Fragrance of Worship - Daily Devotions with the Dean

Friday • 3/31/2023 •
Week of 5 Lent 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 22; Jeremiah 29:1,4–13; Romans 11:13–24; John 12:1–10 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93) 

 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we bring to our lives that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you this Friday of the fifth week of Lent, as we prepare for Holy Week.   

If there are anything like “best friends” in Jesus’s life, they would have to be the sisters Mary and Martha of Bethany, along with their brother Lazarus. Of the three, Mary appears to be the one who understands the implications of Jesus’s plan to go to Jerusalem. In Luke 10, she is the one who sits at Jesus’s feet rather than wait on tables. Here in John 12, Martha is once again waiting on tables, and Mary is once again at Jesus’s feet. This time, she’s not listening. She is offering a gift of powerful symbolism, anointing his feet with costly oil and wiping them with her hair (John 12:3).  

“Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him” (John 12:1–2). Shortly before the events of John 12, Jesus had restored to life Mary’s recently-deceased brother Lazarus. The raising of Lazarus is the last provocation for the Jewish leadership. They are planning to kill Jesus (and Lazarus as well, as it turns out—John 11:50; 12:10). Jesus avoids traveling to Jerusalem for a short while. People wonder if he will dare to make a showing at the upcoming Passover. In fact, he will. To prepare for his entry into Jerusalem for the religious celebration, he stays with his three friends in Bethany about a mile outside the city. Mary and Martha and Lazarus throw a dinner party in Jesus’s honor.  

Like everybody else, Mary has heard the buzz. The cynical leaders are conspiring to take “one man’s life” in a ridiculous ploy to “save” the nation. Mary’s loving act is a wonderful counterpoint to the ironic and unwitting prophecy by Caiaphas that Jesus would die “for the nation … and not for the nation only,” as John comments, “but to gather into one the dispersed children of God” (John 11:52).  

Mary has comprehended the political climate following the restoration of her brother Lazarus. She’s become aware of the conspiracy against both Jesus and Lazarus. More than anything, I suspect, she has given thought to what Jesus had proclaimed of himself in advance of raising Lazarus from the dead: “I AM the Resurrection and the Life” (John 11:25). Somehow, she has rightly inferred Jesus’s “being resurrection and life” means he must first die. Resurrection, after all, comes only after death. Such an understanding accounts for the NRSV’s sage rendering of Jesus’s defense of her extravagance: “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial” (John 12:7).  

Mary has bought for Jesus an expensive and fragrant ointment that ordinarily would be used to prepare a corpse for interment. Perhaps she had just planned to show him the bottle she had acquired in advance, signaling her readiness to prepare his body for resurrection from the dead. With the purchase of the “pound of costly perfume made of pure nard” (John 12:3), Mary acknowledges, if reluctantly, that she understands what it’s going to take for him to be “resurrection and life.” If she had intended to anoint him on this occasion, you might have expected her to have a towel at hand for wiping his feet. Instead, in a spontaneous gesture, while Jesus is reclining at table, Mary pours the fragrant burial ointment on his feet and towels them with her hair. Here is one of the most poignant, tender, and loving scenes in all Scripture.  

“The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” — John 12:3. The reader will be pardoned for being reminded of the powerful symbolism of smell elsewhere in the Bible. Paul describes Jesus as sacrificing himself as “an offering and sacrifice to God as a smell of fragrance” (my literal rendering of the Greek of Ephesians 5:2). Paul welcomes a gift from the Philippians as “a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, very pleasing to God” (Philippians 4:18 NET). We ourselves “are a sweet aroma of Christ to God” (2 Corinthians 2:15).  

Every time I walk into the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, my first sensation is that of the fragrance that exudes from the incense-soaked stone walls and pillars. And I think to myself, “That’s what church is supposed to smell like. It’s good to be here and to take my place among the generations who have offered up the sweet fragrance of worship to the Crucified and Risen Savior.” 

Contrast the beauty of the fragrance that Mary’s gift releases with the moral stench of Judas’s crass and disingenuous objection: “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (John 12:5). This isn’t the last time, alas, a moralistic voice is raised to deride beautiful and heartfelt worship in the name of a righteous cause, masking hypocritical and base motives. Happily, in the deeper experience of the church, generosity towards God encourages, rather than negates or frustrates, generosity towards our neighbor. In the realm of the Spirit of God, some things are not a zero-sum proposition.  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+