Stinky Jesus?

So the laundry mat I frequent is a really nasty place. I jokingly call it the "ghetto laundry." It's the kind of place you don't want to be alone in at night. The walls are beat up and most of the dryers don't work. The washers are very dirty. None of the vending machines work and the wall on the other side of the toilet in the bathroom looks like it has never been cleaned. But it's close to home and it's cheap so I put up with it all. Well, except for that toilet. Nothing on earth could make me even get close to that toilet.

I go about once a week to dry, as our dryer has not been working for some time. I spend my 20 minutes and get out as fast as I can. I don't like not having a dryer anymore, but I love that I'm only spending a few minutes a week on laundry. Did I mention how much I hate laundry? 

So yesterday was my laundry day. I washed my four loads and then headed over to the laundry mat with Katie and her six loads. She won't go alone so she waits for the time I am going, to dry her things. 

We went in and I put the first basket in and went out to the car for the second basket. While I was out there a van pulled up and parked. Through the open window, carried on the breeze, came the most horrible, awful smell. Worse than the smell of the worst B.O, was this barf inducing odor. Like maybe this van had been lived in...a lot.

So I wrinkled my nose and went in and sat down. The owners of the van, a handicapped man and an older man came in and put a couple of things in the wash and left. They seemed friendly. I was friendly in return. After they left I told Katie "That van STANK. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Do you think Jesus was stinky? she asked. I kind of paused. I was folding my first load of clothes while we talked. Uh... no I said. No, no no. I don't like to think about that. No. Not my Jesus. Why not? she asked. Don't you think as he walked around from town to town that he got dirty? Don't you think his feet were smelly when they were washed? He really didn't have any amenities, she said. I never really thought about this before and I was joking when I said "Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and that's as Godly as you get, so no, my Jesus wasn't stinky." But my mind was spinning. Wasn't he? Wasn't he human? And all that entails? What if he was stinky? Then I realized the truth of it. He was fully human. And he didn't have the luxury of deodorant. He probably smelled. He hung out with dirty, smelly, people. The problem is that I don't like that perception of him. I like to think that my sanitary Jesus was above the human situation. I like to think he was clean, had clean hair, clean clothes, and smelled like Old Spice. 

I thought about the people he hung out with, the ones he called his friends. Prostitutes, fishermen, thieves, and tax collectors. Smelly people. He came for the smelly people. The broken and the sick people were his targets. He got down in the dust and sweated with them. Became one of them, in order to reach them. To show them the way to live. To show us the way to live.
The men came back to pick up their laundry. We chatted for a minute or two and  finished folding the clothes and then struggled out the door with our ten loads. The older man reached out and held the door open with his cane for us. They both smiled as we left. I wished them a good day, anxious to get out of the "ghetto laundry" where the smelly people hang out. But as I drove away I realized it was exactly the kind of place Jesus would be, if he was still walking this earth. Hanging out with the people who needed him the most. Like me, perhaps? What a thought.