Jesus sat by himself often, trying to understand his family, the murder of his uncle, Zachariah, and the murder of his male peers. He was five, he was eight, he was eleven. He had no answer. Sometimes he wished he’d been murdered, too. At those times he was angry with his father for having dreams and for obeying them. Angry that his father’s dreams had twice saved his life.
When he spoke in the Temple, though he was only twelve, he spoke of unhappiness, destiny and the web into which, though we don’t design it, we are born. He spoke with great conviction and little emotion. That he knew about human suffering was clear to those who heard him.
He didn’t speak of the night visitors who came bringing gifts. That he still had the kite, his mother, the gold. He spoke of what he’d seen, of the limit of riches to bring happiness, that gold did not lift his mother’s despondency when he watched her stand before the mirror newly clothed in fine garments and wept. The dress that still hung at the back of her closet, unworn. Riches could not prevent the slicing off anymore than righteousness could. Her righteousness, his father’s, his uncle’s, the parents in his neighborhood.
“The Son of Man will bring division,” he said because this was the nature of the puzzle he was trying to solve, the severing he’d already seen and had set in motion. A family of four children had three. A family with two sons had only one. That knife blade. That sickle.
“Those who hear the word of God and do it,” he answered and spoke the same that day in the Temple.
Those present listened with amazement and some said, “Surely this boy is a prophet.”
After searching for Jesus three days, Joseph and Mary found him in the Temple and Joseph instructed him to come home, but Jesus answered, saying, “Here I am doing my father’s business,” rebuking his father, which offended Joseph. And the Elders, witnessing the exchange, said among themselves, “Is he the boy’s father? This carpenter? The one who can’t read? The one who makes chairs?”
Mary did not hear the insult, so that Joseph bore the full weight of the humiliation without her.
In that moment he saw the degree of his uselessness to both her and their son and felt anger again toward Jesus. He thought of Abraham’s rage against Isaac, a story he knew from childhood, his father telling it to him with sadness, saying, “I hope we never have that strife between us.”
His wife and son had eyes fixed on something greater that he could not see, something more important than being a family, even a holy one. And Joseph fell away from them, so that there was no repairing it. Once they reached home, he would gather his possessions and move away.
They seemed unconcerned with happiness, which he held as life’s greatest gain, a true measure of the spiritual life. Life was made for joy, after all. And he did not take it for granted much less devalue it as they seemed to do. He looked at them as they walked ahead, feeling how keenly he wanted a simple life, a life without the supernatural in it.
They walked so closely that their steps almost matched, the boy almost as tall as his mother, each occasionally looking away at the landscape, the hills to the left, the wide, flat expanse of sand to the right. By the time they reached home, Joseph wondered if their quest for some higher meaning that he did not feel or feel drawn to was a kind of gluttony or greed.
Enrique Martínez Celaya
Seated Figure, 2002
Oil and tar on canvas
78 x 100 in.
©Enrique Martínez Celaya. Courtesy of the artist