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[ Back to index of March articles ] BEARINGS: As a child, I couldn't figure out why so many people couldn't detect all the scents that I picked up. Eventually, I realized that the powerful sense of smell that both my grandmother and I were endowed with was quite exceptional. (Recent research has confirmed that some people's sense of smell can be as much as 80 times stronger than the norm.) Perhaps this is why I naturally respond to the imagery of aroma in the scriptures, which is often overlooked. The Easter stories themselves are suffused with olfactory descriptions. Jesus was buried with a fantastically extravagant quantity of spices - 100 pounds of myrrh and aloes - and even this hadn't seemed enough to the women who had prepared his body, and were intent on returning after the Sabbath with yet more. I think of the beloved disciple crouching in the tomb to verify the stunning news that the body was missing, and then turning to look out at the rising sun. The perfume of the spices he was crunching underfoot must have been overpowering. The aroma would have been pouring out from the tomb into the dawn air. The gospels tell us that there was something about Jesus that made people go completely overboard with perfume. The astrologers who tracked him down to Bethlehem in the first weeks of his life left him their entire supply of myrrh and incense, with gold to buy more when that ran out. The woman who was so desperate to demonstrate her gratitude to Jesus for his message of forgiveness gate crashed Simon the Pharisee's private dinner party and poured a year's supply of imported perfume onto Jesus' feet. When Jesus dined with Lazarus and Martha before the final Passover, Mary anointed Jesus with an entire jar of Indian perfume. "The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume." But it made Judas Iscariot sick to his stomach with resentment. He just couldn't hold back from trying to cancel out the exaltation and beauty of her gesture with a moralistic criticism. Mark tells us that Jesus made a promise: "Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her." The promise has come true. The pouring out of perfume in a gesture of reckless love has itself become part of the good news as an image of what has happened through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. God has released into the world the only thing that can ultimately win us. Even God cannot win us by coercion. We can only be won by attraction, by love. The myrrh and the aloes of the Easter tomb, the ointment of nard poured over Jesus, the frankincense left at his cradle - all these are specifically mentioned in the Song of Songs, the book of scripture that most revels in the erotic splendors of scent and which was read as an allegory of the Ultimate Love Affair, the Creator's ardent courtship of the human race and of each and every human being. I suspect Paul had a good nose, appreciative of the incense used in outdoor processions, and of the perfumes sold in the bazaars. Perhaps, like me in airport duty-free shops, he couldn't always resist the free samples of colognes at the perfumers' stalls. In his second letter to the Corinthians, he gets us to imagine ourselves as God's incredibly attractive aroma. "But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life." (2:14-16) It is an extraordinary image for everyday evangelism. Evangelism is "spreading in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him." We are the aroma of Christ. The power of the risen Christ is the power to attract, and by knowing him ourselves, by following our attraction, we acquire and transmit his allure. As members of his body, we exert his attractiveness in the world. This is imagery we don't hear preached very often. Passionate it is, but not sentimental. Paul knows full well that many people think the gospel of a crucified Messiah stinks as a message. So we will stink to them too by association. In holding their noses at the gospel and at us, they will become more even more set in their ways. To those we are "a fragrance from death to death." These are disturbing and thought-provoking metaphors with a gusty realism to them. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [ Back to index of March articles ]
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