Today's Gospel serves as a lovely prelude to the Passion of Jesus. Jesus is in the house of his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus, recently brought back from the dead. Perhaps his last moments of companionship before the horrors that are to come. Mary, the contemplative one, brings in expensive perfumed unguent and pours it all over the feet of Jesus, filling the house with its fragrance. It is a sign of great love and compassion.

Judas, the spiritually blind materialist, sees what he regards as terrible waste.

Hypocritically he suggests the money would have been better spent helping the poor. Jesus sees an altogether different meaning in Mary's action. He sees the tremendous love behind the action and interprets it as a symbolical anointing for his burial. Dying as a common criminal, Jesus would normally not have been anointed. (And, in fact, he was not anointed after his burial.)

"You have the poor with you always, you will not always have me." The poor cannot be truly loved except in God and in Jesus. "As often as you do it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you do it to me." Only those who truly love God (whatever name they call him) are able truly to love the poor and all those in need.