Great Lion of God

  Chapter 48

  THE story of the miraculous deliverance exalted the Christian community, and they never tired of hearing about it and the heavenly messenger. If Saul had been so rescued and by such an ineffable personage, then surely the Messias’ Second Coming was at hand.

  “It does not follow,” said Saul. “What if the laborers in the fields said, ‘We believe the master will return home tonight and will ask us to feast with him, so why should we labor and exhaust ourselves and not stand at the gates and watch for his coming?’ The master would return to discover that the grain had rotted because it had not been reaped, and woe to that man who had let his scythe remain idle! We do not know when He will return. But He must not find His harvest lost and the rats among the grain and the bread devoured by vermin.”

  It seemed to many that Saul was too harsh, and that he did not believe that the Lord would imminently arrive, and so there was much discontent. But Saul exhorted them and taught them like children, and after a long sojourn in Philippi he resumed his journeys. He rejoiced in the gathering multitudes of Gentile converts, whom he patiently taught and with a paternal love. He baptized them, guided them, enlightened them and brought them in, rejoicing, to the Christian community. The majority of Christians welcomed them with almost the deep love which Saul held for them, but there were also dark glances of suspicion and contention and whispers among the majority. These were sometimes quite valid, for some of the new Christians were at first exalted by the thought of the almost instantaneous arrival of the Messias in clouds of glory, to judge the quick and the dead, the sheep and the goats, and when He did not appear but the daily drudgery and weariness remained, and the same problems of taxes and food and shelter and discontented wives and intransigent children and wages and quarrels and ills of the flesh, the new Christians began to doubt, and frequently doubt was followed by defection and contempt and hatred and ridicule, and even malice and a desire for vengeance on the “deceivers.”

  In vain did Saul try to enlighten these men and women. They would look at him narrowly, and narrowly smiling. He had promised them ecstasy of soul and a seat in Heaven—but the world remained the same and the Messias tarried, if He ever intended to return at all, or if there was any truth in Saul’s words. They had sought, he saw, not the rapture of the oneness with God, not the deliverance from sin and death, not the delight of service and virtue, but worldly affluence and comfort and triumph. “Did you not tell us of the words of Christ, that if we accepted the Kingdom of Heaven all else will be given to us? Yet, nothing has been given! The world remains the same and our misery and our hopelessness, in spite of our acceptance.”

  “His Kingdom is not of this world,” Saul would repeat. But they contradicted him with his own quotations from the words of the Messias, and they resented his explanations and interpretations. So, they defected. Some of the Christian Jews said to him with gloomy satisfaction, “What other did you expect, Saul ben Hillel? They cannot comprehend the Messias, nor can they encompass His parables which echo the old Scriptures.”

  The more educated of the Gentile converts, in particular the Greeks, said, “They are ignorant and venal, low slaves or freedmen or peasants. Their old religions taught them only earthly joys and victories, if they pleased the gods, and they cannot understand spiritual rewards.”

  But Saul grieved over these wandering sheep and wept over them and prayed for them, and some returned for in the world they found no hope at all, no love or companionship, no friends, no concern for their welfare. At least in the Christian community they had friendship, and if they were hungry they were fed, and if they were thirsty they were given wine, and if they had no shelter a roof was found for them. “Let us not drive them forth, like intruding cattle, these poor little ones,” said Saul, to the vexed Christians. “Did He not seek the lost sheep and bring them home? There is room in His House for the very meanest and the most humble and stupid, and His wings can cover all humanity. Let us be patient, and teach and bring light to those dark small minds, and who knows but one day they will shine suddenly like the sun?”

  As Saul traveled in Asia Minor and in Europe he not only founded new churches but increased and heartened the established. He wrote always, endless letters full of eloquence and poetry and passion and faith and love, and especially to his dear friends in Corinth, the weaver Aquila and his wife, Priscilla, who had once sheltered him. His letters were cherished and treasured and guarded, but many were lost forever though their spirit remained. He suffered stonings, blows, floggings and shipwrecks on his journeys, for to the pious Jews he was still the “great renegade,” and many of the Christians remembered his earlier persecutions of the Church, and priests of local religions resented his converts and their loss of revenue, and the Romans were suspicious of this white-maned man who spoke in cultured accents but lived like a slave. Such men were dangerous, as history had noted, for they did not love the things of the world and incited men against the world, and the world was the theater for law and order and Roman prosperity, and what else existed but the world of men—and perhaps of the gods? Besides, it was reputed that he spoke of “the conquest of the world,” and that was treasonous.

  Yet, multitudes of Romans also became converts, and soldiers and their officers, including those in Philippi who had spread the wondrous tale of Saul’s deliverance from prison. As a number of these were rich the Church could expand her charitable endeavors and succor the sick and the dying and the abandoned, and the children left to die of exposure, and runaway slaves and the aged and former prisoners. Great ladies in various cities became Christians, and found in the new faith a rescue from boredom and fear, an inspiration beyond mere physical beauty and fleshly pleasures. Becoming Christians, they were charitable and their hearts, for the first time in their pampered lives, were moved by the misery of their fellow men whom they had once regarded as lower than vermin.

  One day, Saul said to Timothy who was now, himself, no longer young, “My time grows shorter. I have had a vision. I must return again to Jerusalem, and when I saw the vision I saw a darkening over the beloved city—and never again after that will I see her.”

  “You are weary,” said Timothy. “Your tired flesh speaks, and not your soul.”

  But Saul had his premonitions. “I long to see my sister again, and her grandchildren, whom I have never seen,” he said evasively. “I hear of my nephew, Amos, and his triumphs during his travels and ministrations, and I might encounter him in Jerusalem.” He smiled at Timothy. “I am only a man, and I need human comforting, though none appears aware of that.”

  He received letters from Lucanus, and answered them, and they rejoiced in each other’s victories and converts. “One day,” wrote Lucanus, “there will not be a people or a nation that will be ignorant of His Name, and the triumph He foretold will have come to pass. Press on, dear friend, though you complain of bodily weakness and a weariness that will not lift! It is only our flesh, and it can be commanded and subdued, for He will give us sustenance for our souls and not let us die before we have accomplished our mission.”

  Saul sighed on receiving this letter. He had come on a period of dryness where the way was no longer plain and all inspiration had been removed. He knew the Truth, but his mind felt dulled and his volition was faltering. Sometimes he dreamt of his house in Tarsus, now sold to strangers, and he could smell the roses and the jasmine again and see the black carved bridge over the peaceful water, and the arbors and the grottoes. His whole being craved for surcease, for quiet loving voices and the touch of loving hands, and the sun setting on palm and cypress and pomegranate tree and sycamore, and gentle music in the atrium, and the smiles and voice of his dead son, whose children he had never seen. Sometimes he dreamt that he was a child again, laughing at Aristo and teasing his little sister, Sephorah. And sometimes he dreamt of Dacyl and her love for him, and his love for her no longer seemed lewd and wicked but the love of a young Adam for his Eve, and the place of the waterfall was the Garden of. Eden.

/>   And there were times when he was beset by evil agonies which he recognized but could only strive against, weakly, though knowing their source. Had it all been a phantom, a dream, his whole life? Sometimes he groaned like Job, “My eye is also dim by reason of sorrow, and all my members are as a shadow.” In this dark confusion, he would wander for days, and even weeks, and all that he said and did during that time was as if he struggled in manacles of iron. He found his followers tedious and dull; he found even his devoted Timothy to be obtuse. His native impatience, fed by illness and age, would be like a flame in his heart and his flesh would itch and he would scratch himself until he bled. All sought his comfort and learning and enlightenment; all believed he was more than man. If they saw his exhaustion, they were dismayed and troubled, but felt little pity, for was he not the shepherd and they only the sheep, and must the sheep not be eternally comforted and sustained or the shepherd be held guilty? When he saw their faces Saul would arouse himself by sheer power of will, for if the sheep doubted or felt lost, they might well stray. They were fragile and uncertain in the wilderness of their lives, and could stumble. So he would speak to them resolutely, with a smile on his ashen lips, and they were relieved.

  Then one night he received the summons to return to Jerusalem, and he awoke, saying to himself, “The beginning of the end has arrived, and soon I will find rest.”

  Chapter 49

  ALL had been the reverse of peaceful in Jerusalem during Saul’s long and many absences.

  The Christians—or the Nazarenes as their fellow Jews still called them in the city—and especially the young men, had joined with the Essenes and the Zealots, and were led into a desperate situation by the Zealot, Eleazar. He lured them into a turbulent and deadly struggle with the Romans, saying that the time had come to free their beloved country. Whether or not he was a true Christian Saul had not been able to learn from the letters he had received from Jerusalem, but it was evident that Eleazar was a violent man and was employing the Nazarenes “to take our people from bondage,” as the Messias had promised. So fierce and savage was the uprising that nearly thirty thousand Jews, both “faithful” and Nazarene, were slaughtered bloodily in the Temple purlieus, and the Roman procurator declared a state of revolution and anarchy. Eleazar was found and publicly executed. And the bitterest of hatreds rose among the people.

  The families of the Jews who were murdered blamed those deaths on the Nazarenes, and now considered the “heretics” to be their mortal enemies, who brought down slaughter and death and ruin on all Jews. They detested the “renegade” Jews more profoundly than they detested the Gentile Nazarenes, for were not the Christian Gentiles the humblest and generally the most peaceable of the workers in their midst? But the “heretics” included some of the more intelligent and wealthiest and educated members of the Jewish people, and therefore they should have restrained Eleazar and his Zealots and not made common cause with them against the Romans. “Revolutionaries! Brigands! Outlaws!” they cried to the Christians. “You betray your own people and lead them to the slaughterhouse!”

  Now it was said that all the churches established throughout the civilized world by the Apostles and evangelists were subversive and were instigating riots and upheavals against Rome. Once Saul had been denounced to the Romans in Jerusalem: “He is a plague-carrier, a fomenter of revolt among all the Jews of the Empire, which he detests.” This had been taken so seriously by the Emperor in Rome that he had warned the Jews of Alexandria not to receive missionaries, unless they wished to be condemned as participants in “a pest which threatens the whole world now.” To the Romans, there was no significant difference between the Nazarene Jews and the “faithful” Jews, for the new sect was “but a Jewish sect, now led by the most irresponsible and murderous of the Zealots and Essenes.”

  Saul had known of these things; he knew he was considered a Zealot by Jew and Roman alike. His appearance in Jewish synagogues throughout the world, during his travels, was greeted with dismay at first, then was tolerated, and later was cursed. He would bring fresh death and persecution and forced exile on his people—he must, therefore, be avoided at all costs. He had caused “the first Jewish war” against the Romans. The Jews were determined that he would not cause another. They heard with sorrow and despair that the synagogues in Rome, among the more prosperous, had been closed by the Emperor, “for fear of a mounting revolution.” When the Nazarenes ceased their worship in the synagogues in Rome the Emperor permitted their reopening. But the bitterness and terror remained, and now the cleavage between the Nazarenes and their fellow Jews was complete. “The Nazarene youths,” wrote the historian Josephus later, “are unkempt, savage, intolerant, lawless, alas, and their very appearance excites Roman animosity, for they appear as barbarians and not part of a civilized community. They walk and talk offensively, and with open sneers at authority and defy established government in all nations. They engage in pitched battles with guards in the cities, and hurl unmentionable weapons upon those guards, and the soldiers, shouting that the return of the Messias is at hand and they were to the vanguard of his army.”

  In Israel, the Essenes and the Zealots (so many of them now Nazarenes) became a particular object of the frightened hatred of the Jews. Therefore, they refused to listen to their message and all sympathy for them, as patriotic Jews opposed to the Roman, disappeared. In other parts of the world Saul was received with resentment and fury by his fellow Jews, as a potential troublemaker and revolutionary, and so a threat to their lives. In vain he pleaded that “His Kingdom is not of this world,” and that “freedom from bondage” meant freedom of the soul from death and sin. They thought this a mere sophistry, and so did the Romans.

  So Saul returned to Jerusalem to reconcile both Jews and Christian Jews, and to save the Church there. On the journey, he was often overcome by despair. He feared for the Christian community in Israel, and deplored the excesses of the Christian Zealots and Essenes. He had written to them while still in Athens: “While we proclaim the Messianic Age—for it has truly arrived—we insist that the Law is still in force, for it is immortal and was given by God, blessed be His Name. Alas, that the Zealots believe that the Messianic Age compels them to throw off all restraint and to engage in riot and incendiarisms and physical attacks and disobedience! For the Lord is the Prince of Peace, and not the Leader of violence and murder and hatred between brothers.”

  He had been even more disturbed at receiving information from Jerusalem that the Gentile converts were misinterpreting the Messias, and were using His very Name to incite trouble. As these converts were in the main former slaves, and freedmen, and of many random races, and artisans and malcontents and desirous of the riches “promised” by the Messias, they mischievously mocked the Roman military on the streets of Jerusalem and caused much disturbance and hostility.

  The Romans felt themselves, and their Empire, threatened throughout the world, and were aghast at the incredible spread of the Messianic Message in every nation.

  Saul found matters in Israel much worse than even his vivid imagination had imagined. Simon Peter, the bishop of the Christian community, had left for Rome, with the desire to bring order and comfort to the Christians and to allay the terrors of his fellow Jews. Saul learned of all this in Joppa, the seaport, where he remained for a few days.

  Joppa, though it stank as did all cities, was still swept by the winds of the sea, freshening and stimulating. The streets were like stairs, one above the other, and walled and paved with blocks of marble and sandstone, and wound precipitately, and were so narrow that overhanging balconies almost touched. The windows which looked out upon the streets were grilled and slitlike, and there were meager little shops set in the walls below. Huge flocks of gulls lifted like metallic gold shavings flung against the hyacinth skies, and glittered. And everywhere, where there was a spot of bare ground, rose the green clouds of tamarisk and sycamore trees, and the knifelike emerald blades of palms, and the counters of the little shops were heaped with citrons,
green and yellow, and cakes and meats and fabrics and spices. Over all was the chuckling and wash of the sea and the strong sea-born winds, and the cries of children and the complaints of animals.

  Saul found the house of Simon the Tanner and remained there for a space, while they discussed the precarious situation of the Jerusalem Community, beset within and without. Simon was a crooked little man with a satyrish grin and small dancing eyes and clever hands, and he made elaborate purses and pouches as well as sandals and boots, and exquisite ornaments of leather embossed with gold and silver. He was not a man to take life too seriously, as he explained to Saul. What came of a somber countenance and fears and premonitions and terrors? A bad digestion, and one knew that a bad digestion could cast gloom on the soul, and in that gloom the soul was cut off from the life-giving sun of God, blessed be His Name. To fear was to doubt God, for were not all things in His Hand? Saul looked at that small and malformed face and wondered if Simon were secretly jesting at him.

  “I have loved greatly, and I have lost greatly,” said Simon, in his shrill womanish voice. “But I endured, and I survived. What avail is it to complain? The Jerusalem Community will survive, if God wills it, and it will not survive, if He wills it.”

  “God’s ‘failures’ are really man’s failures,” said Saul, with bitterness. “It is easy to throw all onto the Shoulders of God and do nothing. But we are called to labor, even if the result is His own. What else can we do?”

  Simon went to the door of his odorous little shop and looked at the sky and the gulls and then over the shelves of the street to the brilliant blue sea. Waves were coming in tall and rapid, and as they crashed on the beach they were a pure flash of white fire, hurtful to the eyes. Simon blinked.

  “What else can we do?” repeated Simon. “We can do only our best, and if that fails, it is not our failure, for it was ordained.”