April 6, 2005, What Is That Smell? John 12:1-8 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ April 6, 2025 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to the sermon, click the link above. The text is below.

There are times, when something big is about to happen, that time itself seems to slow down, and every action and word takes on a special meaning. Whether it is something good or something terrible that is about to happen, we see and hear and remember even the smallest detail because every moment is alive with expectation. I remember lots of little details about the morning of Emily’s wedding, Emily and the bridesmaids running through the rain from the parsonage to the church under big green-and-white striped umbrellas. I remember the excited chatter of the bridesmaids putting on makeup and doing each other’s hair, and my sons looking like strangers, standing around quiet and awkward in their tuxedos. And I remember my wonderful mother, watching over the little guys and making sure they stayed tidy.

And I remember just as vividly a few years later, the days before my mother died, sitting beside her bed hour after hour, reading psalms to her and looking at old photographs with her. I remember my big sister bustling around cleaning and making medicine charts. I remember pretty much living on bananas and gummi bears. I remember my sweet, gentle Uncle Armand, my mom’s favorite brother, holding her hand and talking to her about Jesus. And I remember the night before she died, the longest night in the world, sitting in the dark listening to a jazz CD with my younger brother who was bitter and terrified in the face of death.

We’ve all lived through those times, joyful times and sad timess, times of expectation, times of dread, that are imprinted in our memories forever because the meaning of what was about to happen made even the least detail heavy with significance. And the story that we just read from John’s gospel is exactly that kind of time. It’s a story about a dinner party, but not just any dinner party. It was a critical moment in the lives of Jesus and his disciples. The last time they had been in Bethany their good friend Lazarus was four days dead and rotting in a tomb. Jesus had called Lazarus forth from the tomb with a loud cry, and not surprisingly there had been quite a commotion. A lot of people were there and saw what had happened – it’s pretty hard to hush it up when a dead man walks out of a grave. Many of those people put their faith in Jesus, as you might expect, but some of them ran off to alert the Jewish leaders, and that was what really caused problems.

So now, six days before the Passover, Jesus had decided it was time for his final trip to Jerusalem. It was time for him, not to avoid the threat of death, but to come forth openly and challenge it. Dallas Willard said it really well, “Jesus invited the powers of the world to do their worst to him, and that is exactly what they did on the cross.” And so this meeting of good friends was overshadowed by the looming threat of death. Jesus’ disciples still didn’t understand everything that he had been teaching them, but they must have had a sense that a crucial time had come. Coming to Bethany had sealed his fate as far as the Jewish leaders were concerned. There was no more chance of hiding. There was no more waiting. There was no more safety.

Everyone there must have been feeling the tension. Lazarus was at the table with Jesus, Lazarus who could remember hearing his voice and stumbling out of the dark tomb with the grave clothes wra his face and body. When Martha saw her brother alive again she knew, suddenly, who Jesus was and she declared her faith that Jesus was the Christ, the One sent from God. I think Martha must have prepared that meal and set the table in a kind of awe. Everyone in the house must have felt that something big was about to happen, but it was quiet Mary who seemed to understand more than anyone else. Of all the people in that room, Mary really understood the nearness of Jesus’ death. So she brought out a jar of very expensive perfume to anoint her Lord’s feet, those feet at which she had sat to listen and learn so many times before.

When John the disciple remembered that moment many years later, he recalled how the whole house was filled with sweet fragrance when Mary poured out the perfume and began to wipe Jesus’ feet with her hair. It was a gesture of deep emotion, and an expression of intimacy. It was not the done thing for a woman to let her hair down in a room full of men, but Mary didn’t care. She was just overwhelmed with love for her Lord and with grief for his death. She didn’t have anything left for feeling shame or embarrassment.

My favorite part of this story is that John remembers how the sweet scent filled the house as they all stood or sat, watching Mary pour out the precious oil that was worth an entire years’ wages. And every person that saw what Mary did, and smelled that fragrance, had his or her own personal reaction, surprised or perplexed or horrified or whatever.

In the days just before my mother’s death, each of us dealt with our feelings in our own way. My sister kept herself going by keeping busy taking care of everybody, keeping the apartment neat and orderly. My sister was a very Martha person. My brother just kind of turned in on himself; all he was able to see at that time was his own loss and fear. For me, it was a hard time, and a sad time, but I knew that I wasn’t really losing my mother. I knew that she was going home. And I was thankful to have those last days with her. All three of us experienced our mother’s death in very different ways. We saw the same things and heard the same sounds and smelled the same fragrances but they had very different meanings for each of us.

That’s how it was when Mary poured out the perfume and the sweet fragrance filled the house. Everyone smelled it, but each person had his or her own reaction. I suspect Judas wasn’t the only one who was surprised and confused. He was offended by her impropriety, her total lack of concern for being sensible. His concern was for accounts and balances, for losses and gains – and particularly for his own gain, according to John, who says that Judas was in the habit of helping himself to the common purse.

Even surrounded by the fragrance of Jesus’ coming death, all Judas could smell were his own desires, and all he could think to do was to judge Mary, to call her out for being foolish and wasteful. I think for ourselves, we need to be very careful not to pass judgment on Judas, because who can say how any one of us would have felt? Who knows what you or I would have thought or said or done when we smelled the fragrance of Mary’s perfume? The only one who has the right to judge Judas is Jesus, and he is the God who is merciful and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness.

We weren’t able to be there in Bethany among Jesus’ friends that day. But John remembered it, and wrote it down for us. As we come to Holy Week this year, and as we remember Jesus’ suffering and death on our behalf we need to be reminded that Jesus was not just another hapless victim of man’s inhumanity to man. Jesus came to his friends’ house in Bethany to eat with them one last time before entering Jerusalem, where he knew he was going to die. And for everyone who understood Jesus at all, they knew that the meaning of everything that he was about to do was love.

He loved Mary, who sat at his feet and listened, and he loved Martha, whose hands were always willing to serve, and he loved Lazarus, who heard the voice of his friend even in death. He loved his twelve traveling companions, thick-headed though they so often were. He loved Judas. He loved his people, even as they cried out for his death. He loved the Roman soldiers who struck him and spit in his face. He loves you, and he loves me. And because he loved us all, there was nothing in all of creation that was going to stop him from journeying on towards his death. That was the meaning of the sweet fragrance that filled the house in Bethany that day.

My prayer for you and for us all is that as we prepare our hearts and minds for Holy Week, as we prepare to meditate on the Passion and death of Jesus, we too will be able to smell that same sweetness all around us. And I pray that we will come to understand God’s love for us in a new and deeper way. +