Incense

In many churches incense is burnt at the Sung Eucharist as well as at other services.  Incense is made from spices and gums and was widely used in Our Lord’s day.  One of the Wise Men’s gifts to Jesus at Bethlehem was incense.  It was also used in the Temple services at Jerusalem.  You will remember that Zacharias was offering incense to God when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to him and told him that he was to be the father of St John the Baptist.  Jesus attended the Temple services and so was accustomed to its use.  The Jews, like other peoples at the time, used to burn it at home because they liked the smell of it, and there may well have been a dish of burning incense in the Upper Room at the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday.  In the picture of ideal worship in Heaven, which the Book of Revelation in the New Testament gives us, incense is mentioned more than once (5:8; 8:3,4).

Its use in the Christian Church began in the fourth century after the persecutions had stopped, and within 100 years or so it was used in churches almost everywhere in Christendom.

At the Eucharist today the altar is incensed at the beginning and again at the Offertory when the offerings of bread and wine, as well as the priest, servers, choir and people are incensed.  The meaning of this is that they are being set apart for the worship of God.  At the Gospel the book is incensed, and so too is the Blessed Sacrament at the Consecration.  The purpose here is to do honour, first to Our Lord’s Word and then to Our Lord himself.  The smoke of the incense as it rises is like the prayers of the Church ascending to God (Psalm 141:2; Revelation 5:8, 8:4).  The smell of incense in a church also helps us to remember that it is a holy place and to treat it as such.

It is an odd thing that some people can fill their lungs with tobacco smoke without appearing to notice it, whereas the faintest fragrance of incense upsets them at once.  The first person known to have objected to it was a Dr Thomas Green, a Canon of Ely Cathedral in the middle of the 18th century.  A writer in 1779 said that “Dr Thos. Green... a finical man, tho’ a very worthy one, and who is always taking snuff up his Nose, objected to it under the Pretence that it made his Head ache”. (4)  Gregory Dix points out that there were no complaints about the effects of incense from the English puritans and that such effects were totally unknown to the Jews of antiquity, and to the Christians of the first 1,500 years; and Gregory Dix wittily notes that “Dr Thomas Green appears to be the first recorded sufferer, and deserves to be sympathetically commemorated as such”.