A sermon preached from John 12:1-8, as published in Lectionary Homiletics, by Kim Justice
“The Stench of Death, The Fragrance of Love”
When my parents moved away from our home of twenty three years, they moved right before Christmas. I was away at seminary and hadn’t even seen the house yet, but they wanted me to have a great first Christmas. In the two weeks before the move and Christmas, they unpacked as quickly as they could and had the house looking really great by time I got there. Surprised though I was, I walked in the door and immediately saw a fake, pre-lit tree, and some part of my heart just fell. It couldn’t possibly be Christmas if it didn’t smell like Christmas. Though I was pretty careful not to let my disappointment show, my parents seemed to read my mind. Mom said, “Honey, you forgot!” Knowing exactly what she was talking about, Dad rushed over to a drawer and grabbed a little bottle of spray. Suddenly, even though the tree was very definitely fake, it smelled like Christmas. I would’ve tried to put up a brave front, but something just would’ve been missing had Christmas not smelled the way Christmas smells.
Have you ever stopped to think about the power of smell? (I know, I know. There’s a bad pun waiting to happen there.) Obviously, we’re flooded with all sorts of smells every day, some good and some definitely not so good. Because our noses are assaulted by so many smells, certainly not all of them can be processed by our brains. But every now and then, a certain smell grabs your attention. Maybe you walk into a bakery, and the smell of all that bread takes you back to “the good ol’ days” when your Nana would bake rolls just because she knew you loved them. Or maybe you walk into a dear friend’s house, and immediately know you’re “home” just by the way it smells. Or maybe your big, stinky, wet dog gets so excited to come in that all she wants to do is love on you. Now you too smell like big, stinky, wet dog, but you don’t mind as much as you should because she just loves you so much.
Even as smell has the wonderful, magical power to take you somewhere safe and comforting, smells can also do the exact opposite. I remember the rainy cold day that my beloved car blew a head gasket just by the way it smells, and I think of that sad day every time I smell that smell on another car. When I go in emergency rooms, I think not only of the day I went to see Virginia Briggman and had to tell her that her sister had died in that wreck that they were in, but I also am taken back to the hours after my parents were in that really awful wreck last year. When I smell latex gloves, suddenly I’m sitting in a dentist’s chair as they try to put my teeth back together after that ice skating accident.
Smells are powerful. The most offensive smell I can think of is the smell of death. I bet every person in this room could describe the smell of a funeral: sickly sweet, half wilted flowers; ladies’ perfume and men’s aftershave; and then the food– because the parade of casserole bearing well-wishers has started. Every bit of it is well intentioned, but to the mourners, perhaps it all adds up to the stench of death. And what’s worse, every time you go to a funeral after that one that you were pretty sure you couldn’t make it through, you’ll be reminded of that day you’d really just as soon forget.
If we could have been in the room with Jesus and Lazarus and Mary and Martha and the disciples, perhaps we too we would have been assaulted by the stench of death. Judas sure caught a big whiff of it. It was offensive, really, truly, incredibly offensive. But for him, the room didn’t reek of sickly sweet flowers or overpowering aftershave. For him, the stench came from hopes dashed.
I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Judas. We’ve so thoroughly villianized him, that we forget that he was a disciple too. I can step back, and tell myself maybe he was there as a divine character would could start the ball rolling so that Jesus could die for our sins. I think that’s true, but I think that before Judas was the betrayer, I think he was a disciple who believed that Jesus might just be one who would change things. The other disciples didn’t get what was going on, didn’t understand that Jesus was really about to die, though they’d been warned by Jesus enough times. I think Judas might have understood more than we give him credit for. While he didn’t yet know that he was the one who would betray Jesus, he understood that Jesus would die. And in his mind, that meant that Jesus couldn’t be the one to change the world. Perhaps he was filled with disappointment, and that left him quite vulnerable to temptation. I can hear him now, “If he’s going to die any way, I might as well make a little money off of him. Somebody might get something good out of all this, and besides, I’ve given years of my life to serving him, and never gotten so much as a dime.”
As the day wore on, the lovely homey scene that we see in the text just got to be too much for Judas. The Hallmark world became something he wasn’t a part of. The stench of death became more and more powerful, and as it did, the stench changed sources. It was no longer the smell of disappointment, it was the smell of betrayal. And it was all over him.
To make matters worse, that woman made a big display of showing her love for Jesus. She poured oil on him, and washed his feet with her tears, and then dried them with her hair. It was disgusting, really. What an awful, unashamed display of affection. And it made Judas sicker and sicker until he had to say something. Finally, he just blurted out something about the wastefulness of all this display, thinking that surely any reasonable person would agree with him.
He might have been right, but he didn’t count on the fact that he was the only one smelling the stench of death. There was another smell in the room, and that’s what Jesus and the others were smelling. It was the fragrance of love.
Just as I know you’ve smelled the stench of death, I also know that you’ve smelled the fragrance of love. Maybe it’s the way your spouse’s clothes smell, or maybe it’s the smell of a clean house, which was cleaned for you as a labor of love when you were too overwhelmed to do it yourself. Maybe it’s the smell of a home-cooked meal that shows up on your doorstep when you’re too sick to cook it yourself.
I bought a sweater from Judy’s consignment shop last winter. If you’ve ever been in there, you know that the whole store has this nice, inviting, lightly perfumed smell that comes, I’d guess, from the women who work there. All day long, every time I moved, that smell was released. Because it reminded me of her, and because she’s one of my favorite folks, every time I smelled that smell, it was the fragrance of love to me. I remember that day because it was a rough day with too much going on. But every time I caught the fragrance of love, it made me smile just a little bit.
For Mary, the same Mary who just wanted to sit at Jesus’ feet while her sister Martha practiced hospitality, the smell in the room wasn’t the stench of death. All she could smell was love. The love that Jesus had for her. The love that Jesus showed her family when her brother Lazarus died.
I think it’s ironic that Mary smelled the fragrance of love so clearly, when we know she was the other person in the room who really “got” was Jesus was doing. After all, she was, in the best way she could, annointing him for burial. But even the fact that Jesus was getting ready die had a beautiful smell of love to it, at least to her nose.
Two characters. One called a betrayer, one hailed as a great giver of love. One who could only smell the stench of death, one who could smell nothing but the powerful smell of love.
As I’ve been thinking about these characters, I’ve had to laugh a little to myself. When I’d complain about some smell or other, my dad would always say “it’s your upper lip.” It’s a silly expression, but maybe there’s a little bit of serious truth behind it. Maybe you smell most clearly the smell that you give off, at least in the metaphorical sense.
For Judas, he metaphorically reeked of betrayal and greed. No wonder Mary’s act of love was so offensive to him: the more she tried to spread the divine smell of love, the more his own stench smelled sour to him. Then there’s Mary, who was so intent on filling the house with the fragrance of extravagant love that she couldn’t smell anything else, including the stink of Judas’ impending betrayal.
I wonder what the others in the room experienced while all of this was going on. They were probably being assaulted by these conflicting “smells”. Perhaps it depended on how they perceived Jesus and his ministry. Sometimes, I think, the great act of love that we see in Christ is sour for us when we realize that it wasn’t just for us. It was for even those that we don’t like, even for those with whom we disagree. That act of extravagant love was even for liars, and thieves, and murderers and adulterers. Sometimes our own greed makes that deed sour for us. Maybe you smell the stench of death on Christ’s act as you realize that the old way of life, which for you might be the “good ol‘ days”, is forever gone. But then again, once you’ve had the experience of being set free, maybe that act can smell nothing but sweet. What would you have smelled?
Maybe, in a surprising way, this text offers us a choice. Maybe it’s not just about what we smell, maybe it’s about the smell we give off. What are you offering the world? Are you sending out “stinkwaves” like the Peanuts character, Pigpen, or might folks think you belong in the same garbage can with Oscar the Grouch? Are you so full of the negatives that all you can smell is the stench of death, as you focus on the ways you’ve been hurt or let down? Or, are you filling the world with the fragrance of love? Are you making the world a better place, and changing people’s lives for the better? I’d say that the “smell” you’re giving off is directly related to how you perceive Christ’s death, and whether for you, it carries the stench of death or the fragrance of love.
I wonder how Christ’s longest walk to the cross smelled? Did it stink with betrayal, and greed, and mistrust, and death? Or was he maybe able to hold on to a few wafting smells of love?
We live in a world where we’re ok with seeing the foul things of life. We’re used to people only looking out for themselves. We’re used to not being able to trust anyone because they might hurt us. We convince ourselves that nothing really matters that much, and that our misdeeds really don’t smell as sour as we think they do. After all, if everyone is doing it, who could tell one stench of death from another?
But if we sit stewing in our own foulness of soul, when an extravagant fragrance of love wafts in, it makes the sour air around us all the more sour.
For you, does Christ’s death reek of unmet hopes, of grace granted to another “undeserving” one, of love for one who is “unlovable”? Or is it surrounded by the sweet fragrance of entirely extravagant love, because you know that you have been the unlovable one and that you have been called beloved anyway?
My prayer, as we begin this long journey to the cross with Jesus, is that we find ourselves filled with the fragrance of love. And not only that, but that the sweet aroma of extravagant love is so powerful on and around us, that all we want to do is fill the world with that same sweet smell. To do so, I think, is to begin living as Christ would have us live.
Amen.
