The Fragrance

❦

There are some things which arrive before they are seen.

Rain has its scent before the first drop reaches the earth. Bread finds its way beneath a door. Smoke tells of a fire hidden beyond the hill.

And sometimes a fragrance enters the room before we know what has brought it.

Perhaps it was so with the procession. Long before the returning general appeared, before the soldiers and the spoils and the conquered passed through the streets, the incense would have found them.

It drifted ahead. Into windows. Through doorways. Around corners.

And somewhere a man breathed it in and knew that his king had won. Somewhere else, another man breathed the very same air and knew that his own kingdom was gone.

The fragrance had not changed. Only the man who received it.

There is something terribly beautiful in this. We are accustomed to thinking that what is good must appear good to everyone who encounters it. That truth, if spoken properly, will always be welcomed. That light, if sufficiently gentle, will always be preferred to darkness.

But perhaps light does not ask the eye what it wishes to reveal. Perhaps fragrance does not consult the lungs before entering them.

Paul says that Christ has a fragrance. And strangely, he says that it is the fragrance of both life and death. Not because Christ is divided. Because we are.

The same Jesus who feels like the opening of a prison door to one man feels like the collapse of a throne to another. One hears, You may come home. Another hears, You may no longer be king. And perhaps these are not two different invitations. Perhaps coming home has always required leaving some throne behind.

There is another strange thing about Paul’s procession. He does not seem particularly interested in placing himself among the victors.

Paul had once fought against this King. He had resisted Him. He had tried to silence His people. Then, on an ordinary road beneath an ordinary sky, Paul discovered that the Kingdom he opposed was not waiting for his permission to exist.

Christ conquered him. And yet the conquest did not make Paul less himself. It made him, finally, himself.

This is one of the peculiarities of the Kingdom of God. The kingdoms of men conquer by taking possession of what belongs to another. Christ conquers by returning things to what they were made to be.

The rebel becomes a son. The persecutor becomes an apostle. The captive discovers that the chains he feared were the first things to fall away. And afterward, he smells of the country that conquered him.

Perhaps that is what holiness has always been. Not the frantic attempt to smell religious. Not the application of something external to disguise what lies beneath. But the slow absorption of another country.

You sit near the fire and afterward your clothes carry smoke. You walk through a garden and something of it follows you home. You remain near Christ long enough and, imperceptibly at first, His life begins attaching itself to yours.

His patience appears where your irritation once lived. His courage begins occupying rooms previously governed by fear. His mercy turns up in places where you had carefully stored resentment. His holiness begins making certain compromises unbearable. His love makes things precious which once seemed inconvenient.

And perhaps you do not notice it at all. Fragrance is often least apparent to the person carrying it.

But others notice. Some will recognize life. Something in them will awaken before they understand why.

Like remembering a place they have never been. Like hearing, through a wall, a song they somehow know. Like catching the scent of rain over land that has forgotten what water feels like.

And others will recoil. Not necessarily because the fragrance is foul. But because there are things within us that know when their reign is ending.

Pride does not smell life when Christ enters the room. Neither does hatred. Neither does the small kingdom of self we have spent years fortifying. To them, He smells like death. And perhaps He is. But only the death of what could never enter the coming world anyway.

This may be why Paul refuses to tamper with the fragrance. He will not peddle it. He will not improve it. He will not make it more agreeable to the marketplace.

A rose does not become more truly a rose because everyone enjoys its scent. The sun does not become brighter by convincing the blind that it shines. And Christ does not become Lord when we finally find a way of presenting Him that no one finds offensive. He simply is.

The procession is already moving. The victory has already occurred. And we are not asked to manufacture the fragrance. Only to remain near enough to the One who conquered us that something of His country clings to our clothes.

Perhaps this is what it means to carry Christ into the world. Not always to announce that we have arrived. Not to fill every silence with words.

But to have lived so long in the presence of another Kingdom that, when we pass through a room,
someone catches the faintest trace of another country
and suddenly remembers
that they were made for home.

← Return to Along the Way