Today is the last Sunday of Lent. Next week is the start of Holy Week and the journey to the cross. In our gospel today, John 12:1-11, we see a woman anointing Christ’s feet with ridiculously, excessively, expensive perfume: responding out of love; pouring everything out at the feet of the one who pours everything out for us.

This story tells us that our faith, our lives, are not transactional, not about costs, or what could have been bought with the money. It is relational. It is about devotion and love; the recognition that all that we have is a gift, and the only appropriate way to respond is to give ourselves. The beautiful Old Testament reading, Isaiah 43:16-21, reminds us that God is a God of abundance not scarcity. Life may sometimes seem like a desert, but God makes rivers to flow even in the desert.

Today is Mothering Sunday, the day in which we give thanks for our Mother the church, celebrate those who have mothered us, and respond to Christ’s call to offer a mother’s love to others.

Our readings explore how mothering is always done in community and is a task for all of us. In 1 Samuel 1:20-28, Hannah is desperate to be a mother and yet it is Eli, the old, blind, priest (who has done a shockingly bad job at raising his own children) who is given the job of raising Samuel.

In the gospel, John 19:25-27, at his death, Jesus hands his disciple to his mother and his mother to his disciple to become a family for one another. The Christian community is a family defined not by blood or birth but by a love that calls us to mother beyond the boundaries.

If only life were fair. If only good things happened to good people and bad things to bad people. In Luke 13:1-9 Jesus firmly rejects the concept of fairness. People do not get what they deserve. Jesus follows with the story of the barren fig tree which has borne no fruit for 3 years. The owner wishes to cut it down but the gardener pleads to be able to nurture it for a further year. In God’s economy generosity always outweighs fairness. Yet we often fail to enjoy this generosity because we are so wedded to a transactional approach to life. As Isaiah 55:1-9 exclaims, we would rather strive and work for the good things in life than receive them as a gift, because we want to believe that all that we have is down to our merit. It isn’t. If we could appreciate how much of what we enjoy is a gift perhaps we would be minded to share more of it with others.

Lent calls us into the wilderness to discover who we are and what we were made for.

This week our readings move from the margins to the centre: we begin, in Genesis 15:1-18, with Abraham’s nomadic journeying far from home to a place where God tells him he and his offspring will be aliens and strangers. By the time we reach our gospel reading, Luke 13:31-35, Jesus is speaking to the offspring of Abraham in the centre of their world, in the temple, in the city of Jerusalem. He reminds them that they have forgotten who they are and what they were made for: not to bargain for power with those who are in the centre of things, but to travel out to the margins and take God’s blessing to all people.

Lent poses a question for us: who do we think we are? What lies at the core of our identity? In both our readings for the First Sunday of Lent we are taken into the wilderness. In Deuteronomy 26:1-11, the people of God, now settled in the Promised Land, are asked to remember their time in the wilderness and to use that memory to determine who they are and how they should live. They are to give, to offer hospitality, to welcome the stranger and the foreigner because they too had experienced being foreigners and strangers. The time in the wilderness has taught them that they are not to be defined by what they have or where they live but to whom they belong; God. Jesus’ time in the wilderness, Luke 4:1-13, mirrors this experience. It is here that Christ must claim his identity, what kind of leader, what kind of servant will he be? Again and again he returns to scripture and finds the answer: I am who I am because God is who God is. There are many people, many ideologies, many institutions that want to tell you who you are and how you should behave. Lent is a time to stop listening to them and listen again to the voice that tells you “you are my beloved child, on whom my favour rests.”

It is easy to be blinded by light. This week’s gospel falls into two distinct halves: the first half, at the top of the mountain, is the shiny half: dazzling clothes, shining faces, voices booming from clouds, the sudden appearance of long-dead heroes of the faith. The second half is less dazzling. Jesus and his disciples trudge down the mountain to confront chaos, failure and brokenness. The disciples wanted to stay at the top basking in the light, but the difference between this reading, Luke 9: 28-43, and the first reading, Exodus 34:29-35, is that God comes to us, not us to God. God shows up in the mess and the struggle and it is here, not on the mountain top, that the true glory of God is revealed.