Holidays - Seasons Greetings!

It was a thing to see. The late sun was ahead, across the hill behind Jerusalem. The city was a white jewel pronged by the great stone wall around it. Joseph pulled the ass to the side of the road because the pilgrims behind him were shouting. Without turning from the scene, he moved back along the flank of the ass until he touched Mary’s hand. “Jerusalem,” he said again. He said it as though it were an earthly anteroom to paradise, as indeed it was.

The sun would be gone in ten minutes and there was much to see because he could not stay in Jerusalem. His destination, Bethlehem, was still five miles to the south, but he did not mind the night walk if he could stop a moment and drink in all of this and remember it when he was old.

His eyes, and Mary’s too, moved in little darting glances, and they longed to exclaim to each other but there were no words. This was where God lived. They had been told many times that he did not live in the little synagogues around the country of Judea and far out in the diaspora. The synagogues were there to remind the Jews of God, to remind them of their duty never to live more than ninety days travel from the Great Temple of Jerusalem, never to fail, whenever possible, to go to Jerusalem for the Passover. Each year at the time of the first seder, 300,000 Jews stayed in the city and in the hilly fields around it.

Below was the Valley of Kidron, with the full little river running cold below the east wall of the temple. Gray-blue smoke hung still in the sky over the temple proper. This was the last sacrifices of the day, the last baby lambs on the altar. Inside, there were seven thousand Levitical priests to ascertain that each lamb, before sacrifice, was without blemish, and in the courtyards to the north were animals and birds to be bought for sacrifice.

The Porch of Solomon faced them, the marble walk and corinthian columns gleaming like teeth in a seven-foot mouth. Up the side of the great temple was the snowy stone wall, hung with a cluster of solid gold grapes four stories high. In the valley, the Golden Gate and the Fountain Gate slowly regurgitated the last of the temple pilgrims for the day. From the height, Joseph could look across the enclosed city and see Herod’s palace on the far side, a little south of the place called Galgotha.

Softly, haltingly, Joseph found his voice and, as he drank in the exquisite and almost fearful beauty, he began to tell the story to his wife. She knew the story as well as he, but she listened dutifully, interjecting a word here and there, or a question. He reminded her that he came of the family of David, even though his branch was small and poor. It was David’s son Solomon who had built this. He had commissioned Hiram, the King of Tyre, to draw the plans and do the engineering. The work was finished in seven years, a miracle of goodness. The temple was on Oman’s Rock. It was I,600 feet long and 970 feet wide. The bigger the temple got, the more remote Solomon felt from God, and he needed the solace of women, so on the Mount of Offense to the left he had built a palace and placed therein five hundred concubines.

The sin needed washing and, long after Solomon repented, the Jews split into two nations-Judea and Israel -and the Babylonians defeated them and reduced the walls of the temple. Now the Jews were the chattels of Roman emperors and the Caesars appointed Herod as king to rule the people.

The Herod who sat in that palace on the far side of the city proclaimed himself a Jew and made daily sacrifices, but he was not even a good hypocrite. Joseph had heard the elders talk about it in Nazareth, and they averted their eyes when they recited his crimes. Herod bent his knee to Rome. He married Mariamne and, after she bore him two sons, he became piqued and had the three slain. He married ten times and he was so cruel that Caesar Augustus in Rome said that it was safer to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son. This was a sacrilegious joke on the dietary laws, and Joseph did not like to repeat it.

Still-how could one say it?-he had also done good things for God. He had paid ten thousand workmen to repair the temple and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. He made temple spires of marble and they glinted pink in the morning sun. He built a great outer portico around the temple and this was called the Court of the Gentiles. Nonbelievers could walk this far. The next inner walk was called the Court of the Women, then came the Court of the Israelite Men. Signs proclaimed that any nonbeliever who walked this far in the temple was liable to death.

Then came the smaller Court of Priests, and inside of it the temple itself. This consisted of two huge chambers. The outer was the Holy; the inner was the Holy of Holies. In front of the Holy was a heavy veil embroidered in rich color, with all the known flowers of the earth, and a variety of the fruits of the earth.

“Darkness is upon us,” said Mary. She had a feeling of foreboding. She wanted to proceed to Bethlehem for no reason other than that she was trembling and the baby was unusually quiet. Joseph stopped in mid-speech. He knew that she would not interrupt him unless there was a reason. He asked if she desired to get down and have privacy. She said no and, without further conversation, he led the ass westward into the valley and across the little wooden bridge over the Kidron and beneath the great wall of the city and then by the Valley of Hinnon and on up into the hills between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

It was soon night and moonless. Joseph trod slowly, stumbling on stones underfoot, and wondering how much of a man he would be if brigands sprang out of the dark. There was little traffic on the road; a few transients who lived near Jerusalem hurried by, trying to reach home without spending an extra night under the stars.

Something happened suddenly to Mary and she knew in a moment that this would be the night of the baby. She asked Joseph to stop and he became alarmed and asked if she was unquiet. “No,” she said. “I feel no pain, but we must find an inn. The baby-with God’s help-will be born tonight.”

Joseph was frightened. He knew nothing of these things.

The thinking Mary did about the events leading to this night was a kaleidoscope of happy and mysterious and supernatural things calculated to unnerve the most serene young lady. To have a first baby is, in itself, a towering, wordless joy, a living proof of the most common miracle, a sad tenderness to constrict the heart and mist the eyes. To give birth to a first-born who is God and the Son of God and the Second Person of the Holy Trinity is, at age fifteen or any greater age, a heavier responsibility than any other person ever bore, an enormity of weight which could be maintained only by one too young to appreciate it.