Extravagance freaks out some people.
Mary slipped up behind Jesus while he ate. Moved beyond sober rationality by her love for the Master, she impulsively dumped on his head a container of precious perfume worth a fortune.
“Criminal!” yelped the apostles-to-be. Especially Judas, the most cost-conscious of all. “Just think how many poor people we could have fed if Mary had sold the perfume instead!” they wailed.
“Get off her back,” Jesus silenced his men. And he praised her extravagantly “wasteful” love as a commendable act. “Wherever the gospel is preached,” Jesus predicted, “people will tell this story and honor Mary for loving me so much.”
When it comes to gift-giving, though, some of us who follow Jesus have yet to learn the lesson he tried to teach his men that day.
“You really are missing the point about gifts,” one of my readers chastised me last year when I extolled the kind of love we express in an occasionally extravagant gift.
“If you buy things you can’t afford for yourself,” this good lady scolded me, “you surely don’t have any interest in giving anything to the needy, nor do you have anything to give.” Almost exactly what Judas said to Jesus, isn’t it?
Our Lord knew that good and decent people always provide for the poor among them. “You’ll always have more than enough poor folks around to take care of,” Jesus chided Judas.
What a shame, he seems to be implying, that we would let the presence of the ubiquitous poor stifle in us any impulse of extraordinary love for our own flesh and blood! Why should their poverty make us stingy and our gifts niggardly?
The Creator of our world has a habit that annoys some of his more controlled creatures. He is outrageously good to people who don’t deserve it. On every level of nature his way of handing out blessings is described in scripture as “prodigal.” In other words, wasteful.
Sometimes when we’re busy giving gifts, don’t you think we ought to imitate him?
Three things we have to do in this life, according to Eugene Peterson’s great new translation of 1 Corinthians 13: “Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly.”