Lent 5 2004
Isa 43.16-21, Psalm 126, Phil 3.3-14, John 12.1-8.
I wonder if I am alone in feeling slightly uncomfortable when hearing the Gospel reading for this morning. It’s not so much what John says about Judas being a thief. It’s not the extraordinary value of the oil that Mary anoints Jesus with. It’s that I feel like I shouldn’t be watching or hearing about the actual act of anointing.
This is an incredibly intimate act. It is very sensual act. That’s sensual, not sexual. There is a difference. The sensuality is not just in the actual anointing - it is also the wiping of Jesus feet with her unbound hair. Mary has let down her hair for Jesus. I guess in a way I feel almost voyeuristic. Perhaps it is also a bit of a cultural tendency for us Anglo types, especially blokes, not to feel comfortable with intimacy.
About 12 years ago, I studied massage. I remember at the time, when talking with friends about studying massage, particularly men, I’d get those “nudge nudge, wink wink say no more” type of looks and comments. They would automatically associate the touch, especially I guess the touching of bare skin on the back and front with something sexual or pervy. I think it was a way of expressing the fact that they felt uncomfortable about the sensuality, or the intimacy of massage. Perhaps making a crude comment was the only way they could express their embarrassment.
At the same time as I was learning massage, I was also studying aromatherapy. I learned about the importance of our sense of smell. I learned that it is so important that our olfactory nerves, the nerves concerned with smell, are the only nerves in our bodies which can regenerate. I also learned that the olfactory nerves go straight from the nose to the limbic system, a part of the brain that controls emotional responses and may also be a storage area for long term memory. Hence, what we smell can evoke an emotional response in us, or even bring back a long forgotten memory. I’m sure many of you will have had an experience of that. So I guess it was with this distant background in aromatherapy that the line in the gospel “The house was filled with the fragrance” jumped out at me.
At the same time, I found myself looking back at the previous chapter of the Gospel according to John, where Lazarus also gets a mention. You will all, I’m sure, remember that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. And the line I remembered from that chapter was this – “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” I found myself reflecting on these two lines, comparing and contrasting them. I began to reflect on the idea of the fragrance of life and the stench of death. And I came to the conclusion that most of us are more used to the putrid stench of death than the heavenly fragrance of life.
Another amazing fact about our sense of smell – where there is a predominate smell, a smell that is ever present, our brain filters it out. We cease to register it consciously, so that we can be aware of other changes in smell. This is how people are able to live in places such as Rotorua in New Zealand, where the smell of sulphur, otherwise known as “rotten egg gas” from the thermal activity is ever present. When you first arrive there it’s the first thing you smell, but you very soon get used to it and don’t notice it as much.
In the light of this I found myself reflecting on this as a metaphor for the way we seem to become desensitized to some things in life that are constantly there, and we get shocked by others. In particular, I reflected on the way we seem to be more shocked by sensuality and intimacy, expressions of care and love for each other, than by violence and death. I wonder if it’s because we have become so used to the death we see in the world around us that the loving aspects of life become unusual, and so we don’t know how to handle them.
I thought about Judas in the midst of this. In the film the Passion of Christ, the portrayal of Judas’s betrayal and his descent into madness and despair, and death was particularly powerful. Recalling the fact that the sense of smell links into the emotional control centre of our brain, and that our brains filter out the background smells, I thought about what sort of response the smell might have triggered in Judas. That this act of intimacy took place in a public area may have been confronting enough for Judas and others in the room, but perhaps the aroma might have rubbed his nose in it (no pun intended – well, maybe a little bit) and elicited the response he gave. He may have been reacting to an unusually loving thing happening in a rough and tough world. Perhaps it also solidified his desire to betray our Lord.
Then what of the oil? Nard, or spikenard, was a rare oil in those days, imported from India. I had hoped to have some evaporating in the church today but it is still quite expensive. We have some myrrh and frankincense burning this morning. As nard was rare, it was also expensive. When the tomb of Tutankhamen was explored, perhaps plundered might be a more suitable word - unbroken, unopened jars of perfume were found. Chemical analysis of the contents of one of these jars revealed that a major ingredient in these perfumes for the after life was Spikenard. So it seems, ever since ancient times, Spikenard, or nard, was the perfume of choice for dead kings. Do you see the significance? Jesus speaks of her keeping it for the day of his burial. But the act of anointing with oil was also part of the ceremony for the crowning of a king. This woman being very intimate with Jesus, the one who got it right earlier on when she sat at Jesus feet instead of racing about cleaning the house like Martha, this woman who told Jesus if he had got there earlier Lazarus would not have died, was the only one who really understood the true nature of Jesus and His mission. She was the only one who could express what they perhaps should have all been able to express. She was the only one brave enough to step outside of rules about letting down your hair and appropriate behavior in the dining room to do something totally, wonderfully and extravagantly loving and intimate for Jesus. She was the only one able to pick the fragrance of life from the stench of death. She was the only one at that time, it seems, who was transformed by her faith.
We can all allow ourselves to be transformed by our faith. It’s totally up to us. We need to be alert and alarmed by the stench of death that we’ve got used to, and look out for the fragrance of life. And when we find that delicious aroma, savor it, tell others about it, embrace it in all it’s extravagance. Because that fragrance is the fragrance of the risen Christ - not decayed and rotting like a body that’s been in a tomb for four days, but alive, vibrant, radiant, heavenly. It’s the smell of a new born baby. It’s the smell of rain after a long dry spell, the smell of roses first thing in the morning, the smell of freshly baked bread. It is the smell of all of the good things in life and more. Life can be wonderful. If we allow ourselves to be transformed by faith, we can experience it fully. Inhale deeply. It truly is wonderful.
