“For we are the aroma of Christ to God”
By Anthony Esolen *
“Raising of Lazarus” by Duccio di Buoninsegna, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, USA
I have long felt that the parable of the vineyard in Isaiah led up to an anticlimax, at least as it is rendered in English. The owner of the vineyard, who represents God, has done everything he could to tend what he has planted. He has chosen a good hill, no doubt one that faces the south and the sun. He has fenced it, cleared it of stones, built a tower in the middle of it, set up a wine press, and waited for the harvest. “And he looked for it to yield grapes,” says the prophet, “but it yielded wild grapes” (Is. 5:2). That is how Judah and Jerusalem have rendered back to God the good He has done for them.
But what is wrong with “wild grapes”? That they are not as good as cultivated grapes, I can well believe. Yet where we live in New Hampshire, the edges of woods that face the south are often overhung with wild grapevines of the Concord variety, and the aroma in the warm sun is like what I might imagine from a grape jelly factory. I’ve often plucked a bunch of wild grapes and enjoyed the strong flavor and the sweetness. I suppose that many other people have done so, so that the strongly negative force of the phrase “wild grapes” eludes us.
At such a point we may expect that the trouble lies with a difficulty in translation, and sure enough, it does. The Hebrew for grapes, ‘anabim, is quite simply a completely different word from what the prophet uses for the fruit we in English must end up calling wild grapes: be’ushim. It is not “grapes,” with a pejorative adjective appended. It is something else. But what?
The Hebrew root, ba’ash, means to stink. Forms of that word and of its derivatives are frequent in the Old Testament, and they all suggest something odious or shameful. The suffering Job, sitting on a dungheap, scraping his festering sores with the shard of a clay pot, cannot have smelled sweet, but in the final words of his complaint he insists that he has been morally sound: “If my land has cried out against me, and its furrows have wept together; if
I have eaten its yield without payment, and caused the death of its owners; let thorns grow instead of wheat, and foul weeds instead of barley” (Job 31:38-40; Hebrew bo’shah). Or, as I would put it, since we are not talking about a variety of weeds but only one, “Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and stinkweed instead of barley.” Job is sound, despite the smell of the misery about him.
But usually it is the other way around: the stink is moral, and it floats in the air despite good fortune in the world. An example from Genesis will suffice. A young Canaanite man, Shechem, seizes Dinah, one of the daughters of Jacob, and rapes her. But he loves her and speaks kindly to her, and he asks his father Hamor to arrange a marriage between them. The sons of Jacob give their consent on condition: that all the men on the other side be circumcised — invited into the covenant of Abraham.
Hamor and Shechem agree, and they persuade the rest of their men. But on the third day, no doubt while the men were swollen and raw from the operation, Simeon and Levi slay them, take Dinah away, and despoil the city. They get no thanks from their father Jacob, who will, to his dying day, remember this act with disapproval. “You have brought trouble on me,” he says, “by making me odious to the inhabitants of the land” (Gen. 34:30). For “making me odious,” read “making me stink” – from Hebrew hab’ish, the causative of ba’ash, not to stink but to make stink.
The thing about the stench is that unless you are looking at what you know must smell bad by its nature, it cannot be seen. It lurks underneath.
“Resurrection of Christ and Women at the Tomb” by Fra Angelico, Convent of San Marco, Florence.
Hence we can understand all the better the embarrassment that Martha felt, Martha always solicitous for the comfort of others, and sensitive to appearances, when Jesus told the men to roll away the stone before the tomb of Lazarus. “Lord,” she says, “by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days” (Jn. 11:39). She would have used a form of that same verb that David himself, crying out in repentance, used: “My wounds grow foul and fester, because of my foolishness” (Ps. 38:5; Hebrew hib’ishu).
Here for Martha it is the embarrassment of mortality; the smell would be an offense to the man’s memory. And who knows whether Martha was correct about the smell? We are told only that Jesus raised Lazarus from that bed of death, and what lay beneath was not corruption and a dead man’s bones, but life.
There is, of course, another tomb in the gospels. We know that before the beginning of the Sabbath, which we would call sundown on Friday, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus laid the body of Jesus in a new tomb hewn out of the rock, in a garden nearby. They wrapped the body in linen along with a mixture of myrrh and aloes (Jn. 19:39-42). It was doubtless a hurried affair. Hence, at sunrise on the day after the Sabbath, the holy women come to do the work properly: “And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, so that they might go and anoint him” (Mk. 16:1). “Sweet spices” — that is Greek aromata, which Jerome in his Latin translation leaves intact.
The emphasis is on the sweet smell: but there is no need for them, and not just because there is no corruption to mask or overwhelm. The risen Christ, as the poet Herbert puts it, is sweeter than all the Arabian spices:
The sun arising in the east,
Though he give light, and the east, perfume,
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume. (“Easter,” 23-26)
But there is more than the absence of corruption. In Christ, we have the fragrance of the true sacrifice, which we can take part in, loving as he loved us. “Therefore be imitators of God,” says Paul, “as beloved children, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:1-2).
The Christian life then is also fragrant, though not everyone will receive it as such: “Thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumph, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life” (2 Cor. 2:14-16). Those whose nostrils are full of death cannot savor the fragrance of life.
Nevertheless, we walk with Christ, no matter what anyone thinks of it. We do not wash our robes in wild grapes. We are, I suppose, stuck with that translation of be’ushim; but we might fancy a colloquial alternative, in the margin of our minds: stinkers.
It is not just that we cannot gnash down such foul stuff. It is that if we linger among the stench-fruit, as I might put it, or the poison-berries, as Strong’s suggests, we miss the real wine.
Think of Jacob’s blessing of Judah: “He washes his garments in wine, and his vesture in the blood of grapes” (Gen. 49:11). We too seek to wash our garments in the blood of grapes, that is, in the blood of Christ, the Lamb of God, the wondrous bunch of grapes from the true and ultimate Promised Land:
Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and whence have they come?” I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 7:13-14).
* Dr. Anthony Esolen, faculty member at Thales College in North Carolina, has been a professor of literature and humanities for 35 years and is a poet and author or translator of more than 30 books and over 1000 articles. Dr. Esolen publishes a web magazine dedicated to language, music, poetry and classic films called Word and Song with his wife, Debra.
