(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Mar 13, 2016, Lent V)
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Smell: A Portal to Other Worlds
Recently one of my friends was asking me about my experience in England. I mentioned that I had had the opportunity to travel a little bit, and that, yes, I had made it to London a couple of times. She jokingly asked, “Did you find Hogwarts?” I was saddened to reply, “No…. I didn’t.” Platform Nine and Three Quarters may exist in the imagination of J. K. Rowling, just as the enchanted wardrobe may exist in the imagination of C. S. Lewis. But in our world, or at least in my experience, there are no such things as portals that magically transport you to another place.
Today’s scripture, however, reminds me that perhaps I’ve spoken too quickly. Perhaps there are such things as portals that whisk us away to another time and place. Perhaps there are unseen doorways that drop us off in a different dimension. For what else is smell, if not an invitation into the enchanted reaches of our mind, into images and emotions that lie obscured in the misty distance of our memory?
Consider for a moment how “immediate and invasive” a smell can be.[1] It’s just like a magic portal, where a single touch (intentional or not) instantly transports you somewhere else. When I smell freshly cut grass, I am swept back to a summer haze, soccer in the backyard, burgers on the grill, my mom snapping off mint leaves for the tea. When I smell a certain musty scent of long-closed closets or old books, I am hurtled back to my grandpa’s basement, where my brother and I would sit for hours on the cold, bare floor and play marbles, where we’d sleep on two beds side-by-side and wake up to the welcome clamor of a pancake breakfast being made upstairs. When I smell the fragrance of crayons and chalkboards, I am whisked away to Short Pump Elementary, and all of the sudden, I am flooded by a host of uninvited feelings: the nerves I felt every morning stepping through those big metal doors, the excitement I felt when we’d sit down for a new story, the fear I felt whenever a teacher would call on me.
The list of smells goes on and on. Some are deeply unique, and others are shared. I would hazard a guess that among the smells that transport you elsewhere, there would be the brackish scent of salt water and sand dunes, or the friendly fragrance of freshly washed linen, or the sweetly smoky aroma of a woodstove, or the smell of a childhood friend’s house. We may all be sitting in church right now, but chances are the mere mention of one of these smells has transported us somewhere else as well.
“The House Was Filled with the Fragrance”
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. If that’s the case, then perhaps a smell is worth ten thousand. I’d imagine that the original storyteller of today’s gospel story would agree. Reading today’s scripture, I get the distinct sense that as he tells the story, he can recall the striking scent of Mary’s perfume. I get the sense that he is reliving this story and many stories, all at once.
Listen again to his telling of the climactic scene. Martha is serving supper, Lazarus is eating alongside Jesus, and then all of the sudden—this: “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” (12:3). Who else would report a detail like that, make such a claim—“the house was filled with the fragrance”—except someone who was there in the house and was himself overpowered by the fragrance?[2]
And I imagine that our storyteller is overpowered by more than just the fragrance. Mary’s act itself is extravagant and reckless. What she does is unparalleled. In a culture where women would normally refrain from touching men in public, and would certainly refrain from letting their hair down—they left that to ladies of the night[3]—it’s no wonder that what Mary did becomes memorialized. I’d bet this is the kind of thing the disciples would recount years afterward. “Remember the time that Mary…?” And I imagine they’d follow that up with a pensive silence, or perhaps a remark like: “I’m still wondering what she meant by that….”
The Many Meanings of Mary’s Anointing
The storyteller hints at one possible motivation. He says that Mary “anointed” Jesus. To anoint someone with oil in ancient Israel was to appoint him or her to a special role, especially a role like king. Mary would have undoubtedly heard Jesus talking about the kingdom of God. Perhaps she is anointing him king of the kingdom. Perhaps…. But as the storyteller would know, and as we do too, this was a very different king, and a very different kingdom.
Which is perhaps why Mary anoints Jesus differently than most kings. Most kings are anointed on their head. But in rather bizarre fashion, Mary anoints the opposite end of Jesus’ body. She anoints his feet. Why? She never says. But only a chapter later, we will find Jesus himself washing his disciples’ feet. So perhaps Mary overturns the tradition of anointing—exchanging feet for head—because Jesus is overturning the world’s idea of a king and kingdom. It’s only fitting to have an upside-down anointing for an upside-down king and kingdom. What else could you call a king who washes his followers’ feet, or a kingdom where the last is first, where the true leaders are the servants—if not “upside-down”?
Indeed, this kingdom is unlike any other on earth. It would begin not with the death of its enemies…but with the death of its own king.[4] Which presents yet another reason why Mary would have anointed Jesus: in fact, it’s a reason that Jesus himself points out. Mary’s oil is anointing him not only for kingship, but also for burial. Would Mary have known what was going to happen to Jesus? They say “a woman knows.” And I suspect that a woman would have known better than a man, in that day in age, just what would happen to someone who challenged the authority of men in long robes and men wearing crowns and the men who made judgments at the city gate, someone who instead gave pride of place to the sinners and the tax collectors and the prostitutes.[5] I suspect Mary would have known what would happen to such a man.
A Smell That Unites What We Would Separate
So I imagine that the smell of nard would have been more than just a single portal for whoever told today’s story, more than just a flash of remembrance. I imagine that for him, that perfumed fragrance would have been a crossroads of memories, that it would have whisked him away into several different stories at once. Perhaps the aroma’s first floral notes would have sweetly recalled Jesus’ anointing as a king. But then the subtle spicy tones that followed would perhaps have recalled the strange—one might even say spicy—act of footwashing: first Mary washing Jesus’ feet, then Jesus washing his disciples’. So this king’s kingliness was not in power or force but rather in loving and serving others. And then, I suspect, there would be detected a sharp trace of bitterness in the smell, and this could not but remind the storyteller that this king’s love was selfless and sacrificial to the point of death. And of course, whoever told this story originally must also have known that death was not the final word of these stories. And so contained within this scent is also the unbelievable story of new life.
So many stories contained within this single smell. And they cannot be separated, one from the other, just like you can’t separate swimming and sunburn and sandy feet from the smell of saltwater, just like you can’t separate grilling out and games and good friends from the smell of hamburgers on a charcoal fire.
The significance of this single smell is that it unites what we prefer to separate. We talk about Jesus as king or Lord all the time, but when we do that, we tend to repress the idea of Jesus as a humbled and dirty footwasher, or a convicted criminal on a cross. But for Mary of Bethany, this anointing captured in a single scent who Jesus was: king, selfless servant, and crucified criminal, ultimately convicted of challenging this world’s self-centered ways.
And for the storyteller? I imagine that the fragrance of this story was dear to him because it brought Jesus back to life, in a way that was very different but just as real as Jesus’ resurrection, in a way that reminded him of what it actually meant to step foot into the upside-down kingdom of God.
And for us who do not know the smell quite so personally, how do we understand the story? I think we honor it by honoring its many stories, and especially at this time of Lent: we recall Jesus entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday as a king, but we quickly discover on Maundy Thursday that this king leads by love and service, and then on Good Friday that this love and service will lead him to death…and then on Easter, to new life. And perhaps we’re honoring these stories already, every Sunday, when we gather at the table. For there our king serves us, demonstrates the depths of his sacrificial love for us, and invites us into new life.
Prayer
Master of the universe,
Humbled and dirty servant of the world—
May our memories of you be
Exalted and lowly, bitter and sweet,
Reminding us that the way of life
Is also the way of the cross.
And may our lives be a gospel aroma
In a stagnant world desperate for good news. Amen.
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[1] Maria Popova, “The Poetics of Smell as a Mode of Knowledge,” https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/28/lewis-thomas-on-smell-long-line-of-cells/, accessed Mar 9, 2016.
[2] Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John: Revised Edition (NICNT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 513, considers that this notice may be “a reminiscence of someone who was there.”
[3] See the Mishnah—Ketubot 7:6—for how important it was for a woman to keep her hair bound. A woman who “goes out with her hair unbound” may be divorced without the return of the dowry.
[4] Inspired by a remark from Rachel Held Evans, “Woman of the Passion, Part I: The Woman at Bethany Anoints Jesus,” http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/women-of-the-passion-anoint-oil, accessed Mar 9, 2016: “Clearly, the Twelve struggled to conceive of a kingdom that would begin not with the death of their enemies, but with the death of their friend.”
[5] See, again, Evans, “Woman of the Passion.”
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