Extravagant love

Lent 5 C April 7, 2019

I was born in 1939; my parents were both born in 1911, and began at West Chester State Teacher’s college in the fall of 1929. My father and mother both majored in secondary education. He graduated in 1932, she in 1933, into the depths of the Great Depression,. Pennsylvania had 100 school districts; 99 of them hired as teachers only graduates of their district’s own high school; one, Lower Merion, from which my mother graduated, never hired its own graduates. My father went to the Episcopal Divinity School in Philadelphia; my mother took what jobs she could get until they finally married in 1936 when my father was called as Assistant at St. Luke and the Epiphany in downtown Philadelphia (13^th St. between Spruce and Pine).  He was called to serve the people of the neighborhood and was paid $100 a month and an apartment.  

My point is that my parents learned in the Depression to be frugal people, and I was brought up to be frugal. We had what we needed, but extras were carefully considered. My father used to tell me, “Give 10% to the Lord, keep 10% for yourself as savings, live on what is left.”

With that family history, I find today’s gospel challenging. Its teaching about God’s extravagant love is hard for me. Judas said the perfume was worth 300 denarii. 300 denarii was more than a year’s income. A day’s wage for a working man was one denarius – 4 grams of silver - $2 today, but worth a lot more then.  When you file your taxes note your gross income, and figure that as the cost of Mary’s perfume, poured out over Jesus’ feet. It was an extravagant gift.     

But the spiritual truth is that God does love us extravagantly. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”

It didn’t take supernatural wisdom for Jesus to know that the leaders of his people wanted to silence him, to kill him if that was necessary.  Saint John places today’s gospel story “six days before the Passover.” Jesus is aware of the hypocrisy and the increasing hostility of the religious establishment.  Despite the Commandment, “Thou shalt so no murder,” St. John (11:50) reports that the high priest Caiaphas said, after Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, “You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.”

Our continuing temptation, as individuals and as social institutions, to set self-preservation as our first goal. We naturally do whatever we have to do to keep on living and to preserve the institutions we care for. We learn early to care for ourselves, to fight back against those who would harm us. That is prudential, and prudence is a virtue. The Prayer Book includes this rubric, “The Minister of the Congregation is directed to instruct the people, from time to time, about the duty of Christian parents to make prudent provision for the well-being of their families, and of all persons to make wills, while they are in health, arranging for the disposal of their temporal goods, not neglecting, if they are able, to leave bequests for religious and charitable uses.”  The 1979 book places this rubric on page 445 at the end of the service of Thanksgiving for a Child. Earlier books placed it at the end of the burial service. 

“The Minister of the Congregation is directed to instruct the people . . . to make prudent provision . . . .”  For example, our church board is charged with prudently spending the money we all contribute to support the ministry of this congregation. Ron, our Treasurer, tells me we are spending more than we are receiving. Prudence calls us to increase our income or decrease our expenses. We have received grants from the Synod and diocese for $8000 to help with the expenses of the Spanish language ministry we host. That will help some. But we need to be prudent.  

And while we are being prudent we also are called to serve our risen Lord. We are generous in our food basket contributions; the quilt ministry helps many; we tithe our income to the work of the synod and diocese. We gather week by week to worship Christ Jesus. Jesus offered himself on the cross for our sins and the sins of the world. Jesus is Son of God, and God received his self-offering as full and perfect expiation for the sin of the world. When on the cross Jesus cried, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing,” God answered that prayer. God forgives all our sins, the wrongs we do knowingly, in full awareness that what we are doing is wrong, and also the wrongs we do in ignorance, the wrongs we do because our knowledge is limited by our limited knowledge, and by the limits of our circumstances. God loves us extravagantly; God forgives us extravagantly.

Jesus said to Martha and Mary and Lazarus, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” In the physical world, the world of prudence, we do always have the poor, and we don’t have Jesus physically present with us. The resurrected body of Jesus ascended to the Father 40 days after Easter.  And we do physically always have the poor. We are called to do what we can to help the poor.  

But in the spiritual world, the world of abundance, we always have Jesus present with us: present in our hearts by faith, present in his word written as we read his Holy Scriptures, present to us in the sacrament of the altar as we receive his body and blood in bread and wine. And we are the poor, the poor in spirit, continually dependent on God’s grace, on God’s extravagant gifts showered on us by the Holy Spirit of truth and power.

“The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”  God grant that our lives may be filled with the fragrance of God’s grace, unearned and undeserved, extravagantly poured out on us, and that we may witness in our lives to God’s love in Jesus Christ.

The spiritual truth is that God loves us extravagantly. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”