Martha and I part ways with the caravan as it enters Jerusalem from the west, then travel along the outer wall until we reach the road to Bethany. As I point out the various sites, I notice Martha is in a very happy mood.
“What?” I ask.
“You’re just so excited to be here again. You’re almost giddy.”
“I guess I’m excited to be here with you. I feel like I’m showing you my hometown or something. In a sense, that’s a good description, since this is where I grew up spiritually.”
The horses are well-rested, so we make very good time and are halfway to Jericho, when we see Jesus and the crowd that’s following Him come into view. One hundred meters in front of us, I spot two blind men standing on the side of the road, waiting for Jesus to pass them.
“Cover your head and face,” I say. “I’m in that crowd. It’s where I first saw the two assassins. They were working their way to me through the crowd and I gave them the slip when Jesus stopped to heal those blind men.”
“We’re too visible on these horses,” Martha says.
Martha dismounts and puts the hood of her cloak over her head.
“Take them over that small hill and watch from up there. I’ll watch the crowd pass from here and keep the assassins off your back.”
It’s a good plan, so I hide the horses and watch.
As the crowd approaches, the two blind men beside the road start shouting to Jesus and asking Him for mercy. The crowd tells them to be quiet, but they only shout all the louder.
“What do you want me to do for you?” asks Jesus.
“Lord, we want to see!”
I spot myself in the crowd and see my head tilt as I first see the two assassins. I follow my own gaze until I see the two assassins, along with Martha just behind them, waiting for them to make a move.
There’s a great shout of joy near Jesus when the two blind men have their sight restored. As the crowd surges forward to see, Martha trips the lead assassin and they go tumbling, along with a dozen other people. I can’t help but laugh. She saved me and I never knew she was there. I never even noticed there was a commotion right behind me.
The assassins untangle themselves and manage to stand, but I’ve moved closer to Jesus and out of their reach, so they fall back into the crowd. I wait for Martha to return to me and the horses, but she doesn’t. Instead, she also works her way closer to Jesus. At one point, she was standing right behind me in the crowd.
She must think she’s funny.
The crowd moves on, so I retrieve the horses and travel parallel to the crowd a few hundred meters from the road. When I catch up to Jesus, everyone is stopped near the tree where I’ll spend the night. I can see myself at the edge of the crowd, holding the large pack of a man with a crippled hand so he can worm through the crowd.
Jesus heals the man’s hand and the man yells: “Heal my friend the mute, make him speak!” and he points at me. The crowd parts for me and many of them are pushing me forward. Chief among those pushing is Martha. She doesn’t understand the language, but she must think this is when Jesus healed my throat.
I can’t hear the man with the restored hand from this distance, but I remember what he said to me. He said: “Your faith will make you well.”
I see that Martha is the one who gave me one last push so I’d be standing before Christ.
You can push a body, Martha, but you can’t push someone into faith. They must find it themselves.
I remember all too well what I was thinking. I was thinking that to be healed would mean everything I knew, or thought I knew, about the world would be wrong. I was afraid to stand before Jesus and ask for healing because, deep down, I knew He was the son of God, and I was afraid of giving up my sinful and faithless ways.
I watch myself turn from Jesus and walk away. I look like a deflated balloon.
Martha is standing just a few meters away, looking just as deflated. She stands like a statue, staring at me as I sit down hard against the tree. The crowd moves past her, bumping and jostling her as she remains dumbfounded. I see the two assassins pass by along with the crowd, unable to see me because I was sitting.
The man whose hand was healed comes to retrieve his pack and speaks to me, breaking Martha’s trance. She looks around, and sees me on my horse and makes her way to me. She mounts her horse without a word and without looking at me, and we ride away in silence.
We ride into a deep ravine where the horses can graze and drink. We dismount and sit against separate trees. It takes me a minute to find the courage to break the silence.
“Part of me wishes you hadn’t seen that. But another part is glad you did.”
“You rejected him.”
She releases the angry thoughts that have been penned up inside her.
“You turned your back on the Lord and walked away. He was disappointed, but not surprised. I could see it on His face. He wanted to heal you. He wanted you to believe in Him and you chose to deny Him. How could you?”
We sit in silence for what seems an eternity.
“The man whose pack I carried so his hand could be healed - do you want to know what he said to me when I was sitting against the tree? He asked me: ‘Were you afraid your faith is not strong enough to give you your voice back? After you saw my hand was healed, you still did not believe? Your faith is truly weak then, isn’t it?’ Well, he was correct.”
Martha remains silent, so I continue.
“Then, like he could see through time and see hundreds of years of Christianity, he said to me: ‘Imagine all those who have not seen what you have seen and yet believe anyway. They are the ones who truly have faith.’ He’s right, of course.”
“Right now, I’m over those hills sitting against a tree, finding faith, and there’s nothing you or I can do to help me. I had to reach that place on my own. Right now, against that tree, I’m thinking of you. I’m remembering how, in class, you declared that when I have something to say, nobody can shut me up. And I’m thinking that God made me mute, because shutting me up was the only way He could get me to listen to Him.”
I’ve been making this speech with my eyes closed and with tears running down my face. When I open them, I see Martha is staring at me, with tears on her cheeks.
“Jesus knew you were going to reject Him.”
“Yes,” I say.
“And it made Him sad, but He’s willing to wait for you to come to Him.”
“He has time. He’ll wait for the entire world to come to Him. But for me, He only needs to wait a little while longer. By tomorrow morning, I was - and will be - ready.”
“Then let’s go watch over you.”
“You’re going to miss seeing Jesus enter Jerusalem riding on a donkey. Would you like to ride ahead so you can see it? I’ll stay here.”
“Could I?” she asks. “I’d love to do that. But how will we find each other again?”
“You’ll have plenty of time to come back and meet me right here,” I say. “I sat against the tree through sunset and slept until mid-morning. You can get back here by sunset. We’ll take the staff after dark and be on our way. This time, I’d like to get inside the temple early so I can see Jesus turn over the tables of the money changers, rather than just hearing the crashing.”
I take up my post on a hill where I can see myself sitting against the tree, while Martha gives me her pack and trots off on her horse. My eyes linger on her back and I find my mind straying back to lust and, again I force myself to control my thoughts. I laugh when I look down at myself against the tree. Here we are, two versions of Cephas. The one against the tree is struggling to find faith, while the one on the hilltop is struggling to live with it.
By an hour after sunset, I find myself watching the horizon for someone on horseback more than I’m watching over myself against the tree. Martha should have been here hours ago. There’s no way she got lost. She’s just too aware of her surroundings for that to happen. Even in the dark, she has the skill to return to this spot.
I rack my brain, trying to remember if I watched the stars from under the tree or not. I can’t get caught stealing the staff, but I don’t want to wait any longer to search for Martha. Using all the skills of moving silently that Martha taught me, I begin my slow descent to the tree. I make a few mistakes with snapped twigs and rolled rocks, but nothing loud enough to wake someone who is so emotionally exhausted that he fell asleep sitting up against a tree.
In the last ten meters, I see myself start to stir in my sleep. The staff is standing up against the tree and my arm moves and knocks over the staff, causing it to fall to the ground with a hollow clatter. I wait to see if the noise woke me up, but the sound of my own soft breathing indicates it did not. I want to laugh when I realize that by knocking over the staff in my sleep, I made the job of stealing it easier for my future self.
I travel the last three meters in absolute silence and pick up the staff with just a soft scraping sound as I lift it from the rocks. When I’ve backed off ten meters, I can’t handle the slow pace any longer and risk making more noise. By the time I’m fifty meters away I’ve forgotten about stealth and break into a jog to get back to my horse and search for Martha.
The moon is still high in the sky, so I ride a course parallel to the road. If anyone is on the road, I’ll see them pass in the moonlight. I reach Bethany without seeing anyone. Somewhere in this little town Jesus is resting tonight, so I ask for His help.
“Jesus, please help me find her,” I pray.
As if in answer, I hear a soft whinny of a horse that’s in some shrubs twenty meters off the road. I nudge my horse towards the sound and find that it’s Martha’s horse, abandoned. I feel like my heart may stop beating. She could be unconscious in a ditch and I’d never see her in the moonlight.
Worse, everything around me seems to be getting darker by the second. I look up and see some clouds are passing in front of the moon, making it all the harder to see. I’m tempted to curse Jesus for giving me the opposite of my prayer, when I realize the darkness is allowing me to see something I couldn’t before. There’s a tiny pinprick of light coming from a house a half kilometer in the distance. No other house has any light at all.
Why is someone awake in that house?
I walk the horses towards the light and tie them to a tree before their clopping can alert whoever’s awake in there. The light is coming from under a poorly fitting door, but there’s also light coming from the far side of the house, where a window is open. I pass around to listen and hear the rough voices of several men.
“That Roman she-devil is rich enough to have a horse, so why didn’t she have any money? You said she’d have money,” one voice says.
“How should I know? Maybe she spent it,” another voice replies.
“I told you we should’ve followed her instead. She hid it somewhere and would have led us right to it,” a third voice says.
“Well, I know how she’s going to pay us,” the second voice says. “She’s very pretty. She’s going to pay me quite a few times tonight.”
“The way she fights, it’s not going to be easy. We’re all going to have to hold her down for you. My head still hurts where she hit me,” a fourth voice says, “and Gershom isn’t going to be getting any payment from her tonight - considering where she kicked him.”
“Gershom should consider himself lucky she dropped her knife, or she might’ve done a lot more than just kick him down there,” the second voice says and laughs.
I risk a look through the window. There are five men inside the one-room shack. One of them is curled up in the fetal position on a rough bed. That must be Gershom. Three of them are standing to block any escape by Martha, while the fourth is sitting in a corner, holding some sort of pillow against his head. Martha’s knife is sitting on a table behind the men.
Martha is backed into a corner. Her cloak is missing and her toga has been ripped open. She’s made a futile attempt to rewrap what’s left of it, but remains exposed in ways that must be driving these men mad with lust. If I were not so angry, I might have similar thoughts. Instead, my desire is to cut these men’s eyes out for what they’ve seen.
As I move around to the door, I draw my knife and place the blade in my right hand and hold the staff in my left. This staff seems to have a way of showing up in the right place at the right time. I’m certainly going to need it to fight these men.
“We’ll all rush her at once,” the second voice says. “Ira, stand up and help. Once I’m done, you can go second. Maybe it’ll help your headache.”
That’s all I need to hear. I kick through the door on the first try, its brittle wooden bolt snapping into pieces. As the surprised men spin to face me, I throw my knife. It sails past the head of the man in the center and sinks into the wooden wall behind them.
I don’t wait for an invitation. I cross the room in two steps, running right past Gershom on the bed, and swing the heavy end of the staff at the man closest to Martha. He raises his arm, which wards off a blow aimed at his head, but likely breaks his right ulna in the process. I use the other end of the staff to sweep his legs out from under him.
The man on the right moves forward and I have to back up so he can’t get behind me. The man in the center pauses to grab for a staff I couldn’t see propped up against a support post. Gershom has struggled to a sitting position on the bed, so I hit him in the head with the staff, removing him from the fight.
The remaining three regroup, while the one with the broken ulna has backed into a corner and looks like he wants no more of this staff. The one that Martha gave a headache is standing, but also looks unsure. They all look to the man with the staff for direction.
Take out the leader and the rest will fold.
“She leaves with me now, and nobody else will be hurt,” I say in Aramaic.
The one with the staff turns out to be the second voice, the leader.
“She’s not going anywhere, Roman. She owes us all a good time.”
He seems to have an instinct for how to provoke people, and he’s succeeding. My anger is fueled by his words.
“That makes you mad, doesn’t it, Roman? The thought of her with another man? Especially a Hebrew.”
“All we want is to leave.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Roman. What you want is to kill us all. That’s what Romans do.”
He’s right. That is what I want to do. How can I have these murderous thoughts, and still be a Christian?