But Suzanna would never give it to him. She had left him, knowing that he thought he could take it from her when she left, as he thought she must remove it from its hiding place. But it was not hidden in her marriage home. It lay safe in its out box and wrapping buried in the vegetable garden of her father’s home.
But Father and Mother were dead and her older brother had fled the country. They had all travelled to a distant land in a caravan with Able. He said they were ill in the desert and he had buried them in the sand. But her brother had not died and flew ahead of his brother in law back to Judah to warn her and tell her the truth. He had helped her bury the box of ointment and then he and his wife and child fled. f Able was a merchant like her father had been. They became partners after her father risked half his great fortunes to buy the alabaster box of ointment from Egypt. The ointment was not ordinary salve, but relieved all pain when rubbed into the skin. It was said to cure leprosy too.
She had lived alone in her parent’s home for two years. Though her family property became Able’s legally since her brother was thought dead, he did not maintain the house or the woman who lived there.
Suzanna had been forced to find a way to get money. Now creeping disease made it impossible for her to be with her husband again, had she wanted to. But she had accepted the idea of hungry, feverish death before she would return to him.
One April morning, a woman stopped by her garden gate as she dug weeds. She was a Magdalene and though Suzanna warned her away, she came forward and fell to her knees beside her and began helping to pull out the weeds.
“I am diseased, unclean, and a harlot!”
“I know. I also was filled with devils, tormented by them, laden with disease and without hope. I was you. Now I am clean.”
“How can that be?” Suzanna scoffed. The woman seized her hand and pushed it against her own cheek and Suzanna examined her face more closely. She was older that Suzanna, but the lines of the harsh life she claimed she had lived, were also apparent. “Can it be?” she asked.
“Come and see. Wash yourself, put on your beautiful garments. Prepare to meet my master.”?
“Who is he?”
“He is the Lord. The Lord of all. He is the Messiah!”
“Can the Messiah have come and all of Israel not rejoiced? How do you know.” She withdrew her hand from the Magdalene’s and stepped away from her.
“Yes! Remember the words, ‘I came unto my own and my own received me not? Afflicted, a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief?’ That is Him. Come! Make haste! I am the living testimony of his power. He will heal you and cleanse you.”
Suzanna stared into the woman’s face. Her eyes pled with Suzanna to believe and rejoice with her. Suzanna ran back into the garden, levered up a large stone and began to dig.
A few hours later, the two women and others of the Magdalene’s friends stepped through the gate of Jerusalem. There were drying palm fronts all over the street as though a king had passed by a few days earlier. The Magdalene inquired in a house and learned that her master had gone to Bethany.
They camped outside the city walls near a brook. The next morning, they went to Bethany and found more of the woman’s friends, people who also called her master their own, waiting outside of a household where it was said Simon, a leper lived.
“He is at meat,” one of the men told her. He stepped away from her as he spoke. Suzanna was used to it.
But the Magdalene pushed her forward. “Go to the window and look at him.”
Suzanna did as she was bidden. The window was unlatched in the warm April day. Two men sat together and the other reached out and touched his head. “Be ye clean,” he said. Before her very eyes, Suzanna watched the leprous patches vanish and clean, childish skin appear.
“He is the Lord!” Suzanna exclaimed.
The Healer raised his eyes to hers and held out his open hand to her. “And be ye clean also.”
Suzanna had long since ceased to notice the physical sensations of disease and guilt and grief. When the Master said those words to her, the fever departed, her body was healed and heart came to rest in her chest in perfect peace.
The host smiled at her and beckoned her to come in.
She nearly tripped in her haste as she tried to remove the alabaster box of ointment from its outer box. When she had it out, she let the outer box fall to the ground at the threshold of the house.
She studied the man as she came forward. He wore a beautiful coat, made all in one piece, without seam or pucker. His face was tan with mild, blue eyes. Neither handsome nor otherwise.
The host stood back a little, weeping with her as she knelt on the floor before the Healer. “Who am I, Daughter? the Lord asked.”
“Thou are the Christ.” The words came without constraint or doubt. “Thou art the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief. My father told me that he believed that the Jews would kill there Messiah when he came. That cannot be!”
The Lord touched her chin and raised her eyes to his. She knew the truth.
Suzanna stood and moved behind him. She poured out the full contents of the alabaster box onto his head.
“It is said to relieve pain. It may protect you from it when the time comes.”
He turned and looked up at her. “I will think of you when the time comes.”
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