse, that is to say, of the victory of love. Whiteness expresses purity, but it says much more than purity; it symbolizes the victory of love. And that is what Heaven is; Heaven is thanksgiving; it is singing the victory of love and recognizing that there is nothing other than love and that love alone remains eternally.  Heaven will be this unspeakable thanksgiving, which is already taking hold of our hearts.  We are already in heaven when we are in thanksgiving.