June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 163 – 12 June
The fragrance that gets there first
For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. (2 Corinthians 2:15, NKJV)
Long before you catch sight of the bakery, you smell it. You might be hurrying down an unfamiliar street with your mind tangled in a dozen other things, and then the warm scent of bread fresh from the oven curls out of a doorway and takes hold of you, slowing your step, turning your head, drawing you towards a shop you had no intention of entering. Smell works on us in just this way, slipping past the guard of our reasoning to reach some older and deeper part of us. A single thread of an aroma can haul a whole childhood back in an instant, summoning a grandmother’s kitchen or a particular summer you had half forgotten you owned. Of all the ways one thing announces its presence to another, scent may be the most disarming, since it arrives uninvited, travels wherever it pleases, and asks the will for no permission at all. Searching for a way to describe the effect a believer has upon the world, Paul reached for precisely this.
A fragrance, of all things
He told the Corinthians that they were, to God, the εὐωδία (euōdia, meaning a sweet fragrance or pleasing aroma) of Christ, a scent breathed out through them into every place their feet carried them. The choice of image repays a moment’s wonder. He could have called them a sound, a trumpet blast announcing good news, or a light set on a hill for the whole valley to see. Smell, though, behaves unlike either of those. A trumpet falls silent the moment the player tires, and a lamp can be shut away behind a door, yet a fragrance lingers in a room long after the one who brought it has gone, clinging to the curtains and hanging in the air. Paul was telling these unremarkable believers that their truest influence ran below the level of speech and performance, in the trace a life leaves behind it. The patience you showed when it cost you, the kindness nobody asked for, the odd unguarded gladness others could find no earthly reason for, all of it drifts outward on its own and reaches people you may never knowingly meet. You are giving off Christ whether you mean to or otherwise, simply by carrying him about inside you.
The same scent, received two ways
There is a sharper edge to the picture, and Paul declined to file it smooth. The very same fragrance, he allowed, lands on different people in opposite ways, drawn in as the sweetest air by some and waved off like smoke by others. A scent that spells home and safety to one soul can turn another’s stomach, depending wholly on what each one brings to the breathing of it. So a life that carries Christ will draw some folk warmly towards its source while faintly unsettling others, and that difference sits in the heart doing the receiving, never in any flaw of the fragrance itself. A real mercy hides in this for you. Your part stretches only as far as staying honestly fragrant, as far as letting the aroma of a good life spread truthfully wherever you find yourself standing. How each person answers it belongs to them alone, which spares you the wearying labour of forcing a welcome. Some will follow the scent gladly home to its origin, and that is joy enough for anyone, while those who turn from it turn by their own hand, leaving your conscience clear and your peace whole.
Tending what you give off
The whole picture hands you a homely, practical question for an ordinary day, one sitting close to the heart of living for the gospel’s sake. Since you are giving off something in every waking moment, the only real choice left to you concerns its quality. A fragrance, when all is said, rises straight out of what a thing actually is, and a life steeped in grace comes to smell of grace with no effort and no announcement. So you tend the inner thing, the daily company you keep with Christ, the small habits of mercy and honesty and joy, trusting that as the inside grows sweeter the outside looks after itself. You need stage no performance and mount no campaign. You simply move through your hours as someone worth standing near, and the knowledge of him spreads off you the way warmth spreads from a hearth, finding the cold corners of a room without once being told to go there.
Declaration
Something of me reaches people before I have said a single word. The way I treat a stranger, the calm I bring into a tense room, the warmth that lingers once I have gone, all of it travels ahead of my speech and stays behind after I leave. So I tend the quality of that unspoken impression with real care, aware that it does deep work I will seldom see for myself. I scatter what goodness I can across ordinary places and ordinary moments, and I let it be welcomed or refused as each heart decides, holding the outcome loosely and the offering open. Today I move through the world hoping to leave it a little sweeter for my passing, content to be a faint and pleasant trace of something far greater than myself.
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