Fragrant Worship – Bringing Worship Alive Through Music and Drama

The Scent Event at Bethany

I have been exploring the story of Jesus being at anointed at Bethany in Chapter 12 of John’s gospel. Using a bit of a new approach, I want to see if the insights of scholars can be highlighted – but also make some new discoveries – by using the creative process of actors, musicians, and filmmakers to engage with the story as an actual event, with real emotion, interaction, and worship.

There are all kinds of great insights into Mary’s act of extravagant worship that day at Bethany. Professor David Ford, Regius Professor Emeritus at Cambridge University, who has recently published a beautiful commentary on John’s Gospel came up with the description, ‘Scent Event’. Scholars all point towards Mary’s worship as sensual – engaging especially the senses of touch and smell (significantly following the previous story where everyone avoids touching and smelling dead Lazarus). Mary does this act while everyone is tasting magnificent Martha-inspired food at the banquet held in Jesus’ honour. And when this story is brought to life by actors, the sound of the party dies away as everyone, drawn by the scent and surprised by seeing Mary’s hair cascading down, then watches transfixed as she anoints and then wipes Jesus’ feet with the nard perfume.

But it is a phrase in verse 3 that, when trying to interpret, emulate and recreate, is most fascinating:

“And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

Various commentators point out that the nard Mary uses is evocative of the love and devotion between the lovers in Song of Songs chapters 1 and 4. The vocabulary of fragrance also evokes the ‘soothing aroma’ that emanates from many of the burnt offering sacrifices in the Old Testament. Perfumed oils are used to anoint the priests and holy things in the Tabernacle. And the opening of both Tabernacle and Temple are characterised by God’s presence and glory filling the place, accompanied by burnt offerings, washed feet, incense, and people bowing down with their faces to the ground.

So, this scent-event in Bethany was an intense and profound act of worship: overwhelming to the senses and revealing Jesus as the lamb of God, the object of love, and the very Temple of God’s presence on earth. Aquinas might say that it was a deeply sacramental moment – where we are “led by things corporeal and sensible to things spiritual and intelligible.”

So how do we re-enact that?!

Censers and haze machines do a fair enough job in ancient cathedrals and modern warehouses all over the world, as do diffusers in our living rooms. But often these days it is music that takes the place of fragrant perfume of worship. Music fills our buildings and our bodies.  Music works its way into the gaps and crevices, in between the particles and the atoms of our sense-perceptible being. Music, so naturally and easily, takes what is known in the natural and enables it to be experienced in the spiritual.

So, in re-performing this event as live theatre, we have used musicians to recreate the perfumed act of worship – and then observed what effect that has on those participating or watching.

The results have been fascinating

Musicians performing during the story (assuming that Lazarus and sisters or Simon the Leper might have booked a local covers band for the party!) create some party jazz at the start but naturally and inevitably – and sometimes chaotically – stop playing this when everyone’s attention shifts from gossip and dancing to Mary pouring out her oil and wiping Jesus’ feet.

In place of perfume filling the house they have then sometimes chosen a worship song – variously Jesus Culture’s “Holy Spirit You are welcome here”, Brymer and Hall’s “Worthy Of It All”, Michael W Smith’s “Agnes Dei“– and this has had the effect of drawing people into that worship moment despite and beyond the fact it is done within a rehearsal-process-bible-study.

In fact, this shows the power of the invitation that worshipping Jesus has; the things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace, as the old chorus goes. This must have been what it felt like in that house in Bethany. Jesus being soothed by the aroma, and those gathered caught up in the clouds of incense. One participant, suddenly called upon to sit there as Lazarus, who himself had only been a Christian for a short while said that this was “the closet I have gotten to affective piety” – that emotional state of worship often described by the medieval mystics.

Until Judas interrupts it all and ruins the moment

When we have experimented with that part of the story, the actor playing Judas has had to shout quite loudly above the music, and the musicians have been taken by surprise, and once again awkwardly stopped playing. There are comments made with passion that this intrusion feels blasphemous even.

People watching the story unfold have forgotten that we are in a play rehearsal and have treated the worship moment as something to throw themselves into, so they are disturbed and genuinely shocked by Judas’ angry comment, or assume it is a spiritually provoked person ruining their worship time – needing church security to weigh in with their pastoral safeguarding policies.

The actors feel violated. One musician started to play more loudly and insistently to somehow push back against Judas’ interruption – which meant that the actor playing Jesus couldn’t get his line in! And when Jesus does speak about Mary doing this act for his burial and that they won’t always have Jesus with them, the mood tangibly becomes sombre, charged with meaning and weight.

Our authentic worship of Jesus is precious, fragrant, and deeply personal. It is undermined and corrupted by envy, pride, and anger. This story in John’s Gospel is so dramatic and so revealing of these profound realities. Exploring this, both through studying it seriously and re-enacting it with creativity, brings it to life – like seeing it in 3D rather than 2D as one participant noted.

And all this experiential discovery leads inevitably to a desire to worship again – free from the script and the story this time – but once again to pour out that precious oil and release the incense of devotion to Jesus. How evocative to know that our worship is like fragrance that fills the house!

At the end of one of these theatrical bible workshops exploring John 12 a teenage Creative Writing student wrote this poem describing what she saw and experienced.

 

Hair unbound, grief tumbling over shoulders,

She kneels at His feet and begins to clean.

Softened by gratitude, sullen sister

Pauses in service to gaze at the scene.

 

Troubled minds are soothed by sudden fragrance,

Earthly worries laid to rest in tomb.

The people still – now stare in reverence

At Jesus, tranquillised by rich perfume.

 

Judas, blinded, refuses to witness,

Shields his eyes from peace, betrayal brewing.

What a loss to turn from God’s forgiveness,

Whose Name holds power to erase all sin.

 

Here, their hearts are lifted in worship. 

Scented grace settles over this blessed place.

Poem by Neve Wyatt. Used with permission.

One role of the artist is to take what is invisible and make it visible – be that the fragrance, the love, the sacrifice and even the power of the impending death of Jesus. In our film series, it is the cinematographer’s art – the intense power of the frame by frame – using light, movement, sound, setting, performance, and of course music too – that reveals truth. Actors, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, painters, dancers, and poets are those who lead us into worship by unveiling in myriad ways the invisible perfume of the presence, activity, and character of God.

— — — — — —

Devotional Podcast