Fragrance

One year a friend of ours came back from Egypt with a bottle of pure, undiluted perfume. I’ve never seen perfume so strong before. Unlike what I’m used to in the states, this perfume was so fragrant that it had a strong aroma without even opening it. Even kept in a closet, with the lid on it and never having been used, the fragrance filled the closet.

Fragrance can be so powerful, it’s almost as if you use all of your five senses to experience it. However, usually we keep fragrances at a tidy and polite low: just perceptible, faint upon the air, enough to touch the sense of smell and no more.

This isn’t what happened the day Mary anointed Jesus.

Then Mary took a twelve-ounce jar of expensive perfume made from essence of nard, and she anointed Jesus’ feet with it, wiping his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance. (John 12:3, NLT)

The Bible tells us this perfume was a year’s wages (see verse 5). What Mary spilled out was not like an aromatic candle, puff of perfume, or mild air freshener. This would have been an explosion of fragrance, startling everyone at the dinner table. I think not one bite of food could further be taken without tasting only the perfume. The house became transformed into a palace of fragrance. No one could leave or enter without encountering the magnificence of the perfume.

All of this tells the story of what our devotion to Christ should be like. We should be so full of love for Him that no one can even step into our house without being overwhelmed by the fragrance of our love. No one should be able to eat with us and walk away without realizing our fervor for the King of Kings.

But there’s something to this story I have always overlooked, until today.

As she anointed Christ’s feet for the death He would experience, Mary’s hair became saturated in perfume.

Can you imagine Mary meeting any of her friends afterwards? Can you imagine her going to the marketplace? Everyone would have stopped to turn and look at her.

I can imagine them saying,

“Mary, what happened to you?  What is that fragrance about you?”

As Mary anointed Christ, and wiped His perfumed feet with her hair, she herself became a witness of fragrance. She set not only Christ apart for His burial, but she also set herself apart as His follower.

What an example for us to follow. Let us have Mary’s heart. Let us be so in worship of Christ that we exude His fragrance. As we worship Him, may our devotion be so costly and so extraordinarily unheard of that we draw the hearts of everyone around us to think of Him.

“with only a wall”–from Ezekiel 43:8

“They put their idol altars right next to mine with only a wall between them and me.” (Ezekiel 43:8a, NLT)

God is talking about people who are supposed to be His people who have the audacity, in God’s Temple, to add their idols to God’s manifestation of glory . . . with a dividing wall between them.  As if God is going to be okay with that.

The Lord said to me, “Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place where I will rest my feet. I will live here forever among the people of Israel. They and their kings will not defile my holy name any longer by their adulterous worship of other gods or by honoring the relics of their kings who have died. They put their idol altars right next to mine with only a wall between them and me. They defiled my holy name by such detestable sin, so I consumed them in my anger. Now let them stop worshiping other gods and honoring the relics of their kings, and I will live among them forever. (Ezekiel 43:7-9, NLT)

Isn’t that incomprehensible?  Isn’t that unbelievable?  First, that people would dare put their ridiculous little idols (and the word the Bible often uses in the Old Testament, the commentary in my NLT says, is thought to be connected to the word “dung”) . . . and then that God would forgive them?  That He would let them come back?

But the idols have to lose their place.

Now this seems crazy: God is willing to take back these lunatic people, and all He wants is for them to live in His holiness without accessorizing with their sin?  It’s a free gift.  It’s simply coming into the Presence of God and loving Him.  Who could possibly have a problem with that?

Me.

I don’t go to the Temple of God and put wooden idols in the room beside God’s majesty.  But the Scripture tells me that, when I accepted Christ, I became part of the Temple of God.  That means any time I allow idolatry into my mind and heart . . . I am placing an idol right next to the glory of God.  I may think I’ve carefully divided off that idol from the Presence of God . . . but that’s as crazy as thinking God will be okay with a man-made object of junk worship in the room next to Him.  That’s not how it works.  God doesn’t ask for 10% of us, or 50% of us, or even 90% of us.  God wants all of us to be purely devoted to Him.

That means if something’s standing in the way . . . if anything’s standing in the way . . . I have to put it outside the Temple.  I can’t allow it in my mind or heart.  No matter how tempting, no matter how seemingly innocent, no matter how world-approved, no matter how funny, no matter how secularly justifiable, no matter how pleasurable . . . it’s got to go.  And now.  Now of now.

God deserves better than for me to hoard my sin in the room next to Him and try to get by with a partition.

Now devote your heart and soul to seeking the LORD your God. (1 Chronicles 22:19a, NIV)

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Photograph by Tim Snell, profile on http://www.flickr.com/people/timsnell/

Photograph is under Creative Commons License.

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