The Scent of Christmas!

One of the things I love about this time of year is the scent that often permeates the house as Kim bakes the dozens of cookies that we normally only have this time of year.  In fact, the other day I walked into the house, caught a whiff of that which had been baking and began to spontaneously sing, “It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas!”  The scent of those cookies that had just come out of the oven made it seem as if Christmas was really on its way.  I felt as if I had caught the scent of Christmas!

Yet, as I think back to the first Christmas—i.e. the birth of Jesus—it appears that the scent of Christmas was anything but that of cookies coming out of an oven.  The scents that filled the air on that first Christmas had little to do with baking and pine and any of the other scents that today we associate with Christmas Day.  On that first Christmas the scents that surrounded the baby Jesus were more likely those of hay, animals, and all the smells that are associated with a barn.  Even the people involved would not have carried on themselves the most pleasant of scents.  Joseph and Mary had just finished a long journey; the shepherds had come in from the fields where they had been spending time with their sheep.  None of them would have had the pleasure of washing themselves up with perfumed soaps, putting on some deodorant and dabbing themselves with colognes and perfumes. Instead, their own bodily scents were probably raw and harsh to our modern senses.  I even wonder, what kind of scent the rags in which the baby Jesus was wrapped carried on them?

We could say, Jesus was birthed into a very smelly setting!  And, that was true on every level.  For the world into which he came was filled with the stench of sin. It was a world that smelled of despair, pain, sorrow, brokenness, and all the effects that sin brings.  Jesus, the Son of God, had left the beauties and glories of heaven and came into a world that to him must have smelled like the worst of garbage dumps. Yet, he came. Jesus came into the smell and stench of our world for one purpose: “To seek and to save that which was lost.”  (Luke 19:10)

This Christmas, as you enjoy the scents that today we associate with Christmas—the baking of cookies, the smell of pine, etc.—remember that they are really only a temporary fix to the real stench of the world in which we live.  Ultimately, Jesus is the only one who can forever rid our world of the stench of sin.  And, he is still on a mission to seek and to save those who are lost; to rescue those who are trapped in the stinking garbage dump of sin so that in the end, we may all carry on us the “aroma of Christ!” (2 Corinthians 2:15) And, that’s the true scent of Christmas!

Have a great day! 

Pastor Tim Harris