The Big Fisherman (75 page)

Peter made no comment, but seemed deeply impressed by this tragedy that had befallen the royal house of Israel's long-time enemy. Presently he arose and seated himself in a far corner of the dimly lighted room, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, apparently wrestling with a difficult problem.

After half an hour of silent meditation he took leave of them and trudged slowly up the long hill to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he knelt beside a great rock and prayed earnestly for guidance. Could it be possible that God might use him as a messenger of good-will to hostile Arabia?

For a while the authorities in Jerusalem were so stunned by the fearless activities of the new movement that they took no action at all.

Within a week after Pentecost the number of determined men who saw the promise of peace in a divinely sponsored Kingdom that would overwhelm all tyrannies had risen to five thousand.

Many of the converts were sincere believers in the miraculous power of the inspired Galilean. Many more, who had neither heard nor seen him, were ready to cast their lot with any party that guaranteed liberty from oppression. With the rapacious Roman Empire preparing to close in on them they had little to lose by joining in this quest for freedom. Some wanted to save their souls and others their necks. The threat of disaster was urgent. Any port was good enough in this storm.

It was futile for the city fathers to dispose of this Kingdom-movement by declaring that the men of the Pentecostal experience had conspired to fabricate a fantastic lie; and, at the risk of their lives, proclaim it on crowded street-corners and in the Temple. Three men might have been foolhardy enough to do that, but not one hundred and twenty! And ten credulous men might have been taken in by such a fanciful talc, but not five thousand!

The Sanhedrin met in day-long sessions, stroking its beard, successively suggesting and rejecting remedies, ranging in tactics and temper all the way from the conciliatory to the admonitory to the punitive; and adjourned until tomorrow.

The venerable and highly respected Gamaliel, Chief Legal Counsel to the lawgivers of Israel, when besought for advice, reminded them that on several occasions revolutions had collected a few hundreds, made reckless by their discontentments, but all such little tempests had quickly blown out and away. 'Give these infatuated Galileans time. If their cause is unworthy of regard it will perish. If it is inspired of God, as they insist, you will not be able to thwart it, even if you would.'

This sensible deliverance offered a measure of temporary relief. The Sanhedrin would wait—and see. . . . But it didn't have to wait very long. That same afternoon the news broke that Peter, the leader of the new party, had picked up a helpless paralytic on the terrace in front of the Temple; and, setting him on his feet, had told him to walk—and he had walked! And this was no trumped-up tale. A hundred people had witnessed it. The paralysed man had sat on the Temple steps every fair day for years, waving his alms-basin under the public's nose. Now he had leaped up, shouting for joy! However he might feel about it tomorrow, when he realized that his occupation was gone, he was spry enough now; and if the Sanhedrin was to offer a plausible explanation of this event it would have to think fast and hard!

As for Pilate, he gave little credence to these stories of miracles. The whole movement, in his opinion, was but the natural aftermath of Jerusalem's blunder in crucifying a harmless prophet. The victim's friends were belatedly showing their colours. Perhaps it were better to keep hands off and not dignify the new party by opposing it. If the Sanhedrin demanded action, Pilate would act. In the meantime the Insula would pretend not to notice. The jaded Procurator felt under no obligation to relieve the embarrassment of the Sanhedrin.

And so, with no opposition at all, the Kingdom-movement in Jerusalem became increasingly confident, proving its courage by the organization of a 'Christian Ecclesia.' Regional meetings were held throughout the city and mass meetings met in a huge vacant warehouse.

So amazing had been the unexpected triumph of the new cause that the little group of original disciples became convinced of the early reappearance of their Lord to fulfil his promise of 'peace on earth and good-will among men.' It would be well to prepare for his coming by binding together in harmony all the disparate elements comprising the Ecclesia.

It occurred to Peter that if these people could live together they might provide Jerusalem with an object-lesson in tolerance and generosity. He proposed the establishment of a commune. No one would be compelled to join it, but those who desired to experience its benefits should convert their realty into money and bring it, with their household goods, into the new communal home, where the well-to-do and the ne'er-do-wells might share alike.

The people who had next to nothing thought it was a grand idea. The more fortunate, who had something to contribute, weren't so sure, but Peter had already demonstrated supernormal power, and perhaps—under his administration—the experiment might succeed.

But the thing never worked. Peter's theory that the more closely acquainted the people were the more they would love one another turned out to be erroneous. He had declared that if men understood one another, regardless of their training or temperament, they could enjoy a pleasant and profitable fellowship. The facts were that as their mutual understanding increased their mutual distrust mounted from dispassionate contempt to forthright animosity.

In vain did the Big Fisherman plead for harmony. Often and often he used the arresting phrase 'these latter times' in his warnings that the Lord might come at any moment, and that when he came he would expect to find his faithful followers ready to receive him. But this ominous admonition, albeit listened to with respect—for they all idolized Peter—failed to cure the quarrelling. The Greeks complained that the Jews, who outnumbered them, were unfair in their distribution of the necessities. This could easily have been true, though the Greeks in Jerusalem, even in the minority, may have been too keenly apprehensive of discrimination. But whatever may have been the merits of these mounting controversies, the commune was becoming a burdensome disillusionment to Peter. How indeed was the world ever to realize universal peace if a hundred devoted followers of Christ, in the most religious city on earth, couldn't get along with one another?

The problem having now become too hot to handle, Peter appointed a board of seven representative men to administer the benefits of the commune while he himself gave most of his time to visitation of the needy throughout the city. And the commune, now lacking his direct oversight, quickly deteriorated into a public nuisance. Now the Sanhedrin really did have a case against the phantom Kingdom, and pressed it with vigour. Pilate ordered a few companies of legionaries to exterminate the unhappy commune and forbid any Kingdom-talk either in public or private. Peter tried to salvage what was left of his branch of the Kingdom, and was tossed into prison. That same night he walked out of jail, barred doors quietly opening before him. Considerately stepping over the big feet of recumbent guards in the prison corridors, he went to his lodgings; and, next day, no effort was made to recapture him. The authorities in control of the prison were appropriately embarrassed over the incident and Pilate sneered at their shame, advising them not to risk a repetition of their chagrin.

So Peter went free and continued to walk fearlessly and unmolested in the city, his spiritual power gaining such prestige that invalids—whether Christian believers or not—were carried on their cots into the streets so that the great man's shadow, as he passed, might fall across their wasted forms and heal them of their diseases.

As for the hapless adherents of the Christian Ecclesia, they had been dispersed, silenced, scared, jailed, and stoned. Peter viewed the wreck of his local project without dismay. Considering the enormous weight of the forces aligned against it, it was a wonder that it had been permitted even a brief existence. Its disintegration did not mean that the Kingdom was a failure. Christ's Kingdom would prevail—but not today, not tomorrow—and not easily.

* * * * * *

And perhaps it was just as well that the Jerusalem experiment in communal living had come to a prompt and decisive termination.

Had it shown any promise of recovery by careful nursing, the disciples might have felt obliged to stay with it for better or worse; but its collapse had been so complete, so far beyond the reach of repair, that the disciples immediately set forth on other missions: Philip to Antioch, Andrew to Damascus, Thaddeus to the fisher-folk on the Sea of Galilee, Matthew to Capernaum and Bethsaida, John and James to Askelon, Gaza, and Idumea, Thomas to the Parthians in India, the aged Nathaniel Bartholomew to Jericho—and then on home to die.

Learning that a little company of Christians were meeting secretly in Joppa, Peter decided to visit them. The shabby old city had lately come awake, shaken out of its torpor by the Empire's activities on the waterfront. Reconstruction of the wharves and reconditioning of the harbour had tripled the population. The newcomers were slaves for the most part, many of them quite unused to pick-and-shovel labour, paying with their sweat and calluses for futile efforts to defend themselves and their communities against the engulfing tyranny of Rome. Obviously the Christian movement in Joppa was a good thing to keep away from, especially for a distinguished-looking man whose unusual height and bulk made it difficult for him to remain inconspicuous.

Peter was deeply touched by the welcome he received at the lame and blistered hands of these despairing men. He had gone to Joppa with no acquaintances to vouch for him. It was a wonder to him—once he had learned in what danger they stood—that the wary slaves should have accepted his overtures of friendship without distrust, for the Romans were taking no chances of insurrection on the part of these intelligent men, enslaved for political reasons; nor were the slaves risking exposure by confiding in strangers. But the Big Fisherman instantly disarmed suspicion.

Taking lodgings in the humble home of a tanner who lived near the docks, Peter quickly won his taciturn host's confidence and discovered, to his delight, that the quiet old man was a believer in the promised Kingdom of justice and peace. It soon became evident that the house of Simon the Tanner was a secret meeting-place of lonely men. In the night they would arrive in small groups of twos and threes and sit together in dim candle-light, listening to the Tanner's reassurances that all would be well—sometime—somewhere.

Now that Peter had come, they could learn about the divine Nazarene from one who had walked daily by his side. The lean and haggard men hungrily heard the intimate details of the Master's ministry: his comforting words, his marvellous deeds, his courageous death, his return to life; and—most heartening of all—the amazing disclosures of his abiding presence and power on the Day of Pentecost.

Very few of the wistful listeners understood Aramaic, but all of them knew Greek, and although Peter's Greek was anything but fluent, it served its purpose. Indeed, the thoughtful old Tanner told him that his groping for the right words, which his sympathetic—and sometimes amused—audience supplied, had but deepened their interest in what he was saying.

'They help you tell the story,' said Simon. 'It means more to them that way. Don't ever try to improve your Greek, Peter,' he added. 'It's much better when it's not so good.'

Those were blessed days—at Joppa. Not only had they brought fresh courage to the hard-pressed slaves, who, to all outward appearance, were irretrievably doomed, but they had renewed Peter's faith in the inevitable victory of the Kingdom. . . . Perhaps it wasn't going to be so difficult, after all! Perhaps the world would accept it sooner than he had thought! The unhappy people of every nation needed only to be told that peace and freedom were about to come—and with faith in that promise their yokes would be easy and their burdens light.

'Surely,' Peter had remarked to the old Tanner, 'if these enslaved men of Joppa, who live such wretched lives, can believe in the world's liberation and look forward with confidence to the future, it shouldn't be so difficult for the more fortunate to accept the promise.'

'I think you are in error there, my friend,' Simon had replied. 'It is the faith of the beaten men in chains, for whom all human reliances have failed, that will hasten the coming of the Kingdom.'

Late one afternoon—it turned out to be Peter's last day in Joppa—he climbed the narrow stairs to the flat roof of the Tanner's house to meditate in private. It was not yet supper-time, but he was hungry; very hungry. Simon was a frail old man who didn't require much food. Peter's appetite was robust. He found himself thinking about Hannah's table. There was always more than enough to eat. Sometimes he and Andy would buy a fat lamb and roast it over a glowing fire in their back yard. He wished he were at home in Bethsaida now! . . . While he daydreamed, he grew drowsy, stretched out comfortably in the big chair—and slept. The well-pastured sheep and sleek calves of Galilee strolled into his dream. Here came a spring lamb that he might buy. But now the coveted lamb moved on and all the sheep and calves were gone. Presently some other animals appeared: strange, misshapen, repulsive beasts. Peter scowled with disgust.

Someone in the chair opposite chuckled a little.

'If you are so hungry, Peter,' remarked the visitor, 'how about slaughtering one of these?'

'Ugh!' Peter heard himself muttering.

His dream companion laughed softly and Peter gazed in that direction to see what manner of man he was. The newcomer was a well-favoured youth, elegantly clad in white, with a broad band of gold encircling his head and a gold cross on the breast of his tunic.

'You should make the acquaintance of these animals,' said the youth, with a smile. 'They're not to be found in Galilee or Judaea, but you will encounter them. This is a big world, Peter, and it all belongs to our Father. . . . That tall, ungainly beast is a giraffe—and the short, not-very-pretty one behind it is a wart hog. The next one is an ant-eater and beside it is a rhinoceros—'