• Isaiah 43: 16-21

Using the same verb for “create” as is used in Genesis for the creation of the world, the Book of Isaiah now uses the same word to remind God’s people that their identity is only due to God’s “creation” of Israel.  More explicitly, the writer alludes to the paradigmatic event of salvation in that long, storied relationship– It was the Lord “who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters….”   The writer continues with a bold claim: as mighty as that past act of salvation was for the people of God, get ready for a “new thing” for “my chosen people…” says the Lord!  Prepare yourself for a new deliverance!

• Psalm 126

The psalmist celebrates the fact that the Lord has/will restore the well-being of the Lord’s people.  Robert Alter  reminds us that verbs in Hebrew translated “restore.” “dream,” “laugh” in this psalm do not make a distinction between past, present and future tenses as does English, (The Book of Psalms, p.447).  The image of restoration the psalmist uses is easily appreciated: spring showers that fill parched water-beds after a brutal winter.  That image is followed by an invocation of the joy/satisfaction that comes at harvest after a long growing season, which began in hard work, some anxiety and “tears.”

• Philippians 3:4B-14

Paul reviews his personal credentials and history as a zealous religionist for the traditions into which he had been born and raised.  However, he writes, now “I regard them all as rubbish, in order that I might gain Christ and be found in him….”  He has made a new choice that entails a complete reversal in his life, which now has one consuming attraction for him:  “the power of his [Christ’s] resurrection and the sharing of sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I might attain the resurrection of the dead.”  As he writes this, he is just at the beginning of this new stage in his life, “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead….”

• John 12: 1-8

In John’s narrative, Jesus’ public life of healing and teaching began with a party– a wedding reception in Cana where there was more wine than anyone  could drink!– and the narrative now begins its conclusion with a dinner party among dear friends in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem.  Having raised Lazarus from the dead (11:1-44), Jesus and his disciples now join his friend and Lazarus’ two sisters, Martha and Mary, in what must have been a joyous evening.  While Martha serves dinner, Mary “Took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard” and “anoints” the head and feet of Jesus, (a gesture which alludes to the ritual for enthronement of a king and also the preparation of a corpse for burial).  The home is filled with with the powerfully sweet fragrance, John emphasizes.  But the happy mood is shattered by the protests of Judas, who insists that this extravagance is a waste of money.  He appraises the cash value of the perfume and says it could have gone to the poor.  (John says his interest is not the poor, but the size of the disciple’s pooled assets, which Judas is pilfering.)  Jesus tells Judas not to criticize what Mary has done.  Her act of extravagance is appropriate: “You will always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

The bold innovation of Isaiah is still remarkable.  The writer invokes God’s past acts of salvation not with the intention of recalling history, but as an announcement to God’s people to get ready for a new thing!  Using verbs that are not locked into past, present and future tenses as in English usage, the psalmist’s paean to new life can describe the past, but just as accurately the future and our present.  On this last Sunday before that week the church calls “Holy,” these are timely reminders that we are about to begin not just some annual recollection of sacred history, but we are launching the possibility that something new, trans-formative might happen ==again!

Six days before that fateful week in John’s narrative, he writes about an incident that reminds us  that some of the most important things in our lives come from some occasion of extravagance, excess, passion, love-making.  We already know about such times that altered our lives; we fall in love, or at the climax of passionate love-making that results in due time in a new birth, or a consuming commitment to a cause or a movement that changed our life.  These moments when love took over, although rare and not without risks, frequently become the defining moments of our lives.

In his essay “Faith and Reason,” Jean-Luc Marion considers what he calls this “logic of love” or, what he other times calls “great reason.”  Citing key passages from John’s gospel, Marion writes:

“the love revealed by the Logos, is deployed as a logos, hence as a [kind of] rationality.”  “…Christ had shown that… love has its reason, a forceful and original, simple reason, which sees and says what common reason is missing….”  “But Christ has shown not only the logic of love, he has demonstrated and proven it in facts and acts by his passion and resurrection.”  (The Visible and the Revealed, p.152)

When someone can look back over a long, committed relationship and say that ‘falling in love’ with that person was the ‘smartest’ thing I ever did, or look at her or his child and marvel at a life begun in a moment of passionate love-making, we understand the vital importance of this “logic of love” in our lives.  This is just such a moment in the life of Mary that John describes.  Excessive, extravagant, impetuous, even wasteful in the eyes of some, such moments define us, determine us, express us, initiate our relationships and inaugurate communities.  And, of course, this incident provides the lens through which we are meant to see what happens next, as baffling as it is– God’s love for the world revealed in the execution of the Son.  The church begins next Sunday its annual walk in real time through that week which will once again put on full, public display the “logic of love,” God’s love.  We are not getting ready for an historic re-enactment, but we prepare ourselves for the possibility that something new might happen in the “passion” of the moment; love’s response to Love.