by Anthology
“Oh my, yes, sir” said the daughter. “We will have the very best XMAS Day ever! Domo arigato, Father!”
“Pow! Pow! Pow!” continued the son. He slung his playthings so that their itty-bitty bony fists punched one another’s horrified faces. The skin of the creatures split and bledbeneath the family’s twinkling steel tree with its tons of brightly shining chains and its scorching red and white halogen lamps that would continue to flare gaily on and off throughout the whole oh-so-long XMAS Eve night.
YESHUA’S CHOICE
Nancy V. Varian
Old man, old man. Every joint and sinew groaned the words. Old man.
On the day of his leaving, Yeshua grunted when he bent to ladle water from the wide-mouthed clay jug; he couldn’t help it, old men get thick in the belly, no matter if they eat modestly and they work all day. He was not very thick, but the leanness of youth had long ago become hidden. He lifted the ladle high, upending it, sighing with pleasure as the cool water poured over his head. It ran in rivulets through his silver hair, down his neck. It chased through the ugly channels of tortured flesh made by the old scars of an ancient scourging.
Again he bent, again he poured, and now he took up an old linen cloth and washed sweat and sawdust from his shoulders, arms, his thick chest and that old man’s paunch.
Old Man Yeshua.
On this day of his leaving, he was older than most in his little village, younger than most of his storied line. Those people of David’s house, men and women of legend who were said to have lived miraculous numbers of years.
By Adonai’s grace, he thought, for they had been given miraculous deeds to perform.
As, once, I had been given.
Yeshua barely flinched when he thought that. His was the loss of the abandoned; the loss of the orphaned.
Only last night, a hot night when people of Natzeret did as they always did and went up to the rooftops to spread their bedding and sleep, one of Yeshua’s neighbors heard a cry go up: Eli! Eli! Sh’vak toni?
My God, why have you abandoned me?
A child, suddenly wakened, called to her mother. Lying in silence, his own words still echoing in his mind, Yeshua heard the woman tell the little one that their carpenter dreamed and his dreams weren’t for others to talk about.
“Now come here and sleep beside me, child . . .”
They were protective of Yeshua in that little town. He had grown up there, had traveled far and then come home to stay. For a time he had been their rabbi. He was now their carpenter, and a good man for all the strangeness of him.
This nightmare, as others before it, had been spurred by the terrible news being carried up and down the roads like the cawing of ravens.
But this dream had not left in the morning. It had lingered, and through the day he’d heard the words Yerushalayim, Yerushalayim. Yerushalayim!
He felt the words as a drumbeat, he recalled all he’d heard about the fate of Holy City, news brought by those who’d fled her gates. Murderers drove them out, and war drove them out; from both sides the people had reason to dread, and the latest word was that Titus the Roman had left the city in ruins, taking four thousand prisoners with him to be sold as slaves in Rome. Like wolves, factions of Jewish zealots had torn the city apart between them like beasts fighting over a corpse. When not one of those factions could triumph over another, the man Eleazar, descendant of a long line of rebels, took his folk by the hundreds out of the city to go and sit upon the rock that had once been the palace and fastness of Herod the Great—the place known now only as Masada, the Fortress.
“These are days,” said the priests, “like the days of Babylon. These are the dark days before the storm.”
It had been said that for a year a star shaped like a sword had hung over Yerushalayim. Few, it seemed, had seen that as an evil omen, most had thought it a sign of Adonai’s protecting hand.
Only days after the blade star vanished, Titus and his legions had fallen upon the city.
As in the days of Babylon, now the Holy City, the great Temple, was a place where men were as butchers and dogs fed in the streets, the courtyards, in the gardens like wolves.
Some of Yeshua’s neighbors, the ones who had heard the tale from their own fathers, recalled that thirty or more years ago their own carpenter had prophesied this terror.
But had it been prophecy, or had their carpenter cursed the city?
Some wondered, Yeshua saw it in their eyes now.
He wondered, too. In his dream last night he’d heard the sound of his own voice as it had been on a day long ago atop the Mount of Olives. He’d stood looking down at the city, the place where he was to die—and did not die—and said to men who had been his friends that the time was near when not one stone of the great Temple would stand upon another.
He had spoken as he always did, confident that what he said was true. How could it not be? Every breath he took, every word he spoke came into him from Eli, Adonai, Abba. His Father sat beside him when he spoke with his friends, stood at his shoulder when he addressed the multitudes; the breath in his lungs, the blood in his veins, the words in his mouth. Abba.
But Abba was gone now . . . he had long ago withdrawn his spirit and left but this mortal shell behind.
Yeshua snapped out the damp, grimy towel he’d used to wipe away the day’s sweat, hung it on the window sill, then took a clean one from the basket near the door. This he folded neatly, smoothing the creases just so and set it upon the small table he’d today finished making.
Placing it, he heard in memory his foster-father’s admonition when, adolescent and high-headed, he’d challenged the good old man for going against time-honored tradition by using a fresh towel.
“Yes, yes,” Yosef had said. He’d spoken impatiently, for who is not often impatient with the youth who purports to know so much more than his elders? “I know the tradition, boy. Tradition says you place the towel you wipe off with. You offer the sweat of your labor as well as the product. Tell me—” He’d run his hands along the curve of the chest’s lid. “—would you give this to the woman wanting it for her daughter’s carefully woven dowry goods with the grime of your sweat and flecks of sawdust still clinging?”
He’d been a man to honor every tradition, had Yosef. Most he had honored in his own practical way.
And the boy Yeshua, moved by the image of a maiden weaving her dowry, perhaps gathering the lavender from her garden and braiding the slender stalks into fragrant wands to tuck between the linens, had come to follow this tradition in the same way his foster-father had.
He had never called Yosef “Abba,” but his mother’s husband had acted in all ways as a father and didn’t seem to regret the name.
Now, on the day of his leaving, Yeshua touched the table, the cloth, then looked around his little shop. The tools he’d inherited from Yosef hung neatly upon pegs, the floor thick with sweet-smelling sawdust and fat curls of wood from the plane. All was well, as it should be.
When Rivka the smith’s daughter came by in the morning to see the little table inside his workshop with the towel neatly folded and placed she would recognize the carpenter’s simple message: the work is complete.
What she would have paid him, Yeshua hoped she would put to charitable use, for he would not be there to receive it.
On this day of his leaving Yeshua was bound for Yerushalayim, a city whose downfall he had foretold, the city he hadn’t entered in more than thirty years.
No, he didn’t know why he was going. He only knew he must go without delay.
The way from Natzeret took an old man’s time to travel. Yeshua needed to rest often, and so he stopped whenever he could to take advantage of the shade of a cedar grove or the companionable overhang of stone.
Ah, but in his younger days it had been different, for he’d traveled the land on a journey to a fate ordained from birth.
No. Ordained from before birth. There had been the angel, the messenger sent to his mother from Abba.
Fear not
.
“Thy will be done,” the maiden Miryam had murmured.
So had Yeshua murmured, for much of his early life. When he left his family’s home and began to teach, when the crowds came to follow him and name him Reb Yeshua, each night he’d lie down to sleep and murmur, “Thy will be done.” When the lame walked and the dead awoke and tottered out of their tombs; when the multitude had been fed on a few loaves and fishes . . . he had said, “Father, thy will be done.”
Saying so, he would feel Abba’s presence, the spirit of his Father near.
When in Yerushalayim for the Passover of his thirty-third year, when his friends had deserted him and left him to the scourge and the mockery of a purple robe and a bloody crown of thorns, he’d murmured, “Abba, thy will be done.”
And his Father was near, the breath in his lungs, the beat of his heart.
When he’d been bound like a thief and taken back and forth from the court of Pilate to the court of Herod and back to Pilate again, judge to judge, pillar to post, he’d accepted the will of his Father.
He’d been like a man who’d read a scroll bearing a verdict and learned the sentence before any other: this man will die, and it will be a terrible death.
Fear not.
And he hadn’t been afraid. Abba would stand beside him in all his trials. Abba would see and he would judge the sacrifice of his son’s life sufficient to the Redemption of the benighted race of men. And when he was dead he would do great deeds, flinging down the gates of Sheol and showing all the worthy the way to his Father’s house of many mansions.
All this had been foretold since before the time of David.
Men would raise crosses upon the Mount of Skulls, two to bear thieves, one to bear Yeshua the Sacrifice, the Lamb of God. From Sheol the worthy dead would be called home at last.
But the Redemption had not happened that way. Redemption had not happened at all, and the gates of Sheol stood strong and unbreached.
By the will of a woman, freely given to her by her Maker, the race of mankind fell. By the will of a woman, freely used, the Son of the Father was born to redeem what had been lost with the sacrifice of his life.
By the will of a woman, the wife of Pontius Pilate, all that Abba and Yeshua’s own mother and poor Chava herself had set in motion simply stopped.
Just . . . stopped, leaving him, the Lamb of God, the Word Made Flesh, to make do with a world he had not expected to live to see.
For if Chava could use her will freely and take fruit from the Serpent and give it to her weak and faltering husband, if his own mother Miryam could say yea or nay to Adonai’s angel, so could a canny Roman matron exert all her will to convince her own weak and faltering husband to let Yeshua the Jew go, send him on his way.
“I have dreamed, and my dream tells me that the death of this man will bring about great sorrow and terrible change.”
Pilate, who carried lightly the responsibilities of his office, certainly hadn’t wanted to be responsible for that. His wife knew it, and she whispered, “If the crowds hunger for blood, give them a rebel or two. Give them Barabbas.”
Pilate had, indeed, given the sometime-rebel, sometime-thief to the crowd. Yeshua had seen the crosses as he and his mother and a few friends had made their journey out of Yerushalayim. One of those crosses had been destined for him, until a woman willed otherwise. Upon that cross then had hung the man Barabbas.
The memory of those crosses haunted the old man’s steps as he approached the broken walls of Yerushalayim. The sun was high; he judged it safe enough to enter.
He entered barely able to breathe for the stone in his breast, the stone of a lifetime of unshed tears.
He walked in the ruin of Yerushalayim’s beauty, sometimes gasping for breath as he wound through the streets of a city beloved of Adonai, fallen now to rubble. An old man lay upon a heap of ashes, sleeping in the exhaustion of starvation. He passed others lying in the streets or fallen, their bodies half out the doors of their broken houses . . . sleeping forever.
In this way, slowly, his chest aching, his limbs growing more and more feeble, he ascended the roads of the city. Gardens had run to seed, those that had not been burned. Dogs ran in the streets, ears back, tails low. One had a large bone in its jaws; the gleaming bone that had once been the leg of a man or woman. The beast’s prize had been stripped of flesh, but there would be rich marrow to dig out.
He found a stick to use for a staff; the road up was more than he could take unaided. Not all the buildings of the Holy City had been destroyed. During the Roman occupation some had been kept to quarter the legion and house their whores. Others stood empty, but untouched, their doors creaking on hinges in the quickening breeze. As he walked, Yeshua knew himself watched; no man lives so long and has not learned what the peculiar, persistent itch between his shoulder blades means.
Once he saw a hand move a ragged curtain at a window, then vanish. A pale hand, bony beneath a thin cloak of flesh. Another time, walking through streets that had once housed the wealthy of the Beloved City, he heard what sounded like a child wailing.
But no child lived in this places of ash and death, and the cat that had cried died soon enough in the jaws of a lean, black-eyed dog.
As he walked, Yeshua heard no other voice. The city, once home to thousands, rich and poor, Roman and Jew and traders of every nation, sat in bleak silence but for the snarling of dogs.
He had not seen Sheol, Abbadon; nor ever thrown down Sheol’s gates, but Yeshua imagined that this city in her ruin might make up the landscape of that terrible place.
When he came at last to the temple mount, the sight of fallen towers and broken walls, of brazen doors flung down caused a sudden, painful easing of the stony lump in his chest. Gasping, he closed his eyes. Like small daggers, tears pricked behind his eyelids.
When he could bear to look again, he saw the Temple through a wash of running tears.
It was true what he’d said all those years ago about the stones of the Temple. Not one lay upon another, for the Romans had torn them apart after the fires cooled, looking for the gold that had melted.
He had foretold the destruction—and he had promised, with the words of his Father on his tongue, that he would rebuild the Temple within three days.
Three decades and more years than that had passed since that prophecy. The city had fallen, and it lay like a corpse rotting in the sun.
He wept all the long way down through the city, silently but to gasp now and then, for weeping took strength and he didn’t have much of that.
The day was ending when he stood again beside the old man sleeping on his bed of ash. The poor creature in his rags seemed not to have moved in all the hours past.
Yeshua hesitated, for he was moved to take his cloak and spread it over the man, to give him warmth against the coming night. While he hesitated, the old man rolled onto his side and glared through narrowed eyes.
And the glitter in those eyes belied the white-haired, stringy appearance of the man. He might have been in his middle years . . . in another age.
“I’ve nothing to kill me for, old father, unless you want to sell my bones to the dogs.”
“I don’t want to kill you—”
The man laughed, then coughed. “—and the dogs can manage on their own, eh?” But when he saw Yeshua remove his cloak, he struggled to sit. He held out his hands as though warding off a blow. “No. For that fine cloak of yours anyone would kill me.”
Yeshua winced, but he did as he was bid. He knelt beside the man and took food from the leather wallet at his belt, bread and cheese and dried, salted fish.
“Eat—” He shot a look around them as though expecting to see someone, man or beast, ready to pounce on the food. “Eat all you want.”
The man shook his head.
“I am Natan ben Enosh, and I have not eaten in many days. Nor had water to drink. I want none, and will not take yours for it will delay the day of my death.” Then, strangely gentle, he said, “Though I thank y
ou.”
Natan waited, a discordant courtesy in this terrible place, to learn the name of his would-be benefactor. After a long moment, he heard it.
“I am Yeshua ben Yosef. I ask you, please, eat. Don’t let the days Adonai has granted drift away. I’ll take you from here and . . .”
The pain in Natan’s eyes stopped him from saying more.
“You’ve eaten well, old father, I see it, and slept on good beds, tasted good wine. You don’t know what it is like to count the hours until your death and know the last is still too far away.” Natan sighed, a sound like a groan, and slumped to the ground. “Go. Find a better place to be. The city is for robbers, dogs, and the dying now. Go back home, tell your people what a dead city looks like.
“Or go where all the madmen have gone. You talk like a rabbi, so maybe you should go to the Fortress and see how the People of God make their last fight.” He wheezed, it might have been laughter. “They will need a rabbi there. I think no rabbi survived what happened here to flee to the Fortress, and Eleazar and his thousand have decided to face down Flavius Silva and all his legions.”
And so Yeshua knew he hadn’t used all his tears that day. He sat for a while beside the silent man, prayed a prayer for the dying, the kind he’d known in the days when the people of Judea knew him as Reb Yeshua, when the people of Natzeret called him their rabbi. He left Natan ben Enosh, the man barely breathing, as chill twilight fell and he went out to the hills where it would be safer among the jackals than the robbers and the starving dogs now coming out of their holes in broken Yerushalayim.
But he would not go back home to tell a tale they already knew.
Laying himself down to sleep in the shelter of a hollow in the hills, ignoring the unkindness of stone to an old man’s bones, Yeshua listened to faint cries echoing up from the ruined city. He did not know whether they were the cries of the ghosts of those who had died in the terrible battle for Yerushalayim, or those still left alive in the city the Romans, and after them the zealots and revolutionaries, had destroyed.
In the morning, he turned his face south and east. It was another day of leaving, another choice. It was not ordained, not commanded, not demanded.
