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Joel, a Boy of Galilee

<h2>CHAPTER XVIII.</h2> <div class="figleft"> <ANTIMG src="images/drop_w_quote.png" width-obs="125" height-obs="101" alt="W" /></div> <div class='unindent'> AKE up, Joel! Wake up! I bring you good tidings, my lad!" It was Abigail's voice ringing cheerily through the court-yard, as she bent over the boy, fast asleep on the hard stones.</div> All the long Sabbath day after the burial, he had sat listlessly in the shady court-yard, his blank gaze fixed on the opposite wall. No one seemed able to arouse him from his apathy. He turned away from the food they brought him, and refused to enter the house when night came. Towards morning he had gone over to the fountain for a long draught of its cool water; then overcome by weakness from his continued fast, and exhausted by grief, he fell asleep on the pavement. Abigail came in and found him there, with the red morning sun beating full in his face. She had to shake him several times before she could make him open his eyes. [230] He sat up dizzily, and tried to collect his thoughts. Then he remembered, and laid his head wearily down again, with a groan. "Wake up! Wake up!" she insisted, with such eager gladness in her voice that Joel opened his eyes again, now fully aroused. "What is it?" he asked indifferently. "He is risen!" she exclaimed joyfully, clasping her hands as she always did when much excited. "I went to His tomb very early in the morning, while it was yet dark, with Mary and Salome and some other women. The stone had been rolled aside; and while we wondered and wept, fearing His enemies had stolen Him away, He stood before us, with His old greeting on His lips,—'All hail!'" Joel rubbed his eyes and looked at her. "No, no!" he said wearily, "I am dreaming again!" He would have thrown himself on the ground as before, his head pillowed on his arm, but she would not let him. She shook his hands with a persistence that could not be refused, talking to him all the while in such a glad eager voice that he slowly began to realize that something had made her very happy. "What is it, Mother Abigail?" he asked, much puzzled. [231] "I do not wonder you are bewildered," she cried. "It is such blessed, such wonderful news. Why He is alive, Joel, He whom Thou lovest! Try to understand it, my boy! I have just now come from the empty tomb. I saw Him! I spoke with Him! I knelt at His feet and worshipped!" By this time all the family had come out. Reuben looked at his daughter pityingly, as she repeated her news; then he turned to Phineas. "Poor thing!" he said, in a low tone. "She has witnessed such terrible scenes lately, and received such a severe shock, that her mind is affected by it. She does not know what she is saying. Did not you yourself help prepare the body for burial, and put it in the tomb?" "Yes," answered Phineas, "and helped close it with a great stone, which no one man could possibly move by himself. And I saw it sealed with the seal of Cæsar; and when I left it was guarded by Roman sentinels in armor. No man could have opened it." "But Abigail talks of angels who sat in the empty tomb, and who told them He had risen," replied her father. Joel, who had overheard this low-toned conversation, got up and stood close beside them.[232] He had begun to tremble from weakness and excitement. <div class="figright"> <ANTIMG src="images/i007.jpg" width-obs="394" height-obs="600" alt="Pointing at the moved stone" /> "'THE STONE IS GONE!'"</div> "Father Phineas," he asked, "do you remember the story we heard from the old shepherd, Heber? The angels told of His birth; maybe she did see them in His tomb." "How can such things be?" queried Reuben, stroking his beard in perplexity. "That's just what you said when Rabbi Lazarus was brought back to life," piped Jesse's shrill voice, quite unexpectedly, at his grandfather's elbow. He had not lost a word of the conversation. "Why don't you go and see for yourself if the tomb is empty?" Abigail had gone into the house with her mother, and now the summons to breakfast greeted them. She saw she could not convince them of the truth of her story, so she said no more about it; but her happy face was more eloquent than words. All day snatches of song kept rising to her lips,—old psalms of thanksgiving, and half whispered hallelujahs. At last Joel and Phineas were both so much affected by her continued cheerfulness, that they began to believe there must be some great cause for it. Finally, in the waning afternoon, they took[233] the road that led from Bethany to the garden where they firmly believed that the Master still lay buried. As they came in sight of the tomb, Joel clutched Phineas by the arm, and pointed, with a shaking finger, to the dark opening ahead of of them. "See!" he said, pointing into its yawning darkness. "She was right! The stone is gone!" It was some time before they could muster up courage to go nearer and look into the sepulchre. When at last they did so, neither spoke a word, but, after one startled look into each other's eyes, turned and left the garden. It was growing dark as they hurried along the highway homeward. Two men came half running towards the city, in great haste to reach the gates before they should be closed for the night. They were two disciples well known to Phineas. He stopped them with the question that was uppermost in his mind. "Yes, He is risen," answered one of the men, breathlessly. "We have seen Him. Hosanna to the Highest! He walked along this road with us as we went to Emmaus." "Ah, how our hearts burned as He talked[234] with us by the way!" interrupted the other man. "Only this hour He sat at meat with us," cried the first speaker. "He broke bread with us, and blessed it as He always used to do. We are running back to the city now to tell the other disciples." Phineas would have laid a detaining hand on them, but they hurried on, and left him standing in the road, looking wistfully after them. "It must be true," said Joel, "or they could not have been so nearly wild with joy." Phineas sadly shook his head. "I wish I could think so," he sighed. "Let us go home," urged Abigail, the next day, "the Master has bidden His brethren meet Him in Galilee. Let us go. There is hope of seeing Him again in our old home!" Joel, now nearly convinced of the truth of her belief, was also anxious to go. But Phineas lingered; his plodding mind was slower to grasp such thoughts than the sensitive woman's or the imaginative boy's. One after another he sought out Peter and James and John, and the other disciples who had seen the risen Master, and questioned them closely. Still he tarried for another week. [235] One morning he met Thomas, whose doubts all along had strengthened his own. He ran against him in the crowded street in Jerusalem. Thomas seized his arm, and, turning, walked beside him a few paces. "It is true!" he said, in a low intense tone, with his lips close to his ear. "I saw Him myself last night; I held His hands in mine! I touched the side the spear had pierced! He called me by name; and I know now beyond all doubt that the Master has risen from the dead, and that He is the Son of God!" After that, Phineas no longer objected when it was proposed that they should go back to Galilee. The story of the resurrection was too great for him to grasp entirely, still he could not put aside such a weight of evidence that came to him from friends whose word he had always implicitly trusted. The roads were still full of pilgrims returning from the Passover. As Phineas journeyed on with his little family, he fell in with the sons of Jonah and Zebedee, going back to their nets and their fishing-boats. The order of procession was constantly shifting, and one morning Joel found himself walking beside John, one of the chosen twelve, who[236] seemed to have understood his Master better than any of the others. The man seemed wrapped in deep thought, and took no notice of his companion, till Joel timidly touched his sleeve. "Do you believe it is true?" the boy asked. There was no surprise in the man's face at the abrupt question, he felt, without asking, what Joel meant. A reassuring smile lighted up his face as he laid his hand kindly on Joel's shoulder. "I know it, my lad; I have been with Him." The quiet positiveness with which he spoke seemed to destroy Joel's last doubt. "Many things that He said to us come back to me very clearly; and I see now He was trying to prepare us for this." "Tell me about them," begged Joel, "and about those last hours He was with you. Oh, if I could only have been with Him, too!" John saw the tears gathering in the boy's eyes, heard the tremble in his voice, and felt a thrill of sympathy as he recognized a kindred love in the little fellow's heart. So he told Joel of the last supper they had taken together, of the hymn they had sung, and of the watch they had failed to keep, when He[237] took them with Him into the garden of Gethsemane. All the little incidents connected with those last solemn hours, he repeated carefully to the listening boy. From time to time Joel brushed his hand across his eyes; but a deep calm fell over him as John's voice went on, slowly repeating the words the Master had comforted them with. "Let not your hearts be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions.... I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.... If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father.... These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." Joel made an exclamation as if about to speak, and then stopped. "What is it?" asked John. "How could He mean that He has overcome the world? Cæsar still rules, and Jerusalem is full of His enemies. I can't forget that they killed Him, even if He has risen." John stooped to tie his sandal before he answered. [238] "I have been fitting together different things He told us; and I begin to see how blind we were. Once He called Himself the Good Shepherd who would give his life for his sheep, and said, 'Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.'" They walked on in silence a few paces, then John asked abruptly, "Do you remember about the children of Israel being so badly bitten by serpents in the wilderness, and how Moses was commanded to set up a brazen serpent in their midst?" "Yes, indeed!" answered Joel. "All who looked up at it were saved; but those who would not died from the poisonous bites." "One night," continued John, "a learned man by the name of Nicodemus, one of the rulers, came to the Master with many questions. And I remember one of the answers He gave him. 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' We did not understand Him then at all. Not till I saw Him[239] lifted up on the cruel cross, did I begin to dimly see what He meant." A light broke over Joel's face as he remembered the vision he had had that day, kneeling at the foot of the cross; then he stopped still in the road, with his hands clasped in dismay. There suddenly seemed to rise before him the scenes of daily sacrifice in the Temple, when the blood of innocent lambs flowed over the altar; then he thought of the great Day of Atonement, when the poor scape-goat was driven away to its death, laden with the sins of the people. "Oh, that must be what Isaiah meant!" he cried in distress. "'He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter!' Oh, can it be possible that 'the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all'? What an awful sacrifice!" The tears streamed down his face as the thought came over him with overwhelming conviction, that it was for him that the man he loved so had endured all the horrible suffering of death by crucifixion. "Why did such a thing have to be?" he asked, looking up appealingly at his companion. John looked out and up, as if he saw far beyond the narrow, hill-bound horizon, and quoted softly: "For God so loved the world, that He gave[240] His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Just as the feeling had come to him that morning by the Galilee, and again as he gazed and gazed into the white face on the cross, Joel seemed to feel again the love of the Father, as it took him close into its infinite keeping. "'Greater love hath no man than this,'" quoted John again, "'that a man lay down his life for his friends.' He is the propitiation for our sins; and not ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." It was hard for the child to understand this at first; but this gentle disciple who walked beside him had walked long beside the Master, and in the Master's own way and words taught Joel life's greatest lesson. <hr class="chap" />[241] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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