The Widow of Nain – part 2

Just outside the gate, the men carrying the body turned towards the town cemetery. A large group of people were walking towards us heading for the town gate we had just come through. They stopped in respect as the body passed them by. I could see the man leading the group stop someone in the crowd and ask them what was going on. I don’t know why this made me angry, but it did. I was just going to stop walking, and turn and go back and berate these strangers for not respecting our grief, my grief, when the man leading the group ran past me and stopped the body carriers. That was enough to stop my tears. I could have hit him, I was so beside myself. Then he did a strange thing he asked the men to lower my son’s body to the ground, and he knelt beside him. He drew the cover away from his face, and looked down on him with so much compassion that my hand fell to my side, and all anger drained away from me. He looked up at me holding my gaze with eyes that seemed to hold worlds in their depths. Then he looked down at my son again, and poked him in his side. My son took one deep breath in, and opened his eyes. The crowd standing around, also took one deep collective breath in, and began to mutter to each other. Who was this man who could raise the dead? With a hiss of sibilants the name Jesus, the Rabbi from Nazareth came wafting towards me.

Rabbi Jesus, kneeling at his side, unwound the bandages from around him, took his hand, and helped him to his feet. Putting his arm around his waist, and getting my son to lean heavily on him, he brought him to me. I must have looked such a fool standing there with my mouth open. One minute my son had been dead, and my life over, now here he was standing in front of me with a bewildered look on his face, just as he had when he was a child, and he woke up from a nap. I took a step towards him, and put out my hand to touch his cheek. He was there, he was warm, he was alive. I threw my arms around him, and if the Rabbi had not still had his hand on my son’s shoulder, we would have both fallen down. When I finally unwrapped myself from my dazed son, I turned round and threw my arms around the man who had brought him back to life. He hugged me back, and whispered in my ear ‘Look after him well’. I will.

As I gradually came to my senses I realised that time was rushing on, and we were not far from the beginning of the Sabbath. All my friends and most of the people of the town had been on their way to my son’s funeral, and had left the Sabbath preparations to come. The Rabbi had brought with him not only his close followers, but a crowd of people who must have been listening to him talk as he walked along. In a moment of impulse I said, ‘You must all come and share the Sabbath with me.’

As soon as I said it I realised that there was no way I could look after all of the strangers at our gates. My neighbours and friends must have seen the panic on my face as soon as the words came out of my mouth, for they each in their turn found people in the crowd, and invited them to share the Sabbath. I was left standing with my arm around my son’s waist, looking at the Rabbi and his twelve closest friends. I turned, and with help from one of the Rabbi’s friends we walked my son back to my house. Once we got there, everyone pitched in to help get everything done, from preparing the food, to watering the plants in the garden and locking up the chickens. Rabbi Jesus took it upon himself to care for my son, giving him water, sitting by him as he slept, waking him regularly and giving him more water, until he seemed finally satisfied that he was really on the mend. I wanted to do this, but the Rabbi seemed to know what he was doing, and after all, he had just brought him back to life, so he should know what he was doing. When the rest of us had eaten, and the wine all drunk, Rabbi Jesus told us all stories about the kingdom of God, the like of which I had never heard before or since. I sat next to my son all evening, and held his hand while he slept. That night for the first time since he was tiny, I curled up on the mat beside him, so I could feel his breathing as I rested. I won’t say I slept, because I kept on reaching out to touch him to make sure he was the right temperature and that he was still breathing. In fact it was many weeks before I left off just reaching out to touch him to make sure that he really was alright, and that his death was a nasty nightmare somewhere in the past. By this time he was getting really fed up with me, even if he did understand why I was doing it.

I kept up with news of Rabbi Jesus after he left the next day. The strangest story I heard was one that I was told had taken place just before he brought my son back from the dead. They said that he had been up on Mount Tabor, and in sight of his closest friends had somehow become changed, transfigured, almost godlike, and that they had seen Moses and Elijah standing talking with him. I would have wondered at this story had it not also been reported to me that a voice came from heaven saying ‘This is my son, in whom I am well pleased’. I knew then that this story was true. I was distraught when I heard that he had been arrested and crucified, but somehow, unlike almost everyone else, I was not surprised at his resurrection. I had already seen resurrection once, moreover I must be a very rare and privileged woman, for not only have I hugged one man who has been resurrected, I have hugged two!

The Widow of Nain – part 1

‘My son, my son, why have you forsaken me?’ Why have you left me, as your Father did just a few months ago. Now I am alone and without protection, without land to work. How will I grow food, to eat or to sell so that I have money to buy clothes and other necessities of life. I am left to the mercy of kin who will sit me at their tables and pity me as they feed me on food grown on the land which was your father’s inheritance; and yours, for such a short period of time. My son, my son, my son.

As these two words eddied around my brain, my thoughts only on the lifeless body which I had been told was being brought to me from the fields, almost as if my words were of no import, other words entered my brain, like a whisper carried on the breeze ‘This is my son, in whom I am well pleased’. They sounded so real that I stopped my wailing and shot my head up, looking out across the Jezreel Valley, to Mount Tabor just two miles away. In an almost flat landscape of agricultural land growing grains and vines Mount Tabor, is an upturned bowl of solid rock rising up from the valley floor nearly 2,000 feet. It is covered in trees, apart from the top, which has been cleared many times over the centuries, so I am told, so that watchmen can keep guard. They stand there, noting who goes too and fro, travelling along the Via Maris which winds its way around the foot of the mount heading north to Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey from Egypt in the south. The Romans like to know what is going on, as has everyone who has ruled this land!

On this day the top of the Mount was covered in cloud, not wispy, misty clouds. This cloud was dense dark and black, menacing almost, the kind that brings thunder and lightening, and a deluge of rain that moves stones and changes the landscape. On this day the cloud did not move, it stayed put, hovering almost protectively over the top, sheltering and shadowing what was happening up there. In the detached back of my mind, my thought was that at least on this day of all days, the soldiers could not spy on us, on me, and mark my grief as we buried my son. If I could have seen that far and through the density of the clouds, I would have rejoiced, because I might have known what was going to happen to me next, and had hope. As it was, all I knew was that my heart was broken and my life ended, just like that.

The day had started off hot, and got hotter as time passed. It is always difficult to keep cool enough, but when the harvest must come in otherwise the crop will be spoilt, and your father has recently died so you have no one to help you any more, a young man will think he is invincible. Even when everyone else had left the fields and gone to sit to and eat lunch under nearby trees or in the shade of a rock, I was told my son kept on working hour after hour. Someone told me that he began to behave a bit strangely. He would lift a bundle up, and then look around as if he didn’t know where he was. One of his friends tried to get him to have a drink of water, but he said he couldn’t spare the time. Then it happened. He just fell to the ground and started writhing around and there was blood coming from his mouth. As suddenly as it all started, he stopped writhing, sighed and stopped breathing. It all happened so fast that no one knew what to do. They moved his body into the shade of a rock, and as his face cooled down, it lost the red colour that it had apparently been going all afternoon, and became almost normal in colour.

When his body came to me, the men who had brought him carefully from the fields, laid it tenderly on his bed mat in the house. He looked so peaceful, that I almost thought that he was just asleep. When I touched his face, he was as cold as death. I broke down then and started to wail. Friends and neighbours joined me, sharing my grief, recognising their own mortality as well. I gently washed his body and carefully wrapped it tightly in a winding sheet, as I had done for his father only a few month before. A group of neighbours came and gently lifted up my son’s lifeless body onto their shoulders and with just an hour or so to go before sunset, began to walk towards the town gate. Many friends and kinsfolk followed weeping and wailing.