Page 23 of Unveiled Tamar’s Story (Mysteries & Wonders of the Bible #1)
He debated whether to simply tell his men about Tamar and instruct them to stay quiet about it and help protect her, but his lips wouldn’t form the words.
They were good men, yes. But mostly they were good Romans.
While they wouldn’t mind pulling one over on the temple guards, he was sure, they wouldn’t understand why they should protect a strange Jewish woman.
For that matter, Caeso had a bit of a reputation when it came to women, and while Valerius doubted he would do anything questionable, he would quite likely crack a few off-color jokes or look at Tamar in a way that would send her running toward Jerusalem, risks be hanged.
No, he would trust that the Lord had led his family instead of his men to her for a purpose, and he would respect that. Honor it. Trust it.
Much like last night, as soon as they were all done eating, they fell into their positions with comfortable silence, senses on alert and yet relaxed. Tonight, Valerius found his thoughts pounding against the stone at his back.
Jesus was in there.
He hadn’t let himself think about it too much last night, but tonight the thoughts wouldn’t leave him. Just a few feet away, separated by a thick stone slab and the immeasurable chasm between life and death, lay his Master.
In the morning, he knew, women would come to anoint the body properly.
He and his men would have to roll away the stone, after officially recording that the seal had been unbroken, that no one had entered the tomb.
He’d dismiss his men from this assignment, and they’d likely never set foot in this garden again.
He would have no cause to, either. Maybe that was why his feet felt rooted to the rocky ground beneath him now.
Jesus was here. The man he’d been too ashamed to bring under his roof before, even though Jesus did what no other rabbi ever would—He dined with sinners, with Gentiles, with outcasts. He healed not only the children of Israel but anyone with faith enough to ask.
This was the closest Valerius had ever been to Him, other than when He’d hung on the cross, and that pierced him as surely as Longinus’s spear had pierced the Master’s side at Golgotha.
I missed my chance . He could have pushed closer in a crowd.
He could have gone to beg the Lord for Gaius’s life himself instead of sending his Jewish friends from Capernaum.
When he looked out into the night, he saw again the unnatural darkness that had gathered the moment they pierced Jesus’s wrists and feet and hoisted the cross into its hole. When he blinked, he saw his Lord’s chest heaving, struggling to draw air into His lungs.
He saw Gaius’s chest, struggling in the same way, yet without a cross to blame it on. He saw the sweat on his beloved servant’s brows, the hollows under his eyes, the way each bone had protruded after two weeks of growing weaker and weaker.
The wind whipped through the garden, and in it he heard the rumbling of the earth as Jesus cried out to His Father. His feet remembered the feeling.
He recalled the way he’d shaken every bit as much, with gratitude instead of fear, when Gaius suddenly opened his eyes and sat up. Light in his eyes. Health flushing his cheeks. Hollows gone, flesh plump with a youth he hadn’t had in decades.
Yet the tomb behind him was cold and dark and silent. The earth that had ripped itself apart at this man’s death now rested just as His body did, silent and still.
Albus shifted, and Valerius remembered the sneer on the face of one of the criminals crucified with him.
The taunt that the man had found it necessary to make, even though doing so would have been agony.
What had made that man want so much to torment Him that he had put weight on his staked feet and hoisted himself up so he could fill his lungs with air?
All that, only to challenge Jesus to call down the angels and save them, if He was truly the Son of God.
When this was over, he would report to Pilate.
With a bit of luck, he’d catch his old friend in a lull and be able to have more of a conversation than a simple report demanded.
He would ask Pilate what he’d seen in Him, that he’d put that sign above the cross.
He’d ask him—and for that matter, Mariana—what Claudia had dreamed about Him.
He’d sit down with Longinus and ask what had changed his mind about Him as he watched Him die.
He craved the stories, the accounts. He needed them like he needed his next breath, his next meal. The man he’d followed was now just a lifeless body sealed behind a rock behind him…but his wife was right.
Dying hadn’t made Moses or Elijah, Elisha or Ezekiel, Daniel or Isaiah any less a chosen instrument of God.
Jesus had been something none of those prophets had been.
Valerius repositioned his spear, looked out into the full darkness that had fallen, and remembered the story he’d heard about Jesus striding across the Sea of Galilee to meet His disciples’ boat.
When he’d first heard the story, the soldiers he’d been with had laughed, scoffed—Longinus among them.
A ridiculous tale, they’d said. Even Aeneas and Achilles and Heracles of old hadn’t been able to master nature.
But Valerius’s heart had pounded, faith unfurling. Because if someone was only making up the story, they would have left it at that. They wouldn’t have added the part about Peter challenging Him. “Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You.”
Plenty of prophets had done the impossible—but none had been able to give that same power to others, not that he’d read.
Shifting slowly, he pressed his hand against the cool stone separating him from Jesus.
The Lord he followed hadn’t merely given sight to the blind and healed the sick—He’d empowered His disciples to do the same.
He’d sent them out ahead of Him to do the same work.
He’d promised they would do greater works than what they’d seen Him do.
Was that promise void now, just because He lay in this tomb?
No . It couldn’t be. Moses’s word, the Law of God, was no less potent because Moses died.
Elisha’s bones had still contained such power that a corpse lowered onto them sprang back to life.
Isaiah’s prophecies still guided a nation, and Daniel was remembered the world over as being one of the wisest men ever to live, centuries after his body came to rest in Babylon.
Death was far from the end for a true man of God.
Or even of a true man of knowledge, of philosophy, of political influence.
Often, death was the purifying furnace of the ideas those leaders had proposed.
If they stood the test, if they could stand when the Teacher was gone, then they went on to shape cities, nations, the world.
If not, if they withered away without the charisma of the leader shouting them out, then you would realize it had never been the ideas at all. It had just been charm, blinding and deceptive.
The cold seeped into his palm, and the world seemed to hold its breath. There were still no animals scurrying about, no birds singing their mournful night songs. The only creatures who continued to move as if nothing had changed were people.
But he knew something had changed. Creation had been robbed of a key part of itself. He didn’t understand how it all worked, but he remembered frowning over the very first words of Scripture, asking the rabbi why God said, “Let us make…” Who, he had asked, was this plural, if God was One?
God and His Spirit , the rabbi had said. The same Spirit that descended upon the prophets. Jesus had spoken of the Spirit too. He had called it His Spirit and promised to send Him to dwell with His followers. Not to move now and then, to descend and later depart. To dwell.
The same Spirit, Valerius was sure. God’s…Jesus’s. Which meant that Jesus was one with God, just as He’d claimed. ‘ I and the Father are one .’ He, then, was part of that “us” in Creation.
Creation knew it now. It knew that something had shifted.
Valerius shuddered as the chill from the rock worked its way up his arm, into his core.
The first time creation had shifted was when Adam sinned, when a curse fell on the whole world.
When roses grew thorns and wheat fields grew weeds and animals began to kill and to die.
When pain entered the world and had never again let it go.
That had just been when the first man disobeyed a command and ate the forbidden fruit. What would happen now, when men had crucified the very Son of God? What curse would the Father pour out on them?
His gaze shifted toward the neighboring tomb and the woman hidden within it. The veil had torn. The presence of God, protected behind it, had surely departed.
The world would see, through the test of Jesus’s death, that He had been all He said.
Valerius feared they would see it through a curse like none other. The end of days had surely begun. God had left them, just as He had left the garden where He’d once walked with Adam and Eve.
The wind curled around him, a cold finger that drew itself over his neck, up his cheek. Jesus had promised they would continue to do His work.
But what would that look like in a dying world?