Even half asleep at night, I knew when we had reached my grandparents’ house in a rural village in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. I didn’t need to see the gate or hear their voices. The smell of the house, ripe with the memories of summers spent with my grandparents, already told me.
The wardrobe in their bedroom, just past the kitchen and always a little dark, exhaled the scent of warm wood and old drawers, marked by a serene hush. Outside, the wind blew the smell of rice fields—damp, grassy, and faintly sour in the summer heat—through the windows and into the warm, clay-packed floors.
Similar to how I immediately associate these scents with my grandparents’ home, one passage in the Bible illustrates how scent is central to knowing Christ. In John 12, Mary bends low, breaks open a jar, and pours. She does not call Jesus “Lord” or “Rabbi,” and she offers no explanation for her actions. The apostle John simply writes this line: “And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” (v. 3).
Christians today may read this line without recognizing its importance. But when John says that the fragrance filled the house, the detail ought to linger in our imaginations.
Why does this moment feel so vivid, so emotionally charged, even 2,000 years later? John is making a claim: Jesus has just been recognized for who he is, and that recognition has transformed the space. The scent signifies Jesus’ divine presence in a way that is physical, olfactory, and unmistakable.
Here, the scent testifies to who Christ is, like the incense-filled tabernacle that illustrated God’s presence in the Old Testament. To know Christ—to encounter him and be utterly transformed by his presence—does not merely involve intellectual assent. It involves allowing every sphere of our lives to be permeated by Christ and living in a way that spreads “the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere” (2 Cor. 2:14).
Unlike other moments in Jesus’ ministry, this scene unfolds without divine voices or miraculous signs. No one trembles, no cloud descends, no dove appears. There is no sound from heaven, no confession from Peter, no healing to report.
There is, instead, the smell of an overwhelmingly rich fragrance.
In this passage, knowing Jesus comes not by way of word but by way of smell. Fragrance, rather than doctrinal revelation, becomes the medium of recognition.
Nard was not the kind of scent that floated lightly in the air, like lavender or citrus. It was heavier: A mix of sweet earth, warm wood, and the sharpness of spice, reminiscent of ginger or galangal.
The Roman writer Pliny the Elder described nard as sweet and musty, like damp wood after rain. Dioscorides, a Greek physician, said the best kind of nard has a smell that clings to you, stays in your skin, and lingers long after the jar is empty.
But not all nard was this lovely. Some types, especially the ones that grew in the wet lowlands near the Ganges River, had a sour, almost rotten smell, Dioscorides observed. Traders knew to avoid batches mixed with weeds, which smelled like goats.
The best kind, the one Mary likely used, came from high mountain slopes, where the plant grew slow and strong, its roots soaking in sun and thin air.
Oh, How He Smells Us
John saying that “the house was filled” (eplērōthē in Greek) with the smell of nard echoes the language the Septuagint uses to describe the times God’s glory filled the tabernacle and temple (Ex. 40:34; 1 Kings 8:10–11). The scent filling the house may echo the glory that fills God’s house at its consecration, American theologian Craig Keener suggests.
While John does not explicitly draw on these Old Testament temple narratives, the shared vocabulary in these passages highlights how a space can be wholly permeated by something that illustrates divine presence.
Jewish historian Josephus vividly captures a similar scene at Solomon’s temple dedication, describing incense saturating the air and signaling God’s presence:
Burning an immense quantity of incense … the very air [itself everywhere] round about was so full of these odours, that it met … persons at a great distance; and was an indication of God’s presence: and … of his habitation with them in this newly built and consecrated place, for they did not grow weary either of singing hymns, or of dancing, until they came to the temple.
In John 12, scent quietly affirms an indisputable truth: Something sacred now fills this space.
So when John writes that Lazarus’s house was filled with fragrance, he may be doing more than describing its atmosphere. Here, we witness how Christ can be recognized—and glorified—through scent. The smell of nard would not just linger in the air but impress itself on those present, becoming part of how they remembered this seminal moment—and Jesus.
Not everyone receives the fragrance the same way. One person speaks up, not to name the scent but to question its worth. Judas responds not to the act itself but to the excess of the aroma. He turns to cost. He detects waste.
Judas objects: “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages” (John 12:5). The gospel clarifies that Judas spoke not out of care but out of greed (v. 6). His inability to perceive the meaning of Mary’s act reveals the blindness that often accompanies a utilitarian view of gestures of recognition.
In the cultural imagination of the first century, Mary marks Jesus with a fragrance that signifies both burial and honor. Her act resonates with John’s narrative: Death awaits Jesus, and the scent already affirms his worth.
As Susan Ashbrook Harvey, a professor of history and religion at Brown University, writes in Scenting Salvation, “To smell that odor was to gain the knowledge it contained.” In the ancient Mediterranean world, scent was more than sensation. Fragrance could reveal something of a person’s very nature.
Early Christians came to see smell not just as atmosphere but as a way of knowing, Harvey writes. To encounter a fragrance was, in some cases, to encounter presence. And that presence reveals something about oneself in return.
Today, we tend to trust what we can explain: what is clear, logical, and stated. We seek doctrine we can categorize and truths we can name. But the living Christ is not a concept to master. He is a person to know and to follow.
The Book of John does not tell us what Mary knew about Jesus, only what she did in his presence. Perhaps that is the point this passage wants to highlight: We say we know who Jesus is, but if that knowing never bears fruit in us—no change, no humility, no costly love—was it truly knowledge at all?
Like the early church, we can harness our sense of smell as a way of knowing Christ intimately. That does not mean that we break open a bottle of our most expensive perfume at church or concoct a special Lord’s Day fragrance for the sanctuary. Rather, we deepen our knowledge of Christ through becoming people who exude his aroma (2 Cor. 2:15).
Those who love Jesus do not always need to use words. His presence lingers in them, a fragrance that emerges not through ritual smoke but through lives thoroughly shaped by the enduring imprint of knowing Jesus.
Such an aroma is not loud, but it is unmistakable. It smells of mercy, not moral superiority; of humility, not self-righteousness; of love that acts, not merely a voice that speaks. In a world wary of religious pretense, the aroma of Christ is not an argument but a witness, quiet evidence that grace has passed this way.
Faithful witness may not always come in sermons or syllogisms. Sometimes, it comes through a life that quietly bears the fragrance of having known Jesus—like the scent that filled a house and said what no one else could. Like the aroma of Christ: quiet and persistent, a grace that speaks before language and stays after everything else fades.
We get whiffs of the aroma of Christ when we “hold our convictions with confidence and compassion while avoiding the trap of treating every disagreement like a battle to win” in conversations with other believers online, writes Chris Butler from the Center for Christianity & Public Life for CT. Or when we stop asking, “What can I get out of this faith?” and begin to wonder, “What story have I been invited into?” The gospel, after all, is centered on God in Jesus Christ, not on ourselves and what we can gain from God, theologian Andrew Torrance writes for CT.
The aroma of Christ is not something we manufacture. It rises when we forget to be impressive, when we stop trying to win at faith and simply return, again and again, to the Person whom the story is about.
Even now, the smell of my grandparents’ house in South Korea returns to me with startling clarity. The comforting scent of warm wood, sunlit rice fields, and clay floors gently told me what no words ever did: You are safe. You are home.
In some small and sacred way, that is what the fragrance of Christ does still, in John 12 and in these ordinary days. It tells us that he is with us always, to the very end of the age (Matt 28:20).
Bohye Kim teaches biblical studies as an adjunct professor at Paul Quinn College and is a researcher at the H. Milton Haggard Center for New Testament Textual Studies.
