by Pastor Douglas Brauner

The Highest Praise

You can listen to today’s devotion by clicking on this SoundCloud link.

I learned that pastors become friends with funeral directors when on my vicarage, what we in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod call our year of internship. Harold Wakeman of Wakeman Funeral Home in Saginaw, Michigan showed me the ropes of the funeral business. In the year of my internship we had over twenty funerals, most of them directed by Harold.

I would often travel with him to the graveside after the funeral. On one such trip, he pointed out these three crosses in this picture. The crosses mark the burial spot of a Lutheran pastor, his wife, and his sister. As you might guess, the tallest is the pastor’s cross.

Harold pointed out something else, something I had to check for myself. At the bottom of the pastor and his wife’s crosses are two Bible passages. On his cross reads the passage, “Well done good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.” (Matthew 25:23 KJV) On her cross reads,

“She hath done what she could.”
Mark 14:8 King James Version

Yes, the story behind these crosses was buried in 1936. Taken out of its context, her passage might seem demeaning, but this passage was a high complement, a complement that Jesus gave to a woman who anointed his head with oil merely days before his crucifixion. Mark’s gospel is about insiders and outsiders and how the outsides grow to be insiders. The woman would have been considered an outside because, well, she was a woman.

Unlike Jesus’ disciples, who we might be consider insiders, this woman understands that Jesus is going to die. The disciples, however, did not understand, even when Jesus plainly told them he was going to die. She gives what she has because she understands what is coming next. In room filled with “insiders,” she is the only one who gets it.

Through his sacrifice, Jesus makes us insiders. Like this woman, may we do what we can in honor of our blessed Savior.

Copyright Holy Cross Lutheran Church Colorado Springs, Colorado