by John Smelcer
It took almost two hours to sell the wine. By then it was noonday. We ate a midday meal, and I purchased an iron cooking pot for my wife. She had asked me to fetch one home. With a purse full of coins we went in search of a healer. But none would accompany us home for the price I could afford to pay.
They all told me the same thing.
“Your house is too far away. It would take a day to go there and back. If I go with you, I will earn only the little sum you offer. With all the pilgrims in the city this week looking for healers, I can make ten times that amount if I stay. Besides, the Sabbath begins at sundown. It is forbidden to work or travel.”
I knew that we had to get home before sunset. As I have said, I was a good Jew, observant of the laws.
No matter how urgently I pleaded my daughter’s condition or explained that I had to keep enough money for my family to live on until the olives were pressed in the fall, no healer would accompany us. Increasingly distraught, I offered the last healer more money than I could afford and suggested that he come after the Sabbath.
He too waved me aside and laughed.
With a heavy heart, certain that my daughter would die, I returned home with my sons. As I walked behind them in silence, exhausted from my ordeal and feeling every wound on my stiffening body, especially the lashes on my back, I thought about the unexpected events of the day. I also thought about where we would bury Avigail. There was a pretty spot in the olive grove beside a large stone. She always liked the place. Often she asked to eat our midday meal there.
Then I wondered about the man I had left on the cross.
Who was he?
We made it home before sundown. Rachel ran out from the house distraught with worry when she saw me.
“What happened? Were you robbed?”
“Be still, wife,” I said, trying to reassure her, though I must have appeared a fright. “The blood is not mine. How is our daughter?”
“She is awake. She has been asking for you.”
I went straight to Avigail’s bedside. She smiled weakly when she saw me leaning over her.
“Your father is home,” I said with a smile and softly squeezed her hand.
She took my blood-caked hand and caressed it against her feverish cheek. But although she seemed slightly better, her eyes seemed dimmer than ever. I worried she would not last through the night.
A hot tear ran down my cheek.
“Everything is going to be all right,” I lied.
She kissed my hand.
While Alexander and Rufus put away the cart and fed and watered the donkey, Rachel carefully undressed me. She grimaced on seeing the welts on my back and the horrible wound to my shoulder.
“How did this happen? Who did this to you?” she asked.
“I will tell you tonight after the boys are asleep.”
“I do not think this is going to come out,” she said, holding up my bloody clothing.
“It is not important,” I replied.
Just then the boys walked through the door.
“You must be starved from your journey,” she said to them. “Supper is in the pot. You, too,” she said to me. “But first scrub that blood from your hands and arms.”
It took three washbasins of clean water to wash away the blood.
After my sons and I ate, Rachel tended my wounds by lamplight, gently washing the welts on my back and calf and applying a salve. I flinched from the sting when she touched the wounds.
“They are deep,” she said. “They will leave lasting scars.”
For the wound on my shoulder she made a poultice.
“Here, hold this against it,” she said. “When will the healer come?”
I leaned close, pressing my lips to my wife’s ear so that Avigail might not hear.
“No healer is coming,” I whispered, and then looked into her eyes, shaking my head sadly.
“But I heard you say . . .”
“I tried,” I interrupted, “I tried over and over, but none would accompany us.”
She ran outside with her face in her hands.
I gave my wife some time to be alone with her grief before I went out into the moonlight to fetch her. We sat on a large stone with a blanket draped around us while I related what had happened to me. When I finished telling my story, she kissed me.
“I am glad you did not stay,” she said, leaning her head against my good shoulder. “We need you here.”
Then we went inside.
I kissed Avigail on her forehead before I blew out the lamp and then crawled into bed with my wife.
It was difficult for me to get comfortable enough to fall asleep. The stinging lashes made it unbearable to lie on my back. The wound on my right shoulder made it impossible to sleep on that side. My lower back ached, my calf hurt, and I was getting another one of my headaches. Eventually, though, I fell into a restless slumber accompanied by fitful visions and dreams.
I had flashing visions of being crucified, so disturbing in their horror and realness that I awoke in a sweat, frantically feeling for spikes in my hands and feet.
Rachel said, “It is only a dream, husband. Go back to sleep.”
But this was one dream that I remember as clearly as I remember the day my mother died when I was a boy.
In the vision, I was sitting on a boulder in a brook with my feet in the cooling waters. From where I sat, I could see the shadows of trout waving above the pebble bottom. It reminded me of a place along the Jordan, but it was not. The sky was unlike anything I have ever seen. It was swirled with shades of blue, but it was also purple, red, and gold. The intensity of colors dazzled me. It was like looking into a pail of bright paints slowly stirred with a stick, only it was sky and clouds in the pail. And though it was day, yet there were stars in the sky. I recognized none of the constellations. Most fantastic of all, there were two suns in the sky, one noon high and the other rising over far mountains.
I was spellbound.
Along the creek, reeds and tall grasses and flowers swayed in a warming breeze. Their rustling sounded like music from chimes. Butterflies and bees and hummingbirds flitted from flower to flower, and flocks of small birds reeled across the iridescent sky. The green hillsides were speckled with white lambs and ewes. And behind me was a magnificent tree, its outspread limbs heavy with a strange, golden fruit I had never seen before, each as large as a fist. The lowest boughs reached down to the earth and then bent again toward the sun like wings.
The dappled shadow of the great tree was cast upon me.
As I sat, perfectly at peace and in awe of the sheer beauty of the spectacle, a light as blinding as the sun began to appear beside me. At first I was fearful and wanted to flee. But somehow I felt that the light would not harm me. In fact, I felt an abiding wellbeing I had felt only once before. I had a feeling that love resided within the light, that the light was love. I couldn’t look directly at its brilliance. I held a shielding hand to my eyes and squinted.
Slowly, the light diminished to reveal the form of a man. I recognized him as the one I had accompanied to Golgotha, the man I had left to perish on the cross.
I lowered my hand.
But he wasn’t the same man. Gone was the gouging crown of thorns, the bloodied garment, the battered face and eyes, the bleeding marks of the dreadful scourges and lashes. This man’s flesh was unblemished, his clothes as clean and white as new-fallen snow.
He placed his hand on my shoulder and smiled.
“Peace be with you, Simon,” he said.
I was startled. I did not recall having told him my name, and yet he knew it.
“Thank you for helping me to complete my obligation,” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“I came to Jerusalem for the Passover, even though I knew it would mean my end. But my ending is also a beginning. It is the reason I ca
me here. My struggle and my destiny was the cross, and you helped me along the way.”
“You came to Jerusalem . . . to die?”
“As surely as the sun rises, and yet heartily I tell you I did not want to leave you,” he said with the most sorrowful expression I have ever seen.
“Why are you sad?” I asked.
His eyes welled with tears.
“As I said, my death is only the beginning. I fear that multitudes will be killed because of my name, and worse, in my name, despite God’s law not to kill, and contrary to the message I have carried as fervently as I carried the cross. I also fear that many will abuse my words and my message for their own gain, while others will use them to invoke hatred and oppression, masking their transgressions as piety. Human nature has an inexhaustible capacity to rationalize even the worst actions. Among the greatest of all human failings is shamelessness. Perhaps such a thing as Love is beyond human comprehension, as is the nature of God. Humanity will always be bound and limited by its nature, incapable of or unwilling to comprehend the larger purpose of its existence.”
“But why did you come only to die?” I asked, not comprehending anything he had said.
“I came so that every person may have a close relationship with God, with no one and no thing to separate them.
“Are you speaking of the Temple and its priests and the barriers they construct for those who come to worship?”
“Do not judge them so harshly, Simon. After all, like us, they too are seeking to uphold the laws. Also, do not blame them. What happened to me had to happen. These are difficult times in Judaea. In their fear and uncertainty because of the Romans, the priests have become more concerned about avoiding conflict with Rome and protecting their own positions than sharing God’s vision of love and forgiveness. They have lost their way. I did not come to abolish the laws. No, I came to take on the burden of the yoke and to bring an end to misinterpretations of the law and anything else that prevents people from experiencing God’s love.”
“Like what?” I asked with my brows furrowed.
“Like piety. Religious zealotry.”
I was taken aback by his reply. How could being religious hinder nearness to God?
“But are not devotion and righteousness and Godliness things to aspire to?”
“Yes . . . And no,” he said, pausing as if to collect his thoughts. “Oftentimes, the most pious are the most self-centered, including holy men and priests. They are in love with their piety, thinking themselves above everyone else until it is no longer God they love but themselves and their station above others. Their vainglory is their greatest sin. It is a disease that masks itself as humility. Be wary that your efforts to please God may really be blind ambition to set yourself above others or to condemn others, as if to say, ‘Look at me! I am more pleasing than others in the eyes of God.’ That person’s prodigious zeal corrupts his or her ability to love others and fosters prejudice and dissension. Even your earnest prayers should be between you and God, like a secret, and not part of spectacle that you may be seen by other people. Your prayers should be humble and not exalted or full of empty words or phrases like the hypocrites who stand in the House of God and make themselves out to be the loudest and the most pious. God sees through their pretentiousness. You should pray more for others and less for yourself.”
I thought of how much I had been praying for Avigail, begging God to help her. More than once, I had implored God to take me instead and to let my little girl live.
“You do not pray to seek God,” the rabbi continued. “You pray to be found by God. Know that religious fanaticism is ruinous and poisons the well of love with disunity, setting one group against others, mothers and fathers against their children—all contrary to God’s commandment to love one another.”
I was dumbfounded. The things he was saying seemed contrary to what I had been taught.
“Are we not virtuous when we make God the center of our lives?”
“Yes,” he replied, leaning close so that I could look into his eyes. “But conforming to what everyone else around you is doing is not the center of your life. The center is a personal relationship with God. Conformity annihilates that closeness, for you are always worrying about what others will think of you and whether or not you will be accepted. Faith is how we choose to live our lives, mindful that we dwell in the presence of God. It begins with the simple act of loving God. Because God loves you, you cannot have faith until you love yourself. It is a deeply personal thing. Hope cannot exist without faith, just as faith cannot exist without love. But know that true faith comes not from blind obedience to what others tell you, or even from what has been written, but from heartfelt reflection and questioning and a deep desire to experience for yourself God’s unfailing Love. This questioning is sometimes called doubt.”
“We should doubt the existence of God?” I asked skeptically.
“That is not what I said. Doubt is not disobedience to God. It is uncertainty that wells up from the wellspring of love and selflessness. Even the most holy men and women are sometimes full of doubt. There can be no path to faith without doubt. God does not want your blind obedience, for such a thing is as a shadow, without substance. It is a barren field.”
The rabbi must have sensed my misgiving.
“I see you are suspicious,” he said warmly.
I nodded.
“Then let me say this simply. Blind obedience is about closedness, not openness. Evil and tyranny prospers when doubt is stifled. Freedom exists only where doubt exists. That is why you were imbued with free will and curiosity, a desire, more necessity than thirst, to know the unknown, especially to know God. Indeed, part of faith is unknowing. If God but wanted blind obedience, you would not have been made with free will, doubt, and curiosity.”
The things he said confused me. All my life I had been told to accept matters of religion without question.
Because the scriptures say so! the priests snapped whenever I sought answers or explanation.
“What you say confuses me,” I said slowly, forming my thoughts. “I am not learned in such things. I am a farmer who cannot read or write. If I were an important man or a wealthy man, then perhaps I could . . .”
The rabbi did not let me finish.
“No!” he interrupted, though I would not say it was from anger or impatience.
Then he took a deep breath before speaking.
“Power and wealth do not bring one closer to God. That is why I have said that it is impossible for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God, because that person sets himself or herself above the needs of others as if to say, ‘Surely God loves me more than others because I have been given so much.’ I say to you that the rich person has taken so much from others and gives nothing back. Rich people suffer from always worrying about their money. They worry about their expensive homes and possessions. They worry about robbers and kidnappers, about where they hide their money away, about how to avoid paying their fair share of taxes . . .”
I remember thinking that I did not worry about having too much money, but about not having enough money to support my family or to help my daughter.
“. . . and about who will inherit their estate when they are dead and buried. The rich worry too much about their wealth instead of worrying about their neighbors. Whosoever shuts his heart against the needs of others does not love God. Good fortune does not imply God’s favor; neither does bad fortune imply God’s punishment. God does not want you to be rich. And power can turn a good man into a cruel and capricious man. Rich in wealth or rich in power, those who live for themselves alone do not live at all. They make an idol of prosperity. They build temples out of avarice. Worse, they are self-idolaters. Whosoever wants to be first in Heaven must be last and above all a servant to others. Mark what I say. God does not love the wealthy more than the poor or the downtrodden.”
I remember th
inking of the high priests in their extravagant robes rubbing their bejeweled fingers together in contemplation of the rewards of demanding twice the fee to sacrifice, and yet proclaiming that it is for God that they steal from and oppress their fellow Jews.
“But surely people can change.” I said.
“All things are possible with God. True freedom to love God belongs to the one who is not chained and fettered by the world and by vainglory. Hence, the heart and mind is unshackled from everything other than God. That is why I have said, ‘Blessed are the poor.’ That is also why I said that I would not pray for the World. I meant the world in which people are assailed from every direction by the obsession to have more goods than their fellows, the world of buying and selling and profiting by any means, the petty and decayed world in which a person’s value is measured by accumulated wealth. The world that pits us against one another, that exploits and enslaves some for the profit of others, and encourages the hoarding of resources by the few so that the many will not have enough. Such arrogance equates progress with profit and profit with righteousness, even though it destroys the world God created. People say they love God, yet they destroy everything they see as if they think God will make another world. It took God more than a thousand times a thousand thousand years to make this one. Was not one miracle sufficient?”
I remember thinking that when I first arrived in Judaea as a boy there were forests around Jerusalem. But now they have all been cut down to supply the timber needs of the ever-hungry city and the Romans who devour the world like locusts.
Just then the rabbi stopped speaking and nudged me with his elbow. He nodded for me to look at something downstream. A deer stepped nimbly into the brook to drink. It was unlike any deer I had ever seen. His pelt was reddish in the sunlight, his antlers enormous yet delicate. Suddenly, he raised his head as if startled, his eyes fixing on us, his ears swiveling forward, his tail twitching nervously. In an instant, he bolted from the stream to the far bank and vanished into the tall grass and reeds.
