Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, and St Luke’s, Creemore, Sunday, 6 April, 2025. Readings for Lent 5C: Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4B-14; John 12:1-8
Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume (Jn 12.3).
Imagine that you’re visiting people who are dear to you. You come into their home and smell warm fresh bread, a savoury meal cooking, fresh bread, cut flowers. These are all fragrances that indicate hospitality and welcome. When our food ministry volunteers are cooking in the kitchen, the smells waft all through the church and even up to my office - very distracting! - but I like to think of how those delicious fragrances speak of food prepared with love and attention, offered as a blessing to those that receive it.
Today’s gospel reading is rich in smells. Implied in the gospel account is the smell of the dinner served to Jesus and his friends, and we have no doubt that it is a lavish and delicious meal, because it wasn’t so long ago that Lazarus was … dead. So a meal and smells in keeping with a celebration.
Of course there is another smell that permeates the gospel story, and that is the perfume that Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with, pouring out the costly substance so freely that as John tells us that “The house was filled with the fragrance”. And we can imagine that just as the rich scent began to spread, the conversation began to fall silent and heads turned to see what Mary was doing.
There are different accounts of what nard smells like. Some say that it has a musky fragrance, others, that it smells like lavender. But there are other fragrances in my there as well, the fragrance of money, and the fragrance of love.
Judas just smells money. Nard in the ancient world was an exotic perfume favoured by aristocrats. Normally it was kept in small vials that a wealthy person could sniff, but Mary has a pound of it, and she seems to pour the whole lot over Jesus’ feet. The value would have been huge - the amount Judas quotes, three hundred denarii, would have been a year’s wages, so according to one source I consulted, about $13k in US dollars.
Judas calculates the perfume in material terms, and only in material terms. John quickly tells us in an aside that Judas has no actual interest in helping the poor, no regard for anything but his own gain. This cold portrayal of Judas is consistent with John’s account of the Passion, where Judas, driven by Satan, leaves the last supper in darkness to go and betray Jesus. John’s Judas feels no remorse afterwards, he is a simply a figure of darkness, someone who has no understanding of love.
For Mary, however, the fragrance of her perfume is mixed with the fragrance of her love for Jesus. Jesus seems to understand her motives when he says that “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial”. It’s now only a week before Jesus will go to Jerusalem for the last time. Mary seems to understand exactly what is happening. She loves Jesus and she knows the trouble he will be walking into. All she can offer him is this act of service and adoration, and who knows, during his long ordeal before and on the cross, if Jesus didn’t go for comfort in his mind back to this moment?
I think we can also say that Mary’s anointing of Jesus is an act of love because it mirrors what Jesus will do for his own disciples when he washes their feet on his last night with them. Mary, who has previously sat at Jesus feet as if she were a disciple, seems to understand better than anyone else the lesson Jesus is teaching, that his followers will be known by their love (Jn 13.35).
Now if all we see in Mary’s action is a sad love that is full of grief for Jesus’ impending death, then I wonder if we are being unnecessarily tragic. In fact, I think Mary senses something else, something wonderful. I said earlier that this gospel story is rich in smells, but there is another smell that, even if it’s no longer in the air, is in the memories of those present.
One of those present is Jesus’ friend Lazarus, and as I said, I think this dinner is in part a celebration of how Jesus has returned his friend to the land of the living. But before he called Lazarus out of the tomb, Martha warned Jesus that “already there is a stench because he has been dead four days” (Jn 11.39). Mary and Martha śaw their brother walk out of the tomb, they saw death vanquished, and they saw proof that Jesus is what he said he was, “the Resurrection and the Life” (Jn 11). So surely Mary’s action is testimony to Jesus’ identity, the fragrance of love and life driving away all memories of the stench of the tomb. And this fragrance will be smelled again by another Mary, Mary Magdalene, when she meets Jesus outside his tomb, standing in the fragrance of a spring garden.
Those of you who watch a lot of sports know that there’s a tradition where after a game, the players of the winning team dump the cooler of water or gatorade over their coach’s head. Someone clever had the idea that maybe Mary’s anointing has a similar intent, that Mary knows that Jesus is on the winning team, the team of life and love, and she is celebrating this, as if to tell Jesus, “I know you’ve got this”. It’s a homespun image, but it captures something of the faith and love that Mary so lavishly pours out on the feet of her Lord and her friend.
What can we take from this story? Certainly there is the lesson that we learn from Judas as well as from Mary, of how to see our actions and our sacrifices not in material terms, of how much they cost, but rather how they express love. As we approach Palm Sunday, Holy Week and Easter, we can also ask ourselves, where in these stories can we see Jesus’ love for us?
Finally, can we see in Mary’s actions how we might express our own love and even adoration for Jesus? And finally, how might we carry that fragrance of love and adoration in our lives and actions, in the same way that Mary wears the fragrance of love in her hair?
