09 The Father, the Son & the Slave
You know the Passion narrative. This is not that tale. This is the story of a father, his estranged son and the slave caught between them as they journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem. This is Chapter Nine.
Here is the link to the Prologue:
N I N E
Iesu and Metlip had taken advantage of a lull in shop business to explore an unfamiliar route among the hills above Nazareth. Though still a boy, the Nubian already had a slight height advantage over Iesu. They followed a narrow defile with high, steep walls on a path peppered with sheep droppings. Few trees grew here due to the limited light that filtered down, but it was also cooler than the open slopes.
Iesu brooded over his dreams, and though he sensed he should discern their meaning, he could not. In some, people clamoured for his attention, in others they listened to him. A few had him passing out food or wrapping wounds. And in some he was lost among lepers keening for aid or, worse, trapped with corpses who came alive and surrounded him.
“Do these dreams scare you, Brother?” Metlip asked. He had unhitched his lead and coiled it around the cloth parcel of food he held. Iesu carried a bladder of water.
“Some do, Brother. One or two have terrified me, yet there is an obvious thread within them all.”
“What is that?”
“I am never a carpenter.”
Metlip laughed, his voice breaking. “What are you, then?”
“I am not sure. I am always the focus of attention, but in some I am a teacher and in others, a healer, though I know not the reason I would surround myself with lepers or corpses. Even so, while these dreams terrify my waking hours, I do not seem so affected within them.”
“Do you think they are linked to your mother’s tale of your birth?”
Iesu shrugged. “No. I think not.”
“I think they must be. Is the Messiah not all of these — teacher, healer, symbol to unite the people?”
Iesu walked a few steps in silence, then halted. “My brother, once again you astound me. Would that I possessed your wisdom. Or perhaps these dreams are just wistful visions to escape my lot.”
The rock walls receded to reveal a sunny glade dotted with grazing sheep.
“Iesu, your problem with carpentry is you deem it beneath you. You think manual labour does not exercise your intelligence. It does. But it demands focus on a single task when you prefer to juggle interpretations of the law. I agree with your father that you have never truly applied yourself to our craft.” Metlip turned about full circle. “Do you see the shepherd?”
“Perhaps he is chasing a stray,” Iesu replied. “Though if he does not return soon, others will wander off.”
Metlip dropped their food bundle. “I will climb that ridge and look for him,” he said. “You gather the flock.”
No sooner had Metlip reached the crown of the ridge than he disappeared behind it. Iesu hiked his tunic above his knees and trotted among the sheep, waving his free arm to bunch them together, but instead caused them to scatter. He had made little progress when Metlip reappeared, cradling a boy in his arms and calling for him.
“He is dead,” the Nubian said as he laid the boy on the grass. “His flesh is cold.”
Iesu knelt beside them. “Did you listen for his breath?”
“He is dead,” Metlip repeated. Iesu reached out and eased the shepherd’s face towards him, then lowered his ear to the boy’s mouth. After several heartbeats, he leaned back, his fingers trailing to the boy’s chest. He did not try to hide his tears. “To what purpose does God demand a boy’s death, and alone in the hills?” Taking the boy’s hand in his, he nodded to Metlip to do the same then he leaned forward again. “Go into God’s embrace.” A tear dropped from his chin onto the lifeless face beneath him.
The corpse convulsed and drew a breath as if to take in all the air in Creation, then continued to twitch as it regained colour, ragged breaths tempering into a steady rhythm.
The boy’s eyes opened, alarmed. He glanced at Metlip and alarm became terror. He screamed so loud Metlip loosed his grasp and fell back, and the boy scrabbled to put distance between them.
But Iesu still gripped the shepherd’s other hand. “Hold,” he said, his tone firm yet without threat, and the boy looked at him and obeyed. “You have nothing to fear from us. I am Iesu, son of Josef the carpenter, and this is Metlip, who rescued you. Here, share our water and find your senses.”
The boy took the leather bladder in his trembling hands and drank. When he lowered the skin, he said, “I am Eli, youngest son of the wool merchant, Samuel. What happened to me?”
Metlip answered. “We found your flock scattered, but did not see you. I discovered you at the bottom of the ridge, seemingly dead. I brought you up and then Iesu — “
“Was able to rouse you,” Iesu interrupted. “Have you any pains? Can you move your limbs?”
Eli sat up, tested his arms and legs, wiggled his fingers and stretched his toes. “My side is sore, and my head, but even these pains are fading. Where are my flock?”
“I am no shepherd,” Iesu admitted, helping the boy to his feet. “I fear I have scattered them.”
“Worry not. They will come as I name them.”
“You name them?” Metlip asked. “Each of them?”
Eli smirked. “My father’s way of making us learn the names of the prophets.” He suddenly went silent, thinking he had said too much. “Please do not tell the priest.” Metlip laughed.
“Never,” said Iesu, restricting his reaction to a smile. “But it speaks to the number of prophets our people have endured in our history and still we have not found a saviour.” He clapped the boy’s shoulder. “Collect your flock and then share our meal. We have bread and oil, grapes and figs. Afterwards, we will make sure you get home.”
They watched Eli move away, reciting the names of the prophets. When he was out of earshot, Metlip grabbed Iesu’s arm.
“Now you know the answer to your question.”
“What question?”
“God’s purpose in the boy’s death. He died so you could return him to life. You worried your fate was your mother’s fantasy, you thought your dreams mere wishes. Now you know, and the boy is your proof. He was dead. Stone dead and cold. Yet there he is, collecting his sheep, ignorant of his role in revealing your destiny.”
“A valid argument, Brother. But perhaps it was you who gave him his life. You held his hand too.”
“I saw the tear drop. Your tear, not mine.”
“How could a single tear have such power? It makes no sense. There must be another explanation. We will ask my father.”
Maryam walked in silence between Iesu and Metlip as she absorbed what she had just heard. The two men waited for her inevitable question.
“What did your father answer?” she asked.
It was Metlip who replied. “He denied it. He sent me away so he could speak alone with Iesu.”
Iesu took up the tale. “Indeed, though I could not understand why, for he knew his own wife prophesied me to be the Messiah. But he was adamant. Even though I said Metlip would speak the same story, confirm my version of the boy’s condition when we found him and the miraculous effect of my tear dripping onto his face, my father insisted it could not be and would not hear otherwise.”
“Later,” the Nubian said, “my master took me aside and commanded me to forget the day’s events as I had witnessed them, and never to speak of them again.”
Maryam looked from one to the other. “Does your father not believe your mother’s tale?”
“For a long time I thought not,” Iesu replied. “Indeed, that is the reason we made this excursion, so near as it is to our wedding and departure to Aegypt.”
“Has he changed his mind now?” Maryam asked.
“Perhaps. He has yet to confirm it.”
“Yet,” interjected Metlip, “there was a victory that day. My rescue of the shepherd earned me my freedom not just from the leash, but the freedom to move about the village unaccompanied thereafter.”
Maryam hugged Metlip’s arm and smiled up at him. Then she looked at Iesu, her face serious.
“Then you must ask him,” she said. “You need to know.”
“Not now. When we rest, or perhaps tonight. It is not something I would speak where others might hear.”
A short time after, a mounted guard cantered past, announcing they had reached where they would wait out the hottest part of the day.
The river’s gorge was flanked for most of its length by a colourful, though dense and inaccessible tangle of bush with rare gaps, and those too often paired with dangerous rapids. In only two places along the eastern valley were there streams that flowed from narrow fissures in the mountains to join the Jordan, and it was at one of these that the caravan halted.
The stream ran through a shallow crevice worn into the rock, gurgling as it flowed between the channel walls. The lead wagon pulled up more than a dozen paces away, but the oxen smelled the water and strained against the brake. Water collection was the priority among the travellers, a chore made that much easier because many could fill their skins and jars at the same time.
As the last few finished drawing their needs, the vehicles moved through the stream to halt once again while the flocks took their turn to drink. The hillside track had not only slowed the caravan, but a pervasive dust cloud had forced the train to spread out almost double the length of the day before. While the travellers found space to rest under the trees, the child-shepherds separated the animals into groups strung out along the channel, afterwards corralling them into the space between the wagons and the glade.
When the family gathered at the wagon’s lowered rear gate to eat, Maryam gave Iesu a subtle nudge with her elbow and pointed her chin at Josef. Iesu looked about to be sure no one would hear.
“Father,” he said, “do you recall your words that day when Metlip and I told you how we found the shepherd boy Eli dead, and how my tear restored his life?”
Josef ceased chewing his mouthful of bread, then looked at his son. “No.”
“Truly?” prodded Iesu. “I recall your answer clearly.”
“I remember being sent away, and later told never to repeat the tale,” added Metlip.
Josef looked from one to the other. “Why bring this up now? What is its importance?”
“Because, Master, Iesu and I had been discussing his dreams and what they could mean, and then finding and restoring the boy’s life provided the answer — ”
“What?” Josef shouted. Faces turned towards them. “What dreams?”
Iesu and Metlip both remained silent. Mother rested her hand on Josef’s arm.
At a much lower volume that failed to dampen his fury, Josef asked again. “What dreams?”
Mother half-expected to witness her son’s legendary temper.
Instead, Iesu was calm as he answered his father. “Some time before the shepherd, I dreamt of myself in roles that had nothing to do with carpentry. I was a teacher and a healer. In others, people screamed for my attention, or gathered to hear me. Once or twice I found myself among lepers and even the dead, who came back to life.”
“Why would you share such dangerous secrets with a slave?”
“He is my oldest and greatest friend.”
“He is not your family. I am.”
“We are not blood kin, so are we family? Yet I accept you as my father, as you look to me as your son. Since he came to us, Metlip has always been a second shadow to me. He is my brother.”
“But I am your father.”
“You are. Yet always you worked against me, deflecting questions of my birth or, if pressed, resorting to anger, implying I was prone to a wandering mind when I should have been focussed on my apprenticeship. Had I come to you, I would have left wrapped in even greater doubt than that which already bound me.
“Even so, I went to you when I and Metlip returned with Eli, the young shepherd we rescued. Both of us repeated the same story, yet still you insisted we had to be mistaken. We knew the truth of what happened and that day I resolved to no longer seek your advice.”
“How else might I have answered?” his father replied. “Should I have encouraged you to seek your death? Look you, are you blind to the risks you face by choosing to challenge the Sadducees, the fatal probability of numbering yourself among the prophets? Even the law refuses to define who is and is not a prophet. The law requires obedience to prophets, but it also demands not to obey false prophets, yet does not provide any measure to determine one from the other.
Josef took a slow, deep breath before continuing. “I imagined one day we might have this conversation, and so I prepared. The Tenakh says a prophet must have first made a successful prediction. Elsewhere, it states a prophet must possess devout piety and an unwavering obedience to the law. But it is the final criteria, to me, which is the most important. A prophet must be old enough to have served a synagogue as a judge for a long span of time. The key, though, is what it does not say. To become expert in the law requires study and application, but it does not demand a lifetime. Much depended on your politics — if your prophecies fit current attitudes and hopes, you were ‘true’. If you contradicted the current priesthood, then you were ‘false’ and accused of blasphemy.”
Josef let his words sink in. “You, my son, do not contradict the priests — you deny them. How do you see yourself accepted as a prophet, then?”
“I want to give God back to the people.”
“You want to change the world,” Josef said.
“I do.”
“God help us.”
“It was His idea.”
Metlip laughed then, drawing Iesu’s attention. Neither witnessed Josef’s scowl, and it was gone when Iesu looked at him and said, “But Metlip made it clear to me.”
“What does Metlip know of God?” Josef growled, his temper growing.
Iesu ignored it. “More than you, Father. Perhaps, even more than I.”
The older man glanced at his slave. “How?”
“Name a topic and I will recite those laws which apply, Master,” Metlip replied. “I learned the law from your own lips, just as I learned it does not apply to me. Aside from Iesu, Mistress, yourself and perhaps the Tribune, all others see me as nothing more than a clever beast, incapable of anything more than base emotions and possessing an eagerness to mimic.”
Josef was about to speak, but Iesu said, “Let him finish, Father.” Josef’s eyes widened, but he kept silent.
The African continued. “I am a slave. But my station limits only my physical freedoms. I have emotions, like you. I dream, like you. And, forgive me, Master, I know God — unlike you.”
“None know God,” Josef snapped.
“No?” asked Metlip. “What of those who claim God supports their goals, and those who say they do His work? Too many to count. To me, it is simple. I have no need to know God’s will. But I know He sees all, and so He must see me. Thus, I act in the best way I can to honour His attention and take joy from my effort. That is enough.”
“It is everything, Brother.”
Without another word, Metlip turned and walked away.
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