Reading · Faith Encouraged

Every place has a smell.

A hospital smells like antiseptic and urgency. A bakery smells like warmth and possibility. A library smells like time itself. A gym smells like honest effort.

And a church smells like incense, beeswax, and something older than any of us can name.

The smell of a place is not accidental. It is the accumulated evidence of what happens there. You know what kind of place you have entered before you read a single sign or speak to a single person. The fragrance reveals it.

St. Paul knew this. Writing to the Corinthians, he reaches for exactly this image to describe what the Christian life is meant to be.

“Through us, God 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.”

We are not merely people who know things about Christ.

And this changes everything about how we understand what formation actually means.

St. Paul is writing his second letter because this young, struggling church needs him again. In his first letter, he had instructed them to put a brother out of communion. This man had been living in a way that was damaging himself and the community. Discipline. The kind of thing real love requires.

It worked. The man repented. Glory to God!

But now the Corinthians won’t take him back.

Brethren, my joy is the joy of you all. For I wrote you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you.
But if any one has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure, not to put it too severely, to you all. For such a one this punishment by the majority is enough; so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, for he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him. For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything. Any one whom you forgive, I also forgive. What I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, to keep Satan from gaining the advantage over us; for we are not ignorant of his designs.
When I came to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ, a door was opened for me in the Lord; but my mind could not rest because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I took leave of them and went on to Macedonia.
But 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.

Paul’s argument here moves in a direction we might not expect. He begins with the messy pastoral situation of a penitent brother being refused restoration, and he ends with a vision of the entire Christian life as a fragrance spreading through the world.

The connection is not accidental.

The way we handle forgiveness and restoration is itself part of our aroma. What we smell like to the world around us is shaped, more than we realize, by whether we actually do what our Lord commands us to do with those who have fallen and come back.

This is worth sitting with before we move to the larger picture. What aroma does your parish have?

First, the aroma of Christ is specifically the fragrance of mercy extended past the point where the ego says enough.

The Corinthians were not wrong to exercise discipline.

They were wrong to stop there.

There is a recognizable smell to the law court: punishment rendered, debt acknowledged, score settled, case closed. Many religious communities carry this fragrance, and you can detect it before anyone speaks. The invisible message is clear enough: here, we know who is in good standing and who is not, and we intend to make sure everyone knows it.

The aroma of Christ is something different. It smells like a father running toward a returning son. It smells like a woman turning her house upside down for one lost coin. It smells like “whatever you forgive, I also forgive.”

The goal of discipline was never punishment. It was always the person.

A church that forgets this has quietly stopped smelling like its Lord. And people notice, even when they can’t name what is missing.

Next, the fragrance cannot be manufactured. It can only be absorbed through intimate connection!

You cannot make a room smell like a bakery without actually baking in it.

And you cannot carry the aroma of Christ through external religious performance alone: right attendance, correct vocabulary, proper associations, while keeping a careful distance from the actual Source.

This is what makes St. Paul’s language here so striking. He does not say we present the knowledge of Christ. He says we are the aroma of Christ. The difference is everything.

Presentation can be managed. Aroma cannot.

It emanates from what we have been near. What has, and is, forming us. What we have taken into ourselves. The Eucharist, the literal Body and Blood of Christ received into our own bodies, is the primary way the Church understands this happening.

We commune with Him, and slowly, persistently, often without our even noticing, we begin to smell like Him. The fasting shapes us. The prayer forms us. The confession clears the air. The service to the poor deepens it. All of it working together, over time, to produce a fragrance that no amount of mere religious activity can substitute for.

Stay close. The aroma will come.

Finally, the same fragrance will be received differently by different people. This is not a problem we are called to solve.

“We are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.”

This is one of the most liberating truths in all of St. Paul’s writing. We are not responsible for making ourselves acceptable to everyone. We are responsible for carrying the genuine fragrance of Christ, and then trusting the Holy Spirit with what He does in each heart He reaches.

The temptation, especially for those of us who love people and desperately want them to encounter Christ, is to dilute the fragrance. To soften it. To make it less demanding, more inoffensive, less like the incense of a thousand years of prayer and more like something pleasant from a gift shop. :-)

But A DILUTED aroma of Christ is not THE aroma of Christ.

Carry Him fully. Forgive as He forgives. Restore as He restores. Give as He gives. And trust the Spirit to do His good work in reaching others.

Archdeacon Laurence was the chief deacon of the church in Rome under Pope Sixtus II, entrusted with care of the Church’s material resources and, far more importantly, its poor.

When Emperor Valerian’s persecution swept through Rome in 258 AD, and Pope Sixtus was arrested, Laurence wept and begged to accompany him to death. “I am not forsaking you, my son,” Sixtus replied. “Three days after my death, you shall follow after me.” He entrusted Laurence with the Church’s treasury and told him to distribute it all to the poor. Laurence did exactly that. When the Emperor’s prefect summoned him and demanded the Church’s treasures, Laurence asked for three days to gather them.

Then he assembled all the poor, the sick, and the suffering of Rome and brought them before the prefect: “Behold the treasures of the Church.” He was condemned to be roasted alive on a gridiron. As he burned, a soldier named Romanus standing nearby saw an angel beside Laurence, wiping his wounds, and immediately demanded to be baptized.

St. Laurence carried the aroma of Christ so completely that it converted people while he was dying. Romanus was not persuaded by an argument. He saw something. He smelled something. A fragrance so unmistakably heaven-sent that no amount of fire could mask it.

Today, examine honestly what you smell like.

What have you been near enough, and consistently enough, to have actually absorbed? Is there genuine proximity to Christ in your daily life? In the Eucharist, in prayer, in service, in the forgiveness you are willing to extend?

And is there someone you have withheld restoration from? Someone who has repented but whom you have not yet welcomed back? That specific act of mercy, extended today, is itself the aroma of Christ made visible and real.

Then pray simply:

“Lord Jesus Christ, let me smell like You. Form me through genuine intimacy: in the Eucharist, in prayer, in honest repentance, in the mercy I extend to others, so that what I carry is authentically Yours. Let me not dilute it to make it more comfortable. Let me carry it fully, and trust You with what it does in the hearts of those around me.”

Being Orthodox on Purpose means staying close enough to Christ, in the Eucharist, in prayer, in forgiveness, and in service to the poor, that you begin to carry His fragrance everywhere you go, because you can only smell like what you have actually been near!

Smell Like Heaven

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