"Extravagant Loves"
Preached on March 29, 1998
by The Rev. Joanne S. Miller
In his book The Road Less Traveled, psychologist
Scott Peck devotes an entire section to
the topic of Love. He spends a lot of time defining what
love is and what love is not, hoping the reader
will come to see that love is more than
a feeling. If you read what Peck has written about love,
you will find that love is a very complicated matter. But you
probably don't need a book to tell you that.
Still, Peck really challenges us to rethink
all the typical ways of looking at love.
Peck's basic premise is that love is not a feeling.
Falling in love is not love. Being dependent
on another is not love. Love does involve choice.
It requires self- sacrifice. It includes commitment. Love is
an action, an activity. Love is something we
do, not something we feel. We love when
we extend ourselves in some way, and in this respect
love is always either work or courage.
When pressed to define love, Peck writes, "The
will to extend one's self for the purpose
of nurturing ones own or another's spiritual growth."
We all have our experiences of love that give
shape to how we might choose to define
it. What I like about Peck's definition is that it takes
love out of the feeling state into the action state. Love is
action. Love is active work. The topic of love
is always of interest to people. We talk
about it, we watch it talked about on TV, we read about
it, we test it out in our lives. Yet in all my talk and reading
about love, I have never really seen the element
that today's Scripture includes when speaking
about love. That element is a sense of urgency. The
type of love that is highly praised by Jesus, has a sense of
urgency about it. It is a part of love that we
have lost, or perhaps never really known.
Jesus is at dinner with his companions, when
a woman enters. She carries a jar made
of alabaster and containing nard, a precious and aromatic
oil from India. The jar holds just enough nard for one
application. The alabaster itself signifies the
very high quality of its contents. Anointing
was a customary practice at feasts, but this particular
ointment was a rare treasure. It may even have been a family
heirloom passed from mother to daughter. The
woman breaks open the jar, pours it out,
lavishes it, over the head of Jesus.
We know nothing else about her - not her name,
her situation, her thoughts, her motives.
Not a word comes from her mouth. Instead, she takes
this single and direct action.
The response of those present is swift in coming.
That ointment was worth a year's pay for
a common laborer, and it should have been used
to feed the poor! Instead she has wasted it in a lavish and
empty gesture.
What will Jesus say about her deed?
"Let her alone... She has performed a good service
for me. For you always have the poor with
you, and you can show kindness to them whenever
you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what
she could; she has anointed my body beforehand
for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever
the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what
she has done will be told in remembrance of her."
Most of us are familiar with Jesus comment here
about the poor. "You always have the poor
with you." Taken out of context, it sounds as if
Jesus meant that there should always be poverty. But Jesus also
says, "You can show kindness to them whenever
you wish." There is not the same sense
of urgency about giving to the poor as there is about
being extravagant toward Jesus before his death.
We would not expect this from Jesus. It
is inconsistent with what he has taught us about being
generous toward those in need, associating with people you would
rather ignore, selling all you have to give to
the poor.
I suspect that Jesus does not criticize the
woman because of the particular situation.
Jesus is about to die. The chief priest and scribes
are plotting to kill him. Judas is about to seek a way to
betray him. Because Jesus will soon be crucified,
what appears to be a wasteful gesture
by this woman, instead is seen as beautiful. This woman
did what she could. She gave all she had. What she had, she
gave. What she had in her power to do, she did.
Her act is beautiful because she invested
all of herself in it. She gave what she had to Jesus
who was about to give his life for her. Nothing else in the
gospel of Mark compares with Jesus praise for
this woman's act.
There is a sharp contrast in this story. That
contrast is between always and not always.
The woman understood this. The bystanders who criticized
her did not. We do not know the urgency about which Jesus
speaks. "You will always have the poor. You will
not always have me." Giving to the poor
is very important. But those who criticized Jesus failed
to see something even more important: the beauty and goodness
of uncalculating love. n
our loving, in our giving, we lack this urgency.
In our love toward God, in our love toward one another, we are
disciplined, tight-fisted. We hold back and practice
self-control. We give what we decide we
can, often giving with the expectation that we will
get something back. Only in the face of death does our perspective
change. Because then, we know we do not have
all the time in the world. Then, always
becomes not always. Suddenly we do not have forever to
act extravagantly, to be vulnerable, to give
more than what is comfortable.
As this story is framed by two conspiracy accounts
against Jesus, so at times, our lives
are framed as well. We, too, have known moments of grace
worthy of praise when what has gone before and what will follow
has left us feeling unloved. We, too, have been
let down by friends, criticized for doing
what we felt we had to do, chastised for making decisions
we believed were right for us. We are in need of simple and
pure acts of extravagant love. And not only are
we in need, but others are too. Others
are in need of our love. It appears that this will always
be the case. It may be true that we can show kindness whenever
we like. But when we live each day with an urgency
about what we can do for one another,
we realize the time to be extravagant is now.
Are we extravagant toward our church? In Ferrol
Sam's story, The Widow's Mite, the widow
who is the central character discusses with her pastor,
how she will use the considerable insurance money she has
inherited. She plans to tithe it, of course,
but she explains that she does not have
to tithe on the Sundays when she misses church because she
is ill. "Even Jesus doesn't expect you to pay
for something you don't get." We give
what we have decided we can afford, and usually the short
end of that. Perhaps someone else will give what
is needed. Perhaps we will give more next
year.
Are we extravagant toward one another? In the
PBS production, Civil War, the primary
resource for the series was actual letters and journals,
filled with depth of emotion. Just one week before Major
Sullivan Ballou was killed at Bull Run, he wrote
in a letter to his wife Sarah, "Sarah,
my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with
mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence could
break... Never forget how much I love
you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battle
field, it will whisper your name."
The gospel calls us to open our selves to one
another, to give up more than what is
comfortable, to act in response to the extravagant love
of God in Jesus Christ. For our God has been extravagant with
us. Even as we struggle with God over
the valleys in our lives, the pains and
losses we can scarcely endure, we must still acknowledge the
extravagance of God's gift of life. Perhaps that
is why Jesus praised this woman so. In
the face of impending death, she knew what was important.
Now is the time to act extravagantly. Now is the time to
give all we have. Now is the time to invest ourselves
in gifts from within that render us as
vulnerable as a woman who pours out a treasure over
the head of Jesus.
The fact that Scripture tells us so little about
this woman is significant. We are told
no details about her that give us a clear sense
of who she is. She could be anyone. The fact that she is a woman
is significant as well. Women at that time had
little status. This woman had no influence
or power. She did not command respect by virtue of
who she was. She did command respect from Jesus by virtue of
what she did. We do not have to be extraordinary
people in order to love. We do not have
to possess anything but the willingness to give what we
have, and the opportunity to do so. Special skill
is not required.
Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard puts it this way,
The highest of all is not to understand
the highest, but to act upon it. To the Christian, love
is the works of love. To say that love is a feeling or anything
of the kind is an unchristian conception
of love. That is the aesthetic definition,
and fits the erotic and everything of that nature. But to
the Christian, love is the works of love. Christ's
love was not an inner feeling, a full
heart and what not, it was the work of love which was
his life.
Lives can be changed through simple, ordinary
works of love. A minister who is a chaplain
in a nursing home had his life changed in this
way. When he was in seminary, he like many of his classmates,
was in awe of the seminary President,
a man whose very name communicates awe:
R. J. MacDowell Richards. Dr. Richards was a giant, not
physically, but emotionally and spiritually,
and students kept their reverential distance
from him. You can imagine the chaplain's delight and
horror when he discovered that Dr. Richards now in retirement
was coming to be a resident in his very
nursing home. He was going to have to
be Dr. Richard's pastor./
One day, not long after Dr. Richards arrived,
he was in his wheelchair in the dining
room eating his meal. His nurse was standing beside
him, and the chaplain, rather tentatively approached him. He
said a few pastoral sorts of things, and then
suddenly something that he had always
wanted to say welled up despite himself. He said, "Dr.
Richards, I've always wanted to ask you. You
had sons, didn't you?"
"Yes, three of them/"
"Well, did you ever tell your sons that you
loved them?"
"No, you don't says that sort of thing - well,
once I did. I was in the hospital, thought
I was going to die. I told one of them, but it wasn't
a routine thing."
"I just wondered," said the chaplain. "You know,
you've always been like a father to me;
my own father never said that to me; I just wondered
if fathers did that sort of thing."
The meal was over. The nurse began to take Dr.
Richards in his chair to the door, and
the chaplain followed him with his eyes. And he saw
that as he got to the door, he suddenly waved to the nurse to
stop. He spoke a word to her. She turned
the wheelchair around and brought Dr.
Richards back to the chaplain. Dr. Richards reached up and touched
his cheek and said, "Bill, I love you."
"I had always known it in a way," he said, "but
to hear it said and to know it in my soul
was so powerful."
"You will not always have me." Jesus spoke words
that we know are true. There are moments
that can and do pass us by. So learn from Jesus.
Within your ability and opportunity, be extravagant toward God
and others. Extravagant love given spontaneously
and selflessly has the power to change
lives. That is what God did for us. In Jesus, God has
loved us extravagantly. That love has changed
us forever. Can we not be extravagant
in return?
May God be with us. May God grant us the courage
and the discipline to love with extravagance.
