Joel: A Boy of Galilee

CHAPTER XVIII

WAKE up, Joel! Wake up! I bring you good tidings, my lad!" It was Abigail's voice ringing cheerily through the court-yard, as she bent over the boy, fast asleep on the hard stones.

All the long Sabbath day after the burial, he had sat listlessly in the shady court-yard, his blank gaze fixed on the opposite wall. No one seemed able to arouse him from his apathy. He turned away from the food they brought him, and refused to enter the house when night came.

Towards morning he had gone over to the fountain for a long draught of its cool water; then overcome by weakness from his continued fast, and exhausted by grief, he fell asleep on the pavement.

Abigail came in and found him there, with the red morning sun beating full in his face. She had to shake him several times before she could make him open his eyes.

He sat up dizzily, and tried to collect his thoughts. Then he remembered, and laid his head wearily down again, with a groan.

"Wake up! Wake up!" she insisted, with such eager gladness in her voice that Joel opened his eyes again, now fully aroused.

"What is it?" he asked indifferently.

"He is risen!" she exclaimed joyfully, clasping her hands as she always did when much excited. "I went to His tomb very early in the morning, while it was yet dark, with Mary and Salome and some other women. The stone had been rolled aside; and while we wondered and wept, fearing His enemies had stolen Him away, He stood before us, with His old greeting on His lips, – 'All hail!'"

Joel rubbed his eyes and looked at her. "No, no!" he said wearily, "I am dreaming again!"

He would have thrown himself on the ground as before, his head pillowed on his arm, but she would not let him. She shook his hands with a persistence that could not be refused, talking to him all the while in such a glad eager voice that he slowly began to realize that something had made her very happy.

"What is it, Mother Abigail?" he asked, much puzzled.

"I do not wonder you are bewildered," she cried. "It is such blessed, such wonderful news. Why He is alive, Joel, He whom Thou lovest! Try to understand it, my boy! I have just now come from the empty tomb. I saw Him! I spoke with Him! I knelt at His feet and worshipped!"

By this time all the family had come out. Reuben looked at his daughter pityingly, as she repeated her news; then he turned to Phineas.

"Poor thing!" he said, in a low tone. "She has witnessed such terrible scenes lately, and received such a severe shock, that her mind is affected by it. She does not know what she is saying. Did not you yourself help prepare the body for burial, and put it in the tomb?"

"Yes," answered Phineas, "and helped close it with a great stone, which no one man could possibly move by himself. And I saw it sealed with the seal of Cæsar; and when I left it was guarded by Roman sentinels in armor. No man could have opened it."

"But Abigail talks of angels who sat in the empty tomb, and who told them He had risen," replied her father.

Joel, who had overheard this low-toned conversation, got up and stood close beside them. He had begun to tremble from weakness and excitement.

"Father Phineas," he asked, "do you remember the story we heard from the old shepherd, Heber? The angels told of His birth; maybe she did see them in His tomb."

"How can such things be?" queried Reuben, stroking his beard in perplexity.

"That's just what you said when Rabbi Lazarus was brought back to life," piped Jesse's shrill voice, quite unexpectedly, at his grandfather's elbow. He had not lost a word of the conversation. "Why don't you go and see for yourself if the tomb is empty?"

Abigail had gone into the house with her mother, and now the summons to breakfast greeted them. She saw she could not convince them of the truth of her story, so she said no more about it; but her happy face was more eloquent than words.

All day snatches of song kept rising to her lips, – old psalms of thanksgiving, and half whispered hallelujahs. At last Joel and Phineas were both so much affected by her continued cheerfulness, that they began to believe there must be some great cause for it.

Finally, in the waning afternoon, they took the road that led from Bethany to the garden where they firmly believed that the Master still lay buried.

As they came in sight of the tomb, Joel clutched Phineas by the arm, and pointed, with a shaking finger, to the dark opening ahead of of them.

"See!" he said, pointing into its yawning darkness. "She was right! The stone is gone!"

It was some time before they could muster up courage to go nearer and look into the sepulchre. When at last they did so, neither spoke a word, but, after one startled look into each other's eyes, turned and left the garden.

It was growing dark as they hurried along the highway homeward. Two men came half running towards the city, in great haste to reach the gates before they should be closed for the night. They were two disciples well known to Phineas.

He stopped them with the question that was uppermost in his mind.

"Yes, He is risen," answered one of the men, breathlessly. "We have seen Him. Hosanna to the Highest! He walked along this road with us as we went to Emmaus."

"Ah, how our hearts burned as He talked with us by the way!" interrupted the other man.

"Only this hour He sat at meat with us," cried the first speaker. "He broke bread with us, and blessed it as He always used to do. We are running back to the city now to tell the other disciples."

Phineas would have laid a detaining hand on them, but they hurried on, and left him standing in the road, looking wistfully after them.

"It must be true," said Joel, "or they could not have been so nearly wild with joy."

Phineas sadly shook his head. "I wish I could think so," he sighed.

"Let us go home," urged Abigail, the next day, "the Master has bidden His brethren meet Him in Galilee. Let us go. There is hope of seeing Him again in our old home!"

Joel, now nearly convinced of the truth of her belief, was also anxious to go. But Phineas lingered; his plodding mind was slower to grasp such thoughts than the sensitive woman's or the imaginative boy's. One after another he sought out Peter and James and John, and the other disciples who had seen the risen Master, and questioned them closely. Still he tarried for another week.

One morning he met Thomas, whose doubts all along had strengthened his own. He ran against him in the crowded street in Jerusalem. Thomas seized his arm, and, turning, walked beside him a few paces.

"It is true!" he said, in a low intense tone, with his lips close to his ear. "I saw Him myself last night; I held His hands in mine! I touched the side the spear had pierced! He called me by name; and I know now beyond all doubt that the Master has risen from the dead, and that He is the Son of God!"

After that, Phineas no longer objected when it was proposed that they should go back to Galilee. The story of the resurrection was too great for him to grasp entirely, still he could not put aside such a weight of evidence that came to him from friends whose word he had always implicitly trusted.

The roads were still full of pilgrims returning from the Passover. As Phineas journeyed on with his little family, he fell in with the sons of Jonah and Zebedee, going back to their nets and their fishing-boats.

The order of procession was constantly shifting, and one morning Joel found himself walking beside John, one of the chosen twelve, who seemed to have understood his Master better than any of the others.

The man seemed wrapped in deep thought, and took no notice of his companion, till Joel timidly touched his sleeve.

"Do you believe it is true?" the boy asked.

There was no surprise in the man's face at the abrupt question, he felt, without asking, what Joel meant. A reassuring smile lighted up his face as he laid his hand kindly on Joel's shoulder.

"I know it, my lad; I have been with Him." The quiet positiveness with which he spoke seemed to destroy Joel's last doubt.

"Many things that He said to us come back to me very clearly; and I see now He was trying to prepare us for this."

"Tell me about them," begged Joel, "and about those last hours He was with you. Oh, if I could only have been with Him, too!"

John saw the tears gathering in the boy's eyes, heard the tremble in his voice, and felt a thrill of sympathy as he recognized a kindred love in the little fellow's heart.

So he told Joel of the last supper they had taken together, of the hymn they had sung, and of the watch they had failed to keep, when He took them with Him into the garden of Gethsemane. All the little incidents connected with those last solemn hours, he repeated carefully to the listening boy.

From time to time Joel brushed his hand across his eyes; but a deep calm fell over him as John's voice went on, slowly repeating the words the Master had comforted them with.

"Let not your hearts be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions… I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also… If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father… These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."

Joel made an exclamation as if about to speak, and then stopped. "What is it?" asked John.

"How could He mean that He has overcome the world? Cæsar still rules, and Jerusalem is full of His enemies. I can't forget that they killed Him, even if He has risen."

John stooped to tie his sandal before he answered.

"I have been fitting together different things He told us; and I begin to see how blind we were. Once He called Himself the Good Shepherd who would give his life for his sheep, and said, 'Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.'"

They walked on in silence a few paces, then John asked abruptly, "Do you remember about the children of Israel being so badly bitten by serpents in the wilderness, and how Moses was commanded to set up a brazen serpent in their midst?"

"Yes, indeed!" answered Joel. "All who looked up at it were saved; but those who would not died from the poisonous bites."

"One night," continued John, "a learned man by the name of Nicodemus, one of the rulers, came to the Master with many questions. And I remember one of the answers He gave him. 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' We did not understand Him then at all. Not till I saw Him lifted up on the cruel cross, did I begin to dimly see what He meant."

A light broke over Joel's face as he remembered the vision he had had that day, kneeling at the foot of the cross; then he stopped still in the road, with his hands clasped in dismay. There suddenly seemed to rise before him the scenes of daily sacrifice in the Temple, when the blood of innocent lambs flowed over the altar; then he thought of the great Day of Atonement, when the poor scape-goat was driven away to its death, laden with the sins of the people.

"Oh, that must be what Isaiah meant!" he cried in distress. "'He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter!' Oh, can it be possible that 'the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all'? What an awful sacrifice!"

The tears streamed down his face as the thought came over him with overwhelming conviction, that it was for him that the man he loved so had endured all the horrible suffering of death by crucifixion.

"Why did such a thing have to be?" he asked, looking up appealingly at his companion.

John looked out and up, as if he saw far beyond the narrow, hill-bound horizon, and quoted softly: "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Just as the feeling had come to him that morning by the Galilee, and again as he gazed and gazed into the white face on the cross, Joel seemed to feel again the love of the Father, as it took him close into its infinite keeping.

"'Greater love hath no man than this,'" quoted John again, "'that a man lay down his life for his friends.' He is the propitiation for our sins; and not ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world."

It was hard for the child to understand this at first; but this gentle disciple who walked beside him had walked long beside the Master, and in the Master's own way and words taught Joel life's greatest lesson.

CHAPTER XIX

THEY went back to their simple lives again, – those hardy fishermen, the busy carpenter, and the boy. Phineas was silent and grave. For him, hope still lay dead in that garden tomb near Golgotha; but Joel sang as he worked.

The appointed time was nearing when the Master was to meet them on the mountain. As often as he could, Joel stole away from the moody man at the work-bench, and went down to the beach for more cheerful companionship.

One morning, seeing a fishing-boat that he recognized pulling in quickly to shore, he ran down to see what luck his friends had had during the night.

He held up his hands in astonishment at the great haul of fish the boat held.

"We have been with the Master," explained one of the men. "We toiled all night, and took nothing till we met Him."

Joel listened eagerly while they told him of that meeting in the early dawn, and of the meal they ate together, while the sun came up over the Galilee, and the blue waves whispered their gladness to the beach, as they heard the Master's voice once more.

"Oh, to think that He is in Galilee again!" exclaimed Joel. That thought added purpose and meaning to each new day. Every morning he woke with the feeling, "Maybe I shall see Him before the sun goes down." Every night he went to sleep saying, "He is somewhere near! No telling how soon I may be with Him!"

When the day came on which they were to go to the mountain, Joel was up very early in the morning. He bathed and dressed himself with the care of a priest about to enter the inner courts on some holy errand.

When he started to the mountain, Abigail noticed that he wore his finest headdress of white linen. His tunic was spotless, and, from the corners of his brown and white striped mantle, the blue fringes that the Law prescribed hung smooth as silk.

He did not wait for Phineas or any of his friends. Long before the time, he had climbed the rocky path, and was sitting all alone in the deep shadowed stillness.

The snapping of a twig startled him; the falling of a leaf made him look up hopefully. Any minute the Master might come.

His heart beat so loud it seemed to him that the wood-birds overhead must surely hear it, and be frightened away.

Imagine that scene, you who can, – you who have just seen the earth close over your best-beloved; who have awakened in the lonely night, with that sudden sickening remembrance of loss; who have longed, with a longing like a constant ache, for the voice and the smile and the footstep that have slipped hopelessly beyond recall.

Think of what it would mean, if you knew now, beyond doubt, that all that you had loved and lost would be given back to you before the passing of another hour!

So Joel waited, restless, burning, all in a quiver of expectancy.

Steps began to wind around the base of the mountain. One familiar face after another came in sight, then strange ones, until, by and by, five hundred people had gathered there, and were sitting in reverent, unbroken silence. The soft summer wind barely stirred the leaves; even the twitter of nestlings overhead was hushed.

After awhile, thrilled by some unseen influence, as a field of grain is swayed by the passing wind, they bowed their heads. The Master stood before them, His hands outspread in blessing.

Joel started forward with a wild desire to throw himself at His feet, and put his arms around them; but a majesty he had never seen before in that gentle face restrained him.

He listened to the voice as it rose and fell with all its old winning tenderness. As you would listen could the dead lips you love move again; as you would greedily snatch up every word, and hide it in your heart of hearts, so Joel listened.

"I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there ye may be also… Peace I leave with you… Not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

As the beloved voice went on, promising the Comforter that should come when He was gone, all the dread and pain of the coming separation seemed to be lost.

Boy though he was, Joel looked down the years of his life feeling it was only a fleeting shadow, compared with the eternal companionship just promised him.

He would make no moan; he would utter no complaint: but he would take up his life's little day, and bear it after the Master, – a cup of loving service, – into that upper kingdom where there was a place prepared for him.

It was all over so soon. They were left alone on the mountain-side again, with only the sunshine flickering through the leaves, and the wood-birds just beginning to trill to each other once more. But the warm air seemed to still throb with the last words He had spoken: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."

Phineas came down the mountain with his face all ashine; at last his eyes had been opened.

"He and the Father are one!" he exclaimed to the man walking beside him. "That voice is the same that spake from the midst of the burning bush, and from the summit of Sinai. All these years I have followed the Master, I believed Him to be a perfect man and a great prophet; I believed Him to be 'the rod out of the stem of Jesse' who through Jehovah's hand was to redeem Israel, even as the rod in Aaron's hand smote the floods and made a pathway for our people.

"When I saw Him put to death as a felon, all hope died within me; even to-day I came out here unbelieving. I could not think that I should see Him. How blind we have been all these years! God with us in the flesh, and we did not know Him!"

Joel walked on behind the two, sharing their feeling of exaltation. As they came down into the valley and entered Capernaum, the work-a-day sights and noises seemed to jar on their senses, in this uplifted mood.

A man standing in an open doorway accosted Phineas, and asked when he could commence work on the house he had talked to him about building.

Phineas hesitated, and looked down at the ground, as if studying some difficult problem. In a few minutes he raised his eyes with a look of decision.

"I cannot build it for you at all," he answered.

"Not build it!" echoed the man. "I thought you were anxious for the job."

"So I was," answered the carpenter; "but when I asked for it, I had no belief that the Master could rise from the dead. Just now, on the mountain yonder, I have been with Him. His command is still ringing in my ears: 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature!'

"Henceforth I give my life to Him, even as He gave His to me. My days are now half spent, but every remaining one shall be used to proclaim, as far and wide as possible, that the risen Christ is the Son of God!"

The man was startled as he looked at Phineas; such a fire of love and purpose seemed to illuminate his earnest face that it was completely transformed.

"Even now," exclaimed Phineas, "will I commence my mission. You are the first one I have met, and I must tell to you this glad new gospel. He died for you! 'God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life!' O my friend, if you could only believe that as I believe it!"

The man shrank back into the doorway, strangely moved by the passionate force of his earnestness.

"I must go up to Jerusalem," continued Phineas, "and wait till power is given us from on high; then I can more clearly see my way. I do not know whether I shall be directed to go into other lands, or to come back here to carry the news to my old neighbors. But it matters not which path is pointed out, the mission has been already given, – to tell the message to every creature my voice can reach."

"And you?" asked the man, pointing to the companion of Phineas.

"I, too, received the command," was the answer, "and I, too, am ready to go to the world's end, if need be!"

"Surely there must be truth in what you say," muttered the man. Then his glance fell on Joel. "You, too?" he questioned.

"Nay, he is but a lad," answered Phineas, before Joel could find words to answer him. "Come! we must hasten home."

Joel talked little during the next few days, and stole away often to think by himself, in the quiet little upper chamber on the roof.

Phineas was making his preparations to go back to Jerusalem; and he urged the boy to go back with him, and accept Simon's offer. Abigail, too, added her persuasions to his; and even old Rabbi Amos came down one day, and sat for an hour under the fig-trees, painting in glowing colors the life that might be his for the choosing.

It was a very alluring prospect; it had been the dream of his life to travel in far countries. He pictured himself surrounded by wealth and culture; he would be able to do so much for his old friends. He could give back to Jesse and Ruth a hundred fold, what had been bestowed on him; and the poor – how much he could help them, when he received a son's portion from the wealthy Simon! O the hearts he could make glad, all up and down the land!

The old day-dreams he used to delight in danced temptingly before him. As he stood idly beside the work-bench one afternoon, thinking of such a future, a soft step behind him made him turn. The hammer fell from his hand to the grass, as he saw the woman who came timidly to meet him.

"Why, Aunt Leah!" he cried. "What brought you here?"

He had not seen her since the night his Uncle Laban had driven him from home.

She drew aside her veil, and looked at him. "I heard you had been healed," she said, "and I have always wanted to come and see you, and tell you how glad I am; but my husband forbade it. Child!" she cried abruptly, "how much you look like your father! The likeness is startling!"

The discovery seemed to make her forget what she had come to say, and she stood and stared at him; then she remembered. "Rabbi Amos told me of the offer you have had from a rich merchant in Bethany, and I came down here, secretly, to beg you to accept it. In your father's name I beg you!"