The Weeping Chamber Read online

  Annas walked to the window and faced away from Caiaphas as he spoke. “I am amused because I believe this is the first time I have seen emotion from you. Not even when you married my daughter did I detect any flow of blood.”

  “The man must die.”

  “Even in the face of the miracles He has wrought within the temple these last few days?”

  Caiaphas snorted. “He is nothing more than a magician, hiring people to walk in lame and run out leaping.”

  Annas turned back from the window. For the first time since entering the room, his voice lost its banter. “I have made queries about some of those people. Neighbors swear they have been lame or blind from birth. I am not so certain it is fraud. This man intrigues me. Someday, I would like time alone with Him.”

  Caiaphas stopped pacing. “If He is not a magician, then He is from the devil.”

  “Oh my. You do want Him dead.”

  “You weren’t there when He publicly denounced us.” Caiaphas had to lean against a nearby table to keep his hands from shaking with rage. “ ‘Whitewashed tombs,’ He called us. Beautiful on the outside yet full of dead men’s bones.”

  Annas shrugged. “The poor always vilify the rich. I learned long ago that wealth is a wonderful balm against insults.”

  “Insults? He called into question our integrity, our teachings, our authority. You were not there to see the people cheer His words. This man must die!”

  Caiaphas swept his arm across the table, sending the wine jug and goblets smashing against the wall.

  “You have gone far past amusement,” Annas said in the resulting silence. “There is great danger in passionate action not grounded in cold thought. If your foolish rage threatens everything I have built . . .”

  Had Caiaphas not been so flushed with the joy of hatred, he would have quailed; only rarely did Annas show the steel of his absolute rule.

  “I shall have both His death and my satisfaction!” Caiaphas continued, riding the wave of his emotion. “Here, in this very room, will I send Him to His knees!”

  Annas stepped toward Caiaphas. He reached up and grabbed the younger man’s angular chin and squeezed until Caiaphas was ready to listen.

  “Do not act in haste,” Annas said in a soft voice. “If you take Him publicly, there will be a riot. That could very well spark the people to the rebellion you fear if you let Him live.” Annas continued to squeeze until all resistance had left his son-in-law. “Do you understand?”

  “We will take Him in private,” Caiaphas said, almost dizzy with his hatred. First the humiliation in the temple court. Now this humiliation with Annas.

  Annas dropped his hand. “How? Have you thought this through? It is difficult to track His whereabouts. He comes and goes at will.”

  “One of His followers could solve that difficulty,” Caiaphas answered. “Over the past days, I have sent spies out to test His disciples one by one. Not in such a way as to raise their suspicions but simply to discover any disloyalty.”

  “And?” Annas asked.

  “Eleven of the twelve are as resolute as stone—so totally worshipful that they either did not comprehend the subtlety of my spies or turned their backs and walked away.”

  “I take it you are suggesting that one might be persuaded to betray Him.”

  “Yes, there is a possibility,” Caiaphas said. “He is a poor man; his father was sent to debtors’ prison. A resentful loner and obviously lustful for power. We can appeal to that and make him feel important.”

  Caiaphas pressed his fingers together and smiled. “His name is Judas.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  My dearest love,

  Remember our days of innocence? The first few years after our wedding? If only I could find a way back to those easy hours of reclining with my head in your lap as you stroked my hair. We happily traded stories of our childhoods, laughed, joked, and hummed silly melodies. Oh, the wonders of love with you, the joyful mystery of abandon in each other’s arms, the drowsy smiles as we woke together, the way the bumps rose on your skin when I lightly ran my fingernails across your arms, your shoulders, your back.

  If, somehow, I could find my way back to you, I would pledge myself again. This time, knowing the dangers that destroy love, I would guard against the gradual selfishness that eroded what we had. I would be a man you could trust and love. Never again would I neglect the small touches and smiles that I now know matter more than the wealth that supplies the clatter of servants in a large, empty house.

  Oh, that I could be with you again.

  Yesterday I woke with the hope that I would be able to return to you, to start over.

  Today I wake with disappointment. The man I approached to heal Vashti sent me away and did so in a manner that neither confirmed nor denied that He could help her.

  My disappointment is all the more bitter against the hope I had allowed myself. I was a fool for entertaining the ridiculous idea that anyone could take away our daughter’s pain and make her whole again. As this day begins, after hours of reflection through the night, I see I was a fool, too, for approaching a crazed man with that hope.

  “When a man believes in Me,” I heard this man say yesterday in the temple, “he does not believe in Me only, but also in the One who sent Me. When a man looks at Me,” I heard Him say, “he sees the One who sent Me.

  “I have come into the world as a light,” I heard Him say, “so that no one who believes in Me should stay in darkness.”

  My love, can you see me waving my arms in exasperation as I tell you this? (Remember the days when I was eager to share with you all the happenings in my daily life, and you laughed at me for how my arms moved as I spoke?)

  My love, what kind of man tells others to believe in Him? As if He is a god. Or the God.

  Only an insane man would declare this. Not a great teacher as some call Him, but an insane man.

  Yet . . .

  I did see Him perform miracles.

  It seems to me that everything rests on that. If the miracles are real, my rational mind can accept the premise that He is more than man. And at the same time, my rational mind cannot accept the premise of God among us as a lowly peasant.

  My mind circles and circles.

  (Here I am, thinking aloud in your presence, as I did in the days before silence settled on us like a frost, unaware it was there until far too much of the cold had arrived.)

  The evidence of my eyes and ears tells me it is preposterous to believe that the world is moved by an invisible hand; preposterous to believe that if such a Spirit does exist, it has chosen to reside in the body of a man; preposterous to think that this man Yeshua could turn water into wine, stop a storm with His voice, or raise a man from the dead.

  Yet . . .

  During the long sleepless hours last night, I realized it is equally preposterous to contemplate a world that is not moved by an invisible hand. My flesh and blood and bones come from the very soil of this earth, nourished by bread made of wheat that draws from moisture and sunlight and soil, strengthened by the meat of animals that feed upon those plants, sustained by the water that falls from the skies and collects in rivers and lakes.

  My body gurgles and groans, and somehow, despite the vulgarity of decay that comes with this flesh, there is something unseen in me that fills with love or hate or greed or compassion—and remorse and regret, which weigh so heavily that I tire of life.

  That the world exists, and that I exist in the world are great mysteries themselves, dulled only because I see and live it every day without giving it thought.

  Thus, I am forced to admit it is a preposterous notion to believe our world exists without the unseen hand of a Creator. If then there is a Creator who breathes spirit into me, could He not have the power to choose to become flesh Himself?

  So my mind circles.

  One is as preposterous as the other. God cannot be. Or we cannot be without God.

  How am I to know? And why, after all these years of comfortable life,
am I suddenly tormented with these questions?

  It is this man Yeshua. His message and His deeds confront me.

  I tell myself He is a lunatic.

  Yet . . .

  As He spoke yesterday in the temple, indeed in the moment He finished declaring glory to God, a loud noise split the skies. Some said it was thunder, but the sky was cloudless. Others fell to their knees, believing they heard angels. Still others in the temple declared it was the voice of God.

  Miracles, the voice of God . . . Yeshua is a man impossible to ignore.

  God or man?

  I cannot rest until I know. Against all rational thought, in the depths of my disappointment, there remains in my heart a small ember of hope. I am in desperate need, stuck in the darkness of this deep hole I have fallen into. If He is light . . .

  God or man?

  Today I will seek Him.

  God or man?

  That is what I must decide before I write any final farewell to you.

  Your Simeon

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  I waited but did not find Him. I spent hours at the temple, sitting on the steps among the columns of the Outer Court, made more miserable by a gloomy cloud that passed over and dropped a light rain. Neither the gloom nor drizzle slowed the hectic activities of pilgrims and priests around me; men and women bustled in all directions, with obvious purpose.

  As for me, I did nothing. I was waiting for redemption.

  As the long minutes passed, my heart became heavier. Why, I wondered, did nothing in this temple promise me relief from the one single action that had cost me so much?

  I knew I owed the truth to my wife before I died, and I hoped there would be a small measure of relief in lancing that heavy boil of conscience. But as I watched the activities of the temple, I could not imagine finding consolation in approaching a somber priest garbed in white robes to confess what I had done. I had already judged myself; I did not need another’s stares of superiority to confirm the vileness that shrouded me.

  Nor, despite my proximity to the temple altar, did I believe I could find forgiveness by brutally taking the life of a creature as much unaware of my sins as of its impending death; no amount of innocent blood could wash me clean.

  I knew this because I had tried with repeated sacrifices.

  A Gentile might recoil from this brutality, not understanding the significance of the sacrifice.

  Our Hebrew word for sacrifice—korban—comes from the same root that means “to approach.” Those who believe in God see man as living between the spiritual and natural worlds. Caught in a battle between the darker desires of fallen flesh and the soul’s desire to reach God, man constantly struggles to overcome this contradiction. In bringing korban, the death offering serves not only as the demonstration of what man would deserve were God to judge him but as appeasement of God’s holy wrath.

  He is a God of love who offered Jews this sacrificial system as a way of restoring spiritual life because we all fall short of His righteousness and truly deserve His eternal wrath. The sacrifice, if offered with true repentance, represents the death of man’s fallen nature, freeing him to bring his true self into connection with God, elevating him by temporarily giving his spiritual nature victory over his physical.

  But months of weekly sacrifices had not redeemed me.

  Yes, I was filled with repentance, with remorse beyond self-hatred. And yes, a lamb’s blood allowed me korban, to approach. But God, I had decided, would not listen to me, no matter how closely I approached.

  I was miserably conscious that, for what I had done, any creature’s death was too little a price to pay. I did not believe any atonement was possible for me and my sins.

  I could buy hundreds more sheep and spill enough blood to overflow the cracks of the stone floor. Yet that river of life would merely cost me more of my surplus of gold. Where was my punishment in that?

  Sitting, waiting, dwelling on all of this, it simply became clearer that only one death would suffice.

  Mine. Unless I found a miracle.

  And the rain fell harder.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I was destined not to find the prophet, for as I would learn before the day ended, this, the day before Passover, was a day on which He rested in seclusion near Bethany.

  Where Yeshua had peace, another, like me, had a horribly restless soul, though for different reasons from mine.

  The other was named Judas.

  He probably passed almost within my reach among the crowd as he hurried to find the high priests. There is only a field of blood to speak for him now, and I cannot pretend to know his heart and what sent him into Jerusalem.

  Still, for me, speculation is inevitable, as it probably is for any who later heard of his secret visit to the temple.

  **

  In the gloominess on the Mount of Olives, donkeys brayed at the city gates across the valley. Singing and chanting came from behind the temple walls. But none of these sounds broke into Judas’s mind.

  He’d been sent to purchase a lamb for Passover. It gave him the perfect excuse to be alone in the city, away from the eyes of the other disciples.

  During a poor night’s sleep, he had spent his wakeful times alternating between vindictive satisfaction as he thought of his revenge against the slights he had endured and renewed lapses of guilt as he realized the path his vengeful thoughts were taking him.

  Now they took him on a literal path, down the Mount of Olives. Jerusalem drew him like a Siren of the Greek myths, beckoning him not with promises of the flesh but with the much sweeter prospect of power among the city’s elite—power that Yeshua had chosen to discard, and in so doing, had wasted three years of Judas’s life.

  Not just three years, Judas thought, but everything he had held dear before meeting Yeshua.

  Outside his Judean hometown, his brother now tended the small herd of goats Judas had built from a sickly pregnant nanny over the course of ten seasons. Why was Judas no longer there? Because in a moment marked as clearly as a watershed on the nearby ravines, Judas remembered the messianic impulse that had swept him to run home and sell those goats for a mere note of promise; as part of a crowd, he’d watched the teacher send a lame man dancing away in joy.

  All his life, Judas had used aggressive hard work to bury the shame of watching his father go to a debtors’ prison for gambling. All his life, Judas had lusted for the security and respectability of wealth, seething at the injustice of belonging to the poor while men of lesser intelligence and character strutted in mastery. Yet on that incredible afternoon, when the teacher’s glance had fallen upon him, the gaze had felt like hot water scathing dirt off crusted old leather. The teacher, Judas had known without doubt in that moment, understood the filth of the meanness of spirit that had been forced upon him and, in that depth of complete understanding, had also accepted Judas without reservation.

  From that one watershed moment, Judas had worked hard—with the same flailing, scrabbling ambition he had applied to growing his goat herd—to gain his position among the followers the teacher most trusted. The teacher had even appointed him among only twelve to preach and drive out demons and take the teachings to the people.

  More and more, however, Judas had begun to feel like the shamed outsider he had been as a teenager jeered by the village boys. A Judean among close-knit Galileans. A slender man among broad-shouldered fishermen with tough hands scarred by years of handling heavy wet netting.

  Judas could mark that first moment of isolation, too—the moment when the teacher had first thrown a shadow over Judas’s hopes. Word had come that John the Baptist had been beheaded. This John had proclaimed Yeshua as Messiah, no less! This John, a man with a great following, had once insisted he was not even fit to untie the thongs of the teacher’s sandals.

  And what had the teacher done for a prophet who had been beheaded at the request of a teenage harlot? Nothing. The teacher, whom Judas had seen command storms into silence, had not sent fire or earthqu
ake or plague to destroy a man as evil as Herod, but instead had shared in grief with the others through prayer. Worse, later the teacher had fled Galilee in fear of Herod. Where was power in that?

  Judas had brooded on this many nights near the flickering campfires in the countryside—until the miraculous feeding of the thousands on the far shore of the Sea of Galilee. In the joyous thunder of fervent hosannas that called the teacher to be king, Judas had found hope again, had swelled with pride to be one of the twelve closest to Him.

  To what end? Judas now asked himself, his heart dominated by angry memories of the synagogue in Capernaum the day after the miracle of the feeding.

  Yeshua that day was easily at the height of His popular support. He had not taken the mantle but had spurned the vast crowds, weaving no stories with His usual charismatic speech, but wearily telling them to drink His blood and eat His flesh.

  Yes, the spy sent from the Pharisees had known well to touch upon this incident with Judas. In Capernaum back then, legions of followers had turned away, their disenchantment verging on disgust, for who could make sense of someone who claimed to be “bread sent down from heaven”?

  Worse, in private conversation with the twelve shortly after, Yeshua had not only repeated the teaching but had also turned to the group and accused one of them of being from the devil.

  It was as if Yeshua had spoken to the bitterness within Judas.

  Could a man be blamed for turning love and hope into hatred at such a betrayal? Could a man be blamed for seeking a way to force Yeshua to take a stand and prove His power?

  Anger drove Judas to walk faster and faster.

  The chief priests awaited him.

  Chapter Thirty

  While Judas’s dark spirit drove him to the city and into the temple, mine eventually drove me out. I could contain my restlessness no longer.

  I went to the theater, the horse races, the gymnasium, but all the entertainment failed to distract me.