Outside, with the sun suddenly sunk behind the hill’s shoulder and the dusk thickening, the night wind chilly after the warm day, she was afraid. Alone, and cold, and afraid. No longer the blessed, the chosen, but an unmarried girl with a child in her womb, and upon her tongue a story that nobody could believe.
She could see now why the angel had said, “Fear not’. There was so much to fear. Her parting words to Joseph had been bold, almost defiant, but now thinking of her parents, her friends and her neighbours, she quailed.
For the first time she saw the width of the gulf that divided what people professed to believe from what they were actually capable of believing. At this very moment if someone went to her home and asked her parents–Do you believe that Messiah will come? They would say—Yes, yes, indeed. Put the same question to Hilliel the Rabbi and he would answer—Indisputably, it is so written. As late as this morning Joseph, confronted by the question, would have professed his belief. Yet tonight he had been incredulous, despite all her efforts to state her case in a manner likely to lead to belief. She had forced herself to speak calmly, not to weep, or gesticulate or plead; She had known, instinctively, that had she cried and made an appeal to his pity Joseph would have weakened and accepted the situation without accepting the truth. That would have been very wrong. So quietly, rationally, she had offered him the facts, and he had not believed her!
The night grew darker, the wind colder; the feeling of loneliness grew. As she neared her home she knew that she must enter and present her
usual untroubled countenance; shecould face no more this day. So she leaned for a moment against the thorn fence which her father had planted to keep out the foxes. She felt the prick of the long sharp thorns and thought of the donkey goad. Chosen of God, and then abandoned. She sent a wordless cry, winging through the night—My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
VI
Joseph, left alone, first thought—I should have walked home with her. But she’d gone so suddenly, and there’d been so much to think about.
He got up from the bench, moving slowly and heavily, like an old man and went into his living-room. He’d spent this day at home, so he’d eaten at midday; bread and cheese would serve for his belated supper. He set them on the table, brought a knife, sat down and felt sick. Up to that point his mind had been engaged in listening to the story, trying to assess its truth and finding possible alternatives. When he had once glanced at the future it had been on Mary’s behalf. What of his own ?
His own future, as well as that of Mary and that of an unborn child, lay in his hands; he must make a decision and at the moment he felt incapable of doing so.
His last task before taking on the job at the new house near Cana had been to make a new gateway and a length of fencing for a man who owned a small vineyard, and as part payment he had accepted a large jar of wine which he had set down in the coolest corner of the workshop, intending to save it and contribute it to the wedding feast. He was, by habit, an abstemious man.
Now he rose, took a jug, went to the jar and broke the stamped clay seal, poured a jugful of the wine and hurried back into the house. In the workshop the stool on which Mary had sat was still in position, and something of her presence seemed to linger there, too. He thought uncomfortably that if, at the end of his thinking, he decided that he didn’t believe her and did not intend to marry her, he would never enjoy working in that place again. In fact he doubted whether he could go on living in Nazareth, where, even if he could avoid seeing her, he would hear about her.
Get away, he thought. And the question Where? was easily answered. He could go into the hills and join the guerrillas, the nameless ones, the nightwalkers.
He thought about them as he sipped his wine and felt it warm and sustaining after the shock.
It was almost sixty years since the Roman, Pompey, had intervened in the Jews’ disastrous civil war, had taken Jerusalem and made Palestine a province of the Empire; the great majority of the Jews had settled down, if somewhat warily and uneasily, under Roman rule. But there were others who refused to accept the fact that the war had ended; there were men who remembered their families massacred, either by the Romans themselves or by their tool, Herod, whom they had made King of Judea. There were ardent patriots, religious fanatics, men with grievances, and they had taken to the hills and seized every opportunity to make a nuisance of themselves. They killed sentries, destroyed stores, stole horses, sabotaged the new road and water works, occasionally even ventured an ambush by daylight. At infrequent intervals individuals or small groups were captured and executed. In official quarters there was a tendency to underestimate their numbers and to decry their activities; there were even Jews who deplored their existence, maintaining that they consisted mainly of lawless men, fugitives from justice; but most people admired their courage and their cunning, and the stories of their reckless, spectacular exploits helped to keep alive the spirit of even the tamest town-dwellers, backing up the conviction that in the end nobody but Jehovah and his appointed servants could govern the Jews.
Into the ranks of the nameless ones Joseph could disappear tomorrow and be lost. And if what Mary said about her state was true, nobody could blame him; or, if they did, he’d never know. % He drank again and was seized by self-pity. Wasn’t it hard, he thought, that at his age, having led a wandering life in youth, and now prepared to settle down,
he should have touproot himself again. He liked his little house; until this evening he had liked his workshop; he liked Nazareth and his neighbours and his customers. Never before had he felt himself to be part of a community; seldom before had he stayed in any place long enough to reap where he had sown in the sense of establishing a reputation for good sound work. Here he was known, Joseph the carpenter, respected and trusted. Must he abandon it all?
The alternative was to stay and face a very distasteful situation. An espousal was a serious thing; to cancel it was almost like breaking a marriage. But even if a couple had been married for twenty years and hadn’t cohabited for a time, due to separation or ritual abstinence and the woman had said she was pregnant because an angel had spoken to her, the man would be fully justified in putting her away. Wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he? He’d have to give his reason, of course. And he could just see Anne’s face, wrenched by shock and horror, Joachim’s distorted by anger; and Mary’s, full of sorrow and reproach. His fundamentally kind nature shrank from that prospect.
There was another alternative; he could accept her story. He drank again, and then, scowling, went through the whole account again.
He was now down to rock-bottom, weighing and measuring exactly the faith in which he had been born and reared and to which he had paid allegiance, always.
He believed in God; the one and only God who in six days had made the heaven and the earth and all that were therein; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who had enabled Daniel to face a den of hungry lions and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to walk unscathed through a fiery furnace, seven times as hot as an ordinary one. These, and a hundred other miraculous stories, he had listened to a dozen times and never doubted; they were now as much a part of him as the callouses on his hands. But they were all long ago, part of the fabulous past, part of ‘once upon a time’. Then, take the prophecies; did he believe them? Naturally; every pious Jew did. Messiah would come, in great power and glory, to deliver His people. But that was all in the future. That was to be one day…. There, you have it, he said to himself, lifting the jug again, Belief in the past things and in the future things is easy; but here and now, that’s different. Do I believe that Mary, the woman to whom I am espoused, this morning was visited by an angel who told her that she was to bear the Messiah, and that upon that word she became pregnant?
And the answer to that was a downright “No’.