Nard
John 12:1-11

March 25, 2007


A friend and colleague Susan Harvey has spent the better part of a decade studying smells and scents. I am not sure if she intends her legacy to be about scents, but she has come up with some intriguing insights about the way Christians have smelled their salvation, breathing in Christ as the Fragrance of Life.

Smell in the ancient world was a primary sense from which there was no escape. Everything had an odor: people smelled, animals smelled, God smelled. Particularly, God was associated with a smell. For after all, an odor is immaterial, invisible, yet tangibly experienced. Scent conveys essence rather than substance; it cannot be contained or circumscribed, yet has the power to cross boundaries and you cannot voluntarily control what you smell. How better to describe God than as a sweet fragrance? The presence of a divine smell.

The smell of incense envelopes a number of our sister churches in more liturgical traditions. But it is seldom remembered that from its beginning until late in the fourth century, Christianity generally excluded incense from its worship - the only religion in the Mediterranean world that banned incense. Many reasons, but the major one was that incense offerings were the required form of Emperor worship, in which Christians refused to participate and at times were then called treasonous to the state and sentenced to death. Incense smelled like death until Christianity became the state religion.

The Protestant Reformation resisted smelling anything. When was the last time you smelled something that was supposed to be part of the worship service? Today, sadly we are working to exclude scents of all kinds from public places. One of my congregations actually had to ban lilies for Easter because our soloist was allergic to the scent. Is smell permissible as a religious experience anymore?

It is not getting comfortable for Jesus and his company. More than the other Gospels, John was ominously aware of the coming confrontation in Jerusalem. The Pharisees and chief priests are openly looking for ways to trip Jesus up and discredit him, and to have him arrested. Jesus is not deaf to these rumours, so he travels back to Bethany six days before the Passover to visit his old friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus - a safe house. Of course, the narrator reminds us that Lazarus had recently been resurrected from death by Jesus, so the conversation among this family who had died and lived in such an extraordinary way must have been extraordinary.

The famous brother and sisters about whom we hear complementary stories across two Gospels were throwing a dinner party for Jesus and for his entourage as well. Once again, nothing happens if there is no food. Martha is serving the dinner according to her traditional role. Lazarus is simply sitting at the table eating, perhaps enough of an assignment after resurrection and he never speaks. Indeed, the three siblings utter no words.

Mary has something else to do, a ritual of hospitality that we have not maintained. She comes in to wash his feet, for the roads were dirty and strewn with pollutants from which sandals could not completely protect. She did not bring water, but pure nard, a very strong fragrant ointment, and bathed his feet in it, wiping the ointment off with her long hair. I’m not supposed to compare this rendition of John with the other Gospels, but I can’t help pointing out the contrast. This is not the home of Simon the Leper as we read in Matthew and Mark; it is the home of Jesus’ closest friends. This is not some woman of ill repute weeping for her sins as she anoints Jesus’ feet with ill-begotten expensive perfume; this is Mary of innocent and respectable repute, pure like her nard, who is extravagantly showing her love for Jesus. This is not a house or occasion of socially suspect characters; this is our house in which Jesus has come to dinner.

The fragrance filled the entire house, no one could escape the smell, and it was that kind of smell that grabs your tongue and forces you to comment immediately. Strong smells don’t leave many of us speechless; it compels strong words.

Judas Iscariot has to come out with some word of disapproval, somebody almost has to, though it easily could have been one of the other disciples, Peter perhaps. Why wasn’t this perfume sold for 300 bucks and given to the poor? A question asked by many, many a social activist and tax watchdog: Why isn’t this money being spent differently and more responsibly? Why do you not spend it on something I care about?

Of course, the evangelist John was not so enamoured with Judas, for John knew what Judas was up to and where he was heading. There is a jaundiced tone to the description of Judas’ embezzling practices - the only Gospel that suggests this - but certainly Judas is just not in tune with the spirit of generosity and beauty that Jesus has established and developed among them. Add to this what we would recognize as crass rudeness to publicly criticize one of the hostesses of their meal. Then they would have called it shaming, dishonouring.

Jesus is not going to be swayed by this jargon because he knows that the motivation is not as justice oriented as it wants to appear. “Leave her alone.” Pretty close to the same tone Jesus used to defend Mary’s choosing the best part when he visited a while back and Martha served. “She has bought the perfume to have it ready for the day of my burial.” The Jews did not embalm bodies, but applied liberal spices, balms and perfumes to the body to delay and disguise decomposition. Nard was not necessarily a funeral spice, but the sweet fragrance would bring that usage to mind and Jesus did know where he was going in six days or so.

Besides.... Judas has given us an awkward proposition about the use of money and the poor, but Jesus tells us something far more hazardous for the soul, “You will always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” We know all about the innumerable poor and oppressed people who have been ignored and pushed aside by governments and corporations and even by churches with their representatives citing Scripture, this verse. What was that line about the devil quoting Scripture?

You cannot forget when all of this is happening, six days shy of the Passover. The chief priests and the Pharisees were on high alert looking for Jesus, wondering whether he would dare to come to Jerusalem for the feast, wondering if he would dare not come? When they knew he was in Bethany they came to check him out and to see this fellow Lazarus as well because on account of his resurrected body, Jews all over the place were deserting and believing in Jesus.

One of the things I still recall 30 years later after reading Nikos Kazantsakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ was the scene with the now fragile and brittle Lazarus - death had taken a lot out of him - eating by himself and then a couple of thugs hired for the occasion came up behind him and put a knife right through him to make sure he died a second time. Not a Biblical event explicitly, but here the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death “as well.” We know they got Jesus; I doubt Lazarus escaped either. What kind of a world is it in which the people of faith and eternal life plan to kill another person of faith? I’ll tell you - it’s still our world!

Jesus is really not talking about poor people here, whether they should be beneficiaries of our compassion or not. There are no slogans or pet projects of political correctness in the kingdom of heaven. What matters is that you and I recognize our sinfulness at every step - the poor are always with us because of us, because of our sinfulness that lacks compassion and generosity and is full of our own greed and self-interest. Jesus invites, even demands that you examine every situation, every person, with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength to decide where the love of God insists you go. This drives truly religious people crazy, for there is nothing harder than to have to be converted to the Christian faith each time anew, again and again.

There is no protocol list for carrying out the Gospel. There is no guidebook, not even the Bible, which gives us explicit instructions in how to construct the kingdom of God. I hate to break the news to some of the United Church faithful, but the Gospel is not contained in The Manual, try as hard as we do to make it so. If you feed all the poor people in the world, and improve their situation significantly, that would be a miracle, but it does not advance you one half-step into the kingdom if you think that is the way it’s supposed to work. Then again, are you in trouble if you do not feed and help at least one of these little ones!

The Gospel of Jesus Christ on this edge of this continually lived out Passion of this sinful and hurting world means paying attention to all the ways one may encounter God’s presence in the world. God is not on our time schedule; God comes at the Kairos, the right time, for something powerful to happen and to change. You see God clothed in people who look the exact opposite of angels. You feel God in the caress of a baby or the touch of a 90 year old in the nursing home. You hear the winds of God in the most beautiful music and in the strangest sounds of creation. You taste God in the food Jesus always seems to be eating and in the kiss you share with one whom you love. You smell the sweet fragrance of God in people and nature, in the baking of bread and the breathing of fine wine, in the spices that are not necessary for nutrition or even survival, but because this is the right time God has decided for you to inhale the resurrected beauty of God’s life. As Jesus hinted, you do not always have me, better take advantage of God’s situation while you have it.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan