The Forgotten Woman Jesus Told Us to Remember

A Sweet Scent

Sweet and Viola continue: “And when He fell, causing more unnamed injuries; when He looked around for His most intimate friends, His disciples, and saw none but the four women and John at a distance; and when the agony was almost too much to bear – He smelled the perfume.

"He remembered the 12-year-old daughter of Jairus, whom everyone thought was dead but whom God healed when He spoke these words: ‘Get up, My child.’ And He remembered the Syro-Phoenician woman and her daughter and the Galilean official and his son.” Jesus kept on. And when they stripped Him naked and nailed Him to the crosspiece He had carried; when they took those six-inch spikes and lacerated the median nerves in His hands and feet; and when they lifted Him up on that cross, above the sinking garbage heap called Golgotha – Jesus smelled the perfume.

A Sweet Scent

And when His body, already in shock, hung from the wrists; and when He struggled for breath to chant two of His favorite psalms (31 and 22), unable to expel even small hiccups of sound without straightening His knees and raising Himself on the fulcrum of His nailed feet, the only thing the soldiers offered His parched throat (“I thirst!”) so He could keep singing was a drink of vinegar, which only made singing more difficult. And when His crucifiers used Him for entertainment (“Let’s see if He can call down the angels”) and when He searched the landscape for signs of love and faithfulness and saw He was abandoned by virtually everyone He ever loved, leading Him to cry a prayer for His disciples as well as for those who crucified Him – then Jesus smelled the perfume.

A Sweet Scent

And He remembered the woman who had given all she had so He would remember God’s love for Him, and in that smell He could even detect the odors that reminded Him that He was going home, from whence He had come. He kept on. The cross was the only footbridge that could get us across the chasm of sin into the true Promised Land. And that perfume kept Jesus on the cross. The greatest honor a person can give anyone is to tell his or her story. Here was someone who “did what she could” (literally, “She used what she had”). She gave all that she had. Love. Now we know why Jesus said, “When you remember Me, remember her.”