John 12:1-8

Love does a lot of hard work.  What I mean is that our English word, love, carries a heavy load and covers a lot of territory that ranges from a fondness for things and persons to deep attachment to ideas and ideals.  We talk of love to describe emotions ranging from infatuation and romance to the bonds of commitment in marriage.  We use the word love to talk about our family relationships and our favorite sports teams.  We talk about books and movies and songs we love.  We say we love our country to declare our patriotism.  

We talk a lot about love in the church, which is appropriate since the word loveappears 185 times in the New Testament.  That’s just over a third of the 540 references to love in the entire Bible.  John 3:16 tells us that Jesus was given to the world as a gift of God’s love.  Jesus commanded us to love each other and also told us to love our enemies.  He affirmed that the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  He told us that people would recognize us as his disciples by our love for one another.  And he said there was no greater love than to give up your life for your friends.

As I said, our English word love covers a lot of territory, which makes it vulnerable to misuse and misinterpretation.  The New Testament, however, was originally written in Greek, a language that has four different words for love, each one with its own sphere of meaning, but the New Testament only uses two of those words.  

Philos describes a friendship love, a deep bond of affection characterized by mutual respect, shared interests and companionship.  Philos (philei) is the word used in John 16:27 when Jesus says, “The Father himself loves you because you have loved me.”  God has befriended us because we befriended Jesus.  Philos is the love word Paul uses in Romans 12:10 when he writes, “Love one another with mutual affection.”

The New Testament use of Philos, or Phileo in its verb form, is a reminder that part of our call as followers of Christ is to befriend each other and live together in a deep bond of friendship.  Philos is an important kind of love. But the most commonly used Greek New Testament word for love is agape.  

Agape is the highest form of love.  It is a pure, selfless, unconditional love that desires the highest good for another. This is the love St. Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 13 when he writes, “Love is patient.  Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant.  It does not insist on its own way.”  And so on.  Agape is the love word Jesus uses when he gives us a new commandment to love one another, and it’s the word the writer of 1 John uses to tell us that God is love.

It’s interesting to think about these different words for love and it’s useful to note which word is being used when we try to more fully understand something we’re reading in the Bible.  But no matter which word you use, unless we embody it, love remains just an intellectual exercise or an immaterial emotion.  Love, to be real,  must be enacted.  

God is love—the most powerful and creative force in the universe.  Ilia Delio, a Franciscan theologian and evolutionary biologist wrote, “Divine love exists when God becomes God within us—it is a potential energy that must be activated to demonstrate its power.”  

God is love, a pure, selfless, unconditional love that desires the highest good for us and for all of creation, a potential energy that must be activated in us to demonstrate its power.  Love must be embodied to activate its power.  But what does that look like?

Six days before the Passover, Jesus and his disciples came to Bethany to dine at the home of Lazarus, Mary and Martha.  While they were dining, Mary began to anoint Jesus’s feet with a very expensive aromatic oil made from spikenard.  She not only massaged the ointment into his tired feet, she dried his feet with her hair.  

This is one of the most evocative and sensual moments in the whole Bible.  And it’s also a very clear depiction of what embodied love looks like.  

This scene in the Gospel of John engages all our senses.  The soothing balm of the ointment being lovingly and gently massaged into the skin of Jesus’s feet by tender and sensitive hands. The silken touch of Mary’s long, dark hair caressing his feet as she dries them.  And the aroma.  The fragrance, John tells us, filled the house—the fragrance of spikenard.  Earthy.  Spicy.  Musky.  Soothing. Hypnotic.  In ancient times, the scent of spikenard was used as aromatherapy to dispel anxiety and stress.  It was even used to treat melancholia—what we call depression.  The ancients believed that it’s scent could transport you out of your thoughts or worries or sadness into a state of tranquility, peace and well-being.

When Mary rubbed this exotic, expensive ointment onto Jesus’s feet, her lovely, extravagant act of devotion, kindness and love was probably exactly what Jesus needed at that moment.  The tender massaging of his feet after so many, many months of walking the stony and dusty roads of Galilee, the Decapolis, and Judah probably felt like a little bit of heaven.  After all the road-weary days and nights surrounded by sweaty disciples and jostling crowds the soothing fragrance that was filling every corner of the house was probably the nicest aroma he had smelled in a very long time.  That moment of just plain niceness as Mary focused all her attention on doing something pleasant for him, something that would speak her love for him better than any words—that moment would be the last time anyone showed him kindness and concern for his wellbeing.  It was his last moment of peace, intimacy and tenderness before his crucifixion.  

Sadly, that moment was interrupted.  

“Why wasn’t this ointment sold and the money given to the poor?” asked Judas. “This stuff is worth what…three hundred denarii?  That’s the better part of a year’s wages for a laborer.  There are better ways to use that much money than slathering it on his feet.”

Judas comes across as one of those people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.  The Gospel of John tells us that he wasn’t really concerned about the poor at all but was angling for a way to get some of that cash into his own pockets.  And maybe that’s true.  But to be fair, spikenard ointment really was very, very expensive.  It’s made from a plant in the honeysuckle family that grows in the Himalayas of Nepal, India and China.  It was costly to make it and even more costly to transport it.

All four gospels tell the story of this deeply personal encounter, but they tell it in different ways and different settings.  One thing that all versions of this story have in common, though, is that someone is indignant about the attention and the expense being lavished on Jesus.  In Matthew and Mark, it’s all the disciples who complain about the expense of the ointment.  All of them chime in about how the money could have been given to the poor.  “Why was this ointment wasted in this way?” they say in Mark.  “Why this waste?” in Matthew.

Waste.  Her extravagant care for Jesus, her loving attention—they see it as a waste.    

Why is it that some of us are so uncomfortable with extravagant expressions of love and devotion?  What is it about moments of intimate caring that gets some of us up on our high horse and turns us into critics?  

I don’t usually quote Friedrich Nietzsche, but there is something he wrote that seems particularly appropriate here.  He said, “The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity.”

Mary had bought this expensive ointment to anoint Jesus’s body after his death.  But she loved him so much that she couldn’t bear the thought that he wouldn’t get to experience its healing and soothing properties while he was still alive. So she opened the alabaster jar and anointed him with it while he was still alive to sweeten his last hours and days “with a precious and fragrant drop of levity.”  She brought lightness to counter the heaviness of those final days.  And only a few days later, Jesus would follow her example as he washed his disciples’ feet at the last supper.

Life is both precious and precarious.  Death is a foregone conclusion; it’s only the timing that’s uncertain.  So why do we not live every moment of every day with “a precious and fragrant drop of levity?”  Why do we not find more ways to express our love for each other?

Why do we back away from extravagant gestures of love?  We should be accustomed to them if we’re paying any attention at all.  Annie Dillard said, “If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.  After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor.  The whole show has been on fire from the word go.”

Mary was extravagant in her love for Jesus.  Jesus was extravagant in his love for the world.  God has been extravagant in love poured out into all of creation.  And God is calling us to embody and enact extravagant love for each other.

So what does that look like?  What does extravagant love look like in your life?  What does it look like in your work?  What does it look like in our community? What does it look like in our nation, especially in a time of political and economic turmoil and disruption?  How do we embody extravagant love?

Last Monday evening, Senator Cory Booker stood on the floor of the Senate and began to speak. Citing the example of the late Representative John Lewis, a man who, as Senator Booker said “loved his country even when his country didn’t love him back,” Senator Booker said, “Tonight, I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.  I rise tonight because I believe, sincerely, that our country is in crisis.”

 I don’t know how Senator Booker’s 25 hour speech looked to you, but I saw it as a powerful act of love.  

Senator Booker set aside partisanship and conventional patriotic rhetoric to speak from his heart about how the recent disruptions and brokenness of our political and economic systems are affecting people’s individual lives.  He talked about real people.  He shared what people had been telling him in phone calls and meetings.  He shared their fear and pain from letters they had written to him.  He didn’t just speak of an ambiguous, amorphous love for the nation, he spoke out of his love for its people.

In that speech he said, “These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such. This is our moral moment. This is when the most precious ideas of our country are being tested…. Where does the Constitution live, on paper or in our hearts? . . . In this democracy, the power of people is greater than the people in power.”

I don’t usually get this political in my sermons, but I have to say that Senator Booker is right.  These are not normal times in our country.  This is a moral moment for the nation which means it’s also a moral moment for the church.  If our faith means anything, it means that now is a time to stand up for those who are abused and oppressed, for those who are living in fear of losing their health care or their livelihood.  This is a moral moment for us. 

Where does the love of Christ live?  On the paper pages of scripture?  In our heads as an ideal?  Or in our hearts…and hands…and voices…and feet?

Yesterday, more than millions of people took to the streets to protest the policies and practices of the Trump administration.  They protested on behalf of immigrants who have been deported and imprisoned without due process.  They protested on behalf of the people who have been swept up off the street and disappeared.  They protested on behalf of all the people whose jobs were suddenly eliminated and all those whose healthcare is threatened.  They protested against a regime that prioritizes tax advantages for billionaires and oligarchs over the everyday needs of everyday people.  They protested out of love.

Dorothy Day said, “God is Love. Love casts out fear. Even the most ardent revolutionist, seeking to change the world, to overturn the tables of the money changers, is trying to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship with each other of love. We want with all our hearts to love, to be loved.”

God is love, a pure, selfless, unconditional love that desires the highest good for us and for all of creation, a potential energy that must be activated in us to demonstrate its power.  But what does that look like in your life?   Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, [we] will have discovered fire.”