Outside the little fence in front of Ananias’ house stood a desert dweller, his face burned black by the sun, his naked body half covered by a ragged sheet. Thick tangles of hair fell over his face, and his thin legs seemed barely able to support him. He tapped on the low gate of woven palm branches with the long bamboo stick he carried. No one passing by recognized him, and neither did the master of the house when he stuck his head through the door opening.
When Ananias opened the door the stranger collapsed into his arms. It was only when Ananias looked more closely at the pear shaped head that he knew the apparition to be Saul. Ananias at once grew pale with fear, knowing that the Ethnarch’s men had never given up their search for Saul even after three years. They still poked around now and then to see if he’d come back.
Quickly Ananias called to his wife and they carried Saul into the tiny, low-roofed house and laid him on the floor. After refreshing him with a cup of milk, which he barely kept down, they covered him with skins so that any neighbor who might happen to look in wouldn’t see him.
Saul came to a while later and immediately started talking about Jesus, who, he said, was the Son of God.
“We’ll talk about this when you get your strength back,” they said to him. “For now, just rest, and be at peace.”
That evening Ananias went to the synagogue for evening prayer, so as not to arouse any curiosity about his absence. But he said nothing to anyone about his visitor.
They kept Saul hidden for several weeks, nourishing him with milk and vegetables. Ananias treated Saul’s black, cracked skin with unguents, and carefully increased the amount of goat’s milk and ground vegetables he fed him each day.
As soon as he could walk, Saul begged them to take him to the synagogue for Sabbath services.
“I have great news for the House of Israel,” he said. “The spirit was with me in the desert and I saw Jacob’s ladder. I understand the dream now.”
Ananias didn’t understand him, and assumed he was still under delirium.
“You can’t go to the synagogue, or show your face anywhere. Some of the men who came with you to arrest us are still here, and they’ve never really stopped looking for you. Most of the people have pretty much forgotten what happened back then, but if they see you or hear you preaching, they’ll remember all right, and surely kill you.”
Nothing can happen to me,” answered Saul, tranquilly. Remember how the lord told you that he’d chosen me as an instrument to carry his word to the nations and to Israel?”
“Yes, that is what he told me,” answered Ananias.
“So how can anything happen to me before the word of the lord is fulfilled? Who can kill me if I’m the lord’s instrument?”
Ananias looked at Saul in astonishment, for Saul’s face was radiant.
“If your faith is that strong, then go in that power and spirit and fulfill what the spirit has said to you,” answered Ananias. And may God go with you.”
* * * * *
Because of Saul’s unshakeable faith in his mission, not only did Ananias agree that he should appear in the synagogue, but he went ahead of time to negotiate for him. He persuaded the head of the synagogue to allow a young rabbi who had just returned from Mount Sinai and was often visited by the spirit, to preach the next Sabbath. Ananias knew that the situation was fraught with danger. He thought that Saul’s sermon might embitter some of the members of the new sect, and that they wouldn't take his conversion seriously. But he was also under Saul’s spell, so to speak, and on the Sabbath he accompanied him to the synagogue.
The great synagogue of Damascus was not a single building. The Jewish community had grown so rapidly, mostly through the addition of Gentile converts, that they couldn’t build new buildings fast enough. As the congregation grew, the synagogue authorities were forced to add new buildings in a hurry with whatever materials were at hand, whether stone, wood or baked clay. The result was that the original synagogue looked like a mother hen sitting on a brood of chicks.
As usual, the synagogue was jammed with worshippers on this day, who overflowed from the main building into all the other buildings. Some sat so far away that they couldn’t hear the speakers, and so would have to watch the beadles’ signals so they’d know when to give the “Amen” response.
After the reading of the Pentateuch, the head of the synagogue got up and said, “A young rabbi is with us today, who just returned from Mount Sinai, where he fasted and sought the secrets of God’s word. He comes today to give us some words of comfort. Let him now speak as the spirit leads him.”
Saul came forward, wrapped in a prayer shawl.
Most of the congregation knew that a man had come from the High Priest three years earlier with a mission, and had then disappeared. But only a few close friends of Ananias knew what he looked like. When the people saw the pallid, sun-scorched young man, with his high pear-shaped head, their instincts told them that something unusual was about to happen. There was total silence.
The preacher didn’t start his sermon in the usual manner, with a verse from the Pentateuch. Instead he started talking about himself.
“I am a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and I sat at the feet of Rabbi Gamaliel. At that time the jealousy of God rose in me against those who praised Jesus of Nazareth as the King Messiah.”
An astonished buzzing ran through the crowd.
“Saul.”
“It’s Saul, the persecutor.”
“It’s the man who tied up the faithful and dragged them to the slaughter.”
“Shh! Let’s hear what he has to say.”
The young man addressed them in simplicity. He described his reason for coming to Damascus the first time, about his vision of Jesus, his blindness, and his flight. He told them of his wandering in the wilderness, and his meditations at Sinai. He explained his vision of Jacob’s ladder, which he knew to be Jesus, and how this caused him to understand that this Jesus was the Son of God the Father, Who’d sent him for salvation to the world.
A certain tension began to be felt in the room as Saul’s voice became alive with exaltation. He said that though the lord Messiah had been crucified in weakness, he was alive in the power of God. He was the only one who gave meaning and justification to our life, for he was the redemption, the fulfillment of creation, the promise that God had given to the prophets. And he would come to resurrect the dead.
This in itself created no new excitement, for there were many believers in the synagogue, and they’d often heard sermons on Jesus. Many believed that Jesus died for their sins and would soon return on the clouds of heaven. What did create a storm was when Saul drew from this that Jesus of Nazareth was not only Messiah, but that he was the Son of God. This was definitely new. This man went on to say that just as there could be nothing apart from God, so too there could be nothing apart from Jesus, for he was the personification of redemption, the purpose of creation. Therefore, Jesus was not merely a god. He was a second Authority.
Who does this man think he is? Just yesterday he was persecuting believers with all his might, and now he stands there preaching things unheard of in Israel. Not only were the pious Jews offended, but even the brows of the faithful were knit in bewilderment and discontent. This could not be allowed to go on.
No fists were raised, and no hands were laid on the preacher as would have happened in Jerusalem. But there was obvious dismay and discontent.
The head of the synagogue stood up, signaled for silence, and declared, “With the permission and authority of the synagogue court and of the other elders, I bid Saul of Tarsus to be silent, and I withdraw from him the privilege of preaching in the synagogue.”
As the congregation dispersed that morning, their heads were lowered in great sadness. They felt like they’d been present at the worship of the golden calf.
* * * * *
It was time for Saul to leave. He wouldn’t stop talking about his views on Messiah to anyone who would listen. He couldn’t preach in the synagogue, and the elders were even considering whether or not he should be put to the lash, but they didn’t want to draw any more attention to the matter than there already was. So Saul went to little groups or individuals, scholars or ignorant. The congregation was split down the middle for and against him with Jews and Gentiles on both sides.
Ananias was worried, not only about Saul’s safety, but the safety of the small congregation as well. Up till now, no one made any distinction between the believing Jews and the non-believing Jews; they were all part of the same congregation. But Saul was here, there and everywhere. He’d suddenly appear in a little group in the synagogue or the marketplace. Buyers, sellers, weavers, camel drivers, it didn’t matter. He’d argue with anyone. Ananias kept warning Saul about the arguments that kept breaking out, but Saul had only one answer. He belonged to the lord, and as long as the lord needed him here in this life, no evil could come to him. And if he were killed, it would just be proof that the lord needed him in the other life.
Rumors of the disturbances soon reached the ears of the governor of the city. He too remembered what had happened three years earlier, and he ordered that Saul be found and arrested.
But when the guards went out to find him, he was suddenly nowhere to be found. They looked for him everywhere they could possibly think of among the believers and the Jews. But Saul no longer came to the synagogue and he wasn’t seen among the believers or in the marketplace. No one seemed to know who had warned him, but apparently someone had. All anyone knew was that he had vanished.
Now it happened that one of Saul’s former lieutenants, Zebulun, was in Damascus at that time. Saul was so well known to him that no disguise would get by him. Zebulun found other men familiar to Saul and they stationed themselves at the gates of the city. Anyone leaving Damascus was closely scrutinized, sometimes even stripped. In fact, they were so determined to find him that they even examined the women. They were certain that if he attempted to leave, they would catch him.
On its eastern side, the wall of Damascus ran through a little olive grove. At the base of the wall inside the city, there were niches, hollows, and arches where the poor oil-pressers, vegetable dealers and camel drivers lived. The wheels of these poor oil-pressers were turned by donkey or by a blind slave. Outside the city, the oil mills of the wealthy were run by streams that ran like a network through the woods around Damascus. Small farmers brought their sacks of olives to be ground and pressed.
During the day the place was noisy with braying donkeys, neighing camels, bargaining farmers, and chaffing merchants. During the night silence reigned, and the only signs of human habitation were the modest little oil lamps sending up slender spirals of smoke.
There lived among the oil-pressers a young man named Zechariah. All day long he dragged sacks and baskets of olives to the mill, and loaded cruses and skins of pressed oil onto waiting donkeys. His body and clothing were greasy with oil. The hole where he lived, including the vessels and mattress and everything else was saturated with oil. And among the baskets and cruses, covered with a greasy rag, Saul of Tarsus lay all day.
For the first time in his life Saul felt what he’d made so many others feel. He knew now what it was like to be in danger for the sake of Jesus. He wasn’t afraid. He knew no one had any power over him as long as his mission was unfulfilled. But he now felt what it was like to be the hunted instead of the hunter. The experience both humbled and exalted him.
Under the filthy cover Saul felt he’d achieved the privilege of being persecuted for the “love of God who is in the King Messiah.”
One night two powerful arms lifted him out of his hiding place and placed him in a basket filthy with the thick ooze of olive waste. Zechariah also gave him a cake of bread and a gourd of water to sustain him in the desert. He covered the basket over with leaves, so that it looked like a basket of olives about to be carried to the mill. Carrying this heavy load on his shoulders, he made his way along the wall until he reached a lonely grove. Climbing to the top of the wall, he lowered the basket down on the other side with a rope. He told Saul to carry the basket so that if anyone saw him, he could say he was taking a load of olives to be pressed outside the city.
But Saul met no one on the other side of the wall. He stepped out into the deep blue night, and looked up at the stars he knew so well from the desert.
He turned his footsteps in the direction of Mount Hermon, whose majestic white head, illuminated by the stars, was visible in the night. His destination? Why, Jerusalem, of course!
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
18 - Metamorphosis
The young man Saul plunges on through the world, marching day and night, alone. Heaven stretches above, and oceans of sand beneath. The fiery tongues of the sun have made him a bundle of bones and nerves. His body, half wrapped in a tattered sheet, is scorched, withered and shrunk, skin drawn tightly over ribs. Scraggly legs support thin hips and his belly is worn out by hunger and thirst. His neck is like a twist of cords.
Only his great, pear shaped head has grown bigger. Brown wisps of shaggy hair stick out from under a tattered head covering, and mix with a beard that covers narrow jaws. His face is covered with a layer of sand. It’s in his throat. His pores are thick with it. He is drunk with sand.
Three years have passed since the day of the vision, but his loneliness has aged him three decades. If not for his one good flaming eye, the youthful twitch of his tightened lips and the strange radiance of his wide forehead, his face would look like that of an old man. Long, pitifully thin hands, lean on a bamboo staff, while his feet sink into the pathless sands at every step. His stooping back inclines almost toward a hump, showing the full weight of what he has taken on himself.
And what’s he been doing these three years? When he left Damascus, he was wrapped up in his vision. His eyes could see again, but his mind was dazed. He had just one desire, to find himself. He had no plan; he just fled aimlessly, asking only to be free from thought and will.
It chanced that the road he took led to Petra in Arabia, the capital of king Artos. When he arrived, he decided that since he knew no one there, he would find a Jew for whom he could work. He told no one who he was. He was careful to follow all the Jewish laws, and on the Sabbaths he went to the synagogue.
Petra was an unclean city, like Sodom. There were a mixture of Moabites, Edomites, Midianites and Amalekites living there, and they all worshipped Dionysus, a god of fruitfulness and joy. There was a never-ending series of festivals going on, including the most abominable forms of sexual deviance. Oil lamps were made in the shape of sexual organs, and revolting perversions were engraved on all the sacred utensils. Every dish, seat, and wall was covered with representations of Sodomite rites.
In this city of unbridled, savage appetites, Saul lived alone in the little Jewish community, worked his trade, and kept to himself.
But when he recovered his strength, the full force of what had happened began to make him afraid. He felt empty and naked. There was no doubt about the reality of the vision, but he knew that if, or since, it was true, then the whole rest of his life was one big sin. So young, and yet he’d committed so much evil, shed so much blood, and brought so much anguish on the world.
So while the vision was the only thing he had to hold onto, it offered him no peace.
At one point, Saul was in danger of sinking into despair, as if the demons were making one last effort to win his soul. His guilty conscience almost caused him to lose what little sanity he held onto.
“If I’ve done so much evil up till now in the name of good,” he said over and over, “who’s to say that tomorrow I won’t find something else that’ll make what I do today seem just as evil? What man can ever think he knows the final truth? We’re all sinners, and everything about us, our thoughts, our deeds, and even our truths, are all foul and putrid. So why not just live like the heathen? Why not quench every lust we have? I’m just a stinking pot that’ll soon be broken.”
One evening Saul somehow got caught up in a procession of riotous men and women carrying palm branches and torches, dancing half-naked to the music of flutes and clashing cymbals, and singing loudly on their way to the temple. A lithe, dark-eyed, brown-skinned Arab girl darted toward Saul and pulled him into the line of dancers. That night he ate sheep and goat flesh from the altars of the idol, and gave himself to the dancing and the music and the drunkenness of the ceremony. In the morning he awoke on the temple steps with his head in the lap of the idolatress, and was immediately tormented with the question of whether he had defiled his body before the god.
He remembered the words of warning from his teacher Rabbi Gamaliel, “I fear for you, Saul. I will pray God for your soul. You’ve chosen a path that is narrow and perilous.”
Saul now understood how easily those words could come true.
But it wasn’t in Saul to yield to such temptation. What it did do was wake him up to the fact that he needed to restore order in his life. But order must be preceded by unification, and that wasn’t possible while his life was divided into before the vision and after the vision. He vowed to sacrifice the former, for he knew that his only salvation was his faith in the new life, the second life.
His old life was one mass of sin, but it had been done in ignorance. The idolaters of Petra were not really guilty of idol worship, for their innermost desire was to worship the true God and their sacrifices were offered in ignorance. Therefore they were sinless. And so it was also with Saul. By abandoning the old life and clinging to the new, it was as if the old life never existed.
The lord had told him to go into Damascus for instructions, and there he’d been told that he was God’s chosen instrument for great things. God had chosen him, the greatest of all sinners, as His instrument.
Thus the old life was gone. His sins were washed clean and he was now as a newborn child. He’d been born again in Damascus.
And so he continued to wait.
Weeks and months went by with no sign and no direction. Such is the tragedy that faith does not contain its own security. The road to Damascus had been illuminated. The road from Damascus he had to build for himself.
He thought about taking a wife and raising a family like all men do, but he realized that he only thought this because of his reluctance to take the yoke that was being prepared for him. For the second part of the message was that “Saul will suffer much for my name.” Once he accepted that, he left for the wilderness of Sinai, the mountain where God had revealed himself to Moses.
Sinai had always drawn the religious souls who hungered for the divine spirit. Tradition declared it to be the purest of all mountains, the center of divine inspiration. It was said that the divine spirit hovered over it because it had never been made unclean with idol worship like other mountains. It had been protected from false gods and reserved and sanctified for the God of Israel. The Essenes were drawn to its penchant for inspiring visions. The disciples of John were drawn to it as well.
And so Saul resolved to live in its divine shadow as a Nazarite, so that the spirit might visit him. He traveled with a caravan of a rich Arab merchant who was taking a cargo of spices from Arabia to a port on the Red Sea. He left the caravan when they reached the sandy plateau where the foothills of Sinai begin.
As he traveled up the roadless slopes, Saul saw here and there withered, half-dead, cave dwelling Nazarites, Essenes, disciples of John the Baptist, and members of a brotherhood of Damascus called the Sons of Moses, who also believed the Messiah had come and who were sanctifying and preparing themselves for his imminent return. They were all just shadows of men, hollowed out by the hot winds and cold storms that alternately raged there. The black tatters on their bodies barely covered their shame, and their hair and beards were wildly matted. They sometimes passed whole weeks without food, and when they did eat, it was either cactus roots, dried pressed dates, or parched wheat grains. They drank the dew, which they collected painfully, drop by drop, in cruses. They passed the days in prayer and meditation, and at night they stared up into the heavens, reading the stars for their destiny. Wailing and howling could often be heard from the black caves in which they lived.
Saul stayed there for several months, fasting and praying in a vain attempt to bring down the Holy Spirit by the strength of his will. But there was no sign, no hint, no revelation. As his body weakened, so did his spirit. He stopped thinking and analyzing, lost control of himself, and started babbling like the others. He hated that for he saw nothing useful in it. The center of his world was his conscious being, not mystical abstractions. If he couldn’t think it through, he wanted no part of it.
Paul’s emphasis on the rational mind was so strong that even in his vision, his first question had been, “Who are you, lord?” He insisted on knowing with whom he was dealing and to what authority he was asked to bow. He remembered a lesson taught by Rabbi Gamaliel that Hillel’s opponents had once argued with him saying that they had heard voices from heaven supporting their viewpoint. Hillel replied that the Torah had been given to men, not angels, and therefore it was he, Hillel, who would decide what was right or wrong, not the angels.
Saul realized that these people at Sinai were all visionaries, trying to hear heavenly voices and achieve a “higher self.” But the Holy Spirit was not here. For that he needed an alert mind, for the Holy Spirit worked through the instrumentality of his brain.
So he left.
Carrying a gourd of water, his staff, and a bundle of dried dates, he went down to the foot of the plateau and joined a caravan bound for Damascus. While traveling with them, he didn’t engage in conversation, but lost himself in thoughts of a long ago generation that had traveled through these same sands. Their skeletons were buried here, the first generation of the liberation from Egypt. Saul felt like he could hear their lamentations over having been left there by Moses and Aaron.
Eventually they came to a place that looked like God had thought about making it into an oasis, but never finished. Perhaps there had been water here at one time, but now there were just crippled shapes of cactus and dwarf palms. He said his evening Shema, drank his little remaining water, and ate the last of his pressed figs. He praised God, and then he slept.
When he awoke his thoughts were clear and fresh. He went through his experience once more. He’d had a vision and an unimaginable, incomprehensible Messiah had revealed himself to him. This Messiah had been with God before creation, and would come on the clouds, surrounded by heavenly hosts, to judge the world. Saul had seen his form and heard his voice, and he now belonged to him eternally.
Now what was he trying to say when he answered that he was Jesus, “whom you persecute,” rather than “Jesus, the Messiah?” This must mean that the persecuted Jesus must come before the Messiah Jesus. So the Jesus who will come on the clouds lived among us first, and we didn’t know him. He taught us, performed good deeds, and died on a cross. So this earthly Jesus was just as important a part of the faith as the Jesus who will come on the clouds of heaven.
So this much was clear. The unknowable and incomprehensible Messiah was also known and comprehensible. We saw him, we heard him, and he walked among us.
But beyond that, who is this one who is like us and yet is also Messiah? He can’t be merely created, as we are, or as the stars are. Creation is comprehensible; it’s bound by natural law. Everything is ordered in its motions according to a system. This system is the wisdom of God that directs the motion of all creation. It’s the nature of God, the radiation of God, and nothing can exist without it.
All is in order. Messiah is the redemption, the lifting of creation to its highest perfection, the ultimate purpose for which God conceived it. It is the fulfillment of the task that was in the mind of God in the act of creation. And for this alone creation took place. Messiah is this part of the divinity in creation. His purpose is perfection, redemption, the highest level of salvation.
Thus Messiah is the higher will of God. He is higher than wisdom, for wisdom is but the present condition of creation. Messiah is the supreme objective of creation, the striving for perfection, for liberation from the earthly nature. He’s not bound in wisdom, which can only be achieved by laws and commandments, by arrangement and system, but in the nature of God, which is possible only through redemption. Messiah is the supreme effort of the universe. Without him creation has neither sense nor purpose. He is the reward and the final achievement, the thread that binds all creation to divinity.
And thus if follows that Messiah is the Son of God, and not, like wisdom, only the daughter of heaven touched with God’s nature. He is the Son who liberates us from nature and unites us with God. Through him we become like the angels. Through him we arise to eternal life. Through him we are redeemed from our imperfection and we achieve highest perfection.
Therefore, Jesus, the persecuted one, he who came from the tiny little town of Nazareth and lived among us, who preached in the Temple court and was not recognized, who was struck and shamed and bore the anguish of the cross, he is Messiah. He is the highest radiation of divinity, God’s redemption for the universe. Only through him do man and the universe acquire the meaning of their existence.
This was the revelation for which Saul had been waiting. And it did not come to him from without, but from within, with the voice of the Holy Spirit.
In the starry night Saul imagined Jesus of Nazareth stretched out like the ladder in Jacob’s dream. It was on a night just like this that Jacob saw the ladder stretched from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. Jesus is the ladder and it is on him that we mount up to heaven.
Saul resolved to bring the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth to all men.
He looked down to see his own black, withered body, and a verse came to mind. “He gave his body to the smiters.”
Saul of Tarsus knew what his body would have to endure for the sake of the gospel.
“I will consecrate my body to Jesus of Nazareth, even as I have consecrated my soul to him.”
Only his great, pear shaped head has grown bigger. Brown wisps of shaggy hair stick out from under a tattered head covering, and mix with a beard that covers narrow jaws. His face is covered with a layer of sand. It’s in his throat. His pores are thick with it. He is drunk with sand.
Three years have passed since the day of the vision, but his loneliness has aged him three decades. If not for his one good flaming eye, the youthful twitch of his tightened lips and the strange radiance of his wide forehead, his face would look like that of an old man. Long, pitifully thin hands, lean on a bamboo staff, while his feet sink into the pathless sands at every step. His stooping back inclines almost toward a hump, showing the full weight of what he has taken on himself.
And what’s he been doing these three years? When he left Damascus, he was wrapped up in his vision. His eyes could see again, but his mind was dazed. He had just one desire, to find himself. He had no plan; he just fled aimlessly, asking only to be free from thought and will.
It chanced that the road he took led to Petra in Arabia, the capital of king Artos. When he arrived, he decided that since he knew no one there, he would find a Jew for whom he could work. He told no one who he was. He was careful to follow all the Jewish laws, and on the Sabbaths he went to the synagogue.
Petra was an unclean city, like Sodom. There were a mixture of Moabites, Edomites, Midianites and Amalekites living there, and they all worshipped Dionysus, a god of fruitfulness and joy. There was a never-ending series of festivals going on, including the most abominable forms of sexual deviance. Oil lamps were made in the shape of sexual organs, and revolting perversions were engraved on all the sacred utensils. Every dish, seat, and wall was covered with representations of Sodomite rites.
In this city of unbridled, savage appetites, Saul lived alone in the little Jewish community, worked his trade, and kept to himself.
But when he recovered his strength, the full force of what had happened began to make him afraid. He felt empty and naked. There was no doubt about the reality of the vision, but he knew that if, or since, it was true, then the whole rest of his life was one big sin. So young, and yet he’d committed so much evil, shed so much blood, and brought so much anguish on the world.
So while the vision was the only thing he had to hold onto, it offered him no peace.
At one point, Saul was in danger of sinking into despair, as if the demons were making one last effort to win his soul. His guilty conscience almost caused him to lose what little sanity he held onto.
“If I’ve done so much evil up till now in the name of good,” he said over and over, “who’s to say that tomorrow I won’t find something else that’ll make what I do today seem just as evil? What man can ever think he knows the final truth? We’re all sinners, and everything about us, our thoughts, our deeds, and even our truths, are all foul and putrid. So why not just live like the heathen? Why not quench every lust we have? I’m just a stinking pot that’ll soon be broken.”
One evening Saul somehow got caught up in a procession of riotous men and women carrying palm branches and torches, dancing half-naked to the music of flutes and clashing cymbals, and singing loudly on their way to the temple. A lithe, dark-eyed, brown-skinned Arab girl darted toward Saul and pulled him into the line of dancers. That night he ate sheep and goat flesh from the altars of the idol, and gave himself to the dancing and the music and the drunkenness of the ceremony. In the morning he awoke on the temple steps with his head in the lap of the idolatress, and was immediately tormented with the question of whether he had defiled his body before the god.
He remembered the words of warning from his teacher Rabbi Gamaliel, “I fear for you, Saul. I will pray God for your soul. You’ve chosen a path that is narrow and perilous.”
Saul now understood how easily those words could come true.
But it wasn’t in Saul to yield to such temptation. What it did do was wake him up to the fact that he needed to restore order in his life. But order must be preceded by unification, and that wasn’t possible while his life was divided into before the vision and after the vision. He vowed to sacrifice the former, for he knew that his only salvation was his faith in the new life, the second life.
His old life was one mass of sin, but it had been done in ignorance. The idolaters of Petra were not really guilty of idol worship, for their innermost desire was to worship the true God and their sacrifices were offered in ignorance. Therefore they were sinless. And so it was also with Saul. By abandoning the old life and clinging to the new, it was as if the old life never existed.
The lord had told him to go into Damascus for instructions, and there he’d been told that he was God’s chosen instrument for great things. God had chosen him, the greatest of all sinners, as His instrument.
Thus the old life was gone. His sins were washed clean and he was now as a newborn child. He’d been born again in Damascus.
And so he continued to wait.
Weeks and months went by with no sign and no direction. Such is the tragedy that faith does not contain its own security. The road to Damascus had been illuminated. The road from Damascus he had to build for himself.
He thought about taking a wife and raising a family like all men do, but he realized that he only thought this because of his reluctance to take the yoke that was being prepared for him. For the second part of the message was that “Saul will suffer much for my name.” Once he accepted that, he left for the wilderness of Sinai, the mountain where God had revealed himself to Moses.
Sinai had always drawn the religious souls who hungered for the divine spirit. Tradition declared it to be the purest of all mountains, the center of divine inspiration. It was said that the divine spirit hovered over it because it had never been made unclean with idol worship like other mountains. It had been protected from false gods and reserved and sanctified for the God of Israel. The Essenes were drawn to its penchant for inspiring visions. The disciples of John were drawn to it as well.
And so Saul resolved to live in its divine shadow as a Nazarite, so that the spirit might visit him. He traveled with a caravan of a rich Arab merchant who was taking a cargo of spices from Arabia to a port on the Red Sea. He left the caravan when they reached the sandy plateau where the foothills of Sinai begin.
As he traveled up the roadless slopes, Saul saw here and there withered, half-dead, cave dwelling Nazarites, Essenes, disciples of John the Baptist, and members of a brotherhood of Damascus called the Sons of Moses, who also believed the Messiah had come and who were sanctifying and preparing themselves for his imminent return. They were all just shadows of men, hollowed out by the hot winds and cold storms that alternately raged there. The black tatters on their bodies barely covered their shame, and their hair and beards were wildly matted. They sometimes passed whole weeks without food, and when they did eat, it was either cactus roots, dried pressed dates, or parched wheat grains. They drank the dew, which they collected painfully, drop by drop, in cruses. They passed the days in prayer and meditation, and at night they stared up into the heavens, reading the stars for their destiny. Wailing and howling could often be heard from the black caves in which they lived.
Saul stayed there for several months, fasting and praying in a vain attempt to bring down the Holy Spirit by the strength of his will. But there was no sign, no hint, no revelation. As his body weakened, so did his spirit. He stopped thinking and analyzing, lost control of himself, and started babbling like the others. He hated that for he saw nothing useful in it. The center of his world was his conscious being, not mystical abstractions. If he couldn’t think it through, he wanted no part of it.
Paul’s emphasis on the rational mind was so strong that even in his vision, his first question had been, “Who are you, lord?” He insisted on knowing with whom he was dealing and to what authority he was asked to bow. He remembered a lesson taught by Rabbi Gamaliel that Hillel’s opponents had once argued with him saying that they had heard voices from heaven supporting their viewpoint. Hillel replied that the Torah had been given to men, not angels, and therefore it was he, Hillel, who would decide what was right or wrong, not the angels.
Saul realized that these people at Sinai were all visionaries, trying to hear heavenly voices and achieve a “higher self.” But the Holy Spirit was not here. For that he needed an alert mind, for the Holy Spirit worked through the instrumentality of his brain.
So he left.
Carrying a gourd of water, his staff, and a bundle of dried dates, he went down to the foot of the plateau and joined a caravan bound for Damascus. While traveling with them, he didn’t engage in conversation, but lost himself in thoughts of a long ago generation that had traveled through these same sands. Their skeletons were buried here, the first generation of the liberation from Egypt. Saul felt like he could hear their lamentations over having been left there by Moses and Aaron.
Eventually they came to a place that looked like God had thought about making it into an oasis, but never finished. Perhaps there had been water here at one time, but now there were just crippled shapes of cactus and dwarf palms. He said his evening Shema, drank his little remaining water, and ate the last of his pressed figs. He praised God, and then he slept.
When he awoke his thoughts were clear and fresh. He went through his experience once more. He’d had a vision and an unimaginable, incomprehensible Messiah had revealed himself to him. This Messiah had been with God before creation, and would come on the clouds, surrounded by heavenly hosts, to judge the world. Saul had seen his form and heard his voice, and he now belonged to him eternally.
Now what was he trying to say when he answered that he was Jesus, “whom you persecute,” rather than “Jesus, the Messiah?” This must mean that the persecuted Jesus must come before the Messiah Jesus. So the Jesus who will come on the clouds lived among us first, and we didn’t know him. He taught us, performed good deeds, and died on a cross. So this earthly Jesus was just as important a part of the faith as the Jesus who will come on the clouds of heaven.
So this much was clear. The unknowable and incomprehensible Messiah was also known and comprehensible. We saw him, we heard him, and he walked among us.
But beyond that, who is this one who is like us and yet is also Messiah? He can’t be merely created, as we are, or as the stars are. Creation is comprehensible; it’s bound by natural law. Everything is ordered in its motions according to a system. This system is the wisdom of God that directs the motion of all creation. It’s the nature of God, the radiation of God, and nothing can exist without it.
All is in order. Messiah is the redemption, the lifting of creation to its highest perfection, the ultimate purpose for which God conceived it. It is the fulfillment of the task that was in the mind of God in the act of creation. And for this alone creation took place. Messiah is this part of the divinity in creation. His purpose is perfection, redemption, the highest level of salvation.
Thus Messiah is the higher will of God. He is higher than wisdom, for wisdom is but the present condition of creation. Messiah is the supreme objective of creation, the striving for perfection, for liberation from the earthly nature. He’s not bound in wisdom, which can only be achieved by laws and commandments, by arrangement and system, but in the nature of God, which is possible only through redemption. Messiah is the supreme effort of the universe. Without him creation has neither sense nor purpose. He is the reward and the final achievement, the thread that binds all creation to divinity.
And thus if follows that Messiah is the Son of God, and not, like wisdom, only the daughter of heaven touched with God’s nature. He is the Son who liberates us from nature and unites us with God. Through him we become like the angels. Through him we arise to eternal life. Through him we are redeemed from our imperfection and we achieve highest perfection.
Therefore, Jesus, the persecuted one, he who came from the tiny little town of Nazareth and lived among us, who preached in the Temple court and was not recognized, who was struck and shamed and bore the anguish of the cross, he is Messiah. He is the highest radiation of divinity, God’s redemption for the universe. Only through him do man and the universe acquire the meaning of their existence.
This was the revelation for which Saul had been waiting. And it did not come to him from without, but from within, with the voice of the Holy Spirit.
In the starry night Saul imagined Jesus of Nazareth stretched out like the ladder in Jacob’s dream. It was on a night just like this that Jacob saw the ladder stretched from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. Jesus is the ladder and it is on him that we mount up to heaven.
Saul resolved to bring the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth to all men.
He looked down to see his own black, withered body, and a verse came to mind. “He gave his body to the smiters.”
Saul of Tarsus knew what his body would have to endure for the sake of the gospel.
“I will consecrate my body to Jesus of Nazareth, even as I have consecrated my soul to him.”
Sunday, November 22, 2009
17 - Road to Damascus
The messengers of the High Priest, along with Saul, are on the road to Damascus. Samuel, the commander of the Temple guards rides on a camel while the guards ride on donkeys. Although Saul was offered a camel, he and his men, Judah, Zebulun, and Zadok, prefer to walk. A wax tablet hangs by a purple thread around Saul’s neck, engraved with his letter of authorization.
“Be it known to all, that Saul, son of Baruch, of Tarsus in Cilicia, who is also called Paul, has been appointed by the High Priest, and is authorized to arrest, bind, and deliver to the men of the High Priest any Hellenistic Jew who fails to fulfill or who actively opposes the Law of Moses, so that they may be brought to trial in Jerusalem.”
The tablet is stamped with the High Priest’s seal and is signed by both him and the Chief Officer of the Temple.
As the young man Saul marches forward, his eyes are red from the dust of the road and from three sleepless nights. After crossing the Sea of Galilee from Tiberias to the heathen soil of Gadara, he traveled through the ten Gentile cities that the wicked Pompey had taken from the Jews and settled with Greek idolaters. The men ate flat cakes, dried cheese, figs and other fruits that they’d brought with them, for they wouldn’t eat the impure food served in the inns of the Gentiles. Other than Caesarea Philippi, he avoided all cities and villages and slept in the open, or in the cleft of some rock, on bamboo mattresses to avoid the pollution of idolaters’ tents.
By the fourth day when they entered the hot lowland that lies between Mount Hermon and the oasis-like thickly covered landscape of Damascus, they began to reel like drunkards. They were breathing more dust than air, and their mouths and noses were filled with sand. It was in every pore of their faces, beards and ears, and even got into their throats and lungs. Their mantles offered no protection. The worst was in the deepest part of the lowland where the rays of the sun beat down on them like bundles of spears and they felt like they were in a cauldron. There was no tree, no bush, no shadow. Though it was still early in the morning, the sun seemed to fill the air with tongues of flame.
On and on they stumble. They see an oasis ahead like a chimera, appearing then disappearing. They see the springs, so close they can almost hear the sound of murmuring waters in the thick groves. But their feet seem cemented to the ground. The closer the vision, the more it seems they’ll never get there. The water skins they’d brought were long since emptied and the camel with the large load seems ready to fall under his burden. Mechanically, they move on.
As they march, Saul feels the emptiness in his heart growing rather than diminishing as he’d hoped. He is filled with the thought that the same faces that haunted him in Jerusalem will continue to haunt him here. He knows that no matter how harsh he is, only a few of the believers will deny their Messiah. They won’t cry out or defend themselves. They will look at him with eyes of forgiveness, thus turning the tortures back on him.
For the hundredth time, he asks himself, “Who is this man they called the ‘Son of God?’” It’s the Jewish people as a whole who are called this. How can it be applied to a single individual, especially someone who was tortured like a slave and hammered to a cross?
But what if they are right? What if the one who took on himself the basest sufferings is the highest fulfillment?
The mad question shakes him like a storm. No! No! No! He is here to prove the opposite is true!
He steadies himself and his footsteps become more defiant. But not for long. Again he sees the face of Stephen and of all his victims. He hears their voices crying out, “Saul, Saul, you are one of us; why do you persecute us?”
“What am I doing?” he cries. “Why did God choose me to be the instrument of doom and punishment? What if I’m the evil one? Oh God, help me!”
The other men are dumbstruck with astonishment, for Saul hasn’t noticed that they’ve crossed the line between desert and town, and are now among trees, bushes and vineyards. Saul’s men have already thrown themselves down on the banks of the rivulets and washed their throats with loud spitting gurgles. They’ve washed their beards and eyebrows and are now plunging their hands and legs into the water to renew themselves in its coolness and sweetness.
The road nearby is filled with travelers. There are camels and donkeys loaded with merchandise. They carry skins of honey wine, earthen jars and woven stuffs. They carry cedar beams, incense and spices. Traders from Tyre and Sidon are here as well as Arab Bedouins with their household possessions towering high up between the humps of their camels. There are lords and slaves and heralds. Caravans and individual travelers pour in from the various roads headed to the gate of the city on to Straight Street.
But Saul is in a fog. In the middle of an oasis, he feels a great weariness taking hold of him. His limbs become soft and some other will seems to take over.
Suddenly the world is quiet. The leaves and branches of the trees stop rustling and are motionless as if they were dead images rather than blossoming things. A thick black cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, appears high above. And suddenly the colors of the world change and become fixed with new radiance. The plants look greener than ever before and their shape is otherworldly.
This is a normal occurrence near the end of summer here, when the rains are about to begin. The small cloud expands with terrifying swiftness until it covers the whole sky. What should happen next is that the winds will be unloosed, and a million storm demons take hold of the four corners of the world. The heads of trees will clash together, and the river waters will heave against their banks. Animals are scattered, and the tinkle of smashed vessels is heard. Bales of wool will tumble on cruses of oil, and donkeys and men flung together. Everyone will grab onto any kind of hold and try to seek shelter. Rocks will come plunging down on the road from the hills. Some men will call on their gods, and others will lift their hands to heaven, for it is the terror of God on earth.
But today, it doesn’t happen this way. Instead, the eerie silence remains. Shafts of light begin to break up the gigantic cloud, multiplying into bundles to become slanting pillars of solid light. Eyes are dazzled and a new fear seizes the earth. Donkeys break away and scatter and camels sink to the ground. Men kneel as the bundles of light coalesce into one burst of light that floods the world from end to end.
Saul lies at the edge of the road as though a mighty hand had thrown him down. His face is turned up to the open sky and his eyes are open. His companions stand paralyzed with amazement, for they hear him speaking with someone. They catch a few words. They know he is seeing a vision and they are terrified to be witnesses.
A man stands before Saul, a man who is both spirit and flesh. He’s not a giant but he seems taller than any man Saul has ever seen. He looks like an ordinary rabbi in a prayer shawl. His eyes are mournful yet radiant, filled with faith and love. Saul has seen these eyes before among the disciples. Since man was created in God’s image, Saul thinks this could be a spirit of the Lord. But the man stretches out his hands to Saul and the sorrow on his face is a human sorrow. His eyes are filled with tears, and his lips are distorted in pain, as if all the anguish of the world had passed into him. His voice is that of a simple man who suffers as Saul has seen so many suffer.
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
In that voice Saul hears the silent protest of everyone he has persecuted.
The men standing nearby hear Saul ask, “Who are you, lord?”
“Saul hears the reply, “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you persecute.”
The men standing nearby hear Saul ask, “Lord, what shall I do?”
Saul hears the reply, “Arise and go to Damascus. There you will be told what you have to do.”
Suddenly the vision is gone. In fact, everything is gone; the whole world has disappeared from Saul’s sight. His companions ask him what he saw; he doesn’t answer. He sits there, silent, helpless, and blind.
His companions tell him that they too were blinded by the light, and assure him that their sight has returned and his will too when his strength returns. Saul hears, but doesn’t answer.
With Zadok on one side and Samuel on the other, they lead blind Saul into Damascus.
On Straight Street they find an inn run by a Jew. They enter the courtyard to the sounds and smells of donkeys and camel dung as well as the heavy odor of damp wool. They hire a little room on the upper floor where they lay the blind Saul down onto a bamboo mattress.
For three days Saul lies there, surrounded by eternal night. The world around him is like the abyss of hell into which he is forever falling with no hope of ever reaching bottom. But there is a point in his heart that is sending out rays of light. He must lie in darkness now, and these rays of light will be his hope.
His companions are impatient, for they want to report to the heads of the synagogue what happened to the messenger who carries the authority of the High Priest. But Saul doesn’t let them. He wants to wait for the sign promised him on the road. Then he will report to the heads of the synagogue.
Meanwhile his companions try to help their blind leader. They bring exorcists, healers, men who cure blindness or drive out evil spirits. Nothing helps.
Then an old man arrives and introduces himself as Ananias. Saul knows the name. He knows that this man is a pious and god fearing Jew who observes the law in all its details. He also knows that this man is one of the leaders of the congregation of believers, and he had planned on making him his first prisoner. But Ananias also knows who Saul is, and he is afraid. He is here only because he also had a vision that told him to come here.
“Leave me alone with him,” Ananias says to Saul’s companions. “I have something to say to him.”
They leave the room and the old man is alone with Saul. He sits on the floor and takes Saul’s hand in his. Saul's heart beats fast, and he trembles. Could this be the sign he is looking for? He can’t see the old man’s face, but warmth and love and understanding stream into him from the hand that encloses his. If not for the vision, this hand would now be loaded with chains, twisted and bound, until the blood gushed forth. And with this thought comes all the beaten bodies with their welt-covered backs and bleeding faces. Saul can see nothing else.
He has an overwhelming urge to just lie there, neither eating nor drinking, until he withers away. But there was that second half of the vision, the promise. In his agony, he is suddenly overwhelmed by repentance and regret.
“How did this blindness come on you, Saul, my brother?” he hears the old man ask.
“I had a vision on the road.”
“A vision, brother Saul?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you see in the vision?”
Saul stares around the room as if he can see, as though he wants to make sure he is alone with the old man.
“There is no one here but you and I?”
Saul sits up on the mattress. His eyes are wide open, and it seems to him that they are blind only to this world of ours. He can see what no one else can.
“I saw Jesus of Nazareth, the one you call lord!” he cries out, falling back on the mattress.
“I know it, brother Saul,” says Ananias.
“You know it?”
He sits up again, feels with his hands for the old man’s knees, and buries his blind face into them.
“Yes, I know it, just like I know that you came here to take the faithful prisoner, just as you did in Jerusalem. The lord showed himself to you on the road.”
Saul lifts his head up. The passion of repentance descends on him like a storm and shakes him from head to foot.
“Ananias! Do you believe there is forgiveness for my sins and salvation for my soul?” he cries.
“Saul, do you not understand that the God of our fathers has chosen you, that you might know his will, and hear his voice? From now on you will be a witness and will testify to all men about what you saw and heard. So why delay? Arise and be baptized and call on the name of the Lord.”
And old Ananias places his warm loving hands on Saul’s eyes.
A violent trembling comes over Saul and in that moment the scales fall from his eyes. A hot flood of tears breaks through the stoniness of his heart and washes away his blindness. He stares around him and sees that everything is joyous and sun-drenched. And beside him stands old Ananias, his face shining with grace and forgiveness.
Saul was baptized that very day. Then, with the letters of the High Priest still in his possession, he stole out of the city secretly, and set out all alone on the road to the wilderness.
“Be it known to all, that Saul, son of Baruch, of Tarsus in Cilicia, who is also called Paul, has been appointed by the High Priest, and is authorized to arrest, bind, and deliver to the men of the High Priest any Hellenistic Jew who fails to fulfill or who actively opposes the Law of Moses, so that they may be brought to trial in Jerusalem.”
The tablet is stamped with the High Priest’s seal and is signed by both him and the Chief Officer of the Temple.
As the young man Saul marches forward, his eyes are red from the dust of the road and from three sleepless nights. After crossing the Sea of Galilee from Tiberias to the heathen soil of Gadara, he traveled through the ten Gentile cities that the wicked Pompey had taken from the Jews and settled with Greek idolaters. The men ate flat cakes, dried cheese, figs and other fruits that they’d brought with them, for they wouldn’t eat the impure food served in the inns of the Gentiles. Other than Caesarea Philippi, he avoided all cities and villages and slept in the open, or in the cleft of some rock, on bamboo mattresses to avoid the pollution of idolaters’ tents.
By the fourth day when they entered the hot lowland that lies between Mount Hermon and the oasis-like thickly covered landscape of Damascus, they began to reel like drunkards. They were breathing more dust than air, and their mouths and noses were filled with sand. It was in every pore of their faces, beards and ears, and even got into their throats and lungs. Their mantles offered no protection. The worst was in the deepest part of the lowland where the rays of the sun beat down on them like bundles of spears and they felt like they were in a cauldron. There was no tree, no bush, no shadow. Though it was still early in the morning, the sun seemed to fill the air with tongues of flame.
On and on they stumble. They see an oasis ahead like a chimera, appearing then disappearing. They see the springs, so close they can almost hear the sound of murmuring waters in the thick groves. But their feet seem cemented to the ground. The closer the vision, the more it seems they’ll never get there. The water skins they’d brought were long since emptied and the camel with the large load seems ready to fall under his burden. Mechanically, they move on.
As they march, Saul feels the emptiness in his heart growing rather than diminishing as he’d hoped. He is filled with the thought that the same faces that haunted him in Jerusalem will continue to haunt him here. He knows that no matter how harsh he is, only a few of the believers will deny their Messiah. They won’t cry out or defend themselves. They will look at him with eyes of forgiveness, thus turning the tortures back on him.
For the hundredth time, he asks himself, “Who is this man they called the ‘Son of God?’” It’s the Jewish people as a whole who are called this. How can it be applied to a single individual, especially someone who was tortured like a slave and hammered to a cross?
But what if they are right? What if the one who took on himself the basest sufferings is the highest fulfillment?
The mad question shakes him like a storm. No! No! No! He is here to prove the opposite is true!
He steadies himself and his footsteps become more defiant. But not for long. Again he sees the face of Stephen and of all his victims. He hears their voices crying out, “Saul, Saul, you are one of us; why do you persecute us?”
“What am I doing?” he cries. “Why did God choose me to be the instrument of doom and punishment? What if I’m the evil one? Oh God, help me!”
The other men are dumbstruck with astonishment, for Saul hasn’t noticed that they’ve crossed the line between desert and town, and are now among trees, bushes and vineyards. Saul’s men have already thrown themselves down on the banks of the rivulets and washed their throats with loud spitting gurgles. They’ve washed their beards and eyebrows and are now plunging their hands and legs into the water to renew themselves in its coolness and sweetness.
The road nearby is filled with travelers. There are camels and donkeys loaded with merchandise. They carry skins of honey wine, earthen jars and woven stuffs. They carry cedar beams, incense and spices. Traders from Tyre and Sidon are here as well as Arab Bedouins with their household possessions towering high up between the humps of their camels. There are lords and slaves and heralds. Caravans and individual travelers pour in from the various roads headed to the gate of the city on to Straight Street.
But Saul is in a fog. In the middle of an oasis, he feels a great weariness taking hold of him. His limbs become soft and some other will seems to take over.
Suddenly the world is quiet. The leaves and branches of the trees stop rustling and are motionless as if they were dead images rather than blossoming things. A thick black cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, appears high above. And suddenly the colors of the world change and become fixed with new radiance. The plants look greener than ever before and their shape is otherworldly.
This is a normal occurrence near the end of summer here, when the rains are about to begin. The small cloud expands with terrifying swiftness until it covers the whole sky. What should happen next is that the winds will be unloosed, and a million storm demons take hold of the four corners of the world. The heads of trees will clash together, and the river waters will heave against their banks. Animals are scattered, and the tinkle of smashed vessels is heard. Bales of wool will tumble on cruses of oil, and donkeys and men flung together. Everyone will grab onto any kind of hold and try to seek shelter. Rocks will come plunging down on the road from the hills. Some men will call on their gods, and others will lift their hands to heaven, for it is the terror of God on earth.
But today, it doesn’t happen this way. Instead, the eerie silence remains. Shafts of light begin to break up the gigantic cloud, multiplying into bundles to become slanting pillars of solid light. Eyes are dazzled and a new fear seizes the earth. Donkeys break away and scatter and camels sink to the ground. Men kneel as the bundles of light coalesce into one burst of light that floods the world from end to end.
Saul lies at the edge of the road as though a mighty hand had thrown him down. His face is turned up to the open sky and his eyes are open. His companions stand paralyzed with amazement, for they hear him speaking with someone. They catch a few words. They know he is seeing a vision and they are terrified to be witnesses.
A man stands before Saul, a man who is both spirit and flesh. He’s not a giant but he seems taller than any man Saul has ever seen. He looks like an ordinary rabbi in a prayer shawl. His eyes are mournful yet radiant, filled with faith and love. Saul has seen these eyes before among the disciples. Since man was created in God’s image, Saul thinks this could be a spirit of the Lord. But the man stretches out his hands to Saul and the sorrow on his face is a human sorrow. His eyes are filled with tears, and his lips are distorted in pain, as if all the anguish of the world had passed into him. His voice is that of a simple man who suffers as Saul has seen so many suffer.
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
In that voice Saul hears the silent protest of everyone he has persecuted.
The men standing nearby hear Saul ask, “Who are you, lord?”
“Saul hears the reply, “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you persecute.”
The men standing nearby hear Saul ask, “Lord, what shall I do?”
Saul hears the reply, “Arise and go to Damascus. There you will be told what you have to do.”
Suddenly the vision is gone. In fact, everything is gone; the whole world has disappeared from Saul’s sight. His companions ask him what he saw; he doesn’t answer. He sits there, silent, helpless, and blind.
His companions tell him that they too were blinded by the light, and assure him that their sight has returned and his will too when his strength returns. Saul hears, but doesn’t answer.
With Zadok on one side and Samuel on the other, they lead blind Saul into Damascus.
On Straight Street they find an inn run by a Jew. They enter the courtyard to the sounds and smells of donkeys and camel dung as well as the heavy odor of damp wool. They hire a little room on the upper floor where they lay the blind Saul down onto a bamboo mattress.
For three days Saul lies there, surrounded by eternal night. The world around him is like the abyss of hell into which he is forever falling with no hope of ever reaching bottom. But there is a point in his heart that is sending out rays of light. He must lie in darkness now, and these rays of light will be his hope.
His companions are impatient, for they want to report to the heads of the synagogue what happened to the messenger who carries the authority of the High Priest. But Saul doesn’t let them. He wants to wait for the sign promised him on the road. Then he will report to the heads of the synagogue.
Meanwhile his companions try to help their blind leader. They bring exorcists, healers, men who cure blindness or drive out evil spirits. Nothing helps.
Then an old man arrives and introduces himself as Ananias. Saul knows the name. He knows that this man is a pious and god fearing Jew who observes the law in all its details. He also knows that this man is one of the leaders of the congregation of believers, and he had planned on making him his first prisoner. But Ananias also knows who Saul is, and he is afraid. He is here only because he also had a vision that told him to come here.
“Leave me alone with him,” Ananias says to Saul’s companions. “I have something to say to him.”
They leave the room and the old man is alone with Saul. He sits on the floor and takes Saul’s hand in his. Saul's heart beats fast, and he trembles. Could this be the sign he is looking for? He can’t see the old man’s face, but warmth and love and understanding stream into him from the hand that encloses his. If not for the vision, this hand would now be loaded with chains, twisted and bound, until the blood gushed forth. And with this thought comes all the beaten bodies with their welt-covered backs and bleeding faces. Saul can see nothing else.
He has an overwhelming urge to just lie there, neither eating nor drinking, until he withers away. But there was that second half of the vision, the promise. In his agony, he is suddenly overwhelmed by repentance and regret.
“How did this blindness come on you, Saul, my brother?” he hears the old man ask.
“I had a vision on the road.”
“A vision, brother Saul?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you see in the vision?”
Saul stares around the room as if he can see, as though he wants to make sure he is alone with the old man.
“There is no one here but you and I?”
Saul sits up on the mattress. His eyes are wide open, and it seems to him that they are blind only to this world of ours. He can see what no one else can.
“I saw Jesus of Nazareth, the one you call lord!” he cries out, falling back on the mattress.
“I know it, brother Saul,” says Ananias.
“You know it?”
He sits up again, feels with his hands for the old man’s knees, and buries his blind face into them.
“Yes, I know it, just like I know that you came here to take the faithful prisoner, just as you did in Jerusalem. The lord showed himself to you on the road.”
Saul lifts his head up. The passion of repentance descends on him like a storm and shakes him from head to foot.
“Ananias! Do you believe there is forgiveness for my sins and salvation for my soul?” he cries.
“Saul, do you not understand that the God of our fathers has chosen you, that you might know his will, and hear his voice? From now on you will be a witness and will testify to all men about what you saw and heard. So why delay? Arise and be baptized and call on the name of the Lord.”
And old Ananias places his warm loving hands on Saul’s eyes.
A violent trembling comes over Saul and in that moment the scales fall from his eyes. A hot flood of tears breaks through the stoniness of his heart and washes away his blindness. He stares around him and sees that everything is joyous and sun-drenched. And beside him stands old Ananias, his face shining with grace and forgiveness.
Saul was baptized that very day. Then, with the letters of the High Priest still in his possession, he stole out of the city secretly, and set out all alone on the road to the wilderness.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
16 - The Brink of the Abyss
When Saul woke up, there were a thousand fiery points pressed against his temples, forehead and neck. He felt like a sharp-toothed adder had forced its way into his bones and was feeding on the marrow. The black abyss of the lowest hell was in his heart and everything in his life that was as firm as rocks was falling into it with him. His nephew brought him a cup of honey wine for strength, for his face was the color of a spleen.
And yet he got up, met his guards, and set out on a feverish hunt for new victims.
Sometimes Saul thought that the demon that was spreading false hope among his victims had chosen his heart for a battlefield between himself and mankind. Other times he thought that God was tossing him back and forth from certainty to doubt like a ball in a wild game. Was this all just one big mockery?
Certainly it was the demon and Saul vowed once again to stand up to the messenger like a man.
So he redoubled his efforts. He closed his eyes and ears to the pains and pleadings of the sinners. There was some small reward. A few repented of the sin and turned back to the God of the Torah. But the vast majority, the simple and most ignorant, still clung to the demon.
Saul learned from his spies that James, Simon and John were making regular, secret rounds into the wretched homes of their followers and strengthening them against the persecution. Sometimes he would arrive at someone’s home where the smell of oils and unguents still lingered, as if James had just been there. This was especially frustrating as he was impotent against James.
But there were other leaders he could move against. Some had fled the city leaving the little people to bear the brunt. He would find them.
First on his list was Phillip, the friend of the dead preacher. He lived in a great house on the Street of the Cheesemakers, not far from the entrance to the upper city. His house stood on a slope spread over several terraces. There was a courtyard with a water basin surrounded by cypress trees on the lowest level. The sleeping quarters were also on this level and a flight of stairs led up to the living quarters on the next level. On the top terraces were the women’s quarters.
When Saul came into the quiet, well-tended garden court, he found no one. The men’s chambers were empty of all furniture, except for a mattress or low table. A mantle hung on the wall in one room. But not a single person was seen.
As he came out of the men’s quarters, Saul noticed that Phillip’s oldest daughter Zipporah was standing on the steps leading from above. She was dressed in sackcloth like all women of her sect.
“The ones you’re looking for aren’t here, Saul,” said Zipporah. “But the women are here, so carry out your work. We’re ready.”
“My work?”
“Command your men to take us prisoner as you’ve done with all the others.”
“Take who prisoner? The men are gone.”
“Us, the women.”
“Women? Who pays any attention to them?” he quoted the Aramaic phrase of contempt current in Jerusalem.
“Are we better than the poor women you’ve dragged into court, Saul? Why don’t you carry out your mission with us?”
“I told you, women don’t count.”
And turning to his companions he said, “Come! The men have fled, leaving the women’s clothes behind.”
Zipporah called out, “Saul, you don’t perform your task honestly! There are some you favor!”
Saul didn’t answer her. He just muttered, “Women are a different breed.”
Nevertheless Zipporah’s words rang true in his ears. He hadn’t done it before, so why did he do it now? He didn’t have any problem dragging the poor women to court. Why should it be different with the rich?
“Who are you, Saul?” he asked himself. “The avenging messenger of God or an oppressor of the poor?”
But Zipporah’s accusation went even deeper than she’d intended. Saul had already suspected that Phillip had left the city, for he no longer appeared in the synagogue. Saul just went to his house to appease his conscience. But there was another man he hadn’t even tried to find.
It would certainly be easy enough to find Barnabas guilty of breaking the law. And of course he knew right where he lived. But Saul had avoided him. He knew he didn’t have the resolve to condemn his old friend to the lash. He hadn’t seen him once since their separation, for in the deepest recesses of his heart, Saul knew that Barnabas was the just man and he was the wicked one.
He was at a crisis point and he knew he couldn’t evade the issue any longer. Saul did respect his old friend’s enthusiasm and envied his ability to surrender to an ideal, and this challenge would be the ultimate test of Saul’s resolve. Saul knew that he was afraid to look Barnabas in the eye, but he also knew that Barnabas had much to offer. Goodness and gaiety radiated from his face and surrounded him with a brightness and warmth that attracted young and old alike. So meeting the test with a man who’d given up as much as Barnabas had would show Saul’s sincerity and prove that what he was doing was of the Lord.
He went directly from Phillip’s house to Mary’s.
There was no servant or overseer to greet him as in the past. A girl opened the gate for him and immediately let out a scream of terror as she fled toward the inner rooms. Saul restrained his men from entering and waited. Barnabas came out shortly along with the boy John.
Saul barely recognized his former friend. Could this be the graceful and elegant Barnabas, who was always seen in his tunic of delicate linen, his flowing black mantle and the flashing ring on his finger? The man walking toward him looked more like a Nazarite. His hair hung straight down, he was wrapped in sackcloth, and a pale face peered out from behind a wild growth of beard.
As the two men looked at each other, Barnabas could see something in Saul’s face that betrayed a terrified weakness.
“Peace to you, Saul, my brother,” said Barnabas, stretching out his hand.
“There is no peace for the wicked,” answered Saul, as he turned his eyes away.
“I pray for you, Saul, that God will help you see where you’ve gone wrong. Wake up, my brother!”
“The prayer of the wicked is like incense on the altars of idols,” retorted Saul. “I am no brother to those who eat of their sacrifices.”
“I’ll never stop praying for you, Saul. And when you wake up and see how far down the path of evil you’ve gone, don’t flee in terror to the valley of death. Instead find the strength to cling to the horns of the altar and return to your Father in heaven. I know you don’t do these things out of wickedness, but because you’ve been misled by evil counselors, who’ve convinced you that you’re doing God’s work.
“Wake up, Saul, and realize that you’re not doing God’s work, but Satan’s.”
“Is this how you speak to the messenger of the High Priest?” yelled Zebulun as he cracked his whip across Barnabas’ cheek.
Blood spurted from Barnabas’ mouth before Saul could even react, for Barnabas’ words had thrown him into confusion. And to top it off, rather than answer with angry words, Barnabas turned his head and said, “The lord taught us that if one smite you on one cheek, turn the other to him also.”
“Yes, we’ve heard it. Let me accommodate you!” shouted Zebulun, lifting up his whip again.
But this time he felt the hot, sharp fingers of his leader on his arm.
“Son of wickedness, are we bandits?”
And without looking at Barnabas, Saul said, “Let’s go. Your whip has spoiled God’s work.”
But as he marched out with his men, he heard Barnabas’ voice, “I knew it, Saul. You are my brother!”
Saul knew he was defeated and had no right to continue in God’s work.
After this Saul wandered around like a blind man. He tried to carry on, but all he could see was the once proud Barnabas in every follower of the disciples. Yes, he’d seen others turn the other cheek, but he never paid attention to it until he saw Barnabas do it. And Zipporah’s voice kept ringing in his ears, “Saul, you don’t perform your task honestly! There are some you favor!”
He was a hypocrite.
He wandered around Jerusalem like this for two or three days until a thought occurred to him. Since he played favorites in Jerusalem, why not go somewhere else, somewhere where he had no friends and no one knew him. That way the only thing between him and the followers of the disciples would be the law of God. How simple then to win back his old confidence.
The opportunity soon came.
The Hellenistic believers of Jerusalem had scattered from the city because of their terror of Saul. They fled to Samaria and Galilee, and even outside Palestine. The gospel was taken to Syrian Antioch where there was a ripe field ready to harvest. Disciples of John the Baptist had already prepared the fields and it was relatively easy for the Hellenistic Jews to found small congregations. Word of this development soon reached the ears of the High Priest.
The reports from Damascus were especially troubling. The rabbis there had already made it too easy for the Gentiles to convert to Judaism, although the men still had to be circumcised. Many of the unconverted crowded the synagogue on the Sabbath. The High Priest was alarmed to find out that a congregation of the new sect had formed in Damascus and a number of Gentiles had also joined them.
Now it so happened that the High Priest had an excellent relationship with the king in Damascus. The Arab ruler was often a guest in the High Priest’s home and brought offerings to the Temple. He would understand that the blasphemous attitude of the leaders of the new sect would corrupt the piety of all the Jews of Syria if allowed to go unchecked.
The High Priest had no doubt that the king would cooperate in the arrests of the leaders, for his influence was powerful and far-reaching. It was recognized everywhere that the Jews were a separate people and that the High Priest was their legal representative. He had the legal right to order his Jewish subjects to appear before him in Jerusalem.
The only concern was to find the right messenger to send to Damascus with authority to arrest the leaders of the new sect and to bring them to Jerusalem for trial. The man chosen for such a mission had to be one consumed with zeal for the cause.
The moment Saul heard of the decision, he rushed to the chamber of the chief officer to volunteer.
The High Priest immediately accepted and letters were addressed to the heads of the synagogues of Damascus the very same day.
The letters were sealed and handed over to Saul, who now had the authority to arrest any Jew in Damascus at his discretion and bring him to the High Priest’s court.
Word of all this reached the ears of James and the other disciples, as these things always do, and they were terrified. Saul’s very name had become synonymous with calamity. Hands trembled and faces were pale as they spent the common mealtime in mourning. But there was also anger and contempt expressed from the Pharisee believers, of which there was a good-sized group. These former students of Gamaliel felt shamed and humiliated at the mention of Saul’s name, the same as their ancestors would have been shamed at the mention of the golden calf.
One said, “Who knows what will happen to the holy congregation of Damascus? I’ve heard that the Damascus ruler is a friend of Annas, and he will surely deliver the saints to the slaughter.”
Another said, “To think this man was once a pupil of Rabbi Gamaliel, a disciple of the mild Hillel.”
“Let us pray for the peace of the holy congregation of Damascus,” said an older disciple. “Let us pray that He protect them from the hand of the enemy.”
“Did not our lord teach us to pray for our enemies?” responded James. “Come, dear brothers, let us all pray for the young man, Saul, that God may be merciful to him and turn his heart to the good.”
So James bowed his head, and the others followed suit.
“Lord of all the worlds, Father of all souls, have compassion on the soul of the young man, Saul. Lift it from the depths to which it has fallen. Open his eyes that he may see the light of Your holy servant, Messiah. Turn his heart to the good, so that he may recognize and forsake the evil he has done. Be compassionate in his hour of repentance. Bring him back to the path of Your teaching, that he may find strength. Amen.”
On the other side of the curtain, the women repeated his prayer, word for word.
And yet he got up, met his guards, and set out on a feverish hunt for new victims.
Sometimes Saul thought that the demon that was spreading false hope among his victims had chosen his heart for a battlefield between himself and mankind. Other times he thought that God was tossing him back and forth from certainty to doubt like a ball in a wild game. Was this all just one big mockery?
Certainly it was the demon and Saul vowed once again to stand up to the messenger like a man.
So he redoubled his efforts. He closed his eyes and ears to the pains and pleadings of the sinners. There was some small reward. A few repented of the sin and turned back to the God of the Torah. But the vast majority, the simple and most ignorant, still clung to the demon.
Saul learned from his spies that James, Simon and John were making regular, secret rounds into the wretched homes of their followers and strengthening them against the persecution. Sometimes he would arrive at someone’s home where the smell of oils and unguents still lingered, as if James had just been there. This was especially frustrating as he was impotent against James.
But there were other leaders he could move against. Some had fled the city leaving the little people to bear the brunt. He would find them.
First on his list was Phillip, the friend of the dead preacher. He lived in a great house on the Street of the Cheesemakers, not far from the entrance to the upper city. His house stood on a slope spread over several terraces. There was a courtyard with a water basin surrounded by cypress trees on the lowest level. The sleeping quarters were also on this level and a flight of stairs led up to the living quarters on the next level. On the top terraces were the women’s quarters.
When Saul came into the quiet, well-tended garden court, he found no one. The men’s chambers were empty of all furniture, except for a mattress or low table. A mantle hung on the wall in one room. But not a single person was seen.
As he came out of the men’s quarters, Saul noticed that Phillip’s oldest daughter Zipporah was standing on the steps leading from above. She was dressed in sackcloth like all women of her sect.
“The ones you’re looking for aren’t here, Saul,” said Zipporah. “But the women are here, so carry out your work. We’re ready.”
“My work?”
“Command your men to take us prisoner as you’ve done with all the others.”
“Take who prisoner? The men are gone.”
“Us, the women.”
“Women? Who pays any attention to them?” he quoted the Aramaic phrase of contempt current in Jerusalem.
“Are we better than the poor women you’ve dragged into court, Saul? Why don’t you carry out your mission with us?”
“I told you, women don’t count.”
And turning to his companions he said, “Come! The men have fled, leaving the women’s clothes behind.”
Zipporah called out, “Saul, you don’t perform your task honestly! There are some you favor!”
Saul didn’t answer her. He just muttered, “Women are a different breed.”
Nevertheless Zipporah’s words rang true in his ears. He hadn’t done it before, so why did he do it now? He didn’t have any problem dragging the poor women to court. Why should it be different with the rich?
“Who are you, Saul?” he asked himself. “The avenging messenger of God or an oppressor of the poor?”
But Zipporah’s accusation went even deeper than she’d intended. Saul had already suspected that Phillip had left the city, for he no longer appeared in the synagogue. Saul just went to his house to appease his conscience. But there was another man he hadn’t even tried to find.
It would certainly be easy enough to find Barnabas guilty of breaking the law. And of course he knew right where he lived. But Saul had avoided him. He knew he didn’t have the resolve to condemn his old friend to the lash. He hadn’t seen him once since their separation, for in the deepest recesses of his heart, Saul knew that Barnabas was the just man and he was the wicked one.
He was at a crisis point and he knew he couldn’t evade the issue any longer. Saul did respect his old friend’s enthusiasm and envied his ability to surrender to an ideal, and this challenge would be the ultimate test of Saul’s resolve. Saul knew that he was afraid to look Barnabas in the eye, but he also knew that Barnabas had much to offer. Goodness and gaiety radiated from his face and surrounded him with a brightness and warmth that attracted young and old alike. So meeting the test with a man who’d given up as much as Barnabas had would show Saul’s sincerity and prove that what he was doing was of the Lord.
He went directly from Phillip’s house to Mary’s.
There was no servant or overseer to greet him as in the past. A girl opened the gate for him and immediately let out a scream of terror as she fled toward the inner rooms. Saul restrained his men from entering and waited. Barnabas came out shortly along with the boy John.
Saul barely recognized his former friend. Could this be the graceful and elegant Barnabas, who was always seen in his tunic of delicate linen, his flowing black mantle and the flashing ring on his finger? The man walking toward him looked more like a Nazarite. His hair hung straight down, he was wrapped in sackcloth, and a pale face peered out from behind a wild growth of beard.
As the two men looked at each other, Barnabas could see something in Saul’s face that betrayed a terrified weakness.
“Peace to you, Saul, my brother,” said Barnabas, stretching out his hand.
“There is no peace for the wicked,” answered Saul, as he turned his eyes away.
“I pray for you, Saul, that God will help you see where you’ve gone wrong. Wake up, my brother!”
“The prayer of the wicked is like incense on the altars of idols,” retorted Saul. “I am no brother to those who eat of their sacrifices.”
“I’ll never stop praying for you, Saul. And when you wake up and see how far down the path of evil you’ve gone, don’t flee in terror to the valley of death. Instead find the strength to cling to the horns of the altar and return to your Father in heaven. I know you don’t do these things out of wickedness, but because you’ve been misled by evil counselors, who’ve convinced you that you’re doing God’s work.
“Wake up, Saul, and realize that you’re not doing God’s work, but Satan’s.”
“Is this how you speak to the messenger of the High Priest?” yelled Zebulun as he cracked his whip across Barnabas’ cheek.
Blood spurted from Barnabas’ mouth before Saul could even react, for Barnabas’ words had thrown him into confusion. And to top it off, rather than answer with angry words, Barnabas turned his head and said, “The lord taught us that if one smite you on one cheek, turn the other to him also.”
“Yes, we’ve heard it. Let me accommodate you!” shouted Zebulun, lifting up his whip again.
But this time he felt the hot, sharp fingers of his leader on his arm.
“Son of wickedness, are we bandits?”
And without looking at Barnabas, Saul said, “Let’s go. Your whip has spoiled God’s work.”
But as he marched out with his men, he heard Barnabas’ voice, “I knew it, Saul. You are my brother!”
Saul knew he was defeated and had no right to continue in God’s work.
After this Saul wandered around like a blind man. He tried to carry on, but all he could see was the once proud Barnabas in every follower of the disciples. Yes, he’d seen others turn the other cheek, but he never paid attention to it until he saw Barnabas do it. And Zipporah’s voice kept ringing in his ears, “Saul, you don’t perform your task honestly! There are some you favor!”
He was a hypocrite.
He wandered around Jerusalem like this for two or three days until a thought occurred to him. Since he played favorites in Jerusalem, why not go somewhere else, somewhere where he had no friends and no one knew him. That way the only thing between him and the followers of the disciples would be the law of God. How simple then to win back his old confidence.
The opportunity soon came.
The Hellenistic believers of Jerusalem had scattered from the city because of their terror of Saul. They fled to Samaria and Galilee, and even outside Palestine. The gospel was taken to Syrian Antioch where there was a ripe field ready to harvest. Disciples of John the Baptist had already prepared the fields and it was relatively easy for the Hellenistic Jews to found small congregations. Word of this development soon reached the ears of the High Priest.
The reports from Damascus were especially troubling. The rabbis there had already made it too easy for the Gentiles to convert to Judaism, although the men still had to be circumcised. Many of the unconverted crowded the synagogue on the Sabbath. The High Priest was alarmed to find out that a congregation of the new sect had formed in Damascus and a number of Gentiles had also joined them.
Now it so happened that the High Priest had an excellent relationship with the king in Damascus. The Arab ruler was often a guest in the High Priest’s home and brought offerings to the Temple. He would understand that the blasphemous attitude of the leaders of the new sect would corrupt the piety of all the Jews of Syria if allowed to go unchecked.
The High Priest had no doubt that the king would cooperate in the arrests of the leaders, for his influence was powerful and far-reaching. It was recognized everywhere that the Jews were a separate people and that the High Priest was their legal representative. He had the legal right to order his Jewish subjects to appear before him in Jerusalem.
The only concern was to find the right messenger to send to Damascus with authority to arrest the leaders of the new sect and to bring them to Jerusalem for trial. The man chosen for such a mission had to be one consumed with zeal for the cause.
The moment Saul heard of the decision, he rushed to the chamber of the chief officer to volunteer.
The High Priest immediately accepted and letters were addressed to the heads of the synagogues of Damascus the very same day.
The letters were sealed and handed over to Saul, who now had the authority to arrest any Jew in Damascus at his discretion and bring him to the High Priest’s court.
Word of all this reached the ears of James and the other disciples, as these things always do, and they were terrified. Saul’s very name had become synonymous with calamity. Hands trembled and faces were pale as they spent the common mealtime in mourning. But there was also anger and contempt expressed from the Pharisee believers, of which there was a good-sized group. These former students of Gamaliel felt shamed and humiliated at the mention of Saul’s name, the same as their ancestors would have been shamed at the mention of the golden calf.
One said, “Who knows what will happen to the holy congregation of Damascus? I’ve heard that the Damascus ruler is a friend of Annas, and he will surely deliver the saints to the slaughter.”
Another said, “To think this man was once a pupil of Rabbi Gamaliel, a disciple of the mild Hillel.”
“Let us pray for the peace of the holy congregation of Damascus,” said an older disciple. “Let us pray that He protect them from the hand of the enemy.”
“Did not our lord teach us to pray for our enemies?” responded James. “Come, dear brothers, let us all pray for the young man, Saul, that God may be merciful to him and turn his heart to the good.”
So James bowed his head, and the others followed suit.
“Lord of all the worlds, Father of all souls, have compassion on the soul of the young man, Saul. Lift it from the depths to which it has fallen. Open his eyes that he may see the light of Your holy servant, Messiah. Turn his heart to the good, so that he may recognize and forsake the evil he has done. Be compassionate in his hour of repentance. Bring him back to the path of Your teaching, that he may find strength. Amen.”
On the other side of the curtain, the women repeated his prayer, word for word.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
15 - Quicksands of Conscience
O Father in heaven Who probes the souls of men, open a little ray of light in the bottomless pit of the human heart that we may penetrate for a moment into its mysteries. For who can understand the dark things of life? What forces worked in the young man Saul for him to carry out the work of the evil one? For indeed his soul was the battleground between good and evil.
Saul of Tarsus became a sinister figure in Jerusalem. He kindled a fanatical hatred of the new sect in some of the darker elements of certain communities and made them his bodyguard. He persuaded them that if they did what he said, they would be performing the highest service to God.
One of his lieutenants was one-eyed Judah, a manumitted slave, a Goliath of a man, with a split upper lip and limbs that bore the marks of the chains he once wore. Another was Zebulon, who gathered a band of manumitted slaves of the Synagogue of the Libertines. He was a little man, but his body was close-knit and powerful, like an ox. He’d been a leader of a certain robber band made up of remnants of the scattered army of Judah the Galilean. He’d been captured by the Romans and condemned to the galleys, but had led a rebellion when the ship was in port and escaped. His name was feared in Jerusalem.
Besides these there were Samuel and Zadok from the loom, as well as seasoned guards from the High Priest. They carried whips and copper-tipped staves. People trembled at their approach. Saul went throughout the city with them, in the Temple courts, on the streets, and in the synagogues of the Hellenists. He also broke at will into the homes of members of the new sect.
His legitimacy was confined to those who offended against the accepted commandments, not against anyone who believed in Messiah or in the resurrection, for these things were not unlawful. This made the followers of James and Peter untouchable, for they were composed of scrupulously pious Jews who were observant in all details of ritual. He was also careful not to bring any charges that would incur the death penalty, for that would have required a meeting of the Sanhedrin and the presence of the Pharisees. Worse, it would have meant the intervention of the Roman authorities. Therefore he limited his accusations against members of the Greek-speaking communities of the new sect and to such transgressions of the law that sentence could be issued by the minor priestly court.
His method was to enter a synagogue alone, wearing the tablet of authority under his cloak. His men would enter first, one at a time, and scatter among the worshippers. They would start talking to people, or just listen to other conversations. If they heard anything that could be interpreted, even in the slightest way, as derogatory against the High Priest, or that lacked the proper reverence for the Temple, they gave a signal to Saul, who then ordered his guards in from the outside. The suspect was seized on the spot and carried off to the Temple court. There he was imprisoned and beaten by the guards until he confessed his transgression of the law. A trial and condemnation followed with little formality.
The most extreme penalty in the court’s jurisdiction was “the lash,” although there were different interpretations on how it could be used. A prisoner could be lashed as many times as it took to make him “repent.”
The name of Saul of Tarsus immediately became synonymous with the angel of death. Whenever his shadow fell on the Temple steps, people scattered. The Hellenists hid in their homes and in their tomb vaults. They dreaded to appear in the synagogue for fear of falling in Saul’s shadow.
But Saul knew the practices and habits of the Greek-speaking Jews and it wasn’t difficult for him to find them. He knew hundreds of them in person, and the ones most likely to have fallen under Stephen’s spell, so he pursued them into their homes without waiting for his guards to report to him. Besides his own memories, there were plenty of people willing to inform him of their activities. Jerusalem was a city of many divisions, and anyone who had a grudge against another had only to point him out as a member of the new sect, and he was taken.
And Saul wasn’t content to limit his activities to the daylight hours. He even invaded suspect homes at night, hauling away the father or mother or both, destroying the family. It became a never-ending cycle of prison, court and lash. Saul usually observed the beatings and sometimes even joined in.
The leaders of the Pharisees looked on in utter amazement at the terror the High Priest had instituted. But when the master rabbi protested to the High Priest, old Annas answered him piously, stroking his long white beard.
“God forbid that we should punish anyone for believing in Messiah, or even for believing in the resurrection. We only bring to judgment those who would destroy the law. It doesn’t matter if they are of the new sect or not. As long as one insults the Temple, or blasphemes the Law of Moses, we don’t ask whether it’s in the name of a false Messiah. We are doing your work, Pharisees!”
Technically, this defense was flawless. The Pharisees could only look on in ironic amazement at this sudden zeal on the part of the High Priest for Pharisaic traditions.
One day Saul sat in one of the cells of the Temple dungeon. His wild hair fell over his face and shoulders, for he’d taken a Nazarite vow on the day he entered the High Priest’s service. Joseph Nikator, a dyer whom Saul’s men had seized at his cauldron, stood before him. Saul knew Joseph well. They’d often prayed together. Joseph was a young man of twenty-four, a widower and father of two children. He was a day laborer employed in the dyer’s section of the valley right next to the goat’s hair weaver that Saul worked for. He wasn’t highly educated; he could barely say his prayers in Hebrew and his Greek was corrupted by many local Aramaic expressions.
But Joseph was deeply pious. He rose early every morning to attend synagogue before work, and didn’t return home till late at night. He was devoted to his congregation and was a willing worker. Saul had delighted in Joseph’s simple unshakeable faith that shone from his eyes, and in turn Joseph found in Saul a help in time of trouble. For the life of this simple man was troubled by many storms. His wife, with whom he’d been very close, had died, leaving him to raise their two sons. Work wasn’t always available and Joseph was too proud to apply to the public charities. Therefore, he often remained in his pitlike dwelling in the valley, hungering together with his children. Yet he never rebelled or complained. He was always joyful and found happiness in every little beam of sunlight. Saul used to love talking with him.
Lately, however, it was discovered that he’d fallen under the influence of the powerful preacher Stephen. He believed in Messiah and expected his coming at any minute. So now he stood before Saul, surrounded by guards with loaded whips. His face was swollen and streaked with wounds, the blood trickling down to his bare chest. Saul’s eyes were fixed sharply on his childlike face.
“When was the last time you brought a purification offering to the Temple?” asked Saul.
“A long time ago, before Messiah revealed himself,” answered Joseph in a quiet matter of fact way.
“Before Messiah revealed himself?” asked Saul.
“Yes, before he showed himself to the disciples and before the martyr Stephen had yet given us the good news.”
“And since then, you haven’t sinned or felt the need to bring a purification offering to the Temple?”
“From that time on my purification offering has been Messiah, who was tormented and died for our sins.”
Saul bit his upper lip and felt the sweat of anguish dampening his brow. He clenched his fists, feeling lost for a moment. If this had been one of the prominent members of the Greek-speaking community, his response would have been to watch the man’s punishment with joy. It would have refreshed him. But this childlike, innocent expression disarmed him. It was the exact same tone and expression he used to use to describe his faith in God the Father. It was the same unshakeable, rocklike foundation that had sustained generations. How could he destroy that?
“Joseph, my dear friend!” he cried. “Don’t you know that for refusing to fulfill a commandment you can be given the lash continuously until you are willing?”
“Saul, my brother, what can you do to me if Messiah has already come?” asked Joseph, lifting his eyes to the roof. “Who can do any evil against me when my soul is knit in redemption by my redeemer?”
“But, Joseph, this is idol worship!” cried Saul, as he felt his patience wane.
“No, Saul, my brother, it’s not idol worship. It’s the tradition of my fathers and the covenant of the patriarchs. We are not deceived. Messiah is true, promised by the prophets in the name of God.”
“Take him away,” shrieked Saul. “He blasphemes!”
Saul stood by while the servants of the High Priest laid Joseph across the threshold of the court, and laid their lead-weighted whips across his back. He watched as one bloody welt after another sprang up. Not a moan or a sigh escaped the young man’s lips. He surrendered his body in love to his tormentors, taking the lashes in the joy of his faith. The only sounds heard from him were words from the Psalms.
And now the lashes seemed to be falling on Saul’s own naked soul, and with every blow he clenched his teeth as though he were the one feeling the burn of it. He knew that the longer he watched, the more harm he did to himself. He knew that the foundations under him were being shaken. But he stayed at his post as though he needed to take this punishment on himself.
That night Saul lay on the hard bench that served as his bed, in the upper room of his sister Hannah’s house, praying, “Lord of all the earth, take pity on me! You’ve taken the children of men and thrown them into a dark jungle and said, ‘Find your own way through the labyrinth!’ How can we Father, when You’ve given authority to both the good and the wicked, and they war with one another. The authorities are confused and we sway this way and that. Father, open just one ray of light for me. You know my heart. You know that everything I do is for Your glory, and for Your holy Torah. What else is there but Your teaching and laws? Father, help me in my wretchedness. I’ve built everything on You. With You I’m the defender of Your Torah; without You I’m a sinner forever!”
His nephew Annas, who slept near his door, heard Saul’s groaning and came to him.
“Uncle Saul, what’s wrong? I hear you crying.”
The sound of concern in the lad’s voice seemed to awaken Saul.
“What difference does it make,” he asked, “to tear the fruit down piece by piece. It’s not the little ones who are guilty. It’s the great ones who mislead them. A great ax must be lifted up against the whole tree, and the fruit will die with it. It’s the great ones we must destroy.”
Early the next morning he set out with Judah on one side of him and Zebulun on the other, his guards following. He found the disciples in the temple court. James son of Joseph, Simon, and the brothers James and John stood in one group. A second group stood in another corner. They weren’t preaching at the moment, but were saying the morning Shema. They didn’t notice Saul, and he backed off a little and watched. Here were Jews engaged in the same devotions as all other Jews. How could he lift up his hand against a tree rooted in Israel? These were Pharisees, just like him.
“Do not lay your hand on James!” the High Priest had said.
Oh the wretched confusion! He left commanding his men to follow.
There was nothing he could do then. He must pluck the fruit piece by piece. He went at it again with renewed fury.
He rested neither day nor night. His ear was ever open to reports, and anywhere suspicion pointed, he went with his guards and dragged sinners from their homes, throwing them into the Temple dungeons.
As long as his energy carried him, he was fine. But the few hours he spent on his hard, narrow bed were hours of torment. There was no peace. His conscience gripped him like a vise. The ripped and bloody flesh he saw by day returned to him at night in the form of bodies writhing above his head. But he seldom heard sounds of complaint. They accepted their suffering in silence as if it were a special gift.
And these nightmares were not of learned men, but of ordinary weavers, dyers and sandal makers. Where did such simple people, whom he knew so well and loved so deeply, find such strength? They could barely read, they were weak in the law, and their code of observance was slender and uncertain. Where could they have gotten the endurance to suffer so much for a false Messiah and a lying hope?
Joseph, the dyer, who belonged to his own synagogue, was the foremost of the ghastly nighttime visitors. His face was open and friendly, with eyes that seemed to look for someone’s superior strength and wisdom. His spirit was the very symbol of the virtues of Israel. Saul told himself a thousand times that it was impossible that he could have tortured and flayed an innocent soul.
Finally, Saul decided to find Joseph and talk to him one last time, to convince him with all the arguments at his disposal that others had misled him to wander on a false path, and that he could still be saved if he would just listen to Saul. If he could save Joseph’s soul, then in rescuing him he would be rescuing himself.
Not wanting to cause a panic, Saul went down into the Kidron valley alone, wrapped in a black mantle and having his face covered. Eventually he found Joseph, lying under a canopy of branches supported by four upright poles. His shattered body was stretched out on a pile of burlap. A cruse of water stood nearby for his refreshment, and a neighbor sat by his side dipping a rag in some oil and applying it to the welts on his back. Other than two children playing nearby, no one else was around.
When Saul unfolded his mantle and sat down near the feet of the beaten man, the neighbor recognized him, jumped to his feet with a wild yell, and fled from the booth.
But Joseph showed no fear, or even astonishment. It took him a moment to focus, but then his face distorted into a smile of pain, and pity was written in his eyes.
“Joseph,” said Saul, “I’ve come to ask your forgiveness for putting you to the lash.”
“I forgave you a long time ago, Saul,” said Joseph with his childlike smile.
“Is there no anger in your heart? I did it for your own good, Joseph.”
“I know you meant it so. I accept the pain with love.”
“It was to make you turn from the evil ways wicked men have lured you into, and to have you return to your Father in heaven.”
“You’re right, Saul. I am a sinner. God punished me for my own good. God is just, and his judgments are just.”
“To have you return,” continued Saul, “from following the path of belief in a false Messiah.”
“No, Saul, Messiah is true. God has seen our poverty and has sent us a redeemer, to help us.”
“How can he help you if he couldn’t help himself?” asked Saul.
“Oh, Saul, Messiah took pain on himself so that, in suffering like us, he could be one of us. He drank the cup of our shame and wretchedness so that he could take our sins on himself.”
These words were like scorpions in Saul’s ears.
“Let the tongue that says such blasphemies be struck dumb. God’s chosen one shamed and beaten by the rod of Rome?”
“I’m not as learned as you, Saul, but don’t you see that in order for Messiah to save us, he must go down to the depths of hell and lift out the souls who have fallen into it? Now, nothing more can happen to us, for even if we fall into the pit of death, Messiah stands there with outstretched arms to lift us up. ‘Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.’ That’s why Messiah gave himself to the blows and insults of Rome with love.”
Saul was dumbfounded. There was no conceivable way to save this man, for nothing he was saying had either wit or logic, and it was all so alien to the Law of Moses that the only answer for him was punishment with the lash. But Saul was weary of doing this. The man who lay before him was so far beyond redemption that all Saul could now do was curse.
“Cursed be the mouth that whispered those lies into your ears! You’ve put yourself outside the community; you’ve lost your portion with Israel. Return, Joseph, before it’s too late.”
“I will pray for you, Saul, that God open your eyes to see the great light that has come into our darkness.”
“You will pray for me? I’m your enemy. I’ve beaten you, and I’ll beat you again, until you admit that the evil one has you in his net. Until you return to the God of Israel, Joseph, I am your enemy.”
“The lord taught us to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us, to do good to those who use us despitefully, and to pray for those who persecute us.”
“Which lord?”
“God’s servant, Messiah.”
“To do good to those who persecute you?” asked Saul, wonderingly.
“Yes, so that we might be children of our Father in heaven.”
Saul fled from Joseph shaken to his very soul, filled with rage against his former friend and also against himself. What was this? He’d gone to an ordinary, simple Jew to teach and enlighten him, and to make it clear that what he was doing, he was doing for the sake of heaven. Instead, he’d cried out that he was his enemy and would punish him again and again. And then the sinner, this beaten man, had turned on him with enlightenment, declared that he had nothing against his tormentor, that he loved him and would pray for him.
Saul was shamed by the actions of this simple man who could so disarm him that not only had he been unable to answer him, he’d been driven to rage and bitterness. What “lord” could implant such love into the hearts of the simple? Who could spread such teachings among the broken of spirit that they could stand up to the learned and disarm them? Who was he whose fall was interpreted as the supreme victory, and whose weakness was seen as unconquerable strength?
Saul had a dream that night. Once again he saw Stephen kneeling naked, half buried in stones, his flesh covered with running blood. But now the stones were no longer stones. They were transformed into human heads with the faces of people Saul knew and loved, people he saw at prayers and in the marketplace, but whose necks were stretched out for the sacrificial knife. These faces were peaceful because all their questions had been answered, and all their hopes fulfilled.
Saul of Tarsus became a sinister figure in Jerusalem. He kindled a fanatical hatred of the new sect in some of the darker elements of certain communities and made them his bodyguard. He persuaded them that if they did what he said, they would be performing the highest service to God.
One of his lieutenants was one-eyed Judah, a manumitted slave, a Goliath of a man, with a split upper lip and limbs that bore the marks of the chains he once wore. Another was Zebulon, who gathered a band of manumitted slaves of the Synagogue of the Libertines. He was a little man, but his body was close-knit and powerful, like an ox. He’d been a leader of a certain robber band made up of remnants of the scattered army of Judah the Galilean. He’d been captured by the Romans and condemned to the galleys, but had led a rebellion when the ship was in port and escaped. His name was feared in Jerusalem.
Besides these there were Samuel and Zadok from the loom, as well as seasoned guards from the High Priest. They carried whips and copper-tipped staves. People trembled at their approach. Saul went throughout the city with them, in the Temple courts, on the streets, and in the synagogues of the Hellenists. He also broke at will into the homes of members of the new sect.
His legitimacy was confined to those who offended against the accepted commandments, not against anyone who believed in Messiah or in the resurrection, for these things were not unlawful. This made the followers of James and Peter untouchable, for they were composed of scrupulously pious Jews who were observant in all details of ritual. He was also careful not to bring any charges that would incur the death penalty, for that would have required a meeting of the Sanhedrin and the presence of the Pharisees. Worse, it would have meant the intervention of the Roman authorities. Therefore he limited his accusations against members of the Greek-speaking communities of the new sect and to such transgressions of the law that sentence could be issued by the minor priestly court.
His method was to enter a synagogue alone, wearing the tablet of authority under his cloak. His men would enter first, one at a time, and scatter among the worshippers. They would start talking to people, or just listen to other conversations. If they heard anything that could be interpreted, even in the slightest way, as derogatory against the High Priest, or that lacked the proper reverence for the Temple, they gave a signal to Saul, who then ordered his guards in from the outside. The suspect was seized on the spot and carried off to the Temple court. There he was imprisoned and beaten by the guards until he confessed his transgression of the law. A trial and condemnation followed with little formality.
The most extreme penalty in the court’s jurisdiction was “the lash,” although there were different interpretations on how it could be used. A prisoner could be lashed as many times as it took to make him “repent.”
The name of Saul of Tarsus immediately became synonymous with the angel of death. Whenever his shadow fell on the Temple steps, people scattered. The Hellenists hid in their homes and in their tomb vaults. They dreaded to appear in the synagogue for fear of falling in Saul’s shadow.
But Saul knew the practices and habits of the Greek-speaking Jews and it wasn’t difficult for him to find them. He knew hundreds of them in person, and the ones most likely to have fallen under Stephen’s spell, so he pursued them into their homes without waiting for his guards to report to him. Besides his own memories, there were plenty of people willing to inform him of their activities. Jerusalem was a city of many divisions, and anyone who had a grudge against another had only to point him out as a member of the new sect, and he was taken.
And Saul wasn’t content to limit his activities to the daylight hours. He even invaded suspect homes at night, hauling away the father or mother or both, destroying the family. It became a never-ending cycle of prison, court and lash. Saul usually observed the beatings and sometimes even joined in.
The leaders of the Pharisees looked on in utter amazement at the terror the High Priest had instituted. But when the master rabbi protested to the High Priest, old Annas answered him piously, stroking his long white beard.
“God forbid that we should punish anyone for believing in Messiah, or even for believing in the resurrection. We only bring to judgment those who would destroy the law. It doesn’t matter if they are of the new sect or not. As long as one insults the Temple, or blasphemes the Law of Moses, we don’t ask whether it’s in the name of a false Messiah. We are doing your work, Pharisees!”
Technically, this defense was flawless. The Pharisees could only look on in ironic amazement at this sudden zeal on the part of the High Priest for Pharisaic traditions.
One day Saul sat in one of the cells of the Temple dungeon. His wild hair fell over his face and shoulders, for he’d taken a Nazarite vow on the day he entered the High Priest’s service. Joseph Nikator, a dyer whom Saul’s men had seized at his cauldron, stood before him. Saul knew Joseph well. They’d often prayed together. Joseph was a young man of twenty-four, a widower and father of two children. He was a day laborer employed in the dyer’s section of the valley right next to the goat’s hair weaver that Saul worked for. He wasn’t highly educated; he could barely say his prayers in Hebrew and his Greek was corrupted by many local Aramaic expressions.
But Joseph was deeply pious. He rose early every morning to attend synagogue before work, and didn’t return home till late at night. He was devoted to his congregation and was a willing worker. Saul had delighted in Joseph’s simple unshakeable faith that shone from his eyes, and in turn Joseph found in Saul a help in time of trouble. For the life of this simple man was troubled by many storms. His wife, with whom he’d been very close, had died, leaving him to raise their two sons. Work wasn’t always available and Joseph was too proud to apply to the public charities. Therefore, he often remained in his pitlike dwelling in the valley, hungering together with his children. Yet he never rebelled or complained. He was always joyful and found happiness in every little beam of sunlight. Saul used to love talking with him.
Lately, however, it was discovered that he’d fallen under the influence of the powerful preacher Stephen. He believed in Messiah and expected his coming at any minute. So now he stood before Saul, surrounded by guards with loaded whips. His face was swollen and streaked with wounds, the blood trickling down to his bare chest. Saul’s eyes were fixed sharply on his childlike face.
“When was the last time you brought a purification offering to the Temple?” asked Saul.
“A long time ago, before Messiah revealed himself,” answered Joseph in a quiet matter of fact way.
“Before Messiah revealed himself?” asked Saul.
“Yes, before he showed himself to the disciples and before the martyr Stephen had yet given us the good news.”
“And since then, you haven’t sinned or felt the need to bring a purification offering to the Temple?”
“From that time on my purification offering has been Messiah, who was tormented and died for our sins.”
Saul bit his upper lip and felt the sweat of anguish dampening his brow. He clenched his fists, feeling lost for a moment. If this had been one of the prominent members of the Greek-speaking community, his response would have been to watch the man’s punishment with joy. It would have refreshed him. But this childlike, innocent expression disarmed him. It was the exact same tone and expression he used to use to describe his faith in God the Father. It was the same unshakeable, rocklike foundation that had sustained generations. How could he destroy that?
“Joseph, my dear friend!” he cried. “Don’t you know that for refusing to fulfill a commandment you can be given the lash continuously until you are willing?”
“Saul, my brother, what can you do to me if Messiah has already come?” asked Joseph, lifting his eyes to the roof. “Who can do any evil against me when my soul is knit in redemption by my redeemer?”
“But, Joseph, this is idol worship!” cried Saul, as he felt his patience wane.
“No, Saul, my brother, it’s not idol worship. It’s the tradition of my fathers and the covenant of the patriarchs. We are not deceived. Messiah is true, promised by the prophets in the name of God.”
“Take him away,” shrieked Saul. “He blasphemes!”
Saul stood by while the servants of the High Priest laid Joseph across the threshold of the court, and laid their lead-weighted whips across his back. He watched as one bloody welt after another sprang up. Not a moan or a sigh escaped the young man’s lips. He surrendered his body in love to his tormentors, taking the lashes in the joy of his faith. The only sounds heard from him were words from the Psalms.
And now the lashes seemed to be falling on Saul’s own naked soul, and with every blow he clenched his teeth as though he were the one feeling the burn of it. He knew that the longer he watched, the more harm he did to himself. He knew that the foundations under him were being shaken. But he stayed at his post as though he needed to take this punishment on himself.
That night Saul lay on the hard bench that served as his bed, in the upper room of his sister Hannah’s house, praying, “Lord of all the earth, take pity on me! You’ve taken the children of men and thrown them into a dark jungle and said, ‘Find your own way through the labyrinth!’ How can we Father, when You’ve given authority to both the good and the wicked, and they war with one another. The authorities are confused and we sway this way and that. Father, open just one ray of light for me. You know my heart. You know that everything I do is for Your glory, and for Your holy Torah. What else is there but Your teaching and laws? Father, help me in my wretchedness. I’ve built everything on You. With You I’m the defender of Your Torah; without You I’m a sinner forever!”
His nephew Annas, who slept near his door, heard Saul’s groaning and came to him.
“Uncle Saul, what’s wrong? I hear you crying.”
The sound of concern in the lad’s voice seemed to awaken Saul.
“What difference does it make,” he asked, “to tear the fruit down piece by piece. It’s not the little ones who are guilty. It’s the great ones who mislead them. A great ax must be lifted up against the whole tree, and the fruit will die with it. It’s the great ones we must destroy.”
Early the next morning he set out with Judah on one side of him and Zebulun on the other, his guards following. He found the disciples in the temple court. James son of Joseph, Simon, and the brothers James and John stood in one group. A second group stood in another corner. They weren’t preaching at the moment, but were saying the morning Shema. They didn’t notice Saul, and he backed off a little and watched. Here were Jews engaged in the same devotions as all other Jews. How could he lift up his hand against a tree rooted in Israel? These were Pharisees, just like him.
“Do not lay your hand on James!” the High Priest had said.
Oh the wretched confusion! He left commanding his men to follow.
There was nothing he could do then. He must pluck the fruit piece by piece. He went at it again with renewed fury.
He rested neither day nor night. His ear was ever open to reports, and anywhere suspicion pointed, he went with his guards and dragged sinners from their homes, throwing them into the Temple dungeons.
As long as his energy carried him, he was fine. But the few hours he spent on his hard, narrow bed were hours of torment. There was no peace. His conscience gripped him like a vise. The ripped and bloody flesh he saw by day returned to him at night in the form of bodies writhing above his head. But he seldom heard sounds of complaint. They accepted their suffering in silence as if it were a special gift.
And these nightmares were not of learned men, but of ordinary weavers, dyers and sandal makers. Where did such simple people, whom he knew so well and loved so deeply, find such strength? They could barely read, they were weak in the law, and their code of observance was slender and uncertain. Where could they have gotten the endurance to suffer so much for a false Messiah and a lying hope?
Joseph, the dyer, who belonged to his own synagogue, was the foremost of the ghastly nighttime visitors. His face was open and friendly, with eyes that seemed to look for someone’s superior strength and wisdom. His spirit was the very symbol of the virtues of Israel. Saul told himself a thousand times that it was impossible that he could have tortured and flayed an innocent soul.
Finally, Saul decided to find Joseph and talk to him one last time, to convince him with all the arguments at his disposal that others had misled him to wander on a false path, and that he could still be saved if he would just listen to Saul. If he could save Joseph’s soul, then in rescuing him he would be rescuing himself.
Not wanting to cause a panic, Saul went down into the Kidron valley alone, wrapped in a black mantle and having his face covered. Eventually he found Joseph, lying under a canopy of branches supported by four upright poles. His shattered body was stretched out on a pile of burlap. A cruse of water stood nearby for his refreshment, and a neighbor sat by his side dipping a rag in some oil and applying it to the welts on his back. Other than two children playing nearby, no one else was around.
When Saul unfolded his mantle and sat down near the feet of the beaten man, the neighbor recognized him, jumped to his feet with a wild yell, and fled from the booth.
But Joseph showed no fear, or even astonishment. It took him a moment to focus, but then his face distorted into a smile of pain, and pity was written in his eyes.
“Joseph,” said Saul, “I’ve come to ask your forgiveness for putting you to the lash.”
“I forgave you a long time ago, Saul,” said Joseph with his childlike smile.
“Is there no anger in your heart? I did it for your own good, Joseph.”
“I know you meant it so. I accept the pain with love.”
“It was to make you turn from the evil ways wicked men have lured you into, and to have you return to your Father in heaven.”
“You’re right, Saul. I am a sinner. God punished me for my own good. God is just, and his judgments are just.”
“To have you return,” continued Saul, “from following the path of belief in a false Messiah.”
“No, Saul, Messiah is true. God has seen our poverty and has sent us a redeemer, to help us.”
“How can he help you if he couldn’t help himself?” asked Saul.
“Oh, Saul, Messiah took pain on himself so that, in suffering like us, he could be one of us. He drank the cup of our shame and wretchedness so that he could take our sins on himself.”
These words were like scorpions in Saul’s ears.
“Let the tongue that says such blasphemies be struck dumb. God’s chosen one shamed and beaten by the rod of Rome?”
“I’m not as learned as you, Saul, but don’t you see that in order for Messiah to save us, he must go down to the depths of hell and lift out the souls who have fallen into it? Now, nothing more can happen to us, for even if we fall into the pit of death, Messiah stands there with outstretched arms to lift us up. ‘Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.’ That’s why Messiah gave himself to the blows and insults of Rome with love.”
Saul was dumbfounded. There was no conceivable way to save this man, for nothing he was saying had either wit or logic, and it was all so alien to the Law of Moses that the only answer for him was punishment with the lash. But Saul was weary of doing this. The man who lay before him was so far beyond redemption that all Saul could now do was curse.
“Cursed be the mouth that whispered those lies into your ears! You’ve put yourself outside the community; you’ve lost your portion with Israel. Return, Joseph, before it’s too late.”
“I will pray for you, Saul, that God open your eyes to see the great light that has come into our darkness.”
“You will pray for me? I’m your enemy. I’ve beaten you, and I’ll beat you again, until you admit that the evil one has you in his net. Until you return to the God of Israel, Joseph, I am your enemy.”
“The lord taught us to love our enemies, to bless those who curse us, to do good to those who use us despitefully, and to pray for those who persecute us.”
“Which lord?”
“God’s servant, Messiah.”
“To do good to those who persecute you?” asked Saul, wonderingly.
“Yes, so that we might be children of our Father in heaven.”
Saul fled from Joseph shaken to his very soul, filled with rage against his former friend and also against himself. What was this? He’d gone to an ordinary, simple Jew to teach and enlighten him, and to make it clear that what he was doing, he was doing for the sake of heaven. Instead, he’d cried out that he was his enemy and would punish him again and again. And then the sinner, this beaten man, had turned on him with enlightenment, declared that he had nothing against his tormentor, that he loved him and would pray for him.
Saul was shamed by the actions of this simple man who could so disarm him that not only had he been unable to answer him, he’d been driven to rage and bitterness. What “lord” could implant such love into the hearts of the simple? Who could spread such teachings among the broken of spirit that they could stand up to the learned and disarm them? Who was he whose fall was interpreted as the supreme victory, and whose weakness was seen as unconquerable strength?
Saul had a dream that night. Once again he saw Stephen kneeling naked, half buried in stones, his flesh covered with running blood. But now the stones were no longer stones. They were transformed into human heads with the faces of people Saul knew and loved, people he saw at prayers and in the marketplace, but whose necks were stretched out for the sacrificial knife. These faces were peaceful because all their questions had been answered, and all their hopes fulfilled.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
14 - James Son of Joseph
The quiet little town of Nazareth lies in a cleft of the rocks, like a traveler sitting between the humps of a camel. One morning a young man, tall, lean, and with a face bronzed by the sun, left there with nothing but a tattered, but scrupulously clean, covering of homespun on his body with a rope tied around his waist and tattered sandals on his feet. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on him because he fasted often. But the young man’s heart was filled with nothing but blessing for the children of God.
Some years had passed since his older brother had set out on the same path that wound through the rocks as it descended toward the green valley. But his brother had continued on to Capernaum, while this man turned and headed for the Jordan valley, which winds south to Jericho, and then through the Judean wilderness to Jerusalem.
He often took this road when he went to visit the Essenes in the wilderness. And though he was a carpenter in Nazareth, like his father, and was the support of his family after his older brother Jesus left on his mission, he lived like an Essene. He was scrupulous about cleanliness and never touched meat. He ate only with others of the sect and never took a wife. And he rarely went to offer sacrifice in Jerusalem, preferring the Essenes emphasis on the prophets who said that God preferred clean hands and a humble heart to sacrifices.
So he shunned worldly goods, threw in his lot with the poor, and when he wasn’t praying, he performed good deeds.
After arriving in Jerusalem he didn’t concern himself with the leadership of the congregation, preferring to leave that to the direct disciples of Messiah. He didn’t preach, or win souls, or perform miracles. His time was spent in the Temple courts in prayer, usually with his face buried in the stone of the ground.
The man’s name was James and he soon became known among the rabbis and Pharisees as a most devout man. His charitable spirit was boundless. He came to the Temple every morning with sacks of flat cakes from the common fund to distribute to the poor. While the disciples preached the gospel, James stood with the listeners. His head was lifted heavenward, so steeped in prayer that his body sometimes actually trembled. His reputation for observing every detail of the law allowed him to be a shield for the believers, for it was said that there could be no evil in any congregation that James was part of.
These mighty strengths of James, his god-fearing piety, his deep sense of justice for the poor and oppressed, for orphans and widows, and his love for all who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, also aroused in him a deep dislike of wealth and a healthy contempt for the rich. These deep feelings were rooted in what he’d witnessed growing up in Nazareth among the field laborers. Palestine, and particularly Galilee, was covered with a network of moneylenders who ground the faces of the poor, often took what little they had, and sometimes even sold men into slavery for the payment of debts. Powerful landowners simply ignored the stern admonition of the Torah to love one’s neighbor, or its prohibition against taking usury, or for that matter even keeping one’s neighbor’s garment to pledge overnight.
Like his brother before him, James had witnessed scenes of oppression and ruthlessness that made his blood run cold. Therefore James preached to the poor laborers that they bear the yoke of suffering in patience until the coming of Messiah, who would remove all inequalities and injustice.
James was also a healer of sorts. He didn’t perform healing miracles, but he knew the art of preparing medicines, which he’d learned from his mother, who’d learned them from her mother. He knew how to prepare certain salves for bruises and boils, and he had a recipe for grinding roots and herbs to put into a plaster. As soon as he joined the congregation in Jerusalem, he made it the beneficiary of his healing knowledge.
Along with this, however, he sought to institute a more strict watch over the “serving at tables” than had been observed up to then. In keeping with his Essene teaching, he was extremely scrupulous as to whom he would sit with at the breaking of bread. He even went so far as to “annul” the conversion of many of the members of the congregation. Yes, they believed in Messiah and had been baptized, but if James wasn’t satisfied with their observance of the laws of purity, he denied them access to the tables.
In most cases it was Hellenist Jews who were affected, since they were accustomed to their native ways and didn’t take easily to the purity laws. James also demanded that the members not just observe the law in all its complicated details, but that they go beyond the law in their devotion. He demanded early morning visits to the Temple, long prayers, and Sabbath observance with all the minute details worked out by the rabbis. They must avoid all contact with Gentiles and even ignorant Jews with didn’t properly practice the laws of purity.
He was also determined to bring back the practice of selling all earthly goods by every new member, and turning over the proceeds to the common fund. James was unhappy with the laziness of many believers, who did nothing but wait for the return of Messiah. He demanded that anyone who wanted to sit at the table, women as well as men, go to work and bring the day’s earnings into the common fund. He demanded further that they leave the houses of the rich and go down into the lower city again to live among the poor. He himself set the example, making his home in the David wall, in the chamber in which the disciples had first lived.
It was customary for those without jobs to assemble in the Temple court according to trade, waiting for someone to hire them. While waiting they were subject to the inflammatory speeches so often heard there. One day James stood in the court talking to a group of men. But he wasn’t talking about rebellion or protest or even complaint. He talked about the poverty of his listeners as if it were not a curse, but rather a gift from the Lord. He said that poverty was God’s highest gift, for only through poverty can man begin to understand God. By being purified in trial, man begins to think of himself as of little worth, and learns to love his neighbor. Complaints or rage provide no relief from need. Relief comes from taking on these sufferings in love, as a gift from God.
He warned them against sins of the tongue. “If anyone among you seems to be religious, but doesn’t control his tongue, you’re just fooling yourselves, and your religion is worthless. Pure religion before God is to visit widows and orphans, and to keep away from the corruption of the world.”
He used parables to illustrate. “We put bits in the horses’ mouths, that they may obey us, and we make them go wherever we want. Huge ships are also guided by a little rudder to wherever the pilot wants to go. Even so, the tongue is a little part of the body, but when it’s not controlled, it can be like a little fire that kindles a whole forest.”
He also taught them that even as beasts are tamed and made harmless, so too must man tame his nature.
And yet this man could not in any way control his own tongue when he talked about the rich. His words about them were full of poison and death, and he cursed men who were created in “the image of God.”
“Hear me,” he said, “has not God chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom he promised those who love him? But you, who are rich, weep and howl for the miseries that will come on you. Your riches are rotting away, and your fine clothes have become moth-eaten.”
Then, he recovered and talked of everyone’s guilt, including his own. He followed this with the promise of the return of Messiah as a reward for the poor, and used Job as an example of patience in suffering.
“We count them happy who endure,” he said. “You’ve heard of the patience of Job, and how the Lord’s plan ended in good, for he was full of tenderness and mercy.”
He further taught them to pray for one another, to love one another, and to help each other in their afflictions.
“Cleanse yourselves from all filthiness and wickedness, and receive with humility the word that is able to save your souls.”
A woman came running up to James in the middle of his sermon, dressed in a torn sackcloth robe. She pushed her way through the crowd, her eyes filled with pain and terror, threw herself at the preacher’s feet, and cried, “Rabbi, rabbi, in the name of Messiah, heal my child!”
James stopped his sermon, lifted up the woman, and said, “Where is your child? Lead me to him.”
In the next moment he was following her, leaping like a goat down the slopes that led to the Kidron valley. They came to the courtyard of a poor weaver, and James saw there a boy of about twelve lying on a pile of leaves, his young body shaking with convulsions.
The mother wrung her hands and poured out her bitterness, “O holy man, an evil eye has been cast on my son. He’s my only son. I bought a talisman from the blind woman who sits in the marketplace, but it didn’t help.”
A woman standing nearby said, “He ate sour, unripe grapes.”
The talisman was a potsherd with some words scratched on it. James tore it from the boy’s neck, and threw it away, while spitting out the words, “Cursed be the filthy thing.”
Then he poured some oil from the gourd at his belt into his hand, rubbed it on the child’s stomach, and closed his eyes. His face became pale. He stretched up his neck, placed his hands on the child’s head, and murmured a prayer.
Seeing this, other mothers started bringing their sick children to him so that he could place his hands on them. Others asked him to come to their homes where their children were too sick to be brought to him. James went from one dark hole to another, squeezing the drops out of his gourd, and warming the people’s hearts with his words. Wherever he went he left behind consolation and hope.
And so it was with James. Without seeking it, his deeds and words lifted him to a place of leadership. The people called him a great comforter and a second Amos.
And indeed James was an Amos, a pillar for the poor and abandoned. He drew the mantle of Messiah over their nakedness. Messiah was not for tomorrow, he was for the here and now. He was life as they lived it everyday. He knew their needs; his poverty was their poverty. He would come for them in their wretchedness and execute vengeance on the wealthy while exalting the poor.
There was no man so sunk in filth and wretchedness that James wouldn’t wash the filth from him with his own hands, and apply oil to his sores. He slept on the floor with them, leaving himself uncovered so that his raiment could be used to cover the festering body of another. Nothing disgusted him, and nothing could turn him away where one of his brothers was concerned. He took his oils and salves to the human refuse of putrefying bodies, withered limbs, stink and decay of Jerusalem by the Dung Gate. He washed their sores, applied his oils and bound them up.
He only demanded one thing – inner cleanliness. His companion in the faith could be outwardly filthy, it didn’t matter; he could still dip his fingers in the same bowl. But if James considered someone unclean inwardly, then no amount of washing, perfuming, or sparkling rings would make him touch them any more than he would a reptile.
So because of all this, anyone who conformed to the law of the Pharisees accepted the leadership of James in love. This included all of the original disciples, for grace and the law was with James the son of Joseph.
The High Priests, who kept a close watch on all that happened among the disciples, knew better than to lay hands on anyone who was a follower of James. They knew this would arouse the wrath of the Pharisees and stir up the masses. The Hellenists, on the other hand, were a fairly easy target, for they didn’t have the support of the Pharisees. Their position was weak because they weren’t as strong in the law.
When enough time had passed since the death of Stephen for the people to settle down, the High Priests held a meeting at which old Annas said, “We must do like the Romans and seek out the weakest side of the fortress to attack.”
It was in this spirit that instructions were issued to Saul. He was told that he could attack the Greek speaking Jews, but could lay no hands on the followers of James.
“We have nothing against those who stay with the limits of the law,” Annas said when he gave Saul his authorization. “Let them believe in their Messiah, if they want.”
Some years had passed since his older brother had set out on the same path that wound through the rocks as it descended toward the green valley. But his brother had continued on to Capernaum, while this man turned and headed for the Jordan valley, which winds south to Jericho, and then through the Judean wilderness to Jerusalem.
He often took this road when he went to visit the Essenes in the wilderness. And though he was a carpenter in Nazareth, like his father, and was the support of his family after his older brother Jesus left on his mission, he lived like an Essene. He was scrupulous about cleanliness and never touched meat. He ate only with others of the sect and never took a wife. And he rarely went to offer sacrifice in Jerusalem, preferring the Essenes emphasis on the prophets who said that God preferred clean hands and a humble heart to sacrifices.
So he shunned worldly goods, threw in his lot with the poor, and when he wasn’t praying, he performed good deeds.
After arriving in Jerusalem he didn’t concern himself with the leadership of the congregation, preferring to leave that to the direct disciples of Messiah. He didn’t preach, or win souls, or perform miracles. His time was spent in the Temple courts in prayer, usually with his face buried in the stone of the ground.
The man’s name was James and he soon became known among the rabbis and Pharisees as a most devout man. His charitable spirit was boundless. He came to the Temple every morning with sacks of flat cakes from the common fund to distribute to the poor. While the disciples preached the gospel, James stood with the listeners. His head was lifted heavenward, so steeped in prayer that his body sometimes actually trembled. His reputation for observing every detail of the law allowed him to be a shield for the believers, for it was said that there could be no evil in any congregation that James was part of.
These mighty strengths of James, his god-fearing piety, his deep sense of justice for the poor and oppressed, for orphans and widows, and his love for all who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, also aroused in him a deep dislike of wealth and a healthy contempt for the rich. These deep feelings were rooted in what he’d witnessed growing up in Nazareth among the field laborers. Palestine, and particularly Galilee, was covered with a network of moneylenders who ground the faces of the poor, often took what little they had, and sometimes even sold men into slavery for the payment of debts. Powerful landowners simply ignored the stern admonition of the Torah to love one’s neighbor, or its prohibition against taking usury, or for that matter even keeping one’s neighbor’s garment to pledge overnight.
Like his brother before him, James had witnessed scenes of oppression and ruthlessness that made his blood run cold. Therefore James preached to the poor laborers that they bear the yoke of suffering in patience until the coming of Messiah, who would remove all inequalities and injustice.
James was also a healer of sorts. He didn’t perform healing miracles, but he knew the art of preparing medicines, which he’d learned from his mother, who’d learned them from her mother. He knew how to prepare certain salves for bruises and boils, and he had a recipe for grinding roots and herbs to put into a plaster. As soon as he joined the congregation in Jerusalem, he made it the beneficiary of his healing knowledge.
Along with this, however, he sought to institute a more strict watch over the “serving at tables” than had been observed up to then. In keeping with his Essene teaching, he was extremely scrupulous as to whom he would sit with at the breaking of bread. He even went so far as to “annul” the conversion of many of the members of the congregation. Yes, they believed in Messiah and had been baptized, but if James wasn’t satisfied with their observance of the laws of purity, he denied them access to the tables.
In most cases it was Hellenist Jews who were affected, since they were accustomed to their native ways and didn’t take easily to the purity laws. James also demanded that the members not just observe the law in all its complicated details, but that they go beyond the law in their devotion. He demanded early morning visits to the Temple, long prayers, and Sabbath observance with all the minute details worked out by the rabbis. They must avoid all contact with Gentiles and even ignorant Jews with didn’t properly practice the laws of purity.
He was also determined to bring back the practice of selling all earthly goods by every new member, and turning over the proceeds to the common fund. James was unhappy with the laziness of many believers, who did nothing but wait for the return of Messiah. He demanded that anyone who wanted to sit at the table, women as well as men, go to work and bring the day’s earnings into the common fund. He demanded further that they leave the houses of the rich and go down into the lower city again to live among the poor. He himself set the example, making his home in the David wall, in the chamber in which the disciples had first lived.
It was customary for those without jobs to assemble in the Temple court according to trade, waiting for someone to hire them. While waiting they were subject to the inflammatory speeches so often heard there. One day James stood in the court talking to a group of men. But he wasn’t talking about rebellion or protest or even complaint. He talked about the poverty of his listeners as if it were not a curse, but rather a gift from the Lord. He said that poverty was God’s highest gift, for only through poverty can man begin to understand God. By being purified in trial, man begins to think of himself as of little worth, and learns to love his neighbor. Complaints or rage provide no relief from need. Relief comes from taking on these sufferings in love, as a gift from God.
He warned them against sins of the tongue. “If anyone among you seems to be religious, but doesn’t control his tongue, you’re just fooling yourselves, and your religion is worthless. Pure religion before God is to visit widows and orphans, and to keep away from the corruption of the world.”
He used parables to illustrate. “We put bits in the horses’ mouths, that they may obey us, and we make them go wherever we want. Huge ships are also guided by a little rudder to wherever the pilot wants to go. Even so, the tongue is a little part of the body, but when it’s not controlled, it can be like a little fire that kindles a whole forest.”
He also taught them that even as beasts are tamed and made harmless, so too must man tame his nature.
And yet this man could not in any way control his own tongue when he talked about the rich. His words about them were full of poison and death, and he cursed men who were created in “the image of God.”
“Hear me,” he said, “has not God chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom he promised those who love him? But you, who are rich, weep and howl for the miseries that will come on you. Your riches are rotting away, and your fine clothes have become moth-eaten.”
Then, he recovered and talked of everyone’s guilt, including his own. He followed this with the promise of the return of Messiah as a reward for the poor, and used Job as an example of patience in suffering.
“We count them happy who endure,” he said. “You’ve heard of the patience of Job, and how the Lord’s plan ended in good, for he was full of tenderness and mercy.”
He further taught them to pray for one another, to love one another, and to help each other in their afflictions.
“Cleanse yourselves from all filthiness and wickedness, and receive with humility the word that is able to save your souls.”
A woman came running up to James in the middle of his sermon, dressed in a torn sackcloth robe. She pushed her way through the crowd, her eyes filled with pain and terror, threw herself at the preacher’s feet, and cried, “Rabbi, rabbi, in the name of Messiah, heal my child!”
James stopped his sermon, lifted up the woman, and said, “Where is your child? Lead me to him.”
In the next moment he was following her, leaping like a goat down the slopes that led to the Kidron valley. They came to the courtyard of a poor weaver, and James saw there a boy of about twelve lying on a pile of leaves, his young body shaking with convulsions.
The mother wrung her hands and poured out her bitterness, “O holy man, an evil eye has been cast on my son. He’s my only son. I bought a talisman from the blind woman who sits in the marketplace, but it didn’t help.”
A woman standing nearby said, “He ate sour, unripe grapes.”
The talisman was a potsherd with some words scratched on it. James tore it from the boy’s neck, and threw it away, while spitting out the words, “Cursed be the filthy thing.”
Then he poured some oil from the gourd at his belt into his hand, rubbed it on the child’s stomach, and closed his eyes. His face became pale. He stretched up his neck, placed his hands on the child’s head, and murmured a prayer.
Seeing this, other mothers started bringing their sick children to him so that he could place his hands on them. Others asked him to come to their homes where their children were too sick to be brought to him. James went from one dark hole to another, squeezing the drops out of his gourd, and warming the people’s hearts with his words. Wherever he went he left behind consolation and hope.
And so it was with James. Without seeking it, his deeds and words lifted him to a place of leadership. The people called him a great comforter and a second Amos.
And indeed James was an Amos, a pillar for the poor and abandoned. He drew the mantle of Messiah over their nakedness. Messiah was not for tomorrow, he was for the here and now. He was life as they lived it everyday. He knew their needs; his poverty was their poverty. He would come for them in their wretchedness and execute vengeance on the wealthy while exalting the poor.
There was no man so sunk in filth and wretchedness that James wouldn’t wash the filth from him with his own hands, and apply oil to his sores. He slept on the floor with them, leaving himself uncovered so that his raiment could be used to cover the festering body of another. Nothing disgusted him, and nothing could turn him away where one of his brothers was concerned. He took his oils and salves to the human refuse of putrefying bodies, withered limbs, stink and decay of Jerusalem by the Dung Gate. He washed their sores, applied his oils and bound them up.
He only demanded one thing – inner cleanliness. His companion in the faith could be outwardly filthy, it didn’t matter; he could still dip his fingers in the same bowl. But if James considered someone unclean inwardly, then no amount of washing, perfuming, or sparkling rings would make him touch them any more than he would a reptile.
So because of all this, anyone who conformed to the law of the Pharisees accepted the leadership of James in love. This included all of the original disciples, for grace and the law was with James the son of Joseph.
The High Priests, who kept a close watch on all that happened among the disciples, knew better than to lay hands on anyone who was a follower of James. They knew this would arouse the wrath of the Pharisees and stir up the masses. The Hellenists, on the other hand, were a fairly easy target, for they didn’t have the support of the Pharisees. Their position was weak because they weren’t as strong in the law.
When enough time had passed since the death of Stephen for the people to settle down, the High Priests held a meeting at which old Annas said, “We must do like the Romans and seek out the weakest side of the fortress to attack.”
It was in this spirit that instructions were issued to Saul. He was told that he could attack the Greek speaking Jews, but could lay no hands on the followers of James.
“We have nothing against those who stay with the limits of the law,” Annas said when he gave Saul his authorization. “Let them believe in their Messiah, if they want.”
Saturday, November 7, 2009
13 - Day of Atonement
A royal caravan winds its way through the streets of Jerusalem, and everyone, young and old, rich and poor, have abandoned their homes to look on the wonder. Housetops are filled with spectators, and every street and alley overflows with people.
What is this marvel? Why, it’s the wealth of the East on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In the riding basket that rocks at the head of the procession sits Queen Helena of Adiabene, which is on the banks of the Tigris. For weeks now the caravan of camels and donkeys has been traveling across the wilderness so that the Queen can come to the house of God, to bring her offering to the Holy One of Israel. For His sake she cast aside the idols of her native land and made this long and burdensome trek so she can bow in worship before Him.
Her face is unveiled and she is dressed in black, in the Persian style. A heavy guard of ringleted eunuchs surrounds her camel and holds back the crowd. Her train of attendants trails behind, followed by the camels and donkeys, laden with bags of golden dinars and silver drachmae. But more importantly, they carry little jars filled with the most marvelous oils and perfumes of Arabia. The myrrh and frankincense of the Arabian wilderness are legendary, more precious than gold, more rare than the costliest stones. These will be burned on the golden pans of the sanctuary, or be ground and mixed with oil for the eight-branched candelabrum. All these are gifts for the House of God.
They say that before she turned her heart to the God of Israel, she married her brother, King Manobaz, according to the custom of her people. Now, she comes to purify herself before the altar of God for these sins committed in ignorance.
When the caravan stops at the Temple entrance, the first camel crouches, and the eunuchs lift the Queen out of the riding basket. She is small and walks with rhythmic steps. She signals, and the ladies of her court approach and take off her sandals. She walks barefoot across the bronze and yellow weave of the carpets her servants spread out at the entrance to the Court of the Gentiles, on the northern side by the vestibule of King Solomon. As she draws near the beautiful gate of the Court of the Women, the leading figures in Israel are assembled in waiting. Beyond them are the “noble and pious women of Jerusalem,” carrying perfumed veils to throw around the Queen. They place two twin doves in one of her hands and a branch of incense in the other for her to offer for purification before she can enter the Court of the Women. Before passing over the threshold, the Queen falls on her knees and touches her face to the ground.
The men crowded in the Court of the Gentiles cry out in exaltation at this sight, for it fulfills the prophecy that the Gentiles “shall seek out Your light, and kings shall seek out the rays of Your brightness.”
Saul of Tarsus is one of these witnesses, and his heart is filled with joyous pride.
* * * * *
Saul of Tarsus was no longer under the authority of his rabbi, nor did he try to find another. He had no regrets over what he’d done, but for some reason his conscience still bothered him. His nights were haunted by the vision of the angel, and he kept seeing the eyes of the stoned preacher and the hands lifted to heaven. But his rational mind told him that it was unthinkable that “they” could be right. For if they were, he was a murderer and it was the utter end for him. And so all the pious words of his rabbi did nothing to swerve him from his path.
In order to salve his conscience, though, he held on to any little sign he could. The visit of Queen Helena, for instance, he saw as a sign that the nations had seen the light. The kings of the east were beginning to come, and soon the kings of the west would also.
So let a thousand Gamaliels reproach him; he would never give up the struggle against those who would do away with the Law of Moses. If there was no one besides him filled with the zeal of the Lord, then so be it. Though he perishes, he will endure.
Now the Day of Atonement was near, Saul’s favorite because of how it stirred up the passions of the zealots and their hatred for the disciples. This was not only due to its solemnity, but also because of the leading role played in it by the High Priest.
Now while it was true that the High Priest had the right to perform the Temple services any day of the year, he normally didn’t; he left that to the regular priesthood. But on the Day of Atonement, no one but the High Priest could perform any part of the ritual.
On this particular Day of Atonement, the new High Priest, John, would be performing the ceremony for the first time. John was Caiaphas’ younger brother-in-law, and he had purchased the exalted office when Caiaphas went to Rome with Pontius Pilate after the latter was removed from being governor.
To prepare for this day, the High Priest spent eight days confined to a special chamber in the Temple in the company of the oldest scholars of the Sanhedrin. They read the sacred books to him and instructed him in all the details of the service. Then the day before the festival, the old members of the Priesthood replaced the scholars. They led him into another chamber, where he made the most solemn oaths to conduct the ritual according to ancient and accepted tradition.
The night before the ceremony, he was not allowed to sleep, but had to listen to more readings from the sacred books, and if he nodded off, the young priests roused him by snapping their fingers in his ears. Not that there was much chance of that, for much tumult could be heard as the whole city stayed awake that night preparing for the festival.
Now the first glimmer of dawn begins to appear in the sky, and the High Priest is led out to begin the ceremony.
After being led behind a curtain to be bathed and sanctified, he puts on a coat with golden bells and pomegranates, a hat, and a golden plate with twelve jewels on which are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. He performs the daily sacrifice and fills the sanctuary with the smoke of incense, carrying the burning spices on golden shovels. Then he takes a cruse of oil with which to light the golden candelabrum.
And now the great moment approaches. The High Priest changes from the robe into a linen garment and is led by the Chief Officer of the Temple and by the oldest members of the Court to the two goats on which he casts lots. One goat is “for God,” and the other is “for Azazel.” The two goats are the same size, young, strong and washed white. One of them is now privileged to give its blood for sprinkling into the four corners of the Holy of Holies. The High Priest then places his hands on the head of the goat destined for “Azazel” and confesses the sins of the people. The goat is then led out to be thrown down a slope of rock to wander away into the wilderness of Judea.
The High Priest now enters the most sacred place in the world carrying the blood and the incense.
In the first Temple, many years ago, the Holy of Holies contained the tables of the law that Moses brought down from Sinai. Now it’s completely empty, although it’s built around the stone on which Abraham had prepared to sacrifice his only son Isaac. The High Priest places the burning incense on the stone and says a brief prayer for his house and for all the sons of Israel.
Out in the courts the congregants, faces pressed to the floor, can hear the High Priest making the count as he sprinkles the blood on the walls of the Holy of Holies. In that moment, all the bitterness they feel towards him through the year is forgotten and forgiven. Whoever he might be and whatever he might’ve done, he is at this moment the son of Aaron, the delegate of Israel to the Lord, and the people are one with him.
In the mind of one particular congregant Moses descends from Sinai carrying the tables of the covenant. Aaron stands before the Ark where the tables are placed. The minds’ eye looks back farther to see Abraham tenderly laying his long prayed for son on the sacrificial stone. This is why Israel is the elect among the peoples. And this was why God spoke to Abraham afterwards, “Because you have done this thing and have not withheld your only son, therefore in blessing I will bless you, and in your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.”
For a moment Saul agonizes as he remembers that Israel is bound like a sheep all right, not on God’s altar, but under the feet of the world’s people. God said that Israel would suffer under Pharaoh for four hundred years, and then he would deliver them with a mighty hand. But the four hundred years never end. Their suffering goes on forever.
But the moment passes, for Saul knows that Israel is not cursed, but blessed. Israel must endure this for the salvation of the world. God’s redeemer, created even before the world began, is to be born into this bed of sorrow. He will bind the beginning from the end and will bring in the Kingdom of Heaven in that great day. The ram’s horn reminds us of the sacrifice of Isaac. It will also be blown when Messiah comes.
The trumpet of Messiah! Even now, Saul hears it, the great pealing of the eternal Redeemer.
But no, those aren’t trumpet peals Saul hears. They are cries of exaltation as the High Priest comes out of the Holy of Holies. By custom the people accompany him to his home in a joyous tumult. Strangers greet each other warmly, friends embrace, and there is a single spirit of happiness and affection that binds them together. Priests, Levites, Pharisees and Sadducees are all one.
That night all the gardens and orchards of Israel are filled with youth, dancing and singing. They’ve come from Palestine and all over the Diaspora to make the acquaintance of the youth of Jerusalem. Young men walk along the rows of young girls seeking their destined ones.
But Saul walks alone in the streets of Jerusalem. He doesn’t visit the gardens to find a wife, for only one thought consumes him. He mustn’t take part in the joys of life; he must dedicate himself to the cause of God. He dares to say it to himself. He is chosen. His life will be one great sacrifice for the cause of God.
The next morning Saul went to the Chief Officer of the Temple and briefly stated that he wished to serve the High Priest in the Temple.
Old Annas himself accepted the offer. He remembered the young man’s zeal and repeated what he’d said before. “There are few Phineases among us because of our many sins. The honor and glory of the Temple are trampled underfoot and the priesthood is shamed. There is no one to play the Phineas. You are a true son of Israel, Saul. May your like be greatly multiplied in Israel.”
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