John 12:1-9
“The Smell of Love”
April 7, 2019
A plump and juicy turkey roasting in the oven…that super-clean soap and baby powder aroma that wafted up from an infant held close…popcorn jumping out of the big metal swinging pot and into the enclosed glass case at the circus…her favorite flower – peonies – beside her hospital bed…the perfect gift wrapped by small hands of an orange poked through with a hundred cloves and a ribbon for hanging in the closet…birthday candles just blown out atop a homemade cake with gooey frosting…hamburgers cooking on the grill at the family reunion…the Christmas tree dragged into the living room and finally upright after much debate on its position in the stand… marshmallows turning brown on the stick over the campfire at the end of a hot summer day with crickets as the only background noise. The smell of love is powerful! Out of the five senses, the sense of smell is the most closely linked to memory. Often coming across a smell in the course of our day can spontaneously evoke a long forgotten person or event or experience. With me it is the smell of a cigar. As soon as I walk by someone smoking a cigar – very distinct from a cigarette, mind you – I am immediately taken back to my 4 or 5 year old self sitting on my grandpa’s lap and he singing K-K-K-Katie to me while his ever present lit Dutch Masters cigar was burning in the heavy ash tray beside his chair next to the fireplace in the house that my father had grown up in on Locust Avenue. Think about one of your transporting smells – it can be pretty amazing to time-travel this way.
Scientists have demonstrated that smell is highly emotive and that is what perfume makers are banking on. A smell is also received differently by each person and can be thought to be lovely by one individual while someone else may be made nauseous by that same scent. Certain smells also alert us to danger and these are more universally shared, like the smell of smoke warning us of fire or that rotten food smell that stops us from eating something that may make us sick. For those who have anosmia, the loss of smell, life can be difficult to navigate and they feel understandably cut off and isolated from others.
When we learn of Mary’s anointing Jesus’ feet with nard and drying them with her hair, what remains is “the sweet smell of perfume” that filled the home that she shared with her hard-working sister Martha and just back from the dead brother, Lazarus. The two sisters are bursting with love and awe for Jesus – one will show that love with a meal and the other with an extraordinary sign of preparing him for death. Interestingly, Mark and Matthew both have her instead anointing Jesus’ head, prophetically making him a king. In this passage we hear no words from Mary – it is her actions alone that distinguish her from Judas who is all talk. And that talk is seen by the Gospel writer John as suspect. When Judas tries to belittle Mary with his supposed generous intentions of caring for the poor, we are treated to a verse in which John can’t help but remind readers decades later then and centuries later now that Judas was not to be trusted and that he was often skimming the shared purse that Jesus and his disciples kept when they travelled.
The love that Mary showers on Jesus does have a price tag to Judas. The stuff she was lavishing Jesus’ feet with cost 300 denari which would be worth almost a year’s wages for a laborer then or about $20,000 today. This nard is what was used to prepare bodies for death in the pre-embalming days as both a sign of honor and, frankly, to cover over the stench of the body. Here Jesus is looking ahead to the death that is coming and it is Mary who is acknowledging that by honoring him while he is still living. Perhaps you’ve heard the sentiment expressed that rather than putting flowers on one’s grave after their dead, visit them with flowers while they’re still living and can enjoy them. Mary here is not wanting to wait to express her abundant love but rather to use the precious perfume now – and Jesus lets her anoint his feet which will soon be pierced on the cross. We all know what’s coming next, starting with another foot washing and this time it will be Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at yet another meal. The one who has been loved extravagantly will offer up the act of love to his dear friends who will carry on for him once he is gone.
Such overflowing and abundant love is something we receive from God through grace upon grace and yet sometimes like Judas here, we react as if it’s not deserved or try to excuse it away. It’s hard imagining that with all the bad decisions we’ve made, actions that hurt people, doubts, silence in the face of injustice and the myriad other ways we’ve fallen short and missed the mark, that God still loves us unconditionally and extravagantly and all that we are to do in response is to love others in return. Sounds easy but, man, is it ever hard. Every day the list of those who are hard to love seems to grow longer and still the love from God continues. Morning after morning we awaken to a new day filled with promise and the opportunity to love more profoundly than the day before and so often we fall short because we start keeping track of all of the shortcomings of the hard to love ones and forget the love that has been showered unconditionally on us.
Judas’ point, however devious it may seem in hindsight, about the poor always being with us should not be used as an excuse for accepting poverty as a given. Jesus here is reminding Judas and Mary that serving the poor – financially, in spirit, in health, in well-being – will continue to be the work of Kingdom building. Jesus did not eliminate poverty in his earthly lifetime. Rather he demonstrated how to love without judgment having mercy and seeking justice for the mentally ill, the sick, the hungry, and the isolated. This work is what it means to be a disciple. No one is beyond God’s love which means no one is beyond being loved by us. Battling poverty, in all its forms, is how we love. Let us offer these words in prayer which beckon to us from a site called Unfolding Light:
Beloved,
where will I meet you today?
Give me faith to go beyond my pity
for some imagined “poor;”
for now, in this moment, I have you,
not in some heavenly dream
but in this world, before me,
hurting, humble, disguised as one of me.
Give me the urgency of the moment,
faith in impending completion,
passion to feed you in your hunger,
to accompany you in your pain,
to anoint your wounded feet, now,
here in this place,
before it is too late for you
and for me,
now, not in another life time.
Beloved, where will I meet you in pain today?
I am ready. Amen.
(“You, here, today,” Steve Garnaas Holmes, 4/4/19)