|
|
Jesus intends to stop death itself
|
|
| 6/10/2007 |
Dear Brother,
I know you must be worried about me, and I am sorry that it has taken me so long to write this letter to you. I am trusting it to a trader headed north, and asked him to find you in the marketplace in Tiberias. It shouldn’t be hard to find another tax-collector like myself.
Yes, it’s true. I am with that man, Jesus. You know him, as you and I were together the time when Jesus healed that paralyzed man. What a scene that was, crammed in such a small house with Jesus teaching and the Pharisees writing down every word, and the mud walls started crumbling right over us and then the roof came off, and that beggar we would step over every day came dangling down, like a spider on its web, landing gently in front of this rabbi. Even you thought that he was more than a rabbi when he said to the paralyzed beggar, “Stand and up walk. ” He said it as if it were simple to cast off your entire history of sin and start over, but it was just that simple. He stood up, and walked. To that paralyzed man, Jesus gave a future that, from the perspective of his dirty mat, he could never imagine for himself.
In a way, the same thing happened to me. Jesus found me later in the same day. I was back at my post in the municipal house, collecting the taxes to send in the evening caravan back to Rome. I only had one soldier that day to protect me, as the other centurion didn’t show because of a sick servant at home. I saw Jesus come in out of the corner of my eye, and I first thought he might be one of those zealots wanting to stick a knife in me for taking the peasants’ money and sending it to Caesar. You and I both know that if I don’t carry on our father’s business of collecting tax, Caesar is sure to stick a knife in me. Jesus made it to my table before I got the soldier’s attention. All he said was the same he said to the paralyzed man. “Stand up.” I did. I can’t describe it. I felt everything I had done wrong, and everyone I had hurt, fall from me like rocks. “Come with me,” Jesus said, and I did, leaving all that money on the table.
It was the first time in my life, brother, that I didn’t feel paralyzed. I felt as if I could make my own decision as to what I wanted to do with my life, Caesar be damned. I know that collecting taxes for Rome is sin, but I always felt I had no choice. How wrong I was. This strange rabbi gave me a choice.
Brother, we’ve been taught wrong about sin. Sin isn’t to hold us down, like the spiked sandals of a Roman soldier. Sin is to be overcome so that we can find a future not defined by our past. I have lived five weeks with Jesus. We have no money in our pockets, and I don’t know from where my next meal will come. But I have never felt more free or more alive. I beg you to put off the notions of sin that we grew up with that tethered us to a past over which we had no power. I collected taxes because my father did, and he told me I had no choice. When people spitted at me and said that I was only a tool of the government’s oppression, I told them that old rant of father’s, “That’s the way its always been, and that’s the way its going to be.” So I sneered when the peasants gathered weapons and stones, as if that could make a dent in the armor of the soldiers who protected me. The peasants seemed to forget that the money I collected from them bought the soldiers the newest weapons that almost aim themselves, and release their fury with barely a thought by the one who holds it. The peasants needed the weapon I have now: the weapon of the imagination of a new future not defined by the past.
Let me tell you what happened today, brother. Our happy band—you could almost call us a small army I suppose—came up on that dusty, broken down village of Nain. We could hear wailing from a ways off, and when we arrived at the gate, a funeral procession emerged. Young men were carrying the stretcher, and one of their own, we could tell, lay on top. Worn out soldiers, the ones that get assigned to a place like Nain, hung around with both the look of guilt and disgust on their faces, as if they had something to do with the boy’s death.
We all stopped and stared. The death of a young one, especially an unjust death, always drains hope for the future from us all.
Walking behind the stretcher was a woman, no doubt the boy’s mother, and she was alone, telling us she was a widow without even a father or brother to care for her. Every hope for her own future lay dead on the stretcher. She was skin and bones, and could barely shuffle behind. If I were to guess, when they got to the grave out beyond the garbage heaps, she was going to lie down in it and die right there. Without money or food, she’d die soon enough, and by the look in her face, today was as good as any. You and I know brother, my shame reminds me, that not having a husband or son was not enough to keep the tax collectors away. We would take the last she had, probably her home.
And Jesus got that look on his face; the same look he had when he first saw the paralyzed man come through the roof, the same look he had when he came to my tax collection table back in the municipal house.
And then it came, the most amazing thing. Jesus stepped through the crowd and put his hand on the stretcher. It stopped and did not move, as if Jesus had stopped death itself. The crowd gasped, and then held its breath. How could a holy man defile himself by touching the dead? their stunned faces seemed to ask. “Doesn’t he know the rules?” He does know them, but they don’t bind them. Death does frighten him. Like stopping that stretcher, I think he plans to stop death itself.
Jesus said to the body on the stretcher, “Stand up.” In that moment, I knew that the body would live, dead as he was, because those were exactly the same words Jesus spoke to me. Collecting taxes, I was dead, but now I am alive. This Jesus plans to stop death, no matter what form it takes, even the form that possesses the living.
But get this brother, Jesus didn’t do this for the boy; Jesus sees plenty of corpses, and whatever his power is, he has no intention of reversing the inevitability of death. But, he wants to end the fear of death. He wants people to have a future defined by the possibility of their life, not the inevitability of their death.
I know I am going to die, but I no longer fear it, for I was dead long before my time, and now I live.
I think he raised this dead boy for the widow. As long as her son was dead, she was dead. She had no future except misery in this unfair world. Jesus gave her a future again.
When our family and friends, and my fellow tax collectors, ask why I left, and why I gave up all my money and power to live with one bag that only has a morsel of food and not even a change of clothes, so as to follow Jesus--whom some say is sorcerer, magician or demon but whom I say is at least a prophet if not the messiah himself--tell them he gave to me what I always took from others—a future that truly is my own.
I don’t know how long I will follow this man. He says he is headed to Jerusalem. He is a hero here in these dusty forgotten towns that dot the darkness along the edges of Galilee, but I know what waits him in the holy city. The leader of his group, this blowhard named Simon Peter (Jesus calls him his “rock” and Peter thinks it’s a compliment) says he’ll defend him, even fight to the death, to protect Jesus. But he doesn’t know the type of soldiers that Caesar keeps in Rome--the ones who scourge their whips, and know forms of torture designed by the devil himself. I watched a debtor of mine beg for crucifixion after these soldiers had her for just an hour. I think Jesus plans to stop them just as he stopped death today. I don’t know how, but somehow I believe he is going to do it.
I may follow him there, but today, for the first time, I thought of coming back to you. Not to the task of collecting tax. I cannot stop thinking of the widows that you and I stole from, and no doubt, left for dead. Today, when Jesus gave the young man back to his mother and thus gave her a chance to live, he turned toward me, and those eyes of his bore into to me, and in that moment I saw the faces of all the widows who clung to our feet, and gave us their daughters to use, and cried that we not take the last of what they had. Jesus’ eyes seemed to say to me, “turn around, go home, and restore what I took. If those you robbed are still alive, do what I have done today. Give them their future back.”
So, brother, I may turn back, not in some geographical sense, but to remake a new life from the ashes of my old one. The reason I send this letter is to give you fair warning that you may see me soon. But know that when I come, I will just say, “Stand up.”
If you do, I’ll know that you are with me, and we will find those whom we’ve destroyed, and try to repair what we’ve done.
If you do not hear from me, that means I followed Jesus into Jerusalem, and you and I both know what that means. But I am free, free, free.
|
|
|
|