The Smell of Myrrh

Our Saturday night service fed all our senses. We partook of communion (taste, touch), worshipped with song (hearing), watched the Jeremy Camp song “This Man” with the clips of The Passion of the Christ (seeing, hearing). But smell?

I admit, after hearing the service be billed as multi-sensory, I’d wondered what we’d be smelling. We were invited to dip our finger into a pot of myrrh. The aroma wasn’t as strong as I expected. A little pine-y, sharp, but pleasant.

The smell of death.

I pondered it. Though myrrh was also used as a perfume, to that culture, the smell would also evoke death. A picture came to me: hands preparing Jesus’ body for burial. Why do I skip over that action? It wasn’t a clean, quick job anymore than giving birth in a stable was. Hands washed our Lord. Hands became smeared with His blood. Hands rubbed the greasy myrrh onto His hairy legs, His cold, dead limbs. They wrapped him in strips of cloth, so like the strips He’d been swaddled in at birth.

Those hands wrung each other, clasped themselves in prayer for the next two days.

And then they touched the warm, solid body of our living Saviour! He is Risen!

Photo courtesy of babasteve