Daughter of Jerusalem (41 page)

The holy spirit descended in wind and fire upon the apostles. I heard about it from Nicodemus, who was there when it happened. Perhaps the most amazing thing was the way the apostles’ preaching had been heard by many foreign Jews who were in Jerusalem on pilgrimage.
They had understood the apostles as if they were speaking in the visitors’ own languages.

The Holy Spirit came to me in a different way. Ever since Jesus left I had been thinking about what he wanted from me. He hadn’t given any specific instructions; he simply wanted me to go out and “teach all nations.” Those words had set me on fire when he spoke them, but once the radiance of his presence was gone, I was faced with reality. How would I accomplish this mission?

My enlightenment was not as remarkable as the tongues of fire that descended on the apostles. It came one afternoon as I was in the village, and a troop of Roman soldiers came riding in. They were heading for Jerusalem and had stopped to water their horses.

Now Jerusalem lay only two miles to the south of Bethany, and normally soldiers would have waited to water their horses at the cavalry headquarters there. But these didn’t; they stopped in Bethany. And their leader, a lieutenant who had been stationed in Sepphoris, recognized me.

We began to talk in Latin, and he asked me if I knew anything about the so-called prophet recently executed by Pontius Pilate. I told him I was one of the man’s followers.

He was intrigued, and all the rest of the troop listened intently as we spoke. It occurred to me that few of the Romans I had known in Sepphoris believed in their gods anymore. They paid lip service to the deities they had modeled after the Greek gods, but they didn’t believe in their reality. The emperor had become their god, but the recent emperors had failed catastrophically as moral examples to the people. Tiberius had turned into a degenerate and had moved to the island of Capri, leaving his hated general, Sejanus, as acting emperor in Rome.

Romans, particularly the lesser folk, might be eager to learn about
a God who cared about the poor, the outcast, the women and children. I thought of Fulvius Petrus in Capernaum, who had become a follower of Jesus. And then I thought of Julia. How much I longed to have my second mother become a believer in the Lord.

And why shouldn’t she? Jesus didn’t care what she ate or what she wore. He didn’t care about her past life. What he cared about was her present, and I knew from Julia’s letters that she was finding her present life increasingly empty.

My rejection of Marcus had made a deep impression on her, and I felt she was searching for more to believe in than a successful social life. In her letters she had often inquired about Jesus and what I saw in him.

After the soldiers left, I walked back to the house. Lazarus had just come in from a day with the apostles, who had begun to preach about Jesus in the very courtyard of the Temple. We sat down to talk.

“There have been many baptisms in Jerusalem, Mary. I don’t know how long the Sanhedrin will tolerate our open presence in the Temple, but many of the people who heard the apostles have been asking for someone to go to their country and tell about the Lord. Soon we will have to decide who is to go where. James, the brother of the Lord, has sworn to remain in Jerusalem no matter how difficult the Sanhedrin might make it for him.”

It was starting.

“I think I might have a different mission,” I said, and then I told Lazarus everything I had been thinking about since speaking to the Roman lieutenant.

“There are certainly many Jews in Sepphoris,” he said. “Perhaps Martha and I could spread the word to them while you work with the Romans.”

“And there are so many villages around Sepphoris, Lazarus. These people are hard-working farmers and workmen. They need to hear the Word of the Lord; they need to know how important they are to him.”

He reached out and took both my hands into his. “We may not be going to the ends of the earth, Mary, but I think we can make a good start in Sepphoris. There will be plenty for us to do there, I think.”

And so that’s what we did. Lazarus, Martha, and I went to stay with Julia and commenced the conversion of western Galilee, both Jews and Romans, to the religion preached by Jesus, the Christ. He was with us all the while, as he had promised, and our successes came because of the faith he had in us and the faith we had in him.

Glory be to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Joan Wolf was born in the Bronx, only a few miles from Yankee Stadium. She has spent most of her adult life in Connecticut, where she and her husband raised two children and a wide assortment of animals. She started out writing books by hand at a table in the Milford Public Library more years ago than she cares to remember. She’s the author of
A Reluctant Queen
and
The Road to Avalon
, lauded as “historical fiction at its finest,” by
Publisher’s Weekly
.