When we finally perceive what the Triune God is doing in Christ Jesus, God’s Son, and what the cross means to God and to love and to life, we will respond as Mary did, with extravagant, boundless worship and offering of all we have in love.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Fifth Sunday in Lent, year C
   texts: John 12:1-8; Isaiah 43:16-21; Philippians 3:4b-14

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

What did Mary do that was so shocking?

The perfume cost a huge amount, nearly a year’s wages. But it was hers to give.

It was an intimate, emotionally intense gesture, making others uncomfortable. But Mary apparently was that way.

So why criticize her? John, who often paints Judas badly, says only he complained, and since he was a thief, John says, we can ignore his pretended compassion. But Mark, writing earliest, said “others” there were angry, and called it a waste. Matthew clarifies the others as “the disciples.” She’s surrounded by friends upset at her.

But everyone there loved Jesus. They saw him at least as Master and they cared for him. How could they complain – especially out loud – that Mary honored him in this intimate, extravagant way?

Isaiah may help answer that. God says through the prophet, “I am about to do a new thing; do you not perceive it?” That new thing is that the Triune God faces suffering and death at human hands to bring about this new creation.

Mary’s different because she perceives this. This dinner party is in Holy Week, and only Mary seems to see clearly. God’s doing this new thing in Jesus’ coming death, and she responds.

And if we don’t share Mary’s outpouring of love and extravagance toward God for what God is doing at the cross, maybe we don’t perceive God’s new thing any more than the others.

Oddly, even at this dinner (to say nothing of us) there should have been clarity about Jesus.

Peter had already confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God. Martha confessed the same thing only days before this meal. They knew who Jesus was. Why didn’t all honor him?

The disciples also knew that coming south to raise Lazarus was a risk. They argued against it, knowing the leaders wanted Jesus dead. Now, a couple weeks later, it’s hard to believe they didn’t sense the tension in the city, and in Jesus. He walked toward Good Friday with a great deal of pain and sadness they ought to have felt.

It’s likely most of them couldn’t admit what was coming. Whenever Jesus told them he was going to be killed, they were uncomfortable, sometimes angry. Peter was harshly rebuked when he told Jesus a proper Christ doesn’t get himself killed. They were clear who he was. They weren’t ready for what he felt he had to do.

Whatever their problem, Jesus deeply appreciates Mary’s gift.

He says, in effect, “I’ve been telling you that I will die for a long time, and now I’m facing death and in pain, and Mary gets it. Leave her alone.”

Mary feels Christ’s pain and responds to God’s lavish love with all she has, this extravagant, foolish gift. She risks ridicule, and gets it. She’s utterly vulnerable before her Lord, and risks he won’t want it. Days before he will himself kneel at the feet of all these disciples and wash their feet, Mary gets it: she loves her Lord, and will serve him, take the weight of his pain if she can.

And Jesus loves her for it. Imagine the burden of giving yourself to so many, being constantly poured out for people you love, and knowing you’ll die for that. To have this woman understand, and seek to ease his pain, must have meant the world to him.

But weren’t the disciples right? Lots of people could have been helped by that money.

In answer, Jesus says something that still shocks people: “You’ll always have the poor with you; you won’t always have me.” But if we think he’s indifferent to the poor, we’re still not perceiving God’s new thing.

All along Jesus has said the will of the Triune God is that we love God with all we are and have – our heart, soul, mind, strength – and that we love our neighbor as ourselves. It’s the center of his teaching.

Here Jesus says, thank you, Mary, for loving me, your Lord and God, with all you have, giving me this extravagant gift, focusing on me.

Nothing else changes. There will always be neighbors, poor people. Of course we’re to love them, care for them, as Christ.

But apparently it’s good for God to be loved, too. It’s good for us to love God with all we have. To offer extravagant beauty and praise, like Mary. The others let their proper concern for the poor distract them from facing the deeper truth about what God is doing, and what that means for God.

We might be the same.

We have a hard time facing what it means that God’s new thing results from God facing death.

When we think of the cross, we most often separate Jesus from the Trinity, we see him at the cross alone. But if he is the Son of God, then – and this is mystery beyond our pay grade and mental capacity and imagination – then Father, Son, and Spirit are bound up in the cross.

Somehow, the Triune God is making a new thing by allowing humanity to execute the Incarnate One, who is one with the Father, and whose Spirit renews the earth.

We’re not very far from Peter and the others in struggling with how this can be God’s answer, to lose to us, to kneel down as a servant but also as a sacrifice to our self-centeredness and arrogance and need to be in control.

But this is the new thing God invites us to perceive: this is the right path for God because it’s the only way love is preserved. This is how God can love us and bring us into the life we were meant to live. Because if this is God’s way to a new thing, then this is our way, too.

Mary shows us God’s new thing comes with that invitation.

In her vulnerable offering of herself, her opening of herself to humiliation, her willingness to give the most expensive thing she had ever had, Mary showed she saw this deep truth: the Triune God’s willingness to die for the love of the world is always an invitation to us to follow.

To offer ourselves extravagantly to our friends, our loved ones, our colleagues, to the world, and most important, to our God. To see, as Paul sees, that everything we hope to gain and accumulate and protect, all these things are rubbish, trash, compared to knowing Christ Jesus and sharing in his suffering.

We might resist this more than anything. We like to protect our selves, our egos, our boundaries, our lives. Following an extravagantly risky God who invites us to risk extravagantly sounds nice, but in practice, it’s hard.

It’s safer to argue about whether Mary could have found a better use for her giving. Safer than asking what extravagance we might be led to give of ourselves to others, or to our God who loves us.

It’s OK to live in this tension.

The reality of God’s new thing is hard to perceive. It takes time. Maybe it even did for Mary.

But see her, and ask: is the Spirit drawing us there? Can we name our reluctance, our anger, our need to distract ourselves from the implications of following Christ Jesus on his path? If so, we’ll see more clearly.

Perceiving our own barriers means with the help of the Holy Spirit we’ll be able to get them down. Then we’ll not only perceive more clearly this new thing God is doing in Christ, we’ll see how it’s happening in us.

And Christ’s road will seem less frightening. Because we will see where it is headed, to resurrection life in Christ which begins even now. And because we will see more clearly our Lord and God who fills us and keeps us on the road.

And our lives and love for such a God will begin to pour out extravagantly, ridiculously, because we’re starting to see like Mary.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

God is reconciling the world in Christ, in God’s way, not ours, and if we are ambassadors of this reconciliation we need to bear it fully and truly in our lives.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Fourth Sunday in Lent, year C
   texts: Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Does God get to be who God wants to be? Can God do what God wants?

Obviously, yes. The Triune God created the heavens and the earth, galaxies and mitochondria, all things. God can be and do whatever God pleases.

But the Triune God is mostly hidden from view in our world. We don’t see God directly. How people see God depends upon interpreters of God.

So: does God get to be and do what God wants? Yes. Does the world get to see the truth about who God is and what God wants? That depends.

This matters, because we are called to speak for God. Paul says that, baptized into Christ, we are ambassadors for Christ, through us God is making an appeal to the world. If we won’t accept who God is and what God does on God’s terms, we’ll deliver the world a misleading and untrue appeal.

As Paul says in another letter, we’ll misrepresent God.

Since we’re not comfortable with who God is in Jesus’ parable today, we may have a big problem.

Wait, you say, isn’t this our favorite parable? We love the story of the prodigal father who freely loves and forgives, who welcomes us when we’re lost.

Maybe. We like to think God will do that for us. Judging from the way Christians, even Lutherans, speak of God’s grace and forgiveness in the world, though, we’ve got serious problems with God’s approach.

This parable is a poor example of parenting, we think. The father enables the younger son’s misbehavior, foolishly giving him his inheritance without strings attached and welcoming him back without strings attached after he wasted it all. He overlooks that his younger son wants him dead and doesn’t care about the shame this puts on him. He doesn’t care about losing face with his older son, and lets him painfully insult and criticize him, responding in love and welcome. He’s never heard of our concept of “tough love.”

When Christians speak of God’s grace, it’s rarely with this fullness. We speak of God needing satisfaction for our sins, of the wrath of God that only Jesus can appease by his death. We threaten people that they can’t expect to be forgiven if they keep on sinning. To hear most Christians, God is nothing like this father.

But if Jesus is the Son of God, the face of the Trinity for us, and this is how Jesus says the Triune God acts, does Jesus get to be right? Or do we get to impose our indignation, our suspicion, our conditional grace on God?

Does the Triune God get to be like this father? Or will we speak and act as if God is different?

If we could, we’d have some criticisms to make to God.

We’d say, look, there are problems with your approach. If you offer grace freely, like this story, you’re going to get taken advantage of. People will sin and ask forgiveness, and go and sin again. They’ll get away with anything, knowing you’re a soft touch. No one will respect you if you don’t defend what’s right.

But the Triune God’s answer is, “what’s your point? Just what do you think happened on the cross, anyway? Don’t you see that taking on your flesh, living among you, I embodied this unconditional love and forgiveness and because it didn’t fit your world view, your sense of justice, your need to earn things, you killed me for it?”

Of course God will be taken advantage of if God acts like this father. Christ Jesus proved that. Even risen from the dead, he didn’t punish his faithless followers, he still loved them, and invited them once more to be people bearing his love in the world.

We may not parent in this way. We may not love in this way. But this is the way that God is. Like it or not. God is not made in our image. As God says in Hosea 11, “I’m God, not human. I don’t have to be like you.”

In this parable, Jesus only gives us one relevant thing: God’s love is unstoppable.

We who need accountability get no answers here we really want. Does the younger son straighten up after this? Does the elder son come into the party? Are he and his brother reconciled? Who knows?

All of that is irrelevant to Jesus’ point. Why the younger son wanted to leave, why he wasted his inheritance, is irrelevant to the story. Why the older son felt left out, and didn’t realize how much his father loved him, is irrelevant. Jesus gives us only enough to fill out the story.

What we get clearly is the unconditional, unassailable, foolish, self-giving love of the father for his sons. This parable says one thing: God will deal with human sin by loving us out of it, into new life. Remember, this is Jesus’ response to the criticism that he spends his time with sinners.

We might think it’s inadequate. That doesn’t matter to God. This is who God is.

God will heal us by unconditionally loving us into life. Nothing else matters.

Paul says in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself. The Triune God comes among us in person, living unconditional love and grace, inviting us to live in that love by loving God and neighbor, to live and move and have our being in such foolish, unrestricted love.

It breaks all our rules. We resent that God offers love to people who are evil, people who don’t deserve it, people who don’t intend to change. God’s love as shown in this parable is the opposite of how the world works. So much so that Jesus was executed for living this. So much so that we crucify Jesus by killing this message and covering God’s grace with all our rules and restrictions.

What we do with this doesn’t change God. This is how God will save all things.

The only question is, will we faithfully carry this message to the world?

God will reconcile all things in Christ and bring a new thing into being, whether we like it or not. Of course it’s messy; remodeling something into new always is. Winning people back by love means a lot of pain and struggle and difficulty. The cross was only the beginning of that.

But this is the message we are called to speak, the ministry we are called to bear as ambassadors. Maybe we fear to admit the truth about God because we fear being taken advantage of, too. We’ll be as vulnerable and look as weak as God. We’ll risk being walked on, misused. That’s the deal.

We’re not as comfortable with this parable as we thought, and so we hesitate to follow Christ with our whole lives.

But remember what this parable is: a promise of welcome in the loving embrace of the Triune God that cannot be taken from us.

When we resent God loving others freely and unconditionally, we forget this: God’s throwing a party of love, a feast of grace, and we’re invited. We’re invited, even if we’ve wasted our inheritance, rejected God in our lives, and run away to do what we wanted. Even if we’ve seen God’s love as a duty and have been “good children”, slaving to be the best we can be, missing the joy of living in God’s love. Even if we haven’t figured out how to keep from sinning after being forgiven. Even if we resent others getting breaks from God that we don’t. We’re invited, period.

God gets to be and do what God wants to be and do. And what God wants to be and do is love.

Love the world, love us, love all, back into new life, love us out of our sin, love us into the image of God. The party is waiting, and it’s for the whole world.

This is what we get to live and tell in our lives. This is the message we get to bear as Christ’s ambassadors to the world.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen