Smell the Air of the Afterlife
Readings for the Fifth Sunday in Lent (Year A)
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka on Sunday March 26, 2023.
Throughout this Lenten season, the Gospel of John has invited us to listen to the wind with Nicodemus, to taste the living water of the Word with the Samaritan woman, and to move from merely looking to deeper seeing with the man born blind. I wonder if you noticed which of the five senses was referenced twice in today’s Gospel, towards the beginning and the end: it was our sense of smell, olfaction, perhaps the most underrated and under-appreciated of the five senses, a sense directly connected to our memories and emotions.[1] In today’s Gospel, which is full of intense emotions,[2] we hear Martha discouraging the opening of Lazarus’s tomb due to the stench of death and decay (11:39) and we learn that Mary of Bethany is the same woman who anointed Jesus with perfume by taking a pint of pure nard, pouring it on Jesus’s feet, and then wiping his feet with her hair as the fragrance of the perfume filled the entire house (11:2; 12:3). The problem with this description of Mary, however, is that this anointing of Jesus has not happened yet in the narrative. It doesn’t happen until the next chapter (12:3). Commentators are confused and try to explain this out-of-order aberration in the text by arguing that the editor or the redactor of John made a mistake in the final draft by placing the raising of Lazarus before the anointing of Jesus when it really should be the other way around. This leads scholars like the great Rudolf Bultmann to rearrange chapters and verses to supposedly make more sense; and then each scholar ends up having their own rearranged version of the gospel, which becomes a bit of a mess in my opinion. But I wonder if there might be a more subtle teaching for us if we read the text as it is with this apparent out-of-order aberration. I wonder if there might be a subtle teaching for us about death and new life and the power of aroma.
When we listen, taste, see, and touch, the electrical impulses are routed through a part of our brain called the thalamus which then sends them to the appropriate processing centers in our body. But smell bypasses that process because odors go straight to what is called the olfactory bulb, which connects directly to the amygdala and the hippocampus, the parts of the brain that process memory and emotion as well as dreams and visions, not unlike Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones. Our sense of smell connects directly to the parts of our brain that can offer us glimpses of the spiritual life beyond this earthly life. That’s partly why they say, “the nose knows.”
I’ve been reading recently about near-death experiences, including an experience that took place in the parking lot of a synagogue in Houston, not far from where my father passed away. Last Sunday was my father’s Yahrzeit, which is the Yiddish term for the anniversary of one’s death. Back in 1988, a woman named Elizabeth Krohn went to synagogue to observe her grandfather’s Yahrzeit and, as she was walking across the parking lot in the rain with an umbrella, she was struck by lightning. She saw her body lying on the wet, dirty ground with her brand-new shoes destroyed by the blast and the bottom of her feet burnt. When she realized that she was dead she saw the warm glow of an otherworldly light that brought her into the most beautiful garden. She writes, “I was dead, but I was more alive than when I had been that twenty-eight-year-old woman with…the umbrella in the synagogue parking lot a few seconds earlier. I was surrounded by and suffused with an unutterable feeling of unconditional love. The love was all-encompassing and embraced me in every way: in the palpable [aromas] that hung in the air around me like ornaments; in the soothing sound of a gently babbling brook nearby; in the cadence of the gorgeous otherworldly music surrounding me; in the visual floral feast before me; and in the deeply comforting knowledge that I was safe, protected, and unconditionally loved by God himself.”[3] In the Garden, Elizabeth was given the choice to move deeper into the afterlife or to return to her earthly body. Since she didn’t want her two boys to grow up without a mother, she chose to return to this life. Before her near-death experience, Elizabeth was a Jewish agnostic who believed that death was the end, but during her time in the Garden, she learned what many others have learned from their near-death experiences. For her, there were three main takeaways: 1) Everyone is loved. Intensely. 2) No one need fear death. 3) There is tremendous comfort in knowing that there is More. She then elaborates on the first takeaway: “Everyone is loved, intensely. To feel the unspeakable love I felt in the Garden is breathtaking. It is also comforting, energizing, empowering, and healing. We have all been hurt by life at some point, but to know that we are loved without question or end goes beyond any medication or therapy known to humankind. To feel that love when your soul separates from your body makes you know you are truly home.”[4]
Along with these messages of a profound belovedness that drives out fear, people also learned that time is not linear. The past, present, and future are all happening now, in the eternal present. Elizabeth Krohn used the metaphor of a layer cake. We can move up the cake to the future and move down to the past but it’s all happening now. And it is this revelation that leads me back to the power of smell, the sensethat connects directly to the part of our brain that can offer us glimpses of the afterlife. It is while referring to smell that the author of the Gospel reveals a non-linear understanding of time, which makes me wonder if the author himself had undergone an experience of the afterlife, if the author of the Gospel was in fact Lazarus, the beloved disciple, for whom Jesus wept before raising him back to life.[5] Perhaps Lazarus smelled certain aromas that would bring back memories of his experience of the afterlife, of the non-linear nature of time, and of the truths he learned in the afterlife, which are expressed so beautifully and emphatically in the Gospel that perhaps he wrote. In my opinion, these truths pass the smell test and it these truths that I hope you can hear and taste and see and touch right now, in this eternally present moment: You are loved and cherished. Intensely. You need not fear death. There is tremendous comfort in knowing there is so much More. Amen.
[1] COVID-19, which changed or even stole people’s sense of smell, has hopefully helped us appreciate the gift of olfaction even more. During these rainy days, we may have noticed the aroma of petrichor, a tasty word that is also a refreshing smell, the smell after rain. “Smell,” according to Helen Keller, “is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived. The odor of fruits wafts me to my Southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instanteous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening grain fields far away. The faintest whiff from a meadow where the new-mown hay lies in the hot sun displaces the here and now. I am back again in the old red barn.” Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: The Century Co., 1910), 66.
[2] Regarding the reason why Jesus wept, I generally agree with one of the more ancient explanations: Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444 AD) explains that Jesus says nothing to correct Mary when she says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Instead, he weeps with her thus serving “as an example for us,” so that when we deal with a mourning person, we do not correct them in their grief. Cyril of Alexandria, In Joannem 11:32,translated by David R. Maxwell (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 89, as cited in Miriam DeCock, Interpreting the Gospel of John in Antioch and Alexandria (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020), 208. According to his book Revealing Heaven: The Christian Case for Near-Death Experiences, the Rev. John W. Price writes, “I don’t think the Jews understood why Jesus wept. I think he wept because he knew he was going to have to bring his friend back to life–from Paradise! Robert [a former preacher who had a Near-Death Experience] explained to me that this is exactly how he feels–he wishes he could have stayed in heaven! If you’d had four days in Paradise, would you want to have to come back to this world? Many returnees are not happy with God for sending them back and angry with the medics who brought them back to life.” John W. Price, Revealing Heaven: The Christian Case for Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperCollins, 2013) 157.
[3] Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal, Changed in a Flash: One Woman’s Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks it Empowers Us All (Berkeley CA: North Atlantic Books, 2018), 25.
[4] Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal, Changed in a Flash: One Woman’s Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks it Empowers Us All (Berkeley CA: North Atlantic Books, 2018), 120. A neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander, who also had a near-death experience, similarly summed up what he learned in three parts: 1) You are loved and cherished. 2) You have nothing to fear 3) There is nothing you can do wrong.” Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven, 71.
[5] Everyone agrees that the disciple known as the “beloved disciple” is the author of John, but there is dispute when it comes to the identity of the beloved disciple. Textual evidence that supports the idea of Lazarus as the beloved disciple include verse 11:5, in which Jesus is told “Lord, the one you love is ill” and verse 11:36 in which others say, “See how he loved him.”
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 