Great Lion of God (74 page)

“And what did you do in the Nabataean kingdom?” asked Joseph.

“I pursued my trade as a goat’s-hair weaver and tentmaker,” said Saul, in that deep melodious voice that Joseph remembered. “I spoke to the peasants and the farmers of the Messias. I lived and ate with them.” He faintly smiled and his large white teeth flashed. I was never a man for luxuries, nor was I ever a voluptuary, but I had been taught, as a Jew, to cleanse myself frequently. Those with whom I have been dwelling were not so fastidious.”

“So I observe—through my nose,” said Joseph, and chuckled. “All the perfumes of Persia could not wash away the redolence that attends you, Saul, though I am certain that you have bathed much recently.”

“I fear I still smell like a camel and a goat, and possibly of dung, and sour milk and cheese.” Saul lifted one of his sinewy hands and sniffed at it consideringly. “Yes, it is true. There were times when I bathed as infrequently as my poor and simple companions, out of necessity. Too, it is not always wise to appear singular.”

“It is also dangerous,” said Joseph, meditating over what Saul had already told him. He saw that the winds and dusts of the terrible deserts had scoured Saul’s flesh, had melted away any suggestion of fat and had reduced his body to leather and whips and sinews and ligaments and hard rope. Yet never had he appeared so young, no, not even in those days long ago when he had visited Jochanan ben Zachary in the wilderness, nor had there been this peace upon his countenance. It was not the placid peace of resignation to the will of God, not the peace of saintliness and gentle forbearance or mysticism, not the peace of withdrawal. His resolute chin was as sharp in contour as if a sculptor had made the line and had forebore to round and soften it, and his nose was thin and large, like a knife, and there were hollows under his cheekbones like dry blackened pits, and the cheekbones thrust out from his face. If ever a man had been seasoned and honed and tempered by God, Saul was such a man, and yet there was about him his very youthful humor—so missing for so many years—and a strong but not mawkish gentleness.

“And the Arabians hearkened to you, my son?” asked Joseph.

“They were courteous, like all dwellers of the desert, who must live or perish by courtesy. But they told me a seer had long foretold that they, the sons of Ishmael, would have their own revelation. For an instant his old impatience sparked in his eyes.

Joseph considered. Then he said, “I am old and forgetful, and so I cannot remember where once I learned that one could imagine God, blessed be His Name, as a wheel of infinitude, sparkling and turning in lightning and in thunder and luminous fire and incomprehensible power, and that while He was the wheel He was also the Hub, and all the spokes leading from the rim to the Hub were the prayerful hopes and faiths of all creation, and as the spokes were also God, as was the Rim and the Hub, they all led to the Center.”

Saul himself considered and frowned—thoughtfully. He said, “We have been given a New Covenant, as told to Jeremias centuries ago, and there is none else.”

Joseph chewed soundlessly on nothing before he replied. “I believe Jeremias also related that one day all men would know the Lord, though perhaps He was, and is, called by a thousand different names, and He will not distinguish among His children. Ages before Moses brought to us the Commandments Egypt had a code of moral and religious laws not too dissimilar, and so did the Persians, and though the Greeks and the Romans based their moral and religious laws on ethics, merely, the Spirit shines through.”

Saul moved restlessly. Was it for this that he had endured the dark hot years in the desert, and other sufferings, merely to listen to a senile old man who had lost the iron in his soul? While he was pondering Joseph gazed at him, and sighed, and realized that the new Saul was not truly new at all, but a man constantly wrestling with his own storms.

“We are a peculiar people,” said Joseph. “God has chosen us from the ages, and will not depart from us, and that makes us peculiar.”

Saul thought this extremely irrelevant and another sign of Joseph’s senility, and he struggled again for the charity he was always proclaiming (though he frequently acknowledged that he had much need of it, himself).

Joseph said gently, “To each people God sends His revelation, in accordance with their nature and ability to understand in their own terms and in their own souls. Though it has been said that all men are the same, that is not entirely true, just as one man is different from his brother. We share the same flesh and the same being, and are of the same species, as Aristotle noted, but each people has its own arête. I have traveled. I have spoken long to the wise men of China and India, and to their people. Their minds are not our minds, nor do they contemplate creation as we contemplate it, nor are their mores ours, and they worship God in the Name they have given Him, and will He deny them His salvation? No. You have told me that one of the Apostles, Simon Peter of Galilee, told you that the Messias commanded him and his fellows to go forth and feed His sheep, in all nations. But how those nations will accept the message, and in what form, is their own, and we must not quarrel with it.

“The form given to us by the Messias is the form sympathetic with our natures and our minds, purely to be understood by the faithful of Israel and among the Gentiles of Greece and Rome, and even perhaps, the wildernesses of the barbarians of Gaul and Britain and the cold nations of the north. It is not alien to the minds of us of these places on the earth; the ground has already been prepared. Yet, to all nations and all peoples was the message given: ‘Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord!’ But who shall quarrel with the Name, and what men herald it?”

He is truly wandering, thought Saul. But Joseph was smiling. He was remembering how he had heard that none in Damascus among the Jews would accept Saul’s new and fervent teaching, saying to his face and among themselves: “Is this not the servant of the Romans, a fierce and ravening Jew, who imprisoned and flogged our brothers in Jerusalem because they believed that the Messias had been born to us? Shall we trust him? No! He is a spy of the Romans. He comes to us now in pretense, that he might trap us, and then bind us and imprison and slay us. Begone with him!” So, they had spoken, and had incited the cynical Greeks in Damascus against Saul, and others of the Gentile community, and to save his life Saul had had to be lowered in a basket at midnight over the walls of Damascus, and had fled to the desert. To one so proud that must have been a humiliating and disastrous experience; to be rejected was intolerable, especially when one believed he brought the truth. Ah, Saul, thought Joseph, with love, and smiled again. Seeing that smile, Saul thought he was being mocked.

The young man said with sternness, “The world is in bondage to the Roman. The world is oppressed by Rome. There is not a man who can today say, I am free, on my own earth, in my own house, safe from tyranny and taxes, free of government hirelings who torment me with inquisitive questions and puny malicious laws, a man free before the Face of God.’ From this oppression and tyranny the Messias came to deliver us.” He paused, with sudden angry impatience, for the old man was slowly shaking his head.

“My son,” said Joseph, “the world of men has always been in bondage, oppressed by some powerful nation or even its own permitted government. No man has ever been truly free for long, safe from taxes and impudence and malicious bureaucrats and wars and massacres and seizures and outrages. It has been said by the Greeks that men deserve their government, and I have seen nothing in my lifetime to refute this. If men are now slaves, it was by their own complacent acquiescence, their own meek weakness, their own greed and slovenly character, their own pridelessness, their own envy. It has also been said that if a mouse accept a morsel from a tiger, in apparent amity and charity, the tiger will soon make a morsel of the mouse for himself. Was it not the Chinese who declared that governments are more to be feared than a tiger?

“So, the world of bondage today is no different from the world of bondage under the Egyptians and under Alexander of Macedonia, nor will it be changed tomorrow. It will always be in bondage. But if a man says in his soul, though his hands are manacled, ‘I am a free spirit and the iron of man cannot manacle that spirit,’ then he is not truly a slave. It was that freedom of the spirit which the Messias brought to us, and the nations who will hear Him, for did He not say, when taunted by the rigorous Pharisees and shown a coin with the head of Caesar upon it, ‘Render under Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things which are God’s’? To Him, blessed be His Name, governments are forever oppressive and bloody and ambitious, and their nature cannot be changed, for men who receive power become devils. But only a man, himself, can make himself a slave in his soul. From that slavery He would deliver us. Caesar will eternally be Caesar. A man can only rise from his knees and know Caesar to be mad, and to refrain from giving Caesar all the power he covets.”

In spite of himself, something impelled Saul to listen, as he would not have listened some years ago, and again he pondered, and he rubbed his dark and seamed forehead. He murmured, “It is true: Only God can give us true liberty. Still, we should fight for freedom against bloody and ambitious and ravenous governments.”

“That is also our duty,” said Joseph. “It is a duty laid upon man from the beginning. Did not Moses shout, ‘Proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto the inhabitants thereof?’ Yes. But man forgets. Bread and ease and security are the tawdry prizes offered for his freedom as a man, and without fail, throughout the history of the ages, he will accept those prizes.”

Saul thought of the insane Caesar now on the throne in Rome, and shuddered. Was it not rumored, with loud laughter, that he had made his horse a Consul of Rome? “We are on the eve of terrible events,” said Saul.

“We always were. We shall always be,” said Joseph, and in his weariness he fell asleep, and Saul rose in silence and left him, and he went to the Street of the Tentmakers where he had begun, again, to ply his trade, and to dream his great dreams and plot his fight.

Saul of Tarshish, called by the Greeks and Romans Paul of Tarsus, was almost incessantly consumed by the power and the glory of the revelations which had been given him, and which were still being given him. To himself, he appeared to walk in light, contemplating the beauty of the world with an overpowering ecstasy, and so filled with the love of the Messias that there were times when he almost fainted in his reflections and raptures. Now he loved man also, and felt pity for him—on most occasions when he did not feel his old passionate impatience—that man did not see the light as he saw it, or looked at him wonderingly or with skepticism, or turned away with indifference. Surely the truth was so clear, so omnipresent! Surely all men felt the presence of the Messias in their souls! What was more important to a man but his eternal destiny basking in the radiance of the Messias, and what was of less importance than the things of the earth, the dusty little things, the miserable little treasures, and the cares they created? Had the average man so small a mind that he could not encompass the incredible difference? It was as if a man entered on a tiny oasis and believed that that oasis was the entire world and resented even the thought that beyond that meager place existed enormous cities and mighty lands and the murmurous hum of endless life. He, little man, wailed when it was indicated that he must leave and go on to a larger existence, and clung to his ragged palm tree and his trampled plot of grass and little pool of murky water, and would not believe—nay, refused to believe—that a greater destiny called him and he must go on. (However, there were charitable moments when Saul reflected that man’s soul was frail and vulnerable, and that what was familiar to him, however slight, was more preferable to him than vistas beyond his comprehension, and therefore he should be pitied rather than constantly chided, and led with tenderness and cheer and compassion rather than driven.)

To the turbulent young man, still so easily exasperated, many of the Nazarenes, who had accepted the Messias, were more than a “thorn in my flesh.” They were a festering spear.

He saw them daily, near sunset, in the cool gardens of the Temple and in the Portico of Solomon, sitting with their fellow Jews and gently expounding, in—to Saul—their pompous simplicity and childish narrow faith. To them, Saul soon discovered, the Messias was not Lord of Lords, the mighty One of Sion, the Majesty of endless universes, armed not only with love and mercy but with terrible justice, King of angels and men and worlds, awful in His power, eternal and inflexible in the Law, crowned with lightnings, armed with thunders. He was “meek and mild,” without sexual attributes, without masculinity, without force and terror, a mere gentle Shepherd clad in ragged garments and shorn of His stateliness and grandeur. Had He not said, they told Saul, gazing at the fuming young man with large childlike eyes, that a man should be humble and patient? Had He not abased Himself by washing the feet of His Apostles? Had He not submitted to shameful execution like the Lamb of God, killed for our sins? Had He not implied, by His whole life, that man should not resist evil, should withdraw himself from the world, should ignore Caesar and his governments, should disavow the whole fabric of manmade institutions, should “take no need for the morrow, what you shall wear and what you shall eat?” His teachings, the innocent ones declared, emphasized no-resistance and passive deportment to exigent demands, and a man should spend his life merely adoring, merely exuding Love and smiling with gentle charity on others.

And was not His return expected hourly, perhaps the next moment? Had He not clearly said, “This generation shall not pass away” until His Second Coming had been consummated? Why, therefore, should a man labor and heap up treasure, or care for the morrow or the bread and milk and cheese and fruit for his family, or engage himself in the industry of more ignorant men? Had they not been told to “watch,” as did the vigilant Virgins of His parable, for “who knew when the Bridegroom will come?”