Resurrection is Nonsense

The ancient recipe of funeral incense and ointments, from the Magi to the Women at the Tomb - An Easter Sermon

First preached at Jubilee Episcopal Church on April 19, 2025, and then again at Imagine Worship at St. Bart’s on April 24, 2025

The women came to the garden, expecting a full tomb, their hands full of the spices and ointments they had prepared to anoint the corpse of their friend.

And what they found instead was a dazzling bright vacated tomb, and sparkling strangers reminding them to remember everything their friend, Jesus, had told them.

And from this wild and holy tale we hear the nonsense of resurrection.

Because that is what the men, the other disciples, think these women are saying, when they come running down the road, making an unholy racket, smelling of spices and fresh earth and babbling about the body being gone from the tomb — the men think these hysterical woman are telling an “idle tale.” The Common English Bible offers my personal favorite translation, “It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary of James, and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles. Their words struck the apostles as nonsense, and they didn’t believe the women.”

Talk about a parable for what happens when we don’t believe women.

The women’s words struck the apostles as nonsense.

But of course, the whole reason the women were at the tomb was that weird, nonsensical womencraft of preparing perfuming, scented oils for a corpse.

It’s an easily overlooked detail; we hear the whole reason the women are at the tomb at all is because — girl things— they were going to put perfume on a corpse.

And this little detail has bewitched me. Why were the women going to the tomb with spices? It’s a critical plot point, but one I hadn’t really ever heard unpacked. I’d heard my whole life that this is what women did in the ancient world, and the most explanation that had been given me was, well, that this was because a rotting corpse smells really bad. And since the burial sites in Jerusalem were not six feet under but were instead caves that were, honestly, not far out from the main life of the city,^⁠1 these fragrant oils and spices were used not only to cover the smell, but to purify the process for everyone’s sanitation.

Just the domestic, girly cosmetic things, like confronting death by tenderly ensuring a body decays with dignity.^⁠2

But I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what, as best we can know, these particular fragrant spices were. Because I know that the details we can be too quick to overlook are often the details that contain recipes of resilience.

And thanks to my friend, The Rev. Jessica Harmon,^⁠3 I got my hands on a botanical guide to every plant in the Bible, where I learned that the herbs and plants used to anoint bodies were likely made up of myrrh, frankincense, aloeswood, and nard.^⁠4

These spices had likely come to the women by way of the Silk Road, not unlike the way, some thirty years prior, magi from the East traveled for months down that Silk road to Bethlehem, because they had observed a star rising and knew it heralded something special. A new king.

A new kind of king, it turned out, who was born not in King Herod’s resplendent palace on top of a hill , but in the valley in the shadow of Herod’s orders of death, a king born to an unwed woman named Mary, who tucked this newborn into a trough-turned-makeshift cradle. And there, on the floor where there now doubt was a cow cooing and a donkey nickering and a sheep slumbering, these magi laid before this baby an offering: the perfuming spices of frankincense and myrrh.^⁠5

A recipe of extravagant scents for a king.

Scents that would, some thirty-three years later, remind his mother of the sweet smell of anointing his newborn body, because it was those same spices she and the other women breathed as they readied themselves to anoint his now lifeless body.

Because it was with frankincense and myrrh the women gathered, maybe in a kitchen, by a hearth, boiling and stirring and rolling and preparing these plants as they had been taught to do, perhaps as they had done many times before.

I imagine the women preparing these spices, these oils, like a scene I know from my own life. From being with my own family in the shock of readying home and ourselves for a funeral. I know the rote response of making a meal, of wiping down countertops, of donning that stiff black dress because the world has split open and now we do the little things we know to do to grieve.^⁠6 I know the way a funeral parlor smells like overpowering lillies and sharp astringent, I know the acrid taste I getting my mouth and on my skin after too long in the hospital, the inability to smell anything because my face is too swollen from tears.

I know the smell of death. I suspect you do, too, beloveds.

And so I know what these women were doing: arming themselves to face the stench of death with the scent of beauty.

Surely they were not fearless, surely they were terrified but determined to say:

The rot of death does not get to claim you forever.

These women just do not know yet how right they are.

Because when they come to the tomb, their hands full of the ointments they had prepared, God is already blooming in the darkness, already upending what was sensible.

Because Jesus Christ is not among the dead. He has been raised.

The smell of death became the fragrance of life.

Because he lives, his mother got to hold him close and smell his sweet scent and cherish her son knowing all that had unfolded was held, eternally, in the palm of her own Creator.

This is the story of Easter, and this story is why we are not afraid of death.

Because do you know what is perfuming our room tonight? Do you know what the ancient recipe of incense is that we put on the hot coal in the thurible? It has all the same ingredients as what those women were using that dark Easter night 2,000 years ago. Frankincense, myrrh, and a little aloeswood, and even a little nard.

Behold: the smell of death becoming the fragrance of life.

We are so unafraid of death as Christians, not only do we perfume our worship with the scent of death, we will soon behold death and resurrection in baptism as we make promises to support our friend in [their] death, and life, with Christ.

Everything we do in church is eating death, smelling death, laughing at death. We eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ, we die and rise with him, and we even perfume the air with the fragrances meant for his body because we know! We know!

We know that even though everywhere around us there are words of death, threats of death, over us — and even though it does not make sense for us to have hope in the face of such violence — and even though we know in our bodies, and in our stories, and in our greatest fears that keep us up in the dark of the night —

In that same dark of night, we have seen the Lord!

We do not look for the dead among the living!

Because the women were right.

Resurrection is nonsense.

Turns out? The God who created the heavens and the earth, and who counts each hair on each head of each one of us is too big to make any sense in the sensible world of violence and death.

God is bigger than death, and that doesn’t make sense because it does not have to. Our God too big, God’s love is too much and too beautiful to be kept in a grave. Our hope is wilder, and more imaginative, and more colorful than anything that will put us in the grave.

Resurrection does not make sense. Resurrection is nonsense. Resurrection takes the stench of death and says: see, I make all things new.

Resurrection is a dazzling nonsense that upends and unravels and overwhelms with perfume the very powers and principalities that put Jesus on the cross.

And the resurrection of Jesus dazzles and perfumes the threats of death spoken over us, such that we cannot taste or smell the fear, only the presence of our God.

For even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, Christ is risen!

The people say: The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!

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² Just the womanly nonsense of knowing birth and death are a holy embrace, a circle of life, and the medicines that ease the passage of life into this world will also solemnize the separation of life as it leaves this world.

³ https://jlharmon.com

⁴ Spices known for many things, first used as incense, as fragrant, long-burning offerings in ancient Egypt,^⁠1 where the incense was thought of as literal food for the gods. And it was in Egypt where Jesus’ ancestors were held in bondage until God parted the Red Sea and took them from slavery to liberation.

¹ Hoffman, Stephen, "1. Pt. 1 - From Ancient Origins to Modern Traditions: Exploring the World of Incense with Stephen Hoffman." Incense Explorer: A Deep Dive into Incense History, Culture, Ritual and Lore. Podcast audio. June 15, 2023. https://audio.listennotes.com/e/p/21d8cca9639d434c848a4759800603cc/.

⁵ There’s gold, too, and some traditions believethe gold is actually resin, and so this is an ancient recipe of incense offered to a god/king. For more: Hoffman, Stephen, "1. Pt. 1 - From Ancient Origins to Modern Traditions: Exploring the World of Incense with Stephen Hoffman." Incense Explorer: A Deep Dive into Incense History, Culture, Ritual and Lore. Podcast audio. June 15, 2023. https://audio.listennotes.com/e/p/21d8cca9639d434c848a4759800603cc/.

⁶ I will always know the smell of a funeral parlor — the top note of overpowering lillies and roses, spread in a spray over a casket or on a stand nearby, and underneath that sweetness there is the sharp astringent used to keep everything hygienically crisp, and underlying it all is the tang of the cleaning powder now baked into a well-walked carpeted floor, a powder that somehow still clings to pinching leather shoes.