Black Saturday

Last evening my husband and I went to Good Friday services to contemplate what Jesus did for us on the cross. Tomorrow we will celebrate the joy of his resurrection and his power over sin and death. 

But what happened on Saturday? 

His disciples were holed up probably in the upper room where they had celebrated Passover on Thursday. They hid in fear and grieved the loss, not only of their dear friend and teacher Jesus, but of the dream that Messiah had come at last, Rome would be defeated, and the world was about to change. Here is how I wrote those feelings in The Innkeeper's Wife from the viewpoint of her son, Simon the Zealot. They don't know that Sunday is coming!

[Note: I use non-English names in The Innkeeper's Wife. Yaacov is James. Marcos is John Mark. Kefa is Cephas--Peter.]

Shimon

 

The sound of marching feet echoed loudly between the houses in the street below—the first patrol we’d heard since the light had begun to return. The Romans were as disturbed by the unnatural darkness that had shrouded the city as we were. 

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. The psalm ran in my head, a charm against evil, although I didn’t dare to speak the words aloud. 

No one moved. Talmai and young Marcos had been whispering in a corner, but they stopped and stared at the shuttered windows with the rest of us. 

The moments seemed like hours, but at last the steps passed. They didn’t so much as pause at Maria’s door. We let out a collective sigh. 

Yaacov ben Yosef muttered a curse under his breath. He and Yeshua’s other brothers had taken refuge with us. “They’ll expect us to take up the leadership of this crazy rebellion,” he’d said. “You fools! Couldn’t you see Yeshua was mad?”

“He may have been mad,” his brother Yehud said, “but he was a good man. He didn’t deserve to die. Not…” He couldn’t finish.

On a cross. 

Like a criminal.

“They won’t kill him,” Yudas had assured me. “He’s too popular.” 

And then Yudas had betrayed him. 

I’d known what was in his heart. I’d known he wanted to force Yeshua’s hand. Known and done nothing. Wretched fool that I am, I’d even thought it might be a good idea. 

Maria brought the news that Yudas had been found hanging in a field outside the city. “They say he tried to return the money to the Council—thirty pieces of silver. They wouldn’t take it.”

Thirty pieces of silver—the price of a slave accident-ally gored by an ox. 

The price of Messiah. 

The price of Israel’s future.

Yaacov and Talmai cursed Yudas and all his house, and I had to agree.

We lit no lamp. No light could be seen through the cracks in the shutters. The neighbors mustn’t know we were here.

A light knock sounded at the door. Matthaios unlocked it, and the light of day pierced the room as Maria and a serving girl slipped in. I raised my arm to shut out the brightness. Maria set a jug of watered wine on a table. The girl added a platter of flat crisp unleavened bread and a basket of fruit. Passover was done, but there were still eight days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread ahead of us—eight days of feast that none of us could stomach. 

“He’s dead,” Maria announced.

“Blessed be the Eternal, God of mercy,” I murmured. The torture of crucifixion could go on for days.

Maria nodded. “Yosef and Nikodemos have gone to Pilatus to ask for the body.”

“Won’t they get in trouble?” Talmai asked.

“Perhaps. But they’re members of the Council and well respected.”

“Couldn’t they have done something to stop this?” I demanded. The others quickly hushed me.

When all was quiet again, Kefa spoke from the farthest corner. “They weren’t there.” His voice had none of his usual confidence. “It was the middle of the night. They met at the high priest’s house, not in the Hall of Hewn Stones.” His eyes never left the floor. 

Kefa had been there. He and Yonas had followed at a distance while the rest of us hid, making our way back here in ones and twos to cower in the darkness in fear that they’d come for us. I wished I’d had his courage.

But now it was as if Kefa were reliving some terrible scene. “They weren’t all there—the members of the Council. They weren’t supposed to be.” He raised his eyes. Even the dimness of the room could not hide the sheen of moisture in them. “Only those who hated Yeshua and would do the will of the high priest.”

Netanel nodded understanding. “And Nikodemos and Yosef have defended him.” He looked around at Yeshua’s friends and disciples. “I think they would have liked to sit among us.”

“But they were afraid,” I said bitterly.

Netanel whirled on me. “And are you not afraid now that you see what it’s cost? Perhaps they had more sense than you, Zealot.”

I jumped to my feet and faced him defiantly across the darkened room. I would have died with him, I wanted to shout as Kefa had sworn last evening. 

But I hadn’t died with him. 

I’d fled. 

Even now I was hiding. 

Here. 

In the dark. 

I sat back down.

In the corner Kefa could be heard quietly weeping—Kefa who’d had the courage to follow, to enter the very courtyard of the high priest, with Yonas, whose family knew Malchus—that servant of the high priest whose ear Kefa had cut off last night. Malchus, whom Yeshua had healed.

How like him to heal even his enemies.

I took two cups of watered wine to where Kefa sat on a couch, leaning against the wall, his knees drawn up in front of him. I handed him one and sat beside him with my own. He wiped his face on his sleeve, took a sip, and stared at the cup. 

Kefa had returned to us well after cock’s crow this morning, bringing the news that Yeshua had been condemned. Yonas remained with his mother Salome and Miryam. And Magdalena, dear faithful Magdalena. My last hope had faded that Yudas had been right, that this arrest would prod our rabbi into announcing his kingdom. I might have known that Yeshua could not be forced into anything.  

“I betrayed him,” Kefa whispered beside me.

“What?” Had I heard him right?

He raised his eyes from the cup to my face. Those eyes were full of pain. “I betrayed him,” he said. “I denied him. I said I didn’t know him. She was only a serving girl, but when she asked if I’d been with him, I said ‘no.’”

I didn’t speak. 

“But she recognized my accent. ‘You were with him. You’re a Galilean.’ And I swore at her. I swore I didn’t know the man.” He’d raised his voice. The others were staring.

“Kefa! Kefa!” I felt sick to my stomach. “The rest of us ran away. We all failed him.”

The Feast of Tabernacles

You might think The Innkeeper’s Wife is long, but it's 20,000 words shorter than my original draft! I knew I had to cut something—a lot of somethings. Like a movie that posts out-takes on YouTube, in the coming weeks I will post here some favorite scenes that got cut. 

The temptation for a historical writer is to share all their fun research even though it doesn’t move the story forward. I loved imagining what I had learned about the Feast of Tabernacles and John 7:37-52 from Alfred Edersheim’s 19^th-century work The Temple based on Talmudic accounts of Second Temple worship. 

In my first draft I had Hadassah coming to Yerushalaim with Shimon between chapters 42 and 43 of The Innkeeper’s Wife to hear Yeshua preach during the autumn Feast of Tabernacles. 

“Let’s go to the temple,” Hadassah said when we were through the gate. “I want to see the temple.” Her eyes sparkled. “Usually it’s your mother and Tirza who bring our things to the market—your mother won’t let your sister out of her sight—and I stay with the children.”

We climbed the slopping tunnel to the Court of the Nations. Around us the crowds recited the traditional Hallel psalms the inn guests had danced to last night, waving citrons and palm branches and myrtle and willow twigs.

When Israel came out of Egypt,

Jacob from a people of foreign tongue,

Judah became God’s sanctuary,

Israel his dominion.

It was almost time for the water ceremony. The crowd had been up all night singing and dancing in the light of the four huge golden candlesticks in the courtyard and uncounted torches, but joy shone on every face. I pushed forward, dragging Hadassah after me, until I found a place where she could see. Her face was alight. 

Levites stood on the steps up to the court of Israel, playing harps, lyres, cymbals, and trumpets. We clasped hands and joined in the ecstatic singing of psalm after psalm. 

The sea looked and fled,

the Jordan turned back;

the mountains leaped like rams,

the hills like lambs.

 I couldn’t take my eyes off my wife as the priests circled the altar seven times carrying a golden vessel of water from the Pool of Siloam. The music rose to a deafening pitch. Hadassah squeezed my hand. Then as one priest poured the usual libation of wine over the altar, another poured water from the golden vessel, and our prayers for rain and fruitful fields in the coming year rose to Adonai as the water ran down the stones of the altar and mixed with the wine of joy and the blood of the sacrifice.

As one, the congregation drew in its breath at this climax to eight days of feasting and delirious celebration. Tears ran down Hadassah’s cheeks, and I realized I, too, was crying. 

In that silence, a voice rang out.

“Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.” 

Hadassah whirled  to see who was speaking, but I knew that voice. 

“Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

Hadassah glanced at me. 

I nodded. “Yeshua.” 

She clung to my hand and listened with rapt attention. 

“I am the light of the world,” Yeshua said. “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

He raised his arms to the torches surrounding us. They were gutting out, no longer needed in the brilliant light of the autumn day. 

Just then a disturbance arose near the north gate. The temple guard marched purposefully across the marble courtyard from the hall where the Council met.

I grabbed Hadassah’s arm. “We’ve got to get Yeshua out of here.” We pushed through the crowd toward the preacher. But we were too late. The soldiers reached Solomon’s Porch and surrounded us. We were boxed in. 

But they did nothing. They seemed content to watch. 

And listen.

“I’m with you for only a short time,” Yeshua was saying, “and then I’m going to the one who sent me. You’ll look for me, but you’ll not find me; and where I am, you cannot come.”

A tall thin scholar near me in long robes crossed his arms and muttered to his companion, “Where does this man intend to go that we can’t find him? Will he go where our people live scattered among the Greeks, and teach the Greeks?”

I didn’t like his tone. He didn’t need to know we’d already been to Tyre and Sidon and Caesarea Philippi. And it wasn’t just to our scattered people that Yeshua had preached.

“If there’s trouble,” I whispered to Hadassah, “you get out and go home. I’ll have to protect my rabbi.” 

“He’s amazing,” she said.

But there was no trouble that day. 

The guard listened as the sun grew hot, reflected off the marble walls and pavement. “No one ever spoke the way this man does,” the commander murmured to his officers. They turned, and marched back the way they had come.

I looked after them and shook my head. “‘My time is not yet here,’” I quoted Yeshua.

“Not yet,” Yudas murmured. “But soon.” His voice was full of determination.

Prayer and Fasting for Minnesota

Screaming protesters

A US citizen led out in the cold in his underwear

A woman shot and killed

Politicians calling one another names

Memories of the riots following the murder of George Floyd

 

I don’t live in Minnesota anymore, but loved ones do, and I'm concerned. Not just for Minnesota, but for our country.

 

There has been a call for Friday to be a day of prayer and fasting for Minnesota. Despite our divisions, I’m looking for things that can unite believers on both sides in prayer. 

 

Here are some I have thought of: 

The Carpenter's Son, Sample Chapter

This is the oldest of the stories in this collection, begun in a flurry of inspiration more than forty years ago and revised many times over the years. I always loved this spunky young man who stood up to the ruling council and called them on their refusal to accept the Messiah they had always claimed to believe in. Although paintings often show him as gray and bearded, his parents pointing out that he was of age to speak for himself suggests that he may not have been much beyond legal age.

Seen

 One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!

John 9:25b

 

i

I felt for the worn step and settled against the cool stone wall near the Temple. Someone tossed a coin into my lap. A bronze lepton by the feel of it, the smallest coin made.

“Peace be upon you,” I muttered. Work was forbidden by law on the Sabbath, but sitting with my face upturned so passers-by could see my sightless eyes could hardly be called work.

I’d work if they’d let me. I polished the pottery my mother made to sell in the market until it was smooth as silk. I could count the coins she earned from feel and always knew when someone had slipped her a counterfeit or one that had been shaved for the metal. 

But my father laughed when I suggested hiring myself out. “No one will hire a boy born blind, Shmuel.”

“I’m not a boy,” I insisted. “I’m a man.” Two years ago I’d been proclaimed a “son of the law” in the synagogue, reciting long passages of Scripture from memory since I couldn’t read them from the scrolls like the other boys. I went with the men now every morning to hear the Scriptures read…although I wasn’t allowed to participate in temple worship. 

Because I was blind. 

Imperfect. 

Impure.

Of Popes, Past and Future

 Jorge Mario Bergoglio has long been on my prayer list with a handful of other Christian voices, some of which I agree with, some not. But all those on the list have influence on the thinking of God’s people that could be turned to good or to ill. Satan would no doubt delight to see them fall (like Ravi Zacarias) and drag down with them the disillusioned. So I pray for steadfastness in faith, protection for families, sensitivity to the nudging of the Holy Spirit. (I pray that one especially for the one with whom I have strong political disagreement.)

Memories of Charles F. Smith

I was asked to say a few words at my father’s memorial service this past weekend along with one of his step-daughters and a fellow doctor he discipled. The following is adapted from my tribute.

 

My father was known as a Bible teacher, yet he never went to seminary. Instead, he went to bed.

He went to bed for three years with tuberculosis. In 1946 he and my mother were newly married. She came down with rheumatic fever—treatment: bedrest. He was diagnosed with TB--treatment: bedrest. They lived with my grandparents.

He was in medical school at the time. It was a routine annual chest X-ray. When they looked at the previous year’s routine annual chest X-ray, the diagnosis said “Active tuberculosis.” 

It had been filed.

In those years they didn’t have the antibiotics that we have today. The treatment for TB was bedrest. 

Dad spent three years in bed pouring over his Bible and Christian books. Mostly his Bible. The one thing I wanted from my father when he died in February at the age of 102 was his Bible from that time period. The margins are crammed with pencil notes, so tiny as to be illegible to my eyes. (I have to remind myself that he was in his twenties.) It’s not what those notes say that means so much to me; it’s what they represent—the value my father placed on Scripture. 

The important parts are not things he would need to go back and look up. (“Now, what did I put in that note? On, no! I can’t read it.”) No, the important parts took root in his heart and guided all his choices: 

·      his choice to become a medical missionary (although that never happened, in part because of health concerns); 

·      his choice to support missionaries, making his first financial commitment before he even knew what his post-med-school salary would be;

·      his choice to foster missionary kids when they came to the States for college. (One of those grown foster kids preached his memorial service.)

·      his choice to teach the college Sunday school class and pass on his enthusiasm for the Word of God and for missions to a new generation. (Some of those former college students who became missionaries spoke to me after his service.)

·      And his choice in later years to disciple men, sometimes together with their teenage sons, studying what it means to commit completely to the Lordship of Christ as a man of God.

In my teens we had the practice of family devotions after dinner. We would sing a couple hymns from the old InterVarsity hymnal (“Praise the Savior, ye who know Him/Who can tell how much we owe Him?” “Who is on the Lord’s side? Who will serve the King?”) Mom played the Allen organ Dad had bought her, and then we studied the Bible together. Dad taught me that the Truth didn’t need to be afraid of questions. It might take some time to figure out the answer, but God was not threatened by my uncertainties. He wasn’t hiding. His truth was there to find in the Bible.

In adulthood, my dad and I disagreed strongly on certain issues. Both of us started from Scripture, but we sometimes reached very different conclusions. But there was one thing we agreed on: Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and coming again, according to the Scriptures.

Thank you, Daddy.

Beth Moore's Knotted-Up Life

With the Barbie movie out, this book may be even more worth talking about than when it first came out.

In our years in South Africa, I did several Beth Moore Bible studies with the wonderful women of Grace Baptist Church, Kempton Park. I confess that I chaffed at the amount of homework (especially when Beth had us hopping all over the Bible, looking up dozens of cross references), but I loved the videos where she spoke from the heart about the issues we were studying. ​

Her conclusions were always biblical and God-honoring even if I sometimes questioned how she got that out of this particular passage. Recently reading her memoir All My Knotted-Up Life, I learned she had no formal Bible training, only a deep desire to study and learn from piles of books and commentaries. She was learning as she went along, responding to the call on her to study and teach, and blessing so many women like our little group in South Africa along the way.