Rose of Sharon.
I saw those words on a poster the other day that listed the names of Jesus. It was between the names "Bread of Life" and "Alpha and Omega."
I'd heard the words before. On the last page of John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," a young mother lets a starving man nurse from her to save his life. The book ends with a description of her "mysterious smile."
It was Steinbeck's way of depicting the milk of human kindness.
Was he saying Jesus was involved, too?
I also got a whiff of an oil labeled Rose of Sharon not long ago. It smelled like my mother's air fresheners from the 1960s.
But the business about Rose of Sharon being a title for Jesus caught me by surprise.
I decided to do some homework.
The name appears just once in the Bible, I found — in the saucy Song of Solomon. The young woman says, "I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys." Sharon, apparently, was a plain filled with flowers and "rose," well, most scholars say there weren't any. Some modern translations substitute "wildflower" or "crocus." For the King James crew, however, I suppose "Crocus of Sharon" just didn't have the right poetic lilt to it.
At any rate, there is a "bride" and "bridegroom" element to those verses that mirror what Jesus said about himself. But I think the scripture I was really after must be Isaiah 35:1-2. That one reads "… the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose … the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon."
That's where Jesus comes in.
If Isaiah is talking about the Millennium, as many assume, then the rose — considered the most beautiful and perfect of all flowers — would be a symbol for the most perfect being during the Millennium.
Others claim that by calling Jesus the Rose of Sharon people are really saying "Jesus will do more than give me flowers. He'll be the flower."
Kind of like when coaches tell athletes to "be the ball."
No one knows when the notion of Jesus as a rose got started; it's part of Christian lore now. Hymns have been written about Jesus as the Rose of Sharon, including one by Ida A. Guirey. The chorus says;
Jesus, blessed Jesus,
Rose of Sharon, Rose of Sharon,
Bloom in radiance
And in love within my heart.
As for that Rose of Sharon oil I smelled not long ago, they say smells will trigger the most vivid of memories. That was true for me. It had taken me 40 years to get the scent of my mother's florid, sticky Air Wick fresheners out of my nose. They never did make a foul odor vanish. They just surrounded it with flowers — as if some animal had crawled beneath a lilac bush and died.
Just writing that line I feel my old gag reflex kicking in.
And something tells me that's not the reaction the Bible writers were looking for.
E-mail: jerjohn@desnews.com