THE JOB

(These thoughts are added to three times each week)

There are nights when the stars seem not so bright as on other nights. It was like that just before the arrest in the garden place. It had been a day that had fed on itself, and it was coming up full, or empty, depending upon whose side you were on.

For political stability, the Judge in the second of two courts had allowed the jury to make the final decision. The emotional instability of the times made the outcome inevitable. It was the repetition of an age-old theme – if you do not like what is being said, silence the culprit. And since rehabilitation was not an option, everyone knew that Jesus was going to die.

It was the Jerusalem of King Herod and Pontius Pilate; a city that the Assyrians had fought over, the Egyptians had occupied, the Babylonians had restrained and the Romans had brutalized. But Jerusalem had never been conquered emotionally. Jerusalem was a city of monumental moments. No one realized that what was happening had the force of eternity about it.

It had begun with an invitation to love one’s enemies. But since interpretation is, at best, a shaky art, many regarded it as a revolution. At the end of two years and three months, everyone thought it was all over. Actually, it was not an end but a beginning.

He was an instrument maker - an instrument of death. Not that he actually used it. He would never do that. He only provided the means. The woodworker desperately needed the money these jobs provided. Taxes were high and always getting higher. Sometimes his conscience bothered him, but not enough to make him change this part of his trade.

He reached for his tools and bent to the task at hand. The soldier who always placed the orders had made it unmistakably clear that he must work faster. If he could not produce more quickly and efficiently, his name would be taken off the list.

The weather was, as usual, unbearably hot and he sweated as his hands properly shaped the beam. He had long since learned how to erase from his mind the cruelty of which he was a part. After all, a man must live.

The old carpenter had never been able to settle down. Perhaps the restlessness was part of his nomadic heritage. He had scorned Bethlehem as a half-dead and dusty little town, so he drifted on. Nor was Nazareth to his liking. It is not that he had failed to acquire a reputation for excellence. Whether building a stable, an inn, a private dwelling or simply shaping a yoke, his work was always appreciated. But there was another carpenter whose reputation outdid even his, so again he moved. Finally, he came to Jerusalem, a city of 55,000. In a matter of months he had settled in and established a small shop near the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.

The maze of tiny streets was nothing like the life of his youth. He, born of the Ta’amreh Bedouin tribe, was raised in those barren areas surrounding the stagnant, bitter waters of the Dead Sea. Yet he enjoyed the crowded marketplaces where merchants loudly haggled over the price of pickled cucumbers, honey-sweetened pastries, and chickens and lambs from their open stalls. He was fascinated by the narrow alleyways that forced one shoulder-to-shoulder with the hustling crowds.

His rustic appearance and accent, coupled with his unusual skill in his trade, made him an anomaly to those who came to his shop. He was an anomaly in his own eyes. Why was he here? There were other big cities, why had he felt drawn to Jerusalem?

What was so special about this city that even King David had declared, “If I forget Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its strength!” The Talmud claimed that God, Himself, had named it, and part of the word Jerusalem meant peace. But the Romans had come, and they tolerated neither God nor the Talmud. And there was certainly no peace. But here he was. He had a shop, and he felt at home in this large, ancient city.

The day was dry and clear with no hint of a storm. Outside, scavenger dogs mingled their barking with the bleating from pens of sheep waiting to be sacrificed, the ceaseless slapping of sandals against the cobble stones seemed to have the same cadence as the blacksmith forging iron and the cacophony of voices were like ageless echoes.

His once-straight spine seemed now caught in a perpetual tilt. Long years of heavy labor had taken a toll. Bending to this hateful, but well paid, task he wielded his bronze hatchet with unaccustomed force. The wood chips behind his ears that designated him a carpenter, almost loosened and fell.

It happened in a moment. He was rushing, as he had been told he had better do, and the sharp axe slipped. In all these years he had never cut himself, and in his trade that was a small miracle. He wrapped his leg tightly in an old rag but the bleeding would not stop. He wrapped the rag tighter and increased the pace of his efforts. He was filled with a kind of dread he had never experienced before. If someone had asked him to describe it he would have had to mutter, “I can’t.”

As he watched his blood drip onto the piece of wood he shaped, he could not help but wonder about the man whose blood would also stain it at the crucifixion.
It was not that he had not made such crosses before, or that he would not make them again, but sleep would not come easily this night nor for many nights to follow.
He thought longingly of a public garden, Gethsemane, not far from his shop. He went there whenever he needed the peaceful beauty of its stately palms and silver-leafed olive trees. Yet this very morning, a customer had told him of how darkness and disorder had visited even its quiet stillness. A dangerous zealot, by name of Jesus, had been arrested. He sighed…why must violence threaten such tranquility and beauty. Somehow he knew that this man would be hanging from one of the crosses he was making.
When one built chairs, they were for rest and fellowship. A bed offered a place to resurrect ones self from weariness. The stables he had constructed became places of birth and life. But crosses were cruel instruments of death. His sense of helplessness and guilt deepened.

There was famine in his eyes because he was not a man of violence and because crucifixion had not yet outlived its time. What is it like to die nailed to a cross? he wondered. How will I die? Surely not upon a cross. The old man shivered but he could not lift his eyes from the trinities of death now finished and placed against a wall.

He heard a gasp and saw a young boy outside turn his head away, savaged by what he saw. Was that the cry of a child he heard or the sound of his own soul weeping?

He heard the jangling of armor. The sound was full of menace. He rarely hated anyone, but then there is no rule that requires the conquered love the conqueror. As he watched them carry their heavy load away, he thought, one thing is for sure, this troublemaker Jesus will never be remembered like Spartacus.