days of the Hasmonean kings ended some one hundred years earlier, there had been no Jewish rulers over us. Either Roman puppets like Herod or Roman governors like Pontius Pilate had governed our country.
When would our state be restored? How long would it be before Jews again ruled the Land of Promise as the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob promised?
When would the Deliverer come?
And could Jesus of Nazareth be the one for whom we prayed? It did not seem possible. Perhaps John the Baptizer could have filled that role, with his angry denunciations and powerful diatribes, but not the pleasant-seeming preacher from the Galil.
How could he ever redress wrongs? I heard he said things like “Turn the other cheek.” This was not the justice for which I, or my people, longed.
All these thoughts mingled with my anger at what had happened to my grandfather and to Judah ben Perez. Though the two men had suffered abuse some forty years apart, they were now forever linked in my mind.
I met Nicodemus the Pharisee outside Nicanor Gate, on the plaza of the Temple Mount. Since the fellowship offering was the lone service after which the meat of the sacrifice was eaten by the participants and not just by the priests, I had invited him to share it with me.
But it was not to be.
“I’m sorry, David,” Nicodemus said, gazing up at the lustrous hues of the Corinthian gold that formed the latticework of the gates towering above our heads. “I am summoned to a meeting of the council that cannot be postponed. It was already too late to catch you, or I would have sent word.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll find someone to whom I can give the food. What’s so urgent, if it’s not a great secret?”
Looking around him as if anticipating the presence of spies, Nicodemus leaned close and whispered, “Lord Caiaphas is concerned about Jesus of Nazareth. He fears he will be blamed if Jesus leads a rebellion against Rome.”
“The Nazarene rabbi?” I scoffed. “Have you heard him speak? There never was a less likely candidate to be a rebel commander.”
“You’ve heard him, then?”
“I’ve met him,” I replied. “He is altogether a gentle soul. Too simple and too genuine for this world. Perhaps Lord Caiaphas expects to find in Jesus a reflection of his own twisted, conniving soul.”
“Shh!” Nicodemus urged. “I agree with you. In fact, I sought Jesus out myself to question him … but I went at night and not openly. The walls have ears, you know.”
A low, chuckling laughter erupted almost at our feet, frightening Nicodemus and startling me.
Tucked in an alcove of the gate was a thin, teenage beggar boy I recognized. His name was Peniel.
“Not only the walls, kind sirs,” Peniel said, “but the floors and the nooks and crannies. I’m sorry to overhear your conversation, but then, I was here first.”
Peniel, blind from birth, was a sweet-natured creature in spite of his disability. The son of a potter, he had a hard life, subsisting by begging for the charity of strangers.
“Don’t look around,” Peniel added, “but here comes Lord Caiaphas now.”
He was correct. The sensitive hearing of the blind man had picked out the strident, pompous tones of the high priest before he and his entourage rounded the corner of the Court of Israel and hove into view. Watching them arrive was like being on the docks at Caesarea Maritima when a fleet of galleys maneuvered into port.
With a nod that barely passed for courtesy toward Nicodemus and a mere curl of the lip toward me, the high priest arrived outside the door to his offices. A swirl of sycophants orbited around him as if they were bits of wood caught in a current and he the drain toward which they were being drawn.
“Lord Caiaphas,” one of the acolytes said in a fawning manner, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.” He waved a perfumed hand toward Peniel and spoke as if the boy were one of the gilded railings and not living at all. “Tell me your opinion. Who sinned—this man or his parents—that he would be so cursed as to be born blind and live such a wretched life?”
In sonorous syllables reeking of boredom, the high priest replied, “Probably all of them. Many generations of sinners, no doubt. He was utterly conceived in sin and born in sin and no doubt lives that way as well. Still, it’s an uninteresting question, since one thing is absolutely certain.”
“And that is?”
“He will