extravagant love that nudges us forward (a sermon on John 12:1-8)

Six days before the Passover. The beginning of Jesus’ final week. We can’t know for sure what emotions and thoughts were running through Jesus as sat down to dinner with his dear friends, but we can certainly imagine. Fear, probably. How much did he know or understand about what would happen to him? Sadness, probably. Whatever was coming would not be easy - not for him, not for his friends. They would be confused, grieving. Stress and fear can bring out the worst in people, and Jesus’ followers and friends would be no different. 
Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash
In the midst of this tension and swirl of emotions, what a gift it must have been to be the recipient of Mary’s extravagant, lavish generosity. How powerful it must have been to feel her tender care as she lovingly anointed Jesus’ soon-to-be-pierced feet. As the smell of the perfume filled the house, it embedded itself in the clothing of those gathered. Though it was a smell associated with death and burial, from now on it would be a smell forever associated with this act of love and care. 

In her commentary on this passage, Pastor and Professor Karoline Lewis called this act “being loved into the future.” On the brink of something big, and scary, and world-altering, Jesus receives love and encouragement from Mary’s actions that gently nudge him toward the next thing. You can do this - you are loved beyond measure. You can do this - you are filled with the Spirit. You may have to do this, Jesus, but you don’t do it alone. 

I wonder if you can think of a time when you gave or received this kind of love and encouragement on the brink of something new, or difficult, or scary. 

Perhaps it was a squeeze on the shoulder and whispered affirmations as you walked into an appointment or meeting with an unknown outcome. 

Perhaps it was a hug and reminder of how hard you had worked and how neither failure nor success get to determine your worth or value as you prepared for a critically important test or interview. 

Perhaps it was a bedside vigil as you accompanied a loved one's final hours with stories, singing, laughter, and tears.

Author Glennon Doyle Melton writes about hard things like addiction, and eating disorders, and parenting, and heartbreak of all kinds. A term that she coined to describe many of her experiences is the word “brutiful” - a combination of “brutal” and “beautiful”. 

Life is so very brutiful. It is brutiful to be Mary. To show extravagant, costly love in the best way you know how and to be ridiculed for it. To be the one giving encouragement and a nudge forward.  

It's so hard to watch someone you love dearly face pain and heartache. We often have the desire to take them away from whatever it is that causes pain, imagining a world in which we can snap our fingers and make the bullies, or the cancer, or the abuser, or the pain, or the depression, or the consequences disappear. 

But we can't. Even so, before we release our grip and watch helplessly as one whom we love moves ahead into the difficulty and pain and unknowns of the brutiful future, we can anoint them with our extravagant love – actions and words of affirmation like “you are loved” and “you are not alone”. 

Life is so very brutiful. It is brutiful to be Jesus, brutiful to be the one going forward into the pain and difficulty, the knowns and unknowns. It is brutiful to receive such an outpouring of love and attention and affirmation at the time you feel weakest or most unsure.

As the one facing such difficulties, even our bodies react - heart pounding, stomach in knots, hitched breathing, sweat, a sense of heaviness and dread. And yet, the lightest touch or quietest whisper can give us the nudge forward that we need in order to do the hard thing. To be loved into the future is not to negate the pain or struggle that lies ahead. Instead, it lends courage and gives us what we need to face them. 

The life to which the baptized are called is not an easy one. It is not easy, or even particularly intuitive, to fear, love, and trust God above all things as our Scriptures and Catechism demand. It is not easy to follow God’s call, which almost always leads us beyond our comfort zone and into a brutiful future. It is not easy to practice a daily dying to sin and rising to new life in Christ. 

As a congregation, we know this feeling. We ourselves stand on the brink of an uncertain, brutiful future. We do not know what the next years will hold. We already grieve that things are not as they used to be and that we are powerless to fix it. It is unsettling and uncomfortable for us to even attempt to imagine life and worship together in a space or style different than what is familiar, known, and loved.  

And yet, this is the future we are loved into by God. Joined to the crucified and risen Christ in the waters of baptism, we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. At the table we are fed and nourished by the Body and Blood of Christ. In the word, we hear the promise of God’s grace and forgiveness and presence with us always. And the sights, and sounds, and fragrance of this fill us, fill the room, and overflow in the world. 

Life is brutiful - brutal, and beautiful. Mary knows it. Jesus knows it. Even Judas knows it. And we do, too. With the fragrance of extravagant love and abundant grace lingering on us, we are nudged forward. You are loved. You are not alone. Whatever the future may bring, God is already there. 

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