That’s the thing about smells, though. They easily overwhelm us. They take us where we would never think of going on our own. All it takes is a whiff of the ocean, and I’m a child again on Galveston beach. A whiff of a fresh mountain pine, and I’m a scraggly camper in the North Carolina woods. Some “Old Spice” soap, and my long-dead father is holding my hand. And then there’s my favorite story of driving through the industrial Ruhr Valley in Germany as a young adult living abroad: As the powerful oil refinery smell seeped through the car window, my friends coughed and complained. But I was filled with homesickness, rather than repulsion. That refinery smell instantly brought me home, home to stinky, polluted Houston, and my eyes filled with longing tears.
The power of smells is mysterious and beyond our control. Smell breaks down barriers of time and place … rather like the power of the Holy Spirit does. We’re just minding our business, and suddenly God comes down and moves us to speak up or to take some action that we never would have done on our own. Like a whiff of perfume, God seeps into our present reality, and before we know it, we’re transported and transformed. Mary, in today’s reading, is acting like a prophet. She is filled with the Holy Spirit. Prophets do the unexpected to get our attention. They break down the barriers so that God can get in. Think of the story of the prophet Isaiah walking around town naked to call attention to an approaching enemy attack. Or the one about Jeremiah lying on his side for months on a downtown sidewalk to make his point. Or Jesus turning over the money changers’ tables in the Temple. Mary the Prophet takes precious, valuable oil and dumps the whole thing out on Jesus’ living feet.
In real-world terms, she is being purposefully wasteful.
In the real world, powerful men were supposed to put oil on the heads of other powerful men in order to anoint them king.
In the real world, the only time that women were supposed to use that oil was to embalm a corpse, yet Jesus is still alive.
In the real world, women in Mary’s day only loosed their hair in the privacy of their bedrooms—not in a room full of men who were not their husbands. And they certainly didn’t rub their hair on another man’s feet.
Mary’s prophetic act is completely crazy. But it works. The real world breaks down. Only Judas is left counting his pennies. Everyone else is swept away as powerfully as we are moved by our sense of smell. All of a sudden, the disciples find themselves in a new world. It is a world filled with the terrible presence of Jesus’ approaching death. It is filled too with the unfathomable power of a love so extravagant that the smell of it knocks your socks off. And it is filled with a preview of the loving humility that Jesus will soon teach them when he himself bends down to wash their own stinky feet at the Last Supper. “Love one another as I have loved you,” he directs us through Mary’s action.
We Christians don’t always do so well with loving one another as Jesus loved us, though. A prime example is our long-standing interpretation of Jesus’ words at the end of today’s reading. Looking for an excuse not to pour out our own money on the poor, we Christians have often latched onto Jesus’ response to Judas in this text. “Oh look,” we say with relief. “Jesus says that we don’t need to worry too much about the poor. There’s always going to be poverty, Jesus says. See! What he wants us to care about are spiritual things, things to do with him alone.”
This rationalization couldn’t be more wrong. Jesus’ words about poverty here have always bothered me --until I learned just a few years ago what he is really doing in this passage. In response to Mary’s extravagant act, rabbi Jesus is quoting Scripture. He quotes words from Deuteronomy, from the Law given to the people of Israel to show them how they are to live with God and with one another. Right after explaining how the people should forgive all debts in the Jubilee Year, God says in Deuteronomy 15:11: “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.” Countering Judas’ critique of Mary, Jesus speaks the first part of the verse, assuming that his listeners know the rest. Jesus is proclaiming “openhandedness,” embodied acts of love poured out no matter what, wherever it is needed. Preacher Debie Thomas eloquently points out that, in caring for Jesus, Mary is caring for the poor: for Jesus, who is denied room at the inn; Jesus, who has no place to lay his head during his years of ministry; Jesus, the one who is killed as a political outcast; Jesus, the one whose crucified body is laid in a borrowed tomb.[1] Jesus is “the poor,” and “the poor” are Jesus. As Jesus says himself in Matthew 25, when we care for those in need, we are caring for him.
What would be a modern-day prophetic sign, I wondered this week, that could help us to get back on track with this Gospel? I thought right away of our Southern Baptist ash-sifter friends, the two groups of volunteer disaster workers who stayed here at St. Ambrose this winter. Ordinary folks like you and me, these men and women left their homes in the dead of winter. They slept on cots in chilly church rooms during a Pandemic. And they went out into the snow and rain every day to dig through piles of wet, stinky, toxic ash. Talk about pungent smells! And for what gain did they take this extravagant risk? To find every once in a while, a charred photo frame or an ash-encrusted heirloom? To meet much more despair than joy, that’s for sure. But they poured out what they had, like Mary, on the suffering people in front of them, opening the sodden gloom to whiffs of the Holy Spirit. (They even sent us a check last week—totally unsolicited--for $500 to cover our heating costs. For us, as we slept in our own cozy beds.) Grumbling like Judas, I might cast aspersions on Southern Baptist politics or theology, but I imagine that Jesus would snap back at me with a defense of their openhanded faith.
As we smell Mary’s overpowering offering today, can you imagine us all choking over the stench of poverty, desperate to pour ourselves out in perfumed love for the needy? Can you imagine us waxing indignant over the odor of injustice that fills the world, crying out over the way that it sticks to our clothes and even our hair? Jesus asks us: When was the last time that you got a whiff of God that turned your world upside down? When was the last time that you let yourself be swept away by compassion, carried away into the realm of God’s love?
[1] Debie Thomas, “Beauty and Breaking.” Journey with Jesus. https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay?id=3357.
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