Hmmm...and phew!

When spring comes and kicks out winter’s sour grayness, the hyacinth celebrates the seasonal change with style.  The flower’s vibrant whites, pinks, purples and pinks are hard to miss. It fragrance is unmistakably sweet. Not surprisingly, the hyacinth is part of a family of “essential oils” from plants used for medicinal purposes. Its fans claim it helps reduce acne, relieve anxiety and depression, and soothe muscle pain.

Not so for another plant recently in the news because it “bloomed.” Native to Western Sumatra but cultivated in botanical gardens around the world, the eight- to ten-foot-tall “corpse plant” blooms only three to four days every three to four years. And that’s after it’s grown to a “mature” eight to ten feet. During “bloom,” it emits a foul odor that has been described as like a rotting corpse.  Supposedly that odor attracts the bugs that help pollinate it for its next “bloom” a few years away. The stink and its exotic shape and color make it quite the tourist attraction—but hold your nose. 

Monstrous, stinky plants don’t hold much of a draw for me.  Give me a hyacinth any day! But the two got me thinking about how the Bible describes the opposites of spiritual behavior—as “the fragrance of life” or the “smell of death.”  The apostle Paul put it this way:

But thanks be to God, who…through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him.  For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.  To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life. (1 Corinthians 2:14-16)