coping with extravagance

Some things loom so big that when we truly begin to see them for what they are, we realize we are but glimpsing the edges. Grace is like that. “Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand? (Job 26:14)” I thought I knew, thought I had my mind somewhat wrapped around the edges. But no, all the time I was the one surrounded, wooed, won.

This King, He has done the unthinkable. He was royalty, but He came as a Servant. He was the beloved of the Father, but He underwent the dark hopelessness of rejection. He was glorious, yet He laid aside His robes for the weak flesh of humanity. “The servant takes the chastisement of the many, who in exchange receive peace,” as Jeremy Treat puts it.

That peace is mine, and I have barely begun to comprehend what that actually means. There is a catch here, for there are gifts easy to accept, and gifts to which I find myself resistant. If I’m shown a casual, cheap love it’s easy to know I’m not indebted. Yet to be shown a love this costly—I’m a fool if I don’t know to my core that I owe my very life. I am indeed indebted, yet my pride rises, and I find myself wanting to do, to be, to earn in the face of this mercy.

                                               

To be shown costly love by God or by others is to be humbled, and it is to learn of the heart of Christ. It’s raw, in a way. If I’m honest with myself, I’d rather earn what I get; that path leaves my pride intact. But extravagant love won’t let my ego escape. It confronts me with my glaring need and emptiness—often an emptiness of which I wasn’t originally aware.

It takes being humbled to accept that sense of neediness, of being the lesser one given a greater gift than I could ever repay. We never know really how empty we are till we are filled. And no one fills us, renews us, heals us more than the One who declared He was the fountain of all living waters.

I can’t fill myself. I cry out to be known, loved cared for in my deepest heart. Yet I know that on this side of eternity I will always be disappointed and I will always disappoint. I will be let down, betrayed, hurt, and I know this because I myself hurt others. I let them down. I inflict wounds. I fail to truly know, love, or care for those to whom I’m closest.

It’s a vicious cycle, and I slip into the easy convenient way. The way that preserves itself intact. The way that doesn’t involve uncomfortable, costly love. Is it my own unwillingness to love others in this costly, extravagant manner that makes me uncomfortable when it is shown toward me?

Yet the very thing I avoid breaks the cycle, the monotony of common, the careless. It’s is the painful love that pours our everything, that awakens to reality, that confronts and confounds the stifling, curbing, robbing effects of the fall. Treat again writes, “The suffering of the servant reverses the hardening because it deals with the source and cause of the hardening in the first place—the sin of the people. ‘He has died for them, their transgressions were laid upon him so that the people can have peace and be healed. . . ’” 

Sin causes us to seek self-preservation, to pursue gain for ourselves. We naturally hate that which requires denial. Yet if there is one thing that requires denial, it is love. Peter lays it all out a bit too clearly for comfort: “. . . Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours I Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

Here is love, vast as the ocean, as the hymn writer puts it. Lovingkindness deep and wide. In His death we live. In His suffering we are reconciled to God. In His giving up of all earthly life and comfort we are given everything. By the extravagant love of the Son of God we find life. We are filled up to overflowing. Love everlasting. Mercy without end.

Extravagance.

It humbles us, brings us to the end of ourselves. It causes us to wonder, to fall to our knees.

Why, O Lord, such love to me?

The price of our ransom was the blood of the Son of God, and this precludes all notions of cheap grace. This kind of love demands everything. After giving us every good thing, He demands everything back, and in this giving we find our fullest life. We cannot keep our lives, but if we lose them we are promised glorious resurrection bodies. Seeds that fall to the ground do indeed die, but oh, what fruit He grants from the sacrifice!

And He said, “If anyone serves Me, let Him follow me.” That requires everything we have and more. It takes laying ourselves on the line and taking up a cross. This is no mere symbol—it’s a concrete, invasive reality that doesn’t leave any corner of our lives intact, undamaged. By this call, we are literally destroyed, ripped apart. We are expendable, small, insignificant in the grand scheme of men and history. Yet the One who orchestrates all things is our loving Father, and because of that we can trust the hand that brings about the lessening of ourselves. “The cross is not simply a truth we confess, it’s a truth we glory in,” as Ian Hamilton said once.

We are left with no alternative. We must lay our lives down to take them up again in eternity. The way of obedience is the way of death, and our unbridled self, our pride cannot escape.

This, then is the reality of our moments and our days. This leaves nothing untouched. We hang on and the discipline of a Father pries away our hands off all those earthly dreams and aspirations we hold precious. Bonheoffer described it well when he wrote, “In renouncing one’s own happiness, one’s own rights, one’s own righteousness, one’s own dignity, in renouncing violence and success, in renouncing one’s own life, a person is prepared to love one’s neighbor. God’s love liberates human perception, which has been clouded and led astray by love of self, for the clear recognition of reality, of the neighbor, and of the world.”

Extravagance in love isn’t usually the way we think things should be—often it’s the opposite. It’s uncomfortable. Often, it’s easier to give to another person if we know exactly what will be accomplished and what will be involved—within reason, of course, we hope. We think everything would be better if we could see the end of all the strands He weaves together. Jesus saw the end, and it brought Him to agony in the garden. He pleaded that there could be another way. Yet He came to do the will of the Father, and His heart and soul stayed true in that allegiance to the point of death. “And He, knowing what was about to happen. . . (Jn. 18:4)”

He knows we like to hold back, to keep parts of ourselves from this abandoned pursuit. Putting us to shame is the story of the woman who put her pennies—all that she had—in the temple box. Had she any idea of the corruption of the priests, any idea if her meager livelihood would be used for a worthy end? What about the prostitute that earned gasps and sideways glances by her intense display of affection for Jesus—pouring ointment, wiping His feet with her hair? This is joyful sacrifice beyond obligation, even beyond reason.

We don’t have flasks to break, or the earthly form of the Son to adore, but like He said, our neighbors are always with us. In loving them, we love Him. John was quite clear on this point: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”