saturate the house

In John 12, our guy John talks about the moment when Mary (Martha's sister) was on the ground anointing Jesus' feet with an alabaster jar of expensive perfume, and then going so far as to even wipe off his feet with her unbound hair.

And John adds:
"The house filled with the fragrance of the perfume"

Well, the whole act of dumping good-smelling oils and lathering one's hair upon a man's feet seems fully unnecessary. And that last sentence about the house smelling good now too is just some dainty topping on an already awkward cake.

There was absolutely no reason for Mary to do this. She hadn't seen it done before and thought huh, yeah okay I'll prostrate myself on the ground too and anoint Jesus too, because that's what all the cool kids do. 

The thing is, is her act was absolutely un-cool. The definition of strange, even back then.

But she felt compelled.
she just did it.
 
Because she knew who Jesus of Nazareth actually was. That He was in fact the King of Glory, the Saviour of the World, the Son of God, the Holy of Holies. This is God incarnate standing in front of her in a room full of people eating and talking and cooking and drinking wine and..and..she just couldn't do nothing about the reality of where she was and Who she was with.

So she grabbed the most valuable thing she could find and gave it up, let it go, poured it out.
And she put it on Jesus' feet. The dirtiest, grimiest place on his body. The place that most people would reel away from. And then she took her hair down (which was scandalous for those times) and wiped his perfumed feet with it. As if saying: I have nothing but myself to give you. No towel, no sponge, but me.  

You know what this is?
Humility.
No inhibitions.
Giving from the deepest core of her being.

Everyone else was constantly coming to Jesus to ask for healing, to ask for advice, for prayer, for guidance, to walk with him, to eat with him, to take and take and take.
And Mary, without words (that we know of) simply falls to the ground and gives all, without Jesus even asking her to.

And then, I love how it says that the house was saturated with the scent of this act. As if the entire house permeated the humility that Mary just showed, the true love that she just gave to Jesus.

Maybe,
if I gave like that,
gave myself wholly, truly, without inhibition, and without reason besides love itself,
my house  (life/actions/words/circumstances)
would be saturated with that fragrance as well.