Blessings through Brokenness (God's Alabaster)

An alabaster phial she broke -
The prize of frugal years;
The costly act her love bespoke -
Her Master she reveres.
Love's claims are hard to reconcile -
The Teacher or the treasure?
When reckless passion breaks the phial,
His praise is truest measure.

Suspended on a suff'ring stake,
Accounting love, not loss;
His body broken for our sake,
Impaled upon a cross.
God's "alabaster" - love revealed,
Oustretched, intense, eternal.
Divine and human kinship healed
At Calv'ry's fragrant kernel.

The redolence of brokenness
Goes out from Calvary;
That fragrancy of graciousness
Now trapped, must be set free.
The phials of self-sufficiency
Destroyed by Love's presuming -
His sweet bouquet at liberty
A fetid world consuming.

The broken petal of the rose
Imbues a wider sphere;
From battered beauty fragrance flows -
The sacrifice is dear.
The incense of His loveliness
Is only penetrating
Through fragments of our brokenness
And God's appropriating.

This poem won first place for the March 2007 poetry contest