The Ironsmith (51 page)

“At long last God will redeem His creation and cleanse the world of sin. Those who live by the Law will inherit the earth and will live forever. There will be no poverty, no injustice, no death. And what is the Law? Is the Law so hard? It asks merely that you love God with your whole heart and you love His creation, your brothers, your fellow men. Are our hearts made of stone that this is so difficult? Love your enemies and pray for them. Treat others as you would be treated. Divide what you have with the poor. Open your hearts to God and know the joy of His forgiveness.”

There was a large audience gathered around him, and they seemed receptive—more receptive than the villagers in Galilee.

“When will it happen, Master? When?”

“Soon, my friend. One like the son of man will come, sent from heaven to judge the world. The sky will open and we will behold the bright day of God's love. Prepare yourselves. Live as if the day had already come. Live in fellowship with all. Set aside your anger and jealousy. Know now that God loves his creation.”

There was a priest among them. The crowd made way for him, and when he stood before Joshua they all fell silent.

“By what authority do you presume to teach?” the priest asked. “You appear to be a villager, and your accent betrays that you are a Galilean. Are you a learned student of Torah? What good ever came out of Galilee?”

The crowd laughed, but the priest ignored them.

“By what authority do you presume to teach?” he repeated.

“I will answer you if you will answer me,” Joshua replied. He found it possible to pity the man. “By what authority did the Baptist teach? By God's or his own?”

One could almost see the priest's confidence draining away. They were in Jerusalem, in the Temple itself, and yet John had been much loved and respected by the people, who now revered him as a martyr. What could this priest say? What was his own authority compared to John's?

“I—I don't know.”

“Then you cannot hope to understand my answer, so I will make none. But I will tell you this. Whether of our own will or not, we are all merely the servants of God.”

Without a word, the priest turned and walked away. And Joshua raised his eyes to heaven and remembered Noah and his fears.

Am I not safe in my Father's house?
he thought.

*   *   *

The priest, Meshach, walked back into the Temple precincts, which were closed to the common people. Caleb was waiting for him, leaning against a pillar.

“What was your impression, my lord?” Caleb asked, with just that degree of deference a Levite owes to one of priestly office.

Meshach smiled mirthlessly, as if to imply that the question was naïve.

“Except for that display at the city gate a few days ago, I would describe him as merely a nuisance,” he answered, with a slight shrug. “The crowds are amused by such as him.”

“Yet he allowed himself to be hailed as the Son of David.”

“The mob hailed him as such. Yet he is here, preaching as usual.”

“Preaching the end of Roman rule, my lord.”

“Possibly.” The priest glanced about him, seeming bored. “A return to Eden might be thought to presuppose an end to Roman rule. Personally, I think it sounds delightful.”

Meshach had only to look at Caleb to realize the irony was lost on him, so he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“It is not a violation of the Law to preach that God will redeem the world. It is not even a violation to claim to be the seed of David.”

“Yet the Romans would think so, my lord.”

“Then let the Romans deal with him. As you see, he is popular. I don't want the Temple authorities involved.”

“Yet he is dangerous.”

“Possibly. I would have said so a few days ago.”

“And now?”

“Possibly.” Meshach looked down at the stone floor beneath his feet. He seemed to be preparing to make a decision he found distasteful. “I am like you, my Lord Caleb. I don't want to see a riot. I am responsible for order in the Temple and therefore, indirectly, for the safety of the people who come here. I don't want the Romans coming in, because then there will be blood.”

“Then, my lord, you would be prepared to recommend that the case be referred to the Romans?”

“Possibly.” The priest looked up. He decided he didn't like Caleb very much. The man would himself have done very well as a Roman. “Yes, I suppose so.”

 

44

Joshua prayed and God was silent. There was no quiet in his heart. Thus does a man know that he is abandoned to death.

For four days he preached in the Temple. Many gathered to hear him. Some mocked, some listened for a while and then wandered away, but some came back the next day, and the next. A few believed.

The priests left him alone.

Yet even in the Temple, God seemed deaf to him. He could not feel His presence. The house of the Lord seemed deserted by its master.

In the mornings Joshua wandered through Gethsemane, seeking in its wilderness solitude some way to make God listen, and in the afternoons he preached. In the evenings, in the upper room near the fuller's tower, he taught his disciples. They had to be prepared to continue his work, as he had continued John's, for he was coming to believe he would not be with them long.

“
He means to have you killed,
” Noah had said of Caleb. Noah understood the world.

What would motivate such a man? Had Caleb grown so estranged from God that he had forgotten the commandments? Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt do no murder. Could a man be so blind? It seemed incomprehensible.

The fear of death was never absent from Joshua's prayers. “Father, if I may be spared this, if I may continue to do Your work … But if not, give me the strength to accept Your will.”

But God's voice was stilled. In his heart Joshua heard only silence.

He could not help but think about going home. In a week he could be back in Nazareth, in his father's workshop, with the smell of freshly cut wood in his nostrils. If he simply admitted to himself that he was a carpenter and not a prophet, his family would welcome his return and he could resume the life he had known before the Baptist. He could survive into old age.

He tried to picture all that to himself, but it seemed like someone else's life, not his.

People believed in him. He had brought Matthias back to life simply by convincing him that God had offered forgiveness. Had he been wrong about that?

In memory, he kept returning to John and those days beside the Jordan when he himself had been a disciple. John had realized that he would soon face death. Either Antipas or the Romans would arrest him, and he would be executed.

“To die is nothing,” he had said. “We suffer for a little time and then sleep. And then at the coming of the Lord we awaken and we live forever. What is there to fear in this?”

John had had no doubts. He knew that the end time was near, that the power of the mighty was a shadow. One had merely to trust in God.

“So I will trust in God,” Joshua told him. “I will school myself to trust. It must be as God wills.”

So, on the seventh night after his arrival in Jerusalem, while he gathered with his closest disciples, he spoke for the first time of the possibility that he might not live to see the coming of God's kingdom.

It was time for dinner. After prayers, when they were all seated, he took a loaf of bread and broke it.

“Thus you see,” he told them. “Bread must be broken before it can be eaten. We even speak of eating as ‘breaking bread.' That is what bread is for, to be broken and eaten.

“Men, too, sometimes are broken. When God wills it, men kill other men. Men die, and this too can serve a purpose—a purpose which God does not reveal to us. It is well to remember that all things happen through the will of God.”

Joshua looked around him, and it was clear to him that they did not understand.

“Yet there is one difference between men and bread,” he went on. “Bread, when it is broken and consumed, is no more. But the dead will rise again in God's kingdom. For those who believe, death is no more than a little sleep. If I am taken from you, you will have but a short time to wait until you see me again. For such is the mercy of God.”

They ate in silence. They seemed depressed and confused. It did not matter, Joshua decided. In a little while he would take them with him to Gethsemane and teach them to pray for understanding.

*   *   *

Noah's cousin Baruch was the grandson of the man to whom his own grandfather had been apprenticed, who in turn had been a cousin of Benjamin's mother. Thus the tie was one more of affection than of blood. Baruch was nearly seventy, and he and his wife had had no children who survived beyond infancy. Noah was a great favorite, almost a son.

And now they could welcome Noah's new wife, whom it was impossible not to love.

“But what of your cousin Joshua?” Baruch had asked, as if to reassure himself of some future pleasure. “Will he be joining us again?”

“Yes, and I fear he will bring a mob of his followers.” Noah threw up his hands, as if the thing were no more in his power to stop than the wheeling of the sun.

“The more the better,” Baruch answered, puffing out his chest. “For the Passover, I like a house full of friends.”

At dinner that night, Noah was like an actor playing a role. He laughed and told jokes, but a part of him was somewhere else. He had to force himself to attend to the conversation.

He was full of dread.

Joshua, he was quite sure, would never again sit in this room and break the unleavened bread of the Passover. He felt as if he were attending a funeral banquet.

After the meal, he and Baruch stayed a long time over the wine.

“What is troubling you?” Baruch asked him at last. “There isn't … some problem with you and your wife?”

“Oh no!” Noah actually laughed, it seemed so ludicrous. “A man would have to be far more fastidious than I not to be happy with Deborah.”

“That was my impression. Then, is it business? Do you need money?”

“No. I am prospering.”

“Then, what?”

It seemed impossible to explain. Noah gestured, as if waving away a fly, and said, “It is nothing. I think I am merely still tired from the journey.”

They were all about to go to bed, when a servant entered the room.

“There is a man here,” he said. “He says he must see the Lord Noah.”

“Did he give his name?”

“Yes. He said his name was Simon.”

Noah felt as if his bowels had turned to ice.

“I will see him,” he said.

He followed the servant down to the entrance of the house, where he found Simon. He had only to look at the man to know that something was terribly wrong.

“What is it?”

For a moment Simon seemed unable to bring himself to speak, and then he opened his arms in despair.

“Joshua has been arrested.”

 

45

From his first entrance into the city, Joshua had been watched. In the crowds at the Temple there was always someone who listened attentively and reported to Caleb everything Joshua said. When Joshua left, he was followed. When he was in the upper room near the fuller's tower, someone watched the door. His every move was observed.

Caleb knew it was necessary to acquire an understanding of Joshua's habits, but time was running short. The Passover would be celebrated in only two days, and this business had to be over by then or it might be too late. After the Passover, Joshua could easily melt into the crowds and disappear.

The crowds were what Caleb feared most. Joshua's teachings were making an impact. People listened to him. He was popular. If he were arrested in public, there might be a riot. The whole matter had to be handled with discretion, so that he was up on his cross and safely dead before anyone missed him.

The best time, Caleb decided, was after the last sundown before the Passover. People's attention would be directed toward the feast. On that night, men did not go into their wives, so as to maintain ritual purity when they went to the Temple for the sacrifice of the lambs. The wineshops were closed. People stayed home and prayed.

There would be no one about to take an interest in what happened to Joshua of Nazareth.

And the best place was the wilderness of Gethsemane. In the evenings, after dinner, Joshua went there to pray, and he was usually alone, although sometimes two or three of his disciples would accompany him. Gethsemane was outside the city walls. A dozen men could close off all avenues of escape. The arrest could take place with a minimum of disturbance.

Caleb knew Gethsemane well, having played there as a child.

He had decided on a mixed force of Temple guards and Roman soldiers. The Romans would be there mainly to be seen. The Temple guards knew the area, but the presence of the Romans would be what everyone remembered.

Gideon was just as content. He had observed Joshua in the Temple, and the man's popularity worried him. “Let the Romans take the blame,” was the way he had put it.

Gaius Raetius was happy to oblige. For a little silver, some of which he parceled out to his men, he was quite willing to risk the mob's hatred.

“We will get him to the fortress, and then he's your worry,” he had said. “Just be sure you have him in front of Pilatus at first light. The prefect likes to deal with this sort of business before breakfast.”

They reached Gethsemane and took up their positions before it became dark. A trail no wider than a goat path threaded its way through the trees, which were dense and would impede flight. They had merely to close off both ends to trap anyone within. The first group went a few dozen paces up the Mount of Olives to wait. Concealment was easy, provided they kept silent.

Shortly after dark, Caleb saw a glimmer of light coming from the northern end of the trail. Gradually the light began to fragment into separate little points, the flames of oil lamps carried by perhaps as many as twelve or fifteen people, the flames dancing with every step they took. He heard the sounds of voices and laughter.