Empire's End (3 page)

My horse? Why?

It had not been lost on me that my superior, the vice chief justice of the Sanhedrin, had issued me a colossal black stallion that allowed me to tower over my troops. Each man was at least a head taller than I and weighed much more, but they all reported to me. I'd had to leap just to reach the four-horned saddle, but I loved being astride that enormous horse.

“Why?” Judas whispered. “What's wrong with the animal?”

“You can see for yourself. But if the stable man's not paid by tonight . . .”

“I'll pay him and let Saul decide when he's up and about.”

“How long before we're able to get him back to Jerusalem?”

“The man is blind, sir!”

“But can he travel?”

“That is not for me to say.”

As footsteps approached, I fell to my face on the floor and cried out, “Jesus, I praise You, Son of the living God, slain to take away the sins of the world, now risen!”

“There's our answer,” my man said. “He's mad.”

“I told you,” another said. “It was a spell, a seizure.”

“That's for those at the Temple to decide.”

All I knew was that I would never return to Jerusalem in the same role
I had left it. Whether I would regain my sight, I neither knew nor cared. God had found me. Christ had changed me. Jesus had made Himself known to me. Able to see nothing else, I saw myself for who I was.

Three days hence, Ananias and I were brought together by God, my sight and strength were restored, and I immediately began preaching Christ and Him crucified to both the believers and the Jews in Damascus. All who heard were amazed and said, “Is this not he who destroyed those who called on this name in Jerusalem and has come here for that purpose, so that he might bring them bound to the chief priests?”

Though I had been a scholar from my youth and knew the Scriptures almost wholly from memory, I felt clumsy holding forth on an entirely new topic in the synagogues and in private homes with gatherings of followers of The Way. Besides having to convince them that I was not a fraud, merely trying to ingratiate myself in order to turn the tables on them and arrest them en masse, I was suddenly preaching sermons diametrically opposed to what I had espoused for two decades.

Passionate and earnest as I was, I found myself stumbling over my words as I gushed with all my evidence and proofs, rolling the sacred scrolls this way and that, feverishly pointing out every prophecy I could remember that pointed to the promised Messiah. “He was to come from the lineage of David, be born of a virgin in Bethlehem, called Immanuel . . .” I went on and on, thrilling the believers with the fact that Jesus met all these criteria, and clearly alarming the Jews.

I glanced up at my listeners as I paced about, referring to the scrolls and then interspersing my personal story, recounting my credentials, my training, my devotion to God, my commitment—just weeks before—to persecuting the very people I now strove to encourage or win over to my side of the argument.

In the eyes of the followers of The Way I saw both the hope that I was genuine and suspicion that I might not be.
Could it be true?
their expressions seemed to say.
Dare we embrace this man whose dark reputation preceded him?
In the Jews I saw anger and sometimes more—resentment? Worse?

Gradually, as I knew more and more of the brothers and sisters—as the believers were wont to refer to each other—they seemed to embrace me as one of their own. Yet, every day I wondered when I might hear of a band sent from the Sanhedrin to transport me back to the Temple.

Mostly I devoted myself to prayer and whatever God wanted to teach me. I felt like a newborn calf in a pasture of cows. All I had were passion and enthusiasm. I knew what I knew and was eager to persuade, yet I also wanted to grow and mature.

What would my family make of this? I could hardly conceive of it. My sister, Shoshanna, and her husband, Ravid, had a son and three daughters, but they had moved back to Tarsus soon after I had begun making a name for myself persecuting followers of The Way. My parents had both fallen ill and, proud as they were of me, said they wanted to spend their final years back at home too. To my shame, I had not kept up with them as I should have.

I had once heard from my sister that they had taken a turn for the worse, and she included a personal letter from the local rabbi. If my work brought me close to my childhood home, Rabbi Daniel informed me, the congregation would welcome me as the hero I was. He wrote,

Reports of your great work on behalf of the Temple only confirm what your family and I and your many friends here in the congregation at Tarsus have known of you since your childhood. Continue
making us proud and do come and see us, should the opportunity ever present itself
.

In my pride I had responded with a generous donation to the Tarsus temple and a formal expression of gratitude I had grandly dictated to an amanuensis with beautiful handwriting on expensive parchment, which I had him roll and seal with the mark of Nathanael, the vice chief justice.

Shoshanna wrote me back.

While Rabbi Daniel is impressed, as you clearly knew he would be (along with most of the people of the congregation), you must know that your dear father and mother would have appreciated even more some personal message. While your garish parchment is now on conspicuous display at the synagogue, your parents remain chiefly unable to attend except on their best days and yearn only for the unlikely possibility of seeing you once more before they pass
.

I don't mind that their care has fallen to me, Saul, I truly do not. It is a privilege to honor parents who were as good to me as they were to you. But if you must know the truth, as successful as Father's business was, rabbinical school, not to mention moving a family from Tarsus to Jerusalem and back, depleted any excess. If you have drachmas to spare, perhaps consider sharing the wealth within the family
.

Imagine my pique. Admired, respected, even bowed to on the street by most in Jerusalem, I was gushed over by my childhood rabbi and those who had attended synagogue with me. But what did I hear from my own
parents? Nothing. They were sick, fine, and that troubled me. But if I could dictate a letter, why couldn't they?

And my own sister scolding me? Wouldn't most siblings be proud of a brother who had risen to such heights?

My response had been to not respond at all. At times I wavered and hoped nothing would happen to either of my parents. But I assumed someone, the rabbi if no one else, would give me fair warning if either truly began to fail.

In my anger I could have sent Shoshanna a gift that would have made her feel small for having asked. I had the means, and because I had not married, my needs and expenses were few. All I desired was respect, and if it was not forthcoming from my family, I got plenty from my colleagues and the citizens of Jerusalem.

Naturally the memory of that ugly self-righteousness sickened me now that I had become a believer, and I craved the opportunity to make things right. I prayed it wasn't too late, but I didn't dare risk revealing my whereabouts to the authorities by sending written messages. Sadly, the news of my conversion to Christ would be a far greater offense to my family than appearing to have become an ingrate in adulthood.

No, if word had already reached them of what I was suspected of now, the parchment would have long disappeared from the wall of the local synagogue. My parents would have been disgraced and surely disowned me. A missive in my own hand would be rejected, even if they knew it to contain a generous contribution to the family coffer. They would not see me as one who had discovered the long-awaited Messiah. I would not be considered even a Jew anymore, let alone a Pharisee. I would be seen as a traitor, a heretic, apostate, anathema, an abomination.

Not welcome in the home of my youth, I'd feel as if I had never been born.

One afternoon while I was praying about what I would impart to a group of believers in a Damascus home that evening, a young boy from the stables arrived to tell me the owner wanted me to come and see about my horse. I followed him to find the stable man demanding, “Either take the beast, pay more, or I'll be forced to put him out of his misery.”

He led me to the back, where I would not have recognized the animal except for his saddle draped over the rail. The once-magnificent mount, which had stood head high, ebony coat shining, now shifted warily, eyes wide, hide faded. His ribs protruded, and a wood bucket full of feed proved his lack of appetite.

As I approached, the horse stamped and banged a shoulder against the wall. I reached to pet his neck and he jerked away.

“Cruel to that horse, were you?” the stable man said.

“We suffered a trauma together.”

“Aah, that's plain. Well, he won't be ridden again, at least not by you.”

I took that as a challenge and believed I could win the steed's confidence again if I took the time. For now I had no actual need of him. I lived day to day at the mercies of Judas and Ananias and on the few coins dropped in a box each time I spoke to a small gathering of believers. Though such wouldn't have paid half a day's worth of the luxuries I had grown fond of as an agent of the Sanhedrin, it took care of my needs now. I wanted no more. If I spent the rest of my life making amends for my sins against Jesus and His people, that would amount to a treasure for me.

I pressed a few coins into the stable man's hand and persuaded him to give me a week before he took any action with the horse. Every morning thereafter I slipped through the narrow alleyways to the livery. At first the horse allowed me close enough only to speak quietly. Eventually I was able to caress his muzzle and tousle his forelock. Finally he let me saddle him, but that made him stand stock-still and I wondered whether he would
ever trust me again. How could I blame him? He associated me with a terrible day and a blinding light that had made him rear and throw me before he crashed to the rocky ground.

I found myself living for the evenings, longing for the camaraderie afforded me when Ananias took me to various homes of followers of The Way. Some had been fortunate enough to see and hear Jesus. He had referred to Himself as “the way, the truth, and the life.” My former self scoffed at that, called Him a heretic, a charlatan, and worse. I imprisoned people who identified themselves with The Way, and yes, put some of them to death.

Now I knew that He
was
the Way.

Many of these believers told me they could see it in my eyes, hear it in my voice, sense from my very countenance that I was genuine. At first they had been suspicious—and why not? Why trust me any more than my horse did? But now we prayed and sang together, and they chuckled with me at how poorly I warbled. “It proves your earnestness,” one said.

Not surprisingly, I was learning that I was not so well received in the synagogues. Since I had come to Damascus as a celebrated dignitary from the Temple in Jerusalem, charged with ridding the local congregations of followers of The Way, the leaders knew my men and that I bore the authority of the high priest.

The story quickly spread that I had been escorted into the city blind by men who had since abandoned me. And when I did appear in the synagogues, I did not roust out interlopers of an opposing sect but rather proclaimed Jesus of Nazareth as the long-awaited Messiah.

Despite being a novice, I debated, preached, cajoled, persuaded. And just about the time a congregation seemed ready to rise up and cast me
out, I moved on to another synagogue. But finally the day came when the Jewish leaders had had enough of me. If the Sanhedrin was not going to do anything about me, they would.

Rumors flew everywhere. Would they capture me, bring me before a tribunal, bind me, and spirit me back to the Temple in Jerusalem?

At sunset one day I was holding forth in a synagogue, my finger on a passage that foretold of the Messiah, when Ananias rushed forward and whispered in my ear, “They mean to kill you, Saul! We must go now! Follow me!”

Amidst a great murmur that rose to shouts, I followed him out the back and into an alley, surprised at how the older man could run. He led me down one street after another toward the eastern wall. “I have sent for your horse!” he called over his shoulder. “When did you last eat?”

“It's been hours.”

“I had no time to get you anything,” he said, as he emptied into one of my pockets coins from a small purse. “You'll have to find something on the road.”

“I don't need all these,” I said.

“Of course you do. Who knows how many days you must make them last?”

“Where am I to go?”

“I had no time to think about that either. Jerusalem?”

By now I was panting. “I would be no safer there! It's likely death here or prison there!”

Ananias led me to one of the homes built into the wall, and we dashed inside and up long narrow stairs. There was no way out except through the city gates, for the outside walls were smooth. I had met the couple residing there at one of the meetings of believers. After a hurried embrace, the man said, “We're two hundred paces from the eastern gate.”

“No good,” Ananias said. “The Jews are watching all the gates. We must lower him out the window.”

“Thirty feet down?” the woman said.

I followed her and peered out. In the disappearing twilight I could barely make out the ground. “Ananias . . .”

“You're not a large man,” she said.

“Still, I would split open like a piece of fruit.”

“You will fit in my basket.”

“Surely not.”

But when she fetched it, I could see she was right. By removing my sandals and tucking them beneath me, I was able to wedge my feet inside and tuck my head between my legs, my hands clasped firmly behind it, elbows pressed to my sides. I leapt out and helped Ananias and the couple fashion ropes from linens, anchor them in the room, and then bind them to the handles of the basket.