Sabbath

Somewhere in an upper middle class neighborhood in Jerusalem, the Sabbath lamps are burning low. A few men and more women sit in the front room. They span generations. There's the young servant girl who wonders when they all will go to bed, since it's a week of hard work ahead for her in the remaining days of Passover. There's the young master, who had been studying in Galilee of all places and returned to Jerusalem last week. There's some older women, visitors from the suburbs or from more distant villages.

You may laugh, Reader. This night seems so present to me. But this night is with us still somewhere, receding far into the distance beyond our grasp. A few photons from those lamps may have reached the Veil Nebula by now.

No one is speaking. They cannot speak. Words and logic fail them.

The three Miriams are there. Each one has a different place in the schema of mourning. The second Miriam mourns out of duty for a nephew and a sister's loss. She does not speak out of decency, out of compassion. She does not say what she must have thought for at least a year: that Joshua was coming to a bad end. The third Miriam mourns the loss of an intimate friend, the loss of a man who seemed to walk living out of the legends of Israel, the loss of a man who had restored true prophecy to the chosen people of God. The young master sitting across from her and some others mourn in the same way. They have seen signs and wonders, but it all has ended in blood and pain outside the city walls this afternoon. They are trying to wake themselves as from a dream. They are trying to tell themselves that they imagined it. Not the death. The death was very real. The death was the real thing that broke the dream. Everything else was imaginary. The third Miriam thinks of her brother. It was very good that the man who died figured out her brother had been entombed alive.

But it is the first Miriam who is most alone, isolated not only by the unique depths of a mother's grief, the sense that a life and heart and breathed and beat with her own had been extinguished cruelly. She is the second Eve, the foretaste of a new deal for creation. But the young master is the one who ponders cosmic significance. We revere the first Miriam because she said, "Yes." Because she agreed to a dangerous intimacy with God. We revere her as a teenager. But this is the night that makes her the first of us all. This is the night on which faith in Jesus Christ as Man and God is first tested by doubt. The first and deepest doubt is reserved for the mother of the deceased, who could not explain away the dream as easily as the rest. She could pretend there was no angel. She could pretend there were no eastern sages or adoring shepherds. But she couldn't pretend that her dear child had come in the ordinary way. Her sign and wonder was not a sudden cure or a thing of light and shadow. He came to her as a little boy, dependent on her for everything. He was a thing that could not be, should not be, and whom she loved dearly because of that, in spite of that. And so when he claimed to be the son of God, she felt as if that weird vision, that sudden pregnancy, that fight with her mother, that gracious response by Joseph, that hard journey to Bethlehem, that rude birth, that time in Egypt, and all of those odd events made sense. It's nonsense now. That is her pain, her weight.

Despite what the servant girl may hope, those men and women aren't going to move much until sunrise. They'll say nothing. Later, no one will write anything about this day beyond a mention of the very private burial. Come sunset, a note will come to the young master from respected family friends. It will say something about how it's all been taken care of and that he should come and see them after the festival. They will advise him to lie low and keep those Galileans out of sight.