his meaning, and I saw again how everything floated there.
He said, “You should know with whom you speak as well. I am also a mamzer. In Nazareth some say I’m Mary’s son, not Joseph’s. They say I was born from my mother’s fornication. Others say my father is Joseph, but that I was illicitly conceived before my parents married. I’ve lived all twenty years of my life with this stigma.”
My lips parted, not in surprise at what he’d said, but that he’d chosen to divulge it to me.
“You’re shunned still?” I asked.
“As a boy I wasn’t allowed in synagogue school until my father went and pleaded with the rabbi. When he was alive, he shielded me from gossip and slights. Now that he’s gone, it’s made worse. I believe it’s why I can find no work in Nazareth.” He’d been rubbing the hem of his sleeve between his fingers as he talked, and he let go now, straightening. “But that is as it is. I only mean to say I know the pain you speak of.”
He appeared uncomfortable that he’d turned the conversation to himself, but I couldn’t cease my questions. “How have you endured their scorn for so long?”
“I tell myself their hearts are boulders and their heads are straw.” He laughed. “Lashing out at them did no good. As a boy, I was always coming home scraped and bloodied from some fight. You’ll think me soft compared to other men, but now when I’m reviled, I try to look the other way. It does the world no good to return evil for evil. I try now to return good to them instead.”
What manner of person is this? Men would think him weak, yes. Women, too. But I knew the strength it took to forgo striking back.
He began to pace. I could sense some stirring inside him. “So many suffer this kind of contempt,” he said. “I cannot separate myself from them. They are cast down because they’re destitute or diseased or blind or widowed. Because they carry firewood on the Sabbath. Because they’re not born a Jew but a Samaritan or they’re born outside of marriage.” He spoke like someone whose heart had overflowed its banks. “They are condemned as impure, but God is love. He would not be so cruel as to condemn them.”
I didn’t answer. I think he was struggling to understand why God, his new father, did not plead more insistently with his people to take these outcasts in, just as Jesus’s father, Joseph, had pled with the rabbi to let him into synagogue school.
“Sometimes I can’t bear what I see around me. Rome occupies our land; Jews sympathize with them. Jerusalem is filled with corrupt Temple priests. When I come to pray here, I ask God to bring his kingdom to earth. It cannot come soon enough.”
He went on speaking of God’s kingdom much like Judas did—as a government free of Rome with a Jewish king and righteous rule, but also as a great feast of compassion and justice. At our last meeting I’d called him a stonemason, a carpenter, a yarn sorter, and a fisherman. I saw now he was, in truth, a sage, and perhaps like Judas, an agitator.
But even that didn’t fully explain him. I knew of no one who put compassion above holiness. Our religion might preach love, but it was based on purity. God was holy and pure; therefore we must be holy and pure. But here was a poor mamzer saying God is love; therefore we must be love.
I said, “You speak as if God’s kingdom is not just a place on earth, but a place inside us.”
“So I believe.”
“Then does God live in the Temple in Jerusalem or in this kingdom inside us?”
“Can he not live in both?” he asked.
I felt a sudden blazing up inside and threw my arms open. “Can he not live everywhere?”
His laughter resounded off the cave walls, but his smile lingered on me. “I think for you, too, God cannot be contained.”
Having grown chilled in the shade, I went to sit on a rock in the sun, thinking of the endless debates I’d held in