Fifth Gospel(19)

For her husband Joseph had died some months ago leaving her a widow with seven children to raise, gardens to tend, flour to mill, and sheep to graze. With so much to do, she never found the time to cultivate her love of reading and learning, and began to neglect even her prayers. If her friends had not offered to look after her animals and garden, she would have let another year pass before Yeshua’s youth ceremony.

As she followed the others, with her dress wrapped around her legs to make walking easier, she told herself that she should accept her destiny with equanimity and look on all the vicissitudes of her life as opportunities for mastering her stubbornness. Still, her destiny had been a difficult one and it would have been even more difficult, had she not befriended Mary, the young mother of Jesus.

Mary, walking beside her, was of mixed blood like many Galileans, and some years her junior. It was true that she lacked learning and sophistication but this lack was compensated for by an abundance of love, a child-like spirit and a fresh, youthful innocence. Mary seemed to her like a sun trapped in a house of flesh, whose rays, falling daily over the icy landscape of Mariam’s soul, made it come awake again. Mariam had not known such innocent and loving company since her youth.

She had been joyous when she discovered that Yeshua and Jesus had also found friendship in one another. For although dissimilar in temperament and learning, the boys too sensed, like their mothers, that a thread of destiny was spun between them.

This brought her now to the primary reason for her concern. She looked about the group for Yeshua and found him walking vacantly beside Jesus. Since their journey to Jerusalem she had sensed something strange about Yeshua. The closer they came to the Holy city the more markedly did she observe this strangeness: Yeshua, once so wise, alert and questioning, had grown long in his silences and dream-like stares and there were moments when she felt him taken by a great oppression of the heart. In truth when she looked directly at her son she saw only an emptiness, as if his spirit had grown loose in the cavity of his body and would wing away at any moment and leave her grasping at the shadows of his ghost.

She did not know what to think. She hoped that Yeshua might awaken from this strange spirit-illness upon seeing the great city, for who could be unmoved by the sight of Jerusalem? Sparkling as if snow-covered and gold dusted it rose now from out of the clefts of the valleys like a jewel, with its great walls, its palaces and criss-crossed streets clotted with houses of every shape and kind. Her companions fell to their knees in a prayer of thanks to see it, for soon they would walk through the gates and find their way through those bustling streets to the Temple and they could even now hear the chanting of the Levites and the blowing of the horns. This was surely a dream experienced in the day! A gleaming heaven-made manifestation of the fulfilment of God’s commandment!

Everywhere there was joy.

Mariam took Yeshua to one side and pointed out the sacred girdle of walls within which stood the splendid Temple, with it magnificent courts and its holy sanctuary. She reminded him that Jerusalem was the seat of the Sanhedrin, the greatest place of learning and piety in the world. The place where he could finally feel at home, for one day his destiny would lead him here again so that he might accomplish a great task.

But this did not seem to stir a fire in the boy’s heart. Instead, the eyes that stared at her appeared removed from life.

‘My task is near at hand mother,’ he said.

These words struck her as a blow, and she found she could not move. What did he mean, near at hand? The others had already walked beyond them and were melting with those crowds at the gates to the city – all except her friend Mary who waited, quiet and patient with Jesus.

Mariam did not wish to draw attention so she walked on and called to him, ‘Come.’

At the city gates Roman soldiers took stock of the names and ages and the birthplaces of all who had come, and now her concern for Yeshua was traded for a palpable, terror-filled knowledge of peril. She stood back in the line, away from the others, letting them pass. She must think. What should she say? That her son was born in Bethlehem at the time of Herod? On their return from Egypt she had heard of the terrible massacre of the children and she had long grieved for her friends and relatives who had lost their sons. Yeshua was the right age to have been one of those children and the Romans would know it. Within her a force compelled her lips to form a lie to save her son’s life and she searched in her mind for support from the scriptures but found only admonitions:

‘A false witness shall not go unpunished; and he that speaketh a lie shall perish!’

A great crowd came from behind and pressed her forward. She realised that she had lost sight of Yeshua again. This added to her mounting anxiety so that her voice came out shrill when she called his name into the bevy of pilgrims. She found him standing before a Roman soldier, whose face bespoke a cruel heart.