What does love smell like to you?
When I was a kid, love smelled like pan-fried steak fingers and fried okra, my favorite meal. It smelled like Old Spice cologne and my dad’s coffee, which was stronger enough to dissolve silverware. It smelled like Cherry ICEEs and the Brahm’s chocolate chip ice cream, but NOT the abominations of circus peanuts or candy corn. When my kids were little, love smelled like a clean diaper and baby lotion and food that was still warm when I ate it. Now that I am older, love smells like a Thistle Farms lavender candle that I light when I pray, in honor of women survivors of the streets and the inspiring ministry of the Rev. Becca Stevens. It smells like incense and sun-warmed tomatoes from the garden and my beloved’s jacket draped over my shoulders.
What does love smell like to you? What does is feel like?
I ask this as our gospel today presents us with one of the most richly sensual depictions of someone caring for Jesus in all of scripture— through our reading we experience a scene of the tenderest of ministrations, redolent with exotic perfume, in a place filled with love and companionship. A place like home—at least the kind of home each of us deserves, a place where people are devoted to each other by bonds of kinship stronger than mere blood ties.
Our version from John is different in several aspects: Jesus and his disciples are in Bethany, yes, but at the home of Lazarus and his sisters, just after Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead. The raising of Lazarus is the seventh of the seven signs in that Gospel—and the one that makes the local authorities determined to kill Jesus. John’s account makes it clear that Jesus is among his friends—friends who are grateful beyond belief for his resurrection of Lazarus from the grave. Perhaps this is as close to having a “home”—and it is just outside of Jerusalem-- that Jesus had.
Our Lenten lectionary does a magnificent job here in terms of sequencing. Last week we were reminded of the extravagance of God’s love and grace in the parable of the Prodigal Son, and here again we have a tale of extravagance. Yet rather than being inwardly directed and selfish, as the prodigal son’s extravagance was, Mary engages in an extravagant act of love—one that is deeply tender and personal. She breaks open a jar of dramatically expensive ointment—one used as a perfume, as incense, as herbal medicine as a sedative—and also for burial preparation.
The drama of this gesture is in its sensory richness: the smell of the perfume fills the entire house, we are told, and that Mary kneels at Jesus’s feet and pours an abundance of the ointment over his feet, wiping away the excess with the hair she lets down, as her family, Jesus, and his disciples look on in a reverent-- or shocked-- silence.
Mary anoints Jesus out of a profound love- it is unlikely that she knew that Jesus’ death on the cross was imminent. Mary’s motive may be to anoint him as Messiah out of gratitude for giving back her brother, which means that she and her sister will not be left exposed and destitute. Her extravagance is shocking—and the fact that she let down her hair, which a woman of that era only did in the presence of her husband—is even more shocking. But this is also the beginning of the second part of John, and at the start of each section, Jesus is anointed, so this anointing shows that Jesus is embarking upon a new phase of his mission. Jesus is presented in John as always being resolute, and matter-of-factly explains that he will soon die.
As Jesus speaks of his coming death, I imagine Mary longing to hoard these sensations of the feel of him, as his potential loss looms over those gathered there. And even in our time, we can have photos, and videos, of those we love even after they are gone. But one of the most final losses is the loss of the touch of the ones we love when they have passed away from us. As we look back on this scene from John’s gospel, I think about how Mary must have been so grateful in the days and years that followed that she yielded to this impulse to serve and caress her friend, regardless of cost or scandal or criticism, especially once he was executed on a cross.
This is a fully embodied story. The senses of sight, smell, touch, and taste are all richly engaged. Maybe that’s why some find this scene uncomfortable. After all, we live in a time of great ambivalence about our own bodies. We judge people’s bodies on their height, their shape, whether we think they take adequate care of their bodies. We make snap—and deadly-- judgments about people based on what shade of brown their bodies are, and divide ourselves along color lines, hair types, and nose shape. Our society dominates and regulates the bodies of children and women. We mock the signs of aging bodies and even try to hide or reverse the signs of aging. And the way we depict Jesus gets caught up into all of that, as it is a source of contention to some people to depict Jesus in a way that hasn’t been filtered through two thousand years of northern European art.
These last years of pandemic have been hard on our bodies—at least for most of us. When we went into preventative shut-down, we were deprived of the ability to be with friends and loved ones. We were unable to physically gather and share in the embodied community of the church in the same way we always had—a way we probably took for granted until it was temporarily taken from us. And worse, a sizeable portion of people around us responded not by doing what can be done to prevent illness, but denied the obligation to care for each other if it meant curtailing their freedom or preferences in any way. If anything should have made us aware of how we actually ARE affected by those around us, you would think it would be a contagious, deadly disease. May we ourselves always be better than that.
There’s one discordant note in the entire scene—and that’s when Judas makes his criticism of the extravagance of Mary’s gesture, and we get that often misinterpreted remark about the poor. But we know that Judas had not real concern for the poor. And when Jesus calls us to remember that the poor are always with us, Jesus reminds us that caring for each other and caring for the poor are not an either/or proposition, for the poor are part of us as surely as Jesus’s anointed feet are part of his body. If the poor are always with us, it is because we have already failed to take seriously our obligation to them to see them as part of us rather than separate and different from us. As Brazilian archbishop Halder Camara remarked, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” That kind of attitude towards other children of God is a true impoverishment of spirit—one that denies the unity of all people in heart, mind, and body.
Just as we do with the poor, too often we forget or ignore the reality of Jesus as a human being, who loved, laughed, wept, hungered, thirsted, despaired. We think him aloof to real human emotions, and real human relationships—and the scriptural witness, written for a specific time and place for specific audiences, does not help that. They didn’t need a Jesus who could break a leg or suffer heartbreak. They needed a Jesus who was more-than-human. And certainly, we do too.
BUT Jesus did have a mother he loved, and friends he cared for, and compassion for those who sought his help. He hungered and thirsted. He knew the power of a nap, as the incident in the boat during the storm reminds us. He had a need for solitude even as he engaged in ministry among multitudes, with all its demands.
In this story we are reminded of the importance of the senses, and of the body, as a sign and location of love and of worship. Luckily, we are Episcopalians, and we worship bodily every week—what the comedian Robin Williams famously termed as “pew aerobics.” Stand, kneel, sit; bow, genuflect, present raised hands to receive communion.
Touch is precious. And it is a very finite gift. We can only touch those who are here with us. As I related to you in my rector’s reflection this week. my dad’s touch is one of the things I miss most because there is no way of artificially preserving it. Touch requires vulnerability. At its most loving it expressed safety. Tenderness. Love.
This is a story of true communion. The use of the word “break,” in saying that Mary “breaks open” the jar of ointment and pours it lavishly over Jesus’s feet, reminds us of the extravagance with which Jesus offers himself to us in the Eucharist, where we break the bread, where we “break bread together” and share in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We speak of being “the Body of Christ,” implying the bold witness of Christ’s visible, tangible presence we are called upon to make in the world.
Mary’s action is an action of love, and an act of worship. Both can be profoundly intimate as well as public. We are therefore reminded that worship itself is an embodied act. But we are also reminded that the greatest way we worship Jesus is to ourselves embody his love, his tenderness, his drive to heal and reconcile and call people together.
The words we say and the stories we tell as we worship urge us to that kind of committed, bodily-engaged life. And so, as we come to worship, whether physically in this space, or watching remotely via broadcast, may we take a moment and breathe, and become aware of the way all of our senses are engaged in worship. May we settle into our bodies as they sit, stand, and move, and be gentle with them and with those around us.
Our bodies are where we meet Jesus, and where Jesus stands in solidarity with us, no matter who we are or what we look like. Our bodies are where Jesus loves us—and where we love Jesus, God, and each other. And we ourselves are called to act as Christ’s physical body in the world each and every day—and the world sees us, and judges Jesus—based on how we embody Jesus’s message—or not.
May we take seriously the proclamation that we are one body, united in Christ. May we remind ourselves of how our bodies are the place we physically meet God and each other. Of the ways they are beautiful, and worthy of care. Of the way they enable us to worship. Of the shared existence we have with one another, and the mutual dependence we have with each other, of our obligations to each other out of the same love that Mary anointed Jesus with the care for each other, and the entire world, generously, physically, tenderly. That is our true worship.
Preached at the 505 Saturday and 10:30 Sunday Eucharists, April 2-3, at St. Martin's Church, Ellisville, MO.
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