Holy Saturday
Ethan
4 April – 33 AD
Ethan ben Timaeus knocked on the door of the home of his long-time friend and former fellow tax collector, Matthew Levi ben Alphaeus. Even after Matthew had left tax collecting to become a follower of Jesus, they remained friends, although their contact had been scarce over the past three years. Yet now, with the news that Jesus had been executed and entombed, Ethan felt strongly that he should pay his respects to his dear friend and offer his condolences.
There was no response, so he rapped again. After pausing another several minutes to give Matthew time to open the door, he turned and left, deep in his many confusing thoughts.
Ethan had his own personal connection to Jesus at His birth in Bethlehem when he was a young shepherd with his three brothers 33 years ago. But after his father had suddenly died and his meager estate was left principally to his older brother, Azriel, he, Johanan, and Bartimaeus were left to fend for themselves. In the end, they all found substantial reasons to drift apart permanently.
But Ethan gave his brothers an airtight reason for estrangement as he had willingly become a traitor to Israel. By collecting taxes from his countrymen and giving them to their occupiers – the deeply despised and hated Romans – Ehtan had all but relinquished his right to be called a son of Israel in exchange for a very lucrative living.
Ethan was consumed in his thoughts on this extraordinary Passover sabbath. This rabbi called Jesus, Whom he had visited as a newborn infant, had emerged as an enigmatic figure in Israel, preaching in fields before multiplied thousands and regularly teaching in the synagogues. Of course, other than his relationship with Matthew and the other tax collectors, Ethan was an outcast in Jewish society, and he never dared even approach a place of worship, much less enter one.
Yet, he had attended one gathering of fellow tax collector outcasts at which Jesus was Himself present. Matthew was there too – no longer as a tax collector, but as a close disciple of Jesus. On two very uncomfortable occasions during that evening, Ethan felt Jesus’ eyes following him about the residence. It made him so uneasy that he departed the gathering early.
Ethan aimlessly wandered the nearly deserted streets of Jerusalem on this quiet Passover sabbath until he stumbled on one splotched with blood. He stopped and surveyed the cobblestones with his eyes when he realized that this was the route often taken by condemned prisoners in their death marches as they carried their wooden crosses to the hill outside the city on which they were crucified.
Seeing a rather large pool of dried blood, he inhaled deeply. Then he began walking to the northeastern gate leading to the hill, following the dirty streets outside the city proper.
As he wound his way up the route toward the top of the ridge on the ugly escarpment, he saw three empty crosses on its upper ridge facing Jerusalem. When they came into his view, his feet slowed and then stopped altogether. The hideous skull-shaped hill that was called Golgotha, or “place of the skull,” had fully earned its name. It was the place the Romans had selected for their countless crucifixion – an unspeakably barbaric way to execute human beings.
Seeing the bare crosses silhouetted between earth and sky in the brilliant sunlight of this Passover sabbath arrested Ethan’s eyes – and his heart. For just a moment, he could finally understand the waves of emotions his friend Matthew must have felt when in the presence of the living Jesus. He knew that something extraordinary must have happened to Matthew to cause him to get up from where he was sitting and leave his wealth and position behind to follow an itinerant rabbi. And now that extraordinary reaction was overcoming him – an emotional response coming from where, he could not imagine.
Ethan began pacing slowly but deliberately closer to the crosses, trying to get a fix on a source of that strengthening energy building now in his mind and heart. He finally stood just three paces away from the center cross, reading a sign affixed to it that was inscribed in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin reading: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”
As his eyes processed the scene of what he immediately recognized as a cosmic crime, Ethan took the final steps to the roughened timber and fell to his knees inches before the blood-stained cross. Compelled by an irresistible force, he reached out to touch it with his fingers, feeling the dried blood against the coarse wooden post.
He began to weep as he recalled the otherworldly choir of angels ecstatically singing and praising and worshiping all those years ago on the midnight field of Bethlehem. He wept for Jesus, he wept for his brothers, he wept for his choices, and he wept for the innocence he had lost or given away along life’s rugged pathway to this ugly place.
Suddenly, there was a gentle touch on his shoulder.
Startled, Ethan blinked his eyes and turned to see two blurry figures standing behind him. Wiping the tears from his eyes, he stood and turned toward the men. He gasped as he recognized his brothers, Azriel and Johanan, facing him.
The three immediately embraced one another, the intervening years of separation falling away, each man overcome by their emotions as they stood at the foot of Jesus’ cross. They wept together as they embraced but said nothing for a long moment.
“Bartimaeus?” Ethan asked. “Where is our baby brother?” he continued, his eyes searching behind them.
Azriel and Johanan just shook their heads. Finally, Johanan said, “I have heard he is dead. Buried in a pauper’s grave.”
Each man looked away, eyes cast down to the ground, dealing with individual remorse and regrets as they mourned together the youngest brother who was lost. A substantial feeling of guilt engulfed each for abandoning him.
They were aware that Bartimaeus had fallen into the life of a drunken miscreant in his youth after their father died. He even robbed their mother just a year before she died and stole everything she had to live on. Seven years previously, he was involved in a drunken brawl and had been struck on the head with a wooden stake. When he awoke, he was permanently blind. From that moment, he had no choice but to beg for his subsistence on the streets.
Their brother had been such a shame to the family that none of them had wanted anything to do with him. After his betrayal of their mother, his fate seemed righteous judgment, and the fact that that he was reduced to a blind beggar was wholly deserved. They had lost track of him and assumed he was dead… as he had been to each of them anyway for many reasons.
Azriel spoke first, placing a hand on each man’s shoulder. “My brothers, I don’t know why God has led us to this place at this time, but I have many things to share with you. Please follow me to my home, and I will prepare a feast for us after the Sabbath has passed!”
“Will you not lose your place in the Synagogue by inviting the likes of me into your home, brother?” Ethan asked, not willing to look in his eldest brother’s eyes.
Azriel embraced Ethan tightly. “It little matters now,” he replied, looking at the cross. “Come along with me. I have much to share with you!”
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