What Is That Smell?
John 12:1-8
Have you ever left your house
for a week’s vacation,
or maybe even just left
for a quick weekend trip to the mountains
or the lake
and as soon as you walk in the door,
you’re stopped dead in your tracks saying,
“What is that smell?”
Maybe you forgot to empty the diaper pails before leaving;
maybe you dumped some leftovers
in the trash and forgot to take it out;
maybe someone’s sweaty sneakers
got left in the hallway near a vent,
maybe something worse…
(Every time I read the passage this week I couldn’t get around smell. Or that given that
Jesus is just a week away from the cross in this passage and given that he explains Mary’s
anointing as a burial act, I couldn’t get away from that Lynard Skynard song, Ooh that smell,
can’t you smell that smell, ooh that smell-the smell of death surrounds you…)
I love how smelly this passage is from John.
Whether it is the smell of the dinner they share;
or the sweet scent of Mary’s perfume
or the acrid smell of betrayal;
the smell of death and resurrection,
because well Lazarus was there—
and he’d just been raised from the dead a few verses ago
—feet, hair, food and people, this is a smelly story.
Do you think Jesus
had an acute sense of smell?
John tells us that
when Mary pours out the perfume,
the fragrance filled the house.
But here’s what makes me wonder
about Jesus’s sense of smell.
Remember, with the Lazarus story
told only in John,
Jesus is told that Lazarus is dying,
but instead of going right away,
he takes his time getting to Bethany.
When he finally does get there,
Lazarus is already dead.
Jesus then tells the family, friends and mourners
to roll away the stone to Lazarus’s grave,
and they sort of give him—
well they give him the stink eye—
and the King James may say it best,
“by this time, he stinketh.”
But this stench of Lazarus
being dead for four days
doesn’t bother Jesus.
Isn’t it interesting, that the smell and stench of death
doesn’t stop Jesus
from what he has set out to do?
You have to wonder if ole Lazarus
still has that slight hint of mothball smell on his robes.
Aside from the smell of Lazarus
who formerly stinketh,
there’s the dinner that Martha is preparing.
The smells of olive oil and grilled fish;
pickled watermelon rind and cucumbers;
sweet cakes of fig and chickpeas1
1
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Food/dining2000.html
…mmm, how wonderful that dinner
must have smelled.
Whenever we cook with onions and garlic at our house,
I can walk in to the kitchen the next day at lunch time
and still smell the aroma of last night’s dinner.
We don’t know much about this dinner party,
except that it less than a week before Passover,
which means Jesus is making his way
to his own death and resurrection.
What was the mood like at dinner?
Light and jovial?
Or was the conversation tinted with anxiety?
Could anyone acknowledge the elephant in the room?
The characters mentioned are few,
Jesus, Mary, Martha, and Judas.
And we don’t see Mary and Martha
in the negative light of Luke:
the busy sister and the dreamer;
all we seem to know about Mary and Martha
is that they were Lazarus’s sisters,
and that they deeply loved their brother and the Lord.
Chapter 11 in John (right before this)
tells us that Jesus loved
Martha and Mary and Lazarus too.
Don’t you have friends like this
who really good at hosting get-togethers?
Friends who you know you don’t have to dress up
to go to their house or
bring any fancy food,
unless you have just been dying to try out
that new deviled egg recipe from Pinterest?
The kind of friends that
when the deviled egg recipe is really a no go
—they will still find a way
to work it into any conversation
over the next several years?
The kind of friends who will say,
“it’s Thursday, come over and let’s eat on the deck”
and you just love their family’s homemade salsa
and how good a hamburger grilled
at their house over charcoal tastes?
Mmm, think of that smell.
I think Jesus and this family
must have been like that.
Maybe Martha and Mary and Lazarus’s home
was as close to coming home to his momma’s lasagna
and pound cake as the Son of Man could get.
So as dinner winds down,
and the cooler evening air sets in,
the smells of good food still lingers,
another smell takes over.
The smell of table wine might have hung in the air
only a moment before
the scent of Mary’s perfume accosted everyone.
We’ve all been there haven’t we?
Minding our own business
when a smell brings back a childhood memory
or the way the smell of sunscreen for sale at Walmart
immediately takes you to the beach?
Maybe you’re engrossed
in reading your emails on your phone
when all of the sudden someone’s perfume,
most likely a woman’s perfume,
suddenly grabs your attention?
“We can’t choose to smell one thing over another.
That is the point of smell.
It takes control of us,
taking over that which we’d rather be able to smell.
It is just there and somehow,
someway, you have to deal with it,
whatever memory it brings back,
whatever feeling it elicits,
whatever good or bad effects it brings on.
That is the power of the sense of smell.”2
I say this with some measure of guilt
for I’m a perfume wearer.
I don’t tell you this out of any need
for a complement on how I smell,
I figure if I like it,
and my family tolerates it,
that’s good enough.
But I’ve worn a certain perfume for so long
that even I don’t know
what I smell like if I don’t wear it.
According to Josephus,
a Jewish historian in the first century,
men were forbidden to wear perfume
but women could.
In fact a woman was allowed to spend
one tenth of her dowry income on perfume.3
Smelling good mattered then just as it does now.
But Mary’s perfume?
Reclining and relaxing on the floor cushions,
glass of good, spicy red wine in hand,
the conversation and chatter after dinner
dies down when all of the sudden
2
3
Karoline Lewis, http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4554
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1559-anointing
Mary comes in with her perfume,
made of pure nard.
Think of it as Clive Christian
Imperial Majesty No. 1 perfume.
There were only 20 bottles of this perfume made,
10 for women and 10 for men.
This is what Katie Holmes wore
when she married Tom Cruise.4
This 2 oz. bottle costs, $215,0005.
Mary kneels at Jesus’s feet
and pours out this expensive perfume on them.
Jaw drop.
The scent of jasmine and lemon aside,
can you imagine?
The waste…$215,000 of liquid on someone’s feet.
Now, you may not mind perfume,
but some of you have just about died,
thinking about feet.
You’re nodding your head,
because you are the, “I’m not a foot person,” people.
Touching someone else’s feet
is so far out of your realm of possibility,
you’d rather eat those bad deviled eggs.
I know.
4
5
http://modernmetanoia.org/2016/02/29/lent-5c-a-scandalous-gift-of-love/
http://luxatic.com/the-8-most-expensive-perfumes-in-the-world/
So imagine 1st century feet.
People walked everywhere;
there weren’t sidewalks and paved roads.
It might be like walking through our backyard,
where the dog refuses
to do her business in the flower beds
and instead opts for any spec of grass,
making it a minefield of well…
you get the idea.
st
Couple those 1 century unpaved dirt roads
and muddy ditches with the fact
that they mostly wore sandals because it’s hot
AND you have got some nasty feet on your hands.
In fact, washing another’s feet
was such a disgusting job
that a slave couldn’t even be forced to do it.6
And since Jesus was as fully human
as he was divine,
we have to assume his feet would have been
just as stinky and dirty and smelly
as your middle schoolers’ feet
after a week (in sandals) at camp.
Mary though doesn’t seem to notice or care.
She has set out to wash and anoint
the Lord’s feet with the most expensive thing
she owned and if that weren’t intimate enough,
she lets down her hair to dry them off.
Um, ladies did not expose their hair in this culture;
it’s disrespectful and hair is only let down or unveiled
within the confines of marital intimacy.
Paul tells the church in Corinth,
“but any woman who prays or prophesies
6
Carol J. Miller, Hosanna: A Spritiual Journey Through Holy Week. The Kerygma Program, 2006 pg. 24
with her head unveiled disgraces her head—
it is one and the same things as having her head shaved.
For if a woman will not veil herself,
then she should cut off her hair;
but if it is disgraceful for a woman
to have her hair cut off or to be shaved,
she should wear a veil.” (1 Cor. 11:5-6)
All this makes me wonder;
all this makes it hard to tell
what might have set Judas off more…
We are led to believe
that it is the cost of the perfume,
the extravagant gift.
He hides under the guise of altruism,
but John tells us he is anything
but innocent and compassionate
toward the poor.
So, is Judas up in arms
because he could have taken the perfume
and sold it for a lot of money;
then as keeper of the common purse,
given some away,
and kept a little for himself?
Or is he hiding even behind that?
Is Judas offended that Mary would do something
so obvious and from such a place
of deep intimacy;
is it the extravagance of the gift
or the extravagance of her love?
I’m not sure many, if any of us
would have felt anymore comfortable
than Judas must have felt.
The way the other gospels tell it,
all the disciples, not just Judas,
become unnerved by the gesture
of the expensive and intimate anointing.
John however, is intent on painting Judas
with a certain brush so to speak.
Judas is the betrayer here,
and for some of us we are happy to have a scapegoat;
better him than me.
But I don’t know that we need Judas as a scapegoat
—because the thing that all of the four gospels
have in common is
that this scene was intimate,
disturbing, extraordinary
and deeply loving.
We are left to wonder,
was there something more going on
between Mary and Jesus?
The answer is yes.
Of course there was!
Mary (you see) had fallen in love with Christ.
She had fallen in love with the God
who was in love with her.
She adored the God who adored her.
Like others throughout our Christian faith,
like the disciples, like Paul,
like you and me,
Mary has come to know the,
“surpassing value of knowing Christ
who has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12).7
Throughout the history of our Christian faith,
people have found their true selves
in the God who pours out himself for us.
I love how the Sparkhouse Bible
that we give our elementary kids says it,
so I’ve invited Harper White
to read us that part from her Bible…
“God doesn’t save any love
but pours it all out on each of us.
Give all your love to God.”
Mary has anointed Jesus
in preparation for his burial,
7
The Rev. Chana Tetzlaff, http://modernmetanoia.org/2016/02/29/lent-5c-a-scandalous-gift-of-love/
he tells them.
Leave her love alone;
even if you don’t understand it,
she somehow understands
that death is tied up in life.
The fragrance of the perfume filled the house
and no one could turn away
from this act of intimate faith.
“That is the power of the sense of smell.
It permeates our life with the good and the bad,
the powerful and the painful,
the delirious and the difficult.”8
This scene of Jesus’s feet being anointed
foreshadows the moment
when Jesus will wash his disciples feet
—equally intimate and loving and smelly.
Francois Clemmons (the man seated on the right) might not be a familiar name
to all of us right off the bat.
But as Officer Clemmons perhaps
he’s more recognizable.
Clemmons played the role of police officer Clemmons
on Mr. Rogers neighborhood for 25 years.
He didn’t like the idea of the role at first
—he’d grown up with negative opinions of the police.
But Fred Rogers convinced him
that he could be a positive role model in the show.
Clemmons was the first African American
to have a recurring role
on a children’s television show.
He recalls a particular moment
in the show’s history with some fondness;
http://www.npr.org/2016/03/11/469846519/walking-the-beat-in-mr-rogersneighborhood-where-a-new-day-began-together
8
Karoline Lewis, http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4554
As we move ever closer to the end of Lent
we can’t separate the smells
of what will happen to Christ
that he will suffer before there is triumph.
We can’t celebrate the resurrection
without first facing the cross.
It is difficult.
It is messy.
It is jarring.
It smells like blood, sweat and tears.
And we can’t ignore the uneasiness
that seeing Jesus feet washed
means letting him wash our feet
so that we will also wash each other’s.
When is the last time
you did something extravagant,
expensive and intimate
excuse the expression,
for the Love of God?
When is the last time we had,
dare I even suggest it,
an intimate encounter with Christ?
With the God who so loves us?
Lent teaches us
that we are caught between—life and death.
Betrayl and loyalty.
While the smell of the perfume
filled the house, Jesus confirms,
“she has anointed me for burial,”
There’s that the sweet smell of life
with the stench of death. Right when you walk in the door.