will be quiet tonight at last, child, if you would just sleep. Maybe you would like your mother now?”
But a glance at the couple on the mound of straw showed that Mary had joined Joseph in sleep. So, quite unexpectedly, Eliah found himself alone, alone with the Christ child and with his thoughts.
He wondered at the baby and was finding the truth of it—that the Messiah, the Christ of God, was here before him—hard to come at. Not that he disbelieved it. No one, having the heard the angels on the hillside, could have done anything less than accept their every word as true. But still there was something in all of this, something vague and in the shadows, that Eliah felt somehow to be wrong, and he'd sensed it the moment he first stepped into the cave.
How strangely God works, he thought. Teenagers? Stables? Shepherds of all people? What, in all of this, is royal or sacred? And the question that had lingered just beyond words all night: why me?
He stared into the face of the crying child, their noses almost touching. “What have I to do with any of this?” And he waited as though the baby would answer. “Do you know, Child, that I turn my thoughts from you? That I cut them off like sprouting weeds?” He eyes jumped quickly around the squalid room. He was fully aware of his blasphemy; and despite the night's events, the old heaviness was there, colder than he had ever known.
“What have I to do with God when He has scraped everything good from my life?” Then he turned his eyes upward. “Job refused to curse you, but Job was a righteous man. I cursed you every day that I was mamzer, born in disgrace, no father to claim me. I cursed you when you took my wife and my children but left me here. And tonight, when the boy asked me what gift I would bring, I cursed you in my heart, for that is all I am able to do.”
Eliah listened to his own words as though they came from another. He recalled the hillside and the angels and the terror of the glory of God. And he was amazed and afraid, for he felt himself teetering between darkness and light. And the strangest thing was this: that it was the darkness that seemed safe, and it was the light that threatened to break him in pieces.
Yet he knew that neither the seeming nor the threat were to be trusted, for he had seen more than angels and radiance. He had seen the earth, the sky, time, and everything he thought to be real thrown aside as so much thin and flimsy stuff. He would trust nothing to his own senses and judgment, for those had quite come undone when God’s angel spoke.
He stared again into the infant’s face, the tiny eyes squeezed shut, the mouth curled into frustration. It was then that the obvious broke in on his thinking, for amid the confounding events of this night, he had failed to see something significant. This family, for whom all of Israel had been watching for centuries, was alone.
They were alone.
Joseph’s entire clan was here in this village, yet there was no one in the stable offering them so much as a drink of water or a word of comfort. And as he looked down at the baby in his arms, there came another thought, an incredible thought: Could it be that this child, the savior of the world, was, like himself, a scandal? The Messiah himself a…he hesitated to even think it…a mamzer? He laughed out loud, not because it was so absurd, though that was reason enough, but because he found himself believing it completely.
Now, everything that had risen up in his soul tonight – fear, awe, wonder, confusion, anger, all of it – collapsed into a heap, into something like shame, for he knew that this innocent child would suffer much in life. A passage from Isaiah came to him then, emerging as though from a fog: our griefs he himself bore, and our sorrows he carried. Eli knew something of the grief that this one would carry, and his hard, desolate life had made him intimate with sorrow. That he should share such things with Messiah moved him strangely.
“Son of God," he whispered, "perhaps I do have a gift for you. It is the only thing you have not taken already, but you are welcome to it. It is this cold, sin-filled heart inside of me.”
He set the child down into the manger, for it seemed that he was beginning to quiet, and laid a sheep skin over the trough. He knelt down and looked into the makeshift crib. “But then maybe that’s why you left it, because it was not worth taking? After all, what can be done with a stone heart, anyway? What can you do, Child, with something that’s already dead?"
The baby was quiet now. Whatever had burdened him before was finally past. And Eliah now realized that he too was very tired. He looked around the stable for a hide with which to cover himself, but finding none, he made a pillow of straw and lay down next to the manger.
It was not long before he could hear the baby’s steady breathing, which he knew meant sleep. And as he listened, he had a peculiar sensation—though perhaps it was only the beginning of a dream—that despite the winter and his bones lying flush against frozen ground, he was not cold. Indeed, it seemed to him then, as he drifted in and out of sleep, that he was warm, that he was quite warm.
*
The shepherds had been together when they heard the good news spoken to them by the archangel, and they had seen it together with their own eyes. But in the days that followed, each spread the word in the way that seemed best to him.
Joshua sought out those places where the crowds were thickest. He went into shops and markets and announced the events to any who would listen, and all who heard were amazed.
Iskail ran to the distant farms and smaller villages, which surrounded Bethlehem, and in fields and along highways he spoke quietly to every person God placed in his path. In this way he would be the Messiah's herald for the rest of his days.
But Eliah…Eliah merely sat near the city gates, and the crowds came to him astonished, for his cold, dead heart of stone, the only gift that the Christ child ever asks for, had been broken wide open, and the light of life was shining from it.
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