The Compassionate One

I will never forget the first time my whole world changed. I was lifting an armful of firewood for my wife when my sleeve pulled back and I saw something on my arm which had not been there before.  I nearly dropped the wood in my surprise, but I recovered myself quickly. I didn’t want to draw attention or alarm anybody until I’d taken a closer look. But I should have known that I could not hide anything from my wife! Her intelligent awareness of everyone and everything around her was one of the qualities I loved her for. She demanded to know, and so I showed her. What else could I do? But when she lifted my sleeve and looked carefully in the clear sunlight I wasn’t looking at my arm. In my heart I already knew the truth. So I was watching her face, and I can still recall, with absolute clarity, how her expression changed from tender concern to alarm and, yes, revulsion. “Leprosy,” she said, and I could feel her shudder against me.

That was the last time I touched my wife. We both knew what the Law required, went to the priest and I was declared a leper. Seven horrible years of loneliness and ostracism followed. Ragged and dirty, forced to depend on the charity of those who despised me for my very survival, I watched the slow spread of the disease in my body with a kind of numb horror. Once I had been a successful man with a beautiful wife, looking forward to the birth of our first child and anticipating a contented future together; now I was an outcast whom all men treated with fear and loathing, occasionally tinged with horrified pity. I did not even know if I was the father of a boy or a girl, and the only name I could call myself was “unclean”.

I will never forget the second time my whole world changed. There had been rumours of a man they called Jesus in the area – a preacher, a healer, some called him a prophet of God. I remembered how Elisha had once healed the Gentile Naaman from his leprosy, and a wild, crazy hope awoke in my heart. Could such things still happen? And what did I have to lose?

So I came, and I found him and, compelled by my desperation, I knelt at a distance and called out to him, “If you will, you can make me clean!” Immediately he turned, and looked me full in the face. I thought I had seen and known love and tenderness in that other life where I had been reckoned as a man, but it was minuscule compared to the Love that shone from him, a compassion that crossed the gulf between life and death, between purity and filth as if it were nothing. He touched me! For seven long years no hand had touched me; I was an object of revulsion and a source of contagion. But this man loved and was not afraid. I had no power to make him unclean. His touch healed my body as simply as running water rinses dirty hands, but it also healed my heart as his tenderness filled and overflowed the hollows dug by rejection.

I am a man with a wife and a son and a trade, but far more, I am a man who met God on a dusty Galilean road, and I pray that the truth of his tender compassion will flow forth from me all the days that he gives me on this earth.

Not My Will ..

Of course it wasn’t what I wanted, how could you think such a thing? It isn’t a pleasure at all, you know, but I’m a leader, and sometimes leaders have to take responsibility and do the things that nobody wants to do. It’s part of the heavy burden of responsibility we leaders have to carry, the burden of office that weighs us down so heavily. We don’t please ourselves, we do what is best for everyone. That’s why we have to be careful to look after ourselves so vigilantly, what would happen if we were too sick, too tired, too weighed down with the petty, bothersome details of daily life to have the energy to do what has to be done when the crisis comes? Oh, don’t look at me like that, you know it would be chaos for Israel if we didn’t step in and do the hard stuff! I didn’t do it for myself, I did it for us; sacrificing this Jesus was one of the most sacrificial things I have ever done. I risked getting my hands dirty for the good of the nation. It truly was expedient that one man should die for the people – look how many lives I saved.

The trouble began up in Galilee, where most such troubles start. You know as well as I do that nothing good ever comes from there. Anyway, the Pharisees heard the rumours and went bustling up there to see if their precious law was being broken. Healing on the Sabbath? They didn’t seem to get that the important thing was that people were getting excited about him healing on the Sabbath. That’s what we have to avoid: excitement, popular movements, anything that destabilises the balance of power. Rome doesn’t like that, and Rome is the one we must placate. We can’t afford any Messiahs, once it goes to their heads they’re not the only ones who end up on crosses, so do a significant number of their followers, and then Rome starts tightening the screws a little more ... You have no idea how much delicate negotiating we have to do just to keep the peace. So, of course it’s expedient that one man should die ...

Sorry, I’m repeating myself. Where was I? Oh yes, we started keeping an eye on him after that – but he was a slippery customer. Our scholars would spend ages thinking up clever questions to trap him and show him up to the people, so that they’d forget about him, and every single time he’d manage to come up with an answer that slid him safely out again. It was infuriating! Someone must have schooled him well. Oh no, the wisdom couldn’t have come from him, he was just a peasant from Nazareth, and you know what they say about that place! And there were rumours that his mother ... you know ... it wasn’t nine months after the wedding ... no better than she should be ...

In the end we had a lucky break, one of his followers came to do a deal with us. Do you think I enjoyed dealing with a low life like him though? The things we leaders have to dirty our hands with to keep the people safe! And this Judas was an idiot! After it was all over he came snivelling back to us and wanted to hand back the blood money! As if we’d want it! And what did he think we were going to do? Give his “Master” a nice little talking-to? Hardly! We had him where we wanted him, and we were going to crush that problem once and for all!

What’s that you say? Oh yes, I’ve heard those rumours, but they can’t possibly be true. Dead is dead. We Sadducees know that the dead don’t rise at all, let alone in this world! No, the only power we have to worry about is Rome, and that’s why we priests are so careful to guard our own power. We do it all for you.

The Last Time

He knew he would never see the palace again, and his eyes lingered over the details as an act of farewell. It looked different in the depths of night, and tonight not all the flaring torches were lit, just enough for to make the so-familiar pillars and painted walls dance in the flickering light. It was a night unlike any other night, and tension ricocheted through the corridors.

Of course, it only took a moment, as they strode through, to burn the image into his mind, to stay there for the rest of his days. The palace had been the exotica of his childhood, occasionally glimpsed when he ventured out of the little world of the women’s quarters, and then, in a sense, his home in his early manhood, when he had walked through these passages as one who had a right to, and the bowing servants had scuttled out of the way. But even when he was most dazzled by his fortune, he had known that his true home was that little slave hut, not far from the banks of the Nile, where his real parents and his brother and sister lived. But in truth he was a wanderer upon the earth, just like Jacob, just like Abraham. And now he was returning to the wilderness, and this time, unlike forty years earlier, when he had fled as a fugitive from justice, he would never come back again.

Death was in the air tonight, and Egypt was racked with the turmoil of grief. This final plague had reached through Pharaoh’s stubborn mind to his broken heart, and this time he was summoning them only to tell them to get out of his sight forever. All over the land the firstborn of Egypt had been struck dead, in a single night, from Pharaoh’s son and heir to the newborn lamb in the pen of the lowliest in the land. Only the Israelites were spared, for over their doorways was painted the blood of a lamb, and where that sacrificial death had been claimed, no further death was required.

And so they would leave Egypt, the land of their sojourning which had become the land of their slavery, and journey out into the wilderness, as God directed, in search of the place which God had promised. How this was to be accomplished he had absolutely no idea, but the hand of God was heavy on the land of Egypt that night, and the breath of God was stirring the cool night air, and at this moment he could feel neither fear nor regret. Mentally he traced his life and the pattern of his journey: from the jaws of death to the palace of Egypt , from the grandeur of the palace to the bleak silence of the wilderness, from that holy, terrifying encounter with the burning bush (long after the desert had dried up all his former self-confidence) back to Egypt again, and now back into the wilderness again, whilst Egypt herself shuddered in the jaws of death. And then forward to a land which he had never seen, where the blessing of God fell as rain from Heaven.

It was time to leave, to gather a whole nation with him, and move forward into a new destiny. The power of Egypt would be gone from his life forever.

A Time for War ..

They called themselves the Zealots because they were zealous for the restoration of Israel’s power. They longed for the overthrow of Rome, and would do whatever they could to subvert the oppressor’s domination. Some of them, as happens in any cause, were brutes who were attracted by the opportunity for violence and personal gain, but many were men who embraced a noble cause. They remembered the promises to Abraham, especially the promise of the Land, and they believed that the restoration of their sovereignty over their own nation (and beyond) was part of that promise. To that end they were waiting for a Messiah who would give them back their rightful place in the world.

And now a likely candidate had appeared. He healed the sick and fed the hungry, he made the lame walk, the blind see and the deaf hear, it was even rumoured he could raise the dead to life. Surely he was the one who would accomplish victory over Rome! And now he had come to Jerusalem at the Passover, the time when all true Israelites were gathered for the feast, a ready-made army who, divinely empowered, with this Jesus at their head, would overthrow the might of Rome. It was a time for war ..

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They saw themselves as the guardians of Israel’s holiness. They knew the Law, and they knew all the other laws that they had devised for themselves as a hedge of protection around it, so that it could not be accidentally transgressed. They knew their history, they knew that violation of the covenant had led to exile from the Land, and they were determined this should never happen again. So they set about creating a visible form of religion that would set the faithful apart from the faithless. They would keep the Law so perfectly that no one could ever accuse them of failure.

But now somebody was accusing them! For a long time this miracle worker, this homespun backwoods preacher, had been disturbing the religious equilibrium, and painting a very different picture of God to the one they taught. Was he going to be another failed revolutionary who would bring down the wrath of Rome upon them and disturb the delicate balance of power? Or would his engaging stories of shepherds and Samaritans alienate their own following? And now he had come out and openly attacked them. Being called whitewashed tombs, or a brood of vipers is very hard to forgive. But he was in Jerusalem, he could be silenced. It was a time for war ..

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His heart was heavy, He knew that the time had come. Around Him the beloved faces whispered and wondered. How long would it take them to understand that a greater Passover was about to unfold? He broke the bread, saying “This is my body  ...”  He took up the cup saying , “This is my blood ..” and He felt the full weight of the sentence about to be passed. Before tomorrow’s sunset, His body would be tortured to death, His blood would be poured out, and He would be crushed beneath the weight of humanity’s terror and despair. There was no other way, and there was no one else who could do it. For this reason He had come into the world. There was a battle to be fought, and the only way to win it was to be utterly defeated. The price must be paid, and sin and death and hell must be overcome. And these, whom He loved, would have to walk through the darkness of grief and loss and despair until the victory would be revealed.

He rose from the table and bid them come with Him to the Mount of Olives. For one last time He must rest in the Father’s love before all was stripped away. It was a time for war ..

Absence

You do not speak, and, as the cold moon turns

I feel the darkness of descending night.

In these hollow spaces

My heart becomes an echo-chamber

Of the words I cannot speak.

Where is your face?

Where is the song you should sing back to me

Reverberant with you?

Are the notes all falling

Into a chasm only God can span?

I will take His hand

And walk across the bridge invisible

To that far place where I can wait for you

In the Garden where no fear can enter in.

A Reason to Dance

She gazed out of the window, and her heart roiled with disgust and shame. She despised him, and she despised herself for loving him. But she was no longer that naive young girl who had been so in love with the handsome, victorious young man, or the innocent young wife who had helped her husband escape her father’s murderous plots. David and Saul – between them they had destroyed her innocence, trampled on her pride, and confused her heart till her one overriding idea was to protect herself from further hurt and guard her fragile dignity with everything she had left. She was the wife of a king and the daughter of a king, horse-traded by her father from one husband to another, only to be demanded back again by her first husband, but more as a status-symbol than his heart’s beloved since there were now other women in his life and in his bed.

And now, when dignity was all she had left, he was throwing it all to the wind, dancing like a crazy man out there in the street, half-naked, as if there were no level to which he would not lower himself as he celebrated the return of the Ark. How could such foolishness ever be appropriate to the worship of God or the dignity of the king? She could think of no reason in the world for him to dance like that, it was a betrayal of their royalty, and she turned her head away from the window as angry tears blurred her sight.

It was hours later when he returned to his own household, tired, exalted and smelling of the smoke of sacrifice, hours she had spent considering her wrongs and re-casting him as her betrayer. All she had left was her royalty, and now she found herself married, as she saw it, to an oaf. Her tongue was bitter with reproaches as she came out to meet him.

David was astonished. Couldn’t she see? Couldn’t she understand? He wasn’t a king because of some dignity he had constructed to make other men elevate him. He was king only and entirely because God had put him there. God had removed the house of Saul, God had overlooked David’s older brothers and placed David on the throne in an act of crazy, glorious grace. How could David’s dignity be of any importance at all? How could any man’s pride or vanity or fragile self-construction matter before such a God? How could it stay standing in the whirlwind of such love?

He shook his head in bewilderment. Today they had celebrated the great glory and wonder of Israel’s God as the Ark, the material sign of His presence, was welcomed back into Jerusalem. If ever there was a reason to dance, to forget self in the wonder-joy of such a gift to a people who had done nothing to earn it, then this was it. And if God asked it of him, he would abase himself further and think nothing of it. It was strange indeed that the lowliest in the land, the poor, the needy, the slaves, could understand exactly why he danced, and join with him in the tear-bedecked rejoicing of the meek who inherit the earth, the dispossessed who possess all things; Yet this proud woman, Michal, daughter of one king and wife of another, could only pour scorn upon his worship. And if she had so closed her heart against God, there were no words he knew that could make her understand.

Memorial to the Working Horse

After long labour on the patient ground:

The plough, the cart, the miserable machine;

After the frost-hard mornings, streaming rain,

The heart-cold silences, the knifing wind,

The hard jerk of the harness, straining toil,

The scant-filled manger and the draughty barn;

After the angry words or kindly pats,

The weather and the blether and the pain,

To yearn for rest yet do it all again ..

Not thus to find one’s immortality

In harness still, the endless round to tread.

The dream still potent, though yet unfulfilled,

Declares another way they had not said.

Another way – where hooves flash from the ground

Into fleet air to sing across the sky

As sharp as lightning or the vivid stars

As free as laughter soaring in delight.

Servant no longer to the goals of man,

Servant no longer to the gruelling day,

Servant no longer to sad servitude.

Here strength makes partner with dear liberty:

To run for joy in having legs to run,

Or rest content, with boundless time to rest

In sweetest meadows underneath the sun.