Spikenard and Tears

It's 5 in the morning and I’m sitting here with spikenard slowly rolling down my forehead. I remember when I was young the first time that I saw snow falling from the sky. It was in Atlanta at my grandma and grandpa’s house. It was just a touch past my bedtime and I was probably wearing my Esmeralda pj’s I so often donned in those days (if you haven’t seen the Disney movie The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, I highly recommend. Esmeralda was always my favorite Disney princess even though she was a gypsy). This memory is a new-every-morning mercy of God to me. Let me explain

After months of nightmares and sleep paralysis almost every single night, I am weary. After a night of fitful sleep, I awoke from what I can utterly verify as the worst nightmare and sleep paralysis that I’ve ever had. I don’t know if it’s a side-effect of all the medication I take or the illness of bipolarity itself, but every few months I will have a month or two with seemingly unremitting nightmares and sleep paralysis. As the end of the time of nightmares draws near my soul is always at a very low point.

As a recovering Pentecostal, I was on defcon 5 this morning: play the live Kim Walker-Smith, pray in tongues, get out the anointing oil. I always keep some essential and anointing oils by my bed. I sobbed as I worshiped god and walked to my bedside table. Spikenard. I love the smell because it takes me right back to my grandparents’ (aforementioned) beige Impala that smelled like cigarettes and perfume. It smelled like my grandmother and if you’ve ever met her you’d know why my memories are so fond. Well, that’s what spikenard smells like to me. I poured too much (as always) and rubbed it on my forehead and cheeks. I then sat down in my arm chair to worship some more. (Worship is our weapon in times of distress-simply proclaiming the worthiness and holiness of Jesus. I’ll preach that till the day I die.) I worshiped through my violent wailing. It wasn’t just about the dream and sleep paralysis, it was the culmination of months of them tormenting me. I couldn’t bear it any longer.

Then, I decided to do some research on spikenard. It comes from the Himalayas of Nepal, China, and India making it a very costly commodity in ancient Israel. It was used as perfume, incense, and herbal medicine and was considered luxurious in the ancient Near East and Rome. On a happy side-note, I found out that the flowers that produce spikenard are pink and bell-shaped; pink is my favorite color J It was offered on the altar of incense in the Tabernacle and the first and second temples. Dante mentions it in his classic Inferno: “He tastes, but tears of frankincense alone/And odorous amomum: swaths of nard and myrrh his funeral shroud.” As referenced in the gospels, one pound of spikenard was worth about 300 denarii with one denarius being the wage of one day’s work. One way to carry this unguent was in a sealed alabaster container. “Ancients considered alabaster to be the best materiel in which to store their ointments (BLB).” To get the oil, you had to break the seal, and, once broken, it could not be sealed again.

Enter a woman named Mary, she is described as a sinner and an immoral person. Some commentators postulate that she was a harlot, although that cannot be confirmed scripturally (but I do think it’s true). Jesus was reclining at the table in the house of a Pharisee named Simon (he truly did not discriminate). Verse 37 of Luke 7 reads, “…and when she [Mary] learned that he was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume.” This act alone was bold due to the classist nature of the contextual society. Verse 38 says, “and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing his feet and anointing them with the perfume.” What messy, unashamed worship. Normally, for dignities sake, a woman of this time and place would keep her hair up and bound. But our weeping Mary throws etiquette to the wind. One commentator even wrote that unbound hair was a sign of mourning; perhaps another unknowing prescient symbol of what was to come in a matter of days. The rest of Luke chapter 7 goes on to denote a little lesson that Jesus teaches his pharisaical host. He/she that is forgiven much, loves much.

When I am most angry at God for the trials in my life (most recently Bipolar I disorder and a struggle with alcohol use to numb my crippling anxiety) I want to worship him like this Mary of history: messy, unabashed, emotionally, physically, bravely. And this morning I got the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is. It wasn’t pretty-it took everything in me to sing, with a quivering voice between sobs, “Your name is glorious/we lift you up higher, higher/come see what God has done/and lift him up higher, higher¹”-but it was real and will be memorialized in my little Eternity Scrapbook forever.

Before I go on, I want to mention another weeping Mary. This time Mary Magdalene in the garden in which Jesus’ tomb rested. She had brought spices to ceremonially embalm the deceased Christ. Among those spices would likely have been our topical oil: spikenard. However, upon arriving at the tomb, she couldn’t find the body to embalm and was quite distraught. Weeping or wept in relation to her is mentioned four times in four verses. Mary’s worship was different. Both the spikenard Mary and Mary Magdalene’s weeping is described by the same Greek word klaio which denotes mourning, wailing sobbing, demonstrative emotion. We don’t know exactly why spikenard Mary was weeping, but a good guess would be the overwhelming feeling of being shown compassion and given forgiveness when you don’t deserve it. Mary Magdalene was weeping because 1) her savior/leader/compassionate friend was dead 2) because his body was missing and she couldn’t honor him with an important ceremonial rite. However, what was the same about both their weeping was that it was costly. The first Mary we discussed wasted 300 denarii of spikenard on Jesus to publicly worship him and unknowingly and prophetically pre-embalm him before his death. The second Mary’s devotion was costly in a deep psychical sense, taking the spikenard and other spices to do a job that she would probably rather not do in the midst of her severe grief.

A day has passed since I wrote this post but as I kneeled on the floor of my bedroom and worshipped Jesus through my tears with spikenard rolling down my face, I felt a deep connection with these two weeping Mary’s. Costly worship is treading in deep waters and I want to go deeper still.

To end this post, I’d like to point out something that has always captivated me. Supposing the risen Jesus to be the gardener in the garden, Mary asked Jesus if he knew where Jesus was. And then he said it; he said her name. “’Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Jewish-Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means teacher) (John 20:16 NASB).” Mary’s visceral mourning instantly ceased the moment her Friend said her name and I'm willing to bet she threw down her costly spikenard and other spices when she heard. I pray today that wherever you are at, whether you are mourning or joyful or somewhere in the mundane in-between, that you hear the Lord Jesus say your name and are arrested. And maybe use a little spikenard to remind yourself that true worship, the best kind of worship is extravagant.