"It was now two days before the Passover, the Feast of the Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for ways that they might have Jesus arrested in secret and kill him, for they had said, 'Not during the feast lest there be a riot of the people.'

Now Jesus was in Bethany in the home of Simon the Leper. And while he was at table, a woman came bringing an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly. She took the flask and broke it and poured the ointment over Jesus’ head.

There were some there who were angry and they said to one another indignantly, 'Why was this ointment wasted like this? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.' And they scolded her.

But Jesus said, 'Leave her alone. Why are you troubling her? She has done me a great service. You always have the poor with you. Whenever you want to you could do some good for them. But you won’t always have me. She has done what she could. She has anointed my body beforehand for burial. I tell you the truth, that wherever the Gospel is proclaimed throughout the whole world what she has done will be told, in memory of her.' "

Since I am a preacher's son, I have learned that life if full of interruptions. The station wagon was packed with luggage, bed linen, bathing suits, beach towels, five children and all their toys. The way was finally open to a two week vacation. Two whole weeks without choir practice, without prayer meeting, or Sunday night church! The fragile alabaster flask that held the sweetness of family time was precious to us! It was worth every bit of the year's salary and the countless hours we all spend at the church it took to earn it.

Then, just as my father's hand would reach for the ignition key, and my mother would drop her shoulders, sigh, and put on her sunglasses, we would hear that sound come from deep within the bowels of the parsonage. Ring! Ring! RING!

And we had to make some choices. Sometimes that flask that held our family time would break open and the sweet ointment of time would flow...in someone else's life.

And I said to myself indignantly, "Had we not stopped to pray as a family, to thank God for this precious gift of time, wouldn't we have pulled off by now, and not heard that phone?"

No, even though I am a preacher's son, I have never gotten used to interruptions.

It was late one evening. Since I was the oldest of five children, my parents would often ask me to take care of my younger siblings while they attended some meeting at the church. On this night, I had made my own deal. Yes, I would keep the others if, my girlfriend Janet could come over to, uh, help me. You see, I had already learned that parents with five children will make almost any kind of deal to get a babysitter, so soon there I was, here she was sitting next to me on the couch, "the children were all nestled all snug in their beds." Janet and I had either finished or successfully postponed our homework for the evening, and were relishing that sweet intoxicating nectar of closeness and quiet conversation, when...

Knock! Knock! Knock!

It was the kind of knock that had terror and desperation in it.

Knock! Knock! Knock!

I went to the door, opened it and saw her for the first time. She must have been more than six feet tall, chestnut hair falling down around her shoulders. About my parent's age, I guessed. She was dressed in a house coat and slippers, and staggering on our porch, drunk!

It was the first time I had ever seen anybody who was drunk.

"Is Rev. Ward at home?" she asked.

Janet came close and squeezed my arm. Oh, I resented this interruption. I resented my parents for being absent and leaving me to handle this. What in the world would I say?

"No, he is at church," I said, "I am his son, can I help you?"

"May I come in? I need somebody to talk to." she said through tears.

Then I recognized her. Her daughter was one of my schoolmates.

"Yes, please, come in."

I was frightened, I was confused, and I was trying desperately to remember what those traveling evangelists had said about how to lead a soul to Christ.

We went by some instinct into the kitchen. Janet, the woman, and I sat down there at the table where my family had so often said grace, talked, argued, and fought many times. This woman entered the room which had been filled so often with the smell of my parents' cooking: bacon, eggs, cakes, beef, chicken, and vegetables . But with her came a different scent: a scent of alcohol and the cigarette that she lit as she sat down.

"Can I get you something?" I asked.

"May I have a cup of coffee?"

I had never made a cup of coffee in my life. Now I was feeling like a stranger in my own house. Helpless, anxious to get to the plan to introduce her to Jesus that I had memorized. Wishing and praying that my parents would come home and rescue me from ministry.

"Well, to tell you the truth, I don't know if we have any or not, we don't drink it very much."

She smiled and waved her cigarette through the air.

"Never mind."

I don't know of anybody that could have been any more embarrassed than I was in that moment. Except maybe someone that Mark talks about: Simon the Leper. Now his story is lost to us but given the way Mark tells it he must have been someone that Mark and his community faith knew about.

In contrast to the plotting of Jesus' enemies that was going on in Jerusalem, I would like to think that Simon had arranged this evening for Jesus' comfort. I imagine that he had invited a few close friends over from Bethany where he lived to meet Jesus and his disciples. I imagine that Jesus was grateful for that invitation since he himself was needing such a break from the hectic pace of his ministry and to prepare himself for his tragic conclusion.

Perhaps Simon wanted the opportunity to tell a story after dinner. Perhaps he wanted to tell how his friends how Jesus had healed him of leprosy and how he had restored him to the joy of human company. Perhaps Simon had his own plan of salvation that would introduce his friends to Jesus that he wanted to share, to draw his close friends into the company of Jesus followers. Simon had a carefully choreographed quiet evening of food and fellowship for a few close friends. But that is not the story we remember. We remember the interruption.

We remember that a woman breaks into that company of men without even bothering to knock. She brings with her all that she has left. She brings with her the fullness of her experience in life: the pleasure and the pain, the questions and the answers, the memories of her past and the hopes for her future, all of that there in that beautiful, translucent, alabaster...bottle.

The bottle breaks and the scent of her life fills the room. It is that scent we remember. Not the scent of the finely prepared foods or the aroma of the sweet wine of table fellowship, but the perfume of the life of an uninvited guest.

And Simon is embarrassed. His precious gift of a quiet evening, broken open, spilled, wasted. He had only wanted to tell his story. He had only wanted to introduce his close friends to Jesus. Instead, a perfect evening interrupted.

I would like to think that Simon learned something about his friend Jesus that night. I would like to think that as he sat in shocked silence, his friends tried to repair this breach of social etiquette with nervous talk. In the midst of a feast they want to complain about somebody else’s extravagance. In the company of one who is right there disenfranchised, they want to talk about the needs of the anonymous poor.

I would like to think that Simon's embarrassed silence turned into quiet understanding. I would like to think that as he saw the perfume dripping off Jesus' chestnut hair, falling down around his shoulders, he remembered some other stories:

Stories of priests in long flowing robes, wearing the coats they wore round the House of God, as the smoke of incense filled the place where God lives, they broke open the bottles the held the precious ointment of their lives and the lives of their community, and poured them over the head of the one they would call King.

She has done what she could—to show Simon and all the rest—that when you are in the presence of Jesus, what you think is normal, might change. She has done what she could to show them that just when you think you know who Jesus is, you learn something else about who he is. She has done what she could to show Simon and all the rest of us that Jesus is always ready to pour out his life for all of us. That is why we remember her.

That is why I remember the woman that came to my door that night. Funny, I thought I was the host that night. I thought I could explain who Jesus was to her. I tried my best to get through that plan of salvation, trying to point her to the way that normal Christians should behave, while she kept offering me what she could, the story of her life, its pleasures and pain, her questions and answers, her own deep desire to be a part of God's story, too.

I really did not know what to say to her then. And to be honest, when I started working on this, I did not know why I started thinking about her again. But now, after all of this time, I think I know. She interrupted my life that night because somehow she sensed that the spirit of Christ would be around that table. And there in his presence, she broke open the jar of her own life and poured it over the One who sat in our midst: One who is always with the uninvited, the unsettled, the confused. One who is always with the earnest adolescent, intoxicated with young love; or the disillusioned adult, intoxicated for want of love.

Because of her, I finally started to get a picture of who Jesus is. I don't always know what to do with interruptions. But after more than a quarter of a century I know what to do with that one: I tell this story, in memory of her.

Interview with Richard Ward
Interviewed by Floyd Brown

Floyd Brown:  I really enjoyed your message! It was twenty five years ago that this woman came to your porch. I have to ask the question, was this one of the great epiphanies of your life as you look at it in retrospect?

Richard Ward: Yes, I think epiphany is a good way to describe it because epiphany is a moment of coming to some understanding, particularly when it’s in the Christian faith, about who Jesus is, why Jesus has come, who Jesus has come for. I think in that moment I made a connection between her presence and her appearance and the spirit of Christ who calls people to healing and to holiness.

Brown: Speaking of calling, your father was a minister.

Ward: Yes.

Brown: Was it a natural flow for you to become a minister in life or was there an epiphany somewhere that said this is your calling?

Ward: I think both. Very early on I became very acquainted with what a minister does and, in fact, took on some responsibilities in the church as a youth minister or youth pastor. So I very early became interested in preaching and speaking. But then later, I think, there comes a moment when you have to decide for yourself and that moment came later that I really owned that my vocation involved a ministry of proclamation and teaching. That came over a longer process of realization, but I think those moments that I had when I was growing up and under my father’s tutelage, if you will, were very important to me.

Brown: One last question in my "how to" segment of the program. You believe in story telling, you do it very well. How should we read the Bible? Should we read these stories here and have them jump out at us and give us an epiphany or should we meditate on them? How do we do this?

Ward: I think the thing to start with is to find some way of speaking the stories, by reading them out loud either with yourself or in a group. You find that you have a different kind of relationship when the stories are heard and have the element of sound and sense.

Brown: It makes sense to me! Thank you very much, Richard. What a marvelous message and what wonderful stories.

Ward: Thank you. It’s good to be here.