A Rejuvenating Fragrance

A Sermon Based Upon John 12: 1-8

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

First Sunday of Lent,   February 22nd,  2015

…..The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. (Joh 12:3 NRS)

Today we begin a new series of messages I’ve entitled, “Object Lessons Around the Cross”.  Some say they get as much, or more, from the children’s sermons, so during this Lenten season, as we journey toward Easter, we are going to consider different ‘objects’ lessons around the death of Jesus.   The first object is based on the smell of perfume.  Mary, the sister of Lazarus, starts us on our journey toward Easter when she takes a “pound” of costly perfume to anoint Jesus’ feet.    As a result, we are told ‘the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.’ (12.3).

Can you imagine the smell?  I’m not just speaking of the smell of the perfume, but the other smell that filled the house---the fragrance of love.  Mary’s deed ‘filled’ the air, not only because of the overpowering odor, but because of her reckless abandon in giving her all to Jesus.   Do you realize that in today’s money, the value of that pound of perfume would be around $17,400 dollars?  Mary poured out 300 day’s work at minimum wage on Jesus’ feet, in one single moment of reckless devotion. 

Mark’s gospel says the other disciples (Mark 14.1f) all grumble, because they can’t believe what they have just witnessed and what she has done.  Even though they love Jesus too, or in Judas’ case, have loved Jesus, they are all embarrassed by the extravagance, the luxury, or even the waste of Mary’s love.   If we are honest, we will also be embarrassed by it.  It seems so careless and reckless because our own devotion to Jesus is much more reserved, calculated, and predictable.   We love Jesus too, but we love Jesus best when we have him on our schedule or when we need him, but to put all our devotional ‘eggs in one basket” in one act of all-out devotion, or to love Jesus when he needs us,  that’s just  not practical.   Like the actress once said,  “I believe, but I don’t want to get carried away.”  In this moment, Mary got carried away and her deed of devotion doesn’t make any kind of good sense.

THE STENCH OF DEATH

None of what Mary does makes sense, unless you see it through the lens of death.   The price she must have paid for the perfume does not make sense.  Wasting all the perfume on Jesus’ feet does not make sense.  Even if this is for Jesus’ burial, pouring it all out now, almost a week before Jesus will be arrested and crucified, still does not makes sense.  Nothing Mary does has any reason or logic, unless you smell the love being poured out.   More than anyone else, Mary knows this is her last chance to show Jesus just how much she loves him.  How much love would you waste on your loved one, whom you know is about to die?

Several years ago, when I was pastor in Shelby,  the founder of Bost bakery, who was from Shelby, discovered that his wife was terminally ill with cancer.   They had been married many years.  He had made a lot of money in the Bakery business.   Most of us over 55 can remember Arthur Smith saying,  “It doesn’t get any fresher than Bost Bread!”   For those of us who know about Mr. Bost, we could also say it didn’t get any better than Mr. Bost.   I spent my college days on a Baptist campus going to chapel, basketball games, and PE class, in Bost Gymnasum, named after his generous philanthropy.    

When his wife was facing her terminal illness, Mr. Bost used every means he could pay for, and that was a lot,  to try whatever experimental medicine there was to help save her life.  He didn’t think about the money.  He didn’t care.  Newspaper reports said that he traveled all over the world trying to save her life---but she still died.  What a waste?  Right?  Think how smarter it would have been for Mr. Bost to have given all that money for Cancer Research.  Think how much smarter it would have been for his wife not to have tried to many experiments and to have suffered much longer.  Think how unreasonable was almost everything he did to try to save his wife, when it was not probable that he would find a cure.  But Mr. Bost did it anyway.  Why did he do it?  He did it because he loved his wife.

Not long ago, I heard about a doctor whose wife also had cancer.  All the time he treated his own wife, he did not tell her just how serious it was.   He told her that it was not that bad.  He told her that it was treatable and curable.   He told her not to worry.   Every bit of what he told her was not the truth.  She died anyway.  But, according to her husband the doctor,  she slipped into a coma still believing in her husband, still believing in her cure, and still believing with hope.  Do I agree with what the doctor did?  Of course not!   Do I understand why the doctor did what he did?   Of course I do.   Love can do some strange, illogical, irrational things when you are facing the edge of life and death.

If you had been Mary in this moment,  a woman who was completely, wholly, entirely, and absolutely sold out with love, devotion and dedication to Jesus,  and you knew it was the final moment you would ever be with him, what would you have done.  Martha was fixing him a meal, while Mary was preparing him for burial.  Martha was showing her love by giving Jesus her best effort,  but Mary was giving Jesus everything she had.   It was her last moment with him,  and she could not take her eyes off of Jesus.  One commentator reminds us that other people were also at the dinner party.  He admits that if he’d been there, that commentator says, his eyes would not have been on Jesus, but on Lazarus, whom Jesus had just raised from the dead.  I’m sure Mary loved her brother Lazarus, but Mary knows something else.  That if it wasn’t for Jesus there would be no Lazarus and there would be no love.  She can’t take her eyes off of Jesus.  Nothing will hold her back.  She has to give Jesus everything.

What is the first thing we can learn from Mary’s wholehearted, reckless, almost ridiculous love?  We will all love like this when we face death.  We will love life like this.  We will love people like this.  We will love our loved ones like this.  We will love God like this.  We can’t understand why death comes, nor can we understand everything about life or death, but we can understand that we only learn the meaning of love and life within the limits of life by living in the shadow of death.  And what do we learn?  We learn that in the shortness of our lives, only love really matters.  As Alfred Lord Tennyson's wrote in his poem, In Memoriam,  “I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.”  (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/62650.html).  To that great statement, Mary might add one thing: “Love has it’s own reasons, which at times can be quite unreasonable, ridiculous and reckless,  and to live but never have loved like that is like dying with never having lived or loved at all.”

THE STENCH OF GREED

“Why was this perfume not sold….and the money given to the poor?”  Judas asked.  And Judas asks a good question.   Even if he is Judas, Mark tells us that this is what all the other disciples were asking too (14.5).   In fact, Judas asked what any good, thinking, calculating, disciple would ask.  “We could better use this money for the feeding the poor, couldn’t we?”  This is the kind of thinking, rational, calculating people have when they look up at all those giant Cathedral’s in Europe---some of which are lined with gold.   Judas question is also what people ask when they get up on Sunday morning, and they don’t see any value in coming to worship?   “What good, will I, or my family, get out of showing up, coming together, singing hymns, hearing the sermon or turning our hearts toward God alone?”  Many will agree with Judas in realizing just how wasteful and ridiculous worship is?  But the kind of question Judas asks is also the kind church leaders ask, when we are putting together church budgets or when we consider how we should tithe, or how we should share some of our hard earned money.   How can it do the most good?  How will it make the most impact?   What should I do protect my money, even when I give some of it away?  Good questions, every one.

I, nor you, should ever call Judas’ question a bad one.   The gospel does not call Judas’ question a bad one either, but it does say that his question came from a heart going it wrong direction (v.4), and it also tells us his heart was not what it should have been (v. 6).  But whether or not Judas was a devil (6.70) or was being led by the devil (13.2), is not the only problem.   What makes Judas so cold and cruel, was not the question, but it was the timing of it.   His question interrupted an act of pure love.  Judas couldn’t help but interrupt deeds or acts of love, because this was something Judas could not do.  He could not, for any reason, let go of reason for the sake of love.

When someone, a person, a people, or even a church, starts to worship Jesus, I mean really worship Jesus, leaving everything else behind--every other practical matter, every other concern, every other question, every other answer, politic or religious truth, even letting go, at least for the moment, every other good that should be done---when people cast their worship and adoration upon Jesus, people like Judas can’t and won’t stay silent for long.   They have to stop the moment, because they can’t feel what is happening, and have to agree with Judas’ own cold, calculating heart.   They have to side with Judas’ own legalistic logic that must be brought to the table, even if it this table is the table of the Lord. 

Here, Judas is the killjoy.  Judas is the moral gatekeeper.  He is like a queen Victoria, who once stood up and said, “I will be good!”  And because of that she lived a long, but tedious, drab, and over predictable life.   Judas is the one who has to be right---who is always right, has the right opinions, makes the right decisions, and has made good from most every decision he has made, which proves even more, that he is, or has been, always right.   Because Judas is always right, he has everything, included the right to speak his mind.   People will listen to Judas because of how successful he is.  They will let him hold and control their money because he is and has what most people want.  

Judas has it all, including the disciples’ own attention.   But there is one thing Judas doesn’t have.  Judas doesn’t have what Mary has, nor can Judas feel what Mary feels, because he doesn’t know what only Mary and Jesus know.   Judas has everything, but he doesn’t know what true love feels like.   Judas proves by the asking of his question, when and how he asks it, because he is incapable of feeling the same kind of reckless, wasteful, or extravagance---that can fill a room with the fragrance of love.  Either his own heart is not in it, he is not ready to surrender to it, or he is simply incapable of it.  In a moment of pure love, we still only see dollar signs are blinking in his eyes.  He sees the money but he can’t have the feeling of true love.  Nor will any who follow him, unless we too, have a change of mind or heart.  

I say ‘we’ because it is wrong for me, or for you, to stand in judgment over Judas, or to judge any disciple who thinks like him.   It is wrong for me and for you, because there is something of Judas in everyone one of us.   You can’t change a Judas anyway.  Don’t waste your time.  Mary’s are rare.  Judases’ are the norm.   We should not stand in judgment over Judas, but we must pray, hope, and dare to ask ourselves,  like all the disciples  finally did, when they too realized what was happening, and asked  “Is it I?”   

Turning the question of love upon ourselves, asking whether or not we can love like this, is the always the right question,  no matter how right or practical we think we are, because self-righteousness (which is all we are capable of) and practicality  (even our best efforts)  can even  become monstrous enough to bring harm and hurt (v. 4), when we lose the capacity of being wasteful, reckless, even ridiculous with our worship and love, like Mary did.   We must ask ourselves this love question in everything we do, or don’t do, and we must ask it over and over, because only love gives meaning to our very short lives.  Only love keeps religious, righteous people from doing what Judas did or becoming what Judas became.   When you lose the capacity or the capability to love, or to recognize it, not even Jesus can change you, and only the eternal God will finally prove what we’ve missed.

Dorothy Day has been called an American saint. She took her Christian faith right into the most dreadful slums of New York City. There she established the first Catholic Worker House, a place of radical Christian discipleship.

That house became a place of hospitality for the down and out — for men Day later described as “grey men, the color of lifeless trees and bushes and winter soil, who had in them as yet none of the green of hope, the rising sap of faith.” Not long after, the Catholic Worker House began welcoming women and children as well.

One day, a wealthy socialite pulled up to the house, in a big car. She received the obligatory tour of the mission from Day herself. When she was about to leave, the woman impulsively pulled a diamond ring off her finger and handed it to Day.

The staff was ecstatic when they heard about this act of generosity. The ring, they realized, could be sold for a princely sum — enough money to take some pressure off the budget, at least for a while.

A day or two later, though, one of them noticed the diamond ring on the finger of a homeless woman who was leaving the mission. Immediately, the staff members confronted Day. Why, in heaven’s name, would she just give away a valuable piece of jewelry like that?

Day responded: “That woman was admiring the ring. She thought it was so beautiful. So I gave it to her. Do you think God made diamonds just for the rich?” (From Homiletics Online, March 21, 2010).

THE SMELL OF LOVE

What did Jesus say, when Judas opposed this act of pure love?   Jesus said to Judas and all the other disciples,  “Leave her alone.  She bought it for so she might keep it for the day of my burial.”  Ouch!   I don’t think anyone in the room was thinking that.   How cruel it is to put a price on anyone’s life?  How stupid it is, especially for a disciple, to try to put a monetary value on the pricelessness of Jesus and his love?  Jesus takes us all right to the heart what love means for each and every one of us?   If you can’t smell the fragrance of love now or here,  you never will and you will miss everything life is about.   Can you smell the love?

If you do have trouble with your capacity to feel the love, I’ve got some good news for you that comes through your nose.   I recently learned that our human sense of smell is the only one of the 5 senses of touch, taste, hearing, sight and smell that can completely rejuvenate itself?  Recently, medical science has been able to help a paraplegic solider walk again when they learned how to put nose nerves into their broken spinal cord to trigger spinal nerves to regrow and rejuvenate.   This quite an amazing breakthrough, but it’s still not as amazing as what love can do to regrow a broken, cruel, cold and malfunctioning soul or heart.   If you will follow your nose, especially where we can smell love in this story, love can change you too.

Why can the smell of Mary’s love story change us, because, as Jesus tells us, it leads us to the love story God is telling us through Jesus.   Mary’s gift of love points directly to the costly outpouring of love, God has pour out for us all---that cost him his Son, Jesus.  Even if you can’t  understand the whole story, or even if you struggle with the story itself,  please don’t miss and understand this: at the heart of everything God is and at the heart of everything you are supposed to be is a story that should be a story of love. 

David Buttrick tells the story of how a British pastor, James Denny, once took an 8 foot cross into the pulpit with him and pointed to it, shouting;  “All this he has done for us!  Can we hold back?  Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”   Mary saved this perfume for Jesus’ burial, and when the time came, she held nothing back.  God saved the coming of his Son, for his death on the cross for us, and when the time came, God held nothing back.   So, as the preacher went on to rightly ask, what the fragrance of love asks all of us today, “What are you saving yourself for?”   If not for love, what?  If not today, then when?  If not from you, then from who?   Jesus will not always be here with us, he says, like he is with us right now.  Can you feel the love, or even if you can’t,  will you let yourself begin to smell it and let it do its rejuvenating work in you?