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The Smell of The Crowd
By Jane Tawel
October 8, 2026
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Can you imagine what they smelled like?
That rag-tag bunch of men who smelled like fish?
Those women who smelled of childbirth?
(no time for baptismal purification, with all that housework
for her ladyship);
The gardeners who arrived,
Necks bent permanently from kneeling in the mud and manure?
(no time to change from cultivating his honorable so and so’s garden)
And all those little children!?
(who let them come?)
Kids so used to being neither seen nor heard,
Unable to remember what it was to play,
Day after day, picking through the garbage thrown out in the streets,
(as many of their families had been)
Children came.
Children who smelled like, well,
children.
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These were the multitudes with no free time
for baths or baptisms,
no spare change for deodorants
or gifts of frankincense and myrrh.
A people with no paid vacations
or access to spas.
In fact, probably a lot of them
knew they’d lose their jobs,
or get beaten by their mistresses
(if they were allowed to return to work).
Maybe some of the teenagers
had run away from home –
Just to hear Him speak.
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By some miraculous communication,
Long before telegraphs or cellphones
Before television or Tik-Tok,
These stinky multitudes got The Word.
Straight to their hearts, His words
The Word
Found them.
And they Knew! Knew!
They had to, simply had to,
Leave everything if they must,
and come to Jesus.
They Knew! Knew!
That they would be welcomed by Someone
Who was wise, and good,
and who cared about them.
Little did they imagine,
That they would be loved.
That they would in all their odiferous reality,
Be seen as something More,
Be touched as flesh that mattered
Be heard with their questions of importance,
And be inhaled like a fresh Breath of Life.
They wept and laughed and hugged each other,
To think they would be
Embraced by Someone who Loved them.
They could barely imagine.
Barely hope or pray
That they would be accepted as they were,
Loved even.
But they were.
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But can you imagine,
in your fresh clothes washed by Tide,
And your shampooed hair, smelling of gardenias,
And your brushed teeth compliments of Crest –
Can you imagine —
Just for a moment —
All of that disgusting, decaying flesh
pressed up all around
Each other and Him?
All of those calloused hands that dug the earth
or hauled the catch,
or wiped the bottoms of the rich and famous?
Can you get a hint
of the smell of those armpits that sweated
in the harsh sun and the baking furnace rooms
in the private gardens of the wealthy
and the gated houses of the powerful?
Can you smell the oozing pus
from their scrapped and bloodied knees
bowed, and bowed, and bowing again and again
in the endless service of those
with leisure and time and place and money
those who could imagine they had
cleaned away for one more day
the body’s smell of daily dying?
And can you imagine their surprise
When Jesus didn’t ask them to bow down,
Or even to help out?
But He invited them to sit and be served.
And to eat. Relax. Chill out. Enjoy.
“Take eat, there is plenty. More than enough.”
(Even his closest friends thought he was a bit nutty).
But Jesus knew he was preparing them to one day hear:
“This bread is my body, given for you. Take. Eat.”
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Oh, yes.
The dirty masses snuck away
from those too busy and with hands to clean to come
to hear a Man who had a different definition
of being clean.
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Can you imagine?
Can you smell the needy stench?
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And Jesus not only gathered them,
Invited them in,
Fed them,
And taught them things they’d only dreamed about,
But He stuck his nose deep in their
Greasy hair,
and smelly armpits,
and knees that knelt in putrid labor all day long
and the hands of tiny children, sticky with snot.
And He held them.
And He loved them.
And He Imbibed —
every stinky, smelly, poverty-stricken, bodily-entombed
one of them.
After all –
Jesus came
to smell like one of us.
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And He smiled as He chased the scent.
Being One with The Hound of Heaven.
Jesus knew that The Kingdom
was not behind the walls or in the mansions,
But right there in the Unseen masses,
But who had eyes to see;
And right there with those with ears to hear;
And in the so-called Untouchables,
But who had open hands, willing to hold them out to others
and touch the Hand of God.
And Jesus knew that in the pungent scrums
pressing up against Him,
were a multitude of noses,
broken, misshapen, fractured
by years of being stuck to the grindstones of the temporal
but there with Him,
ready and able to smell the fragrance of The Eternal Holy.
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And little did they know,
That with every sense informing Christ’s soul,
He was preparing for the ultimate Reek
of His body, hung like offal on a Roman Cross,
And the decaying stench of His body,
Given for us,
So that we might go
and smell likewise.
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Jesus gave the poor and lost and least
a strong whiff
of what it means to live within a Kingdom
Imbued with the Earthy,
smelly, pungent scent of humanness
and yet — -
and yet — -
within each,
there lurked
the aroma of the Divine.
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And He encouraged us
to go —
and smell likewise.
© Jane Tawel, 2026
