THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST

BOOK TWO

THE HEART OF MARY

 When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.” And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me?” Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” They did not understand what he was saying to them. He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and he was subject to them, and his mother kept all these things in her heart....

CHAPTER I:

            “THE FIRST AND THE LAST”

THE STORY OF THE HOLY FAMILY

CHAPTER II:                                                                                                                                

                “THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA”

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE FORERUNNERS

During the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution in Paris, the Son of God inspired me to write this story. I set to work immediately. I left Paris, returned to the South, shut myself away among books, and set out to start at the beginning—that is, to discover the cause of that documentary void through which confusion found a way into the heart of the matter and gave birth to that mountain of books which, using the Hero of the Gospels as an excuse, brought to life fictional characters with no connection to the True Son of Mary: the Virgin of Nazareth.

The need to journey back to  the time of the Nativity led me to the British Museum Library.

With the arrival of the following spring, I stopped searching in books for what I could not find in them. I packed my bags and left for Jerusalem. I crossed Europe by the light of a bright star and traversed the sea on the waves of a Silver Dove. Holy Land!

… “land,” … cries the Colossus of Haifa from the lighthouse, “Welcome to the Holy Land”

I went down to Nazareth. I visited the Church of the Annunciation. After a brief stop in Tel Aviv, I continued on my way to the Holy City.

When I reached Jerusalem, the city was in a state of emergency. Iraq had just invaded Kuwait. The anti-Zionist rhetoric of Islam’s new hero—exploiting the Muslim world’s universal hatred of Jews by linking it to the cause of Arab fundamentalism—demanded, according to Israeli paramilitary newspapers, the use of nuclear weapons, especially the neutron bomb.

While Iraq sparked waves of cheers in the Palestinian territories, a walking advertisement dressed as a prophet wandered through the crowd on David Street, dragging an apocalyptic sign: “The end of the world is near; come have a beer. The Prophet Pub.”

It was a very enlightening trip. I climbed once more onto the wings of the Silver Dove and sailed across the waters of the Great Sea back to the Old Continent.

I set course for London. I settled in Finsbury Park, locked the door, turned on my old typewriter, and sat down, determined not to leave the studio until I had written the story I’d been striving for over the past few years.

It was a very long fall, but a very fruitful one. One day in November of that year, I reached my goal. The goal I had been chasing all those years was the Treasure that the Mother kept in her heart: “the Heart of Mary.”

How Mary met Joseph, who Zechariah and Elizabeth were, who Jesus’ famous brothers and sisters really were. Everything—absolutely everything—she knew everything about her Son. She had lived it all and kept it all in her Heart. And it remained just as it was.

What I saw in the Mother’s Heart is what you are about to read below.

 CHAPTER ONE

THE FIRST AND THE LAST

Genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham… son of David… son of Zerubbabel, son of Abiud, of Eliakim, of Azor, of Zadok, of Achim, of Eliud, of Eleazar, of Matthan, of Jacob…

MARY OF NAZARETH

The Virgin was born in Nazareth, in the very heart of Galilee. As everyone knows very well thanks to the Canonical Gospels, the Virgin’s father was Jacob, and her mother was Anna. Jacob of Nazareth, Mary’s father, died when Mary was still very young. One fine day, the Virgin’s father, the saint, departed for Heaven. And he did not return. This took place during the reign of Herod.

The deceased left behind an orphan, an orphaned son, and a widow. From a human perspective, Jacob, son of Matán, son of Solomon, son of King David, passed away at a bad time. Death, of course, never comes at a good time. In any case, for as bad as it was, Jacob of Nazareth passed away at the best possible moment.

Those great droughts that had ravaged the provinces of the Middle East for so many years had finally lifted; the famous “fat cows,” which for a moment seemed as though they would never return, were coming back, each one plumper than the last; they had returned and were parading their abundance through the fields of all the provinces of the Ancient Levant, when the Greeks and Romans…

The luminous horizon—longed for, prayed for, desired, and pleaded for, up and down the Temple in massive processions—had drawn near, of course, to the hills of Nazareth as well. Its radiance was already beginning to shine in the eyes of its inhabitants with the brilliance of the star of answered prayers, the light of a granted wish. Shepherds of Galilee, fishermen of the Sea of Miracles, farmers of the Jordan Valley, artisans of the land who had lived in the darkness of despair—all together they poured into the streets to celebrate the years of plenty. They had finally arrived!

The House of the Virgin shared in the general joy with the intensity of those who had suffered—as badly as the others, not as badly as some, nor much better than most of the people who truly suffered during those long years. There were so many of them!

It wasn't just that drought. There were also those earthquakes that ravaged the Middle East, spreading famine from the mountains of Lebanon to the shores of the Red Sea. And more. Yes. Much more. Those years of terrible despair were already dreadful enough, but the fiscal policy of Herod, the Butcher of Jerusalem, acted like an axe, cutting off every head that managed to stay afloat. Under the reign of Herod the Great, simply continuing to breathe became a crime. The right to speak was prohibited. The sacred quality that distinguishes humans from beasts was criminalized, and its exercise condemned: in the best of cases to exile, to capital punishment in all other cases. As many strongholds as Herod built, so many gallows were counted in the kingdom of Israel. Of all trades, prostitution is the oldest, but the only one that never went out of style during the days of Herod the Great was that of the executioner. How ironic—while the Day of Judgment may or may not have been approaching, the offspring of the Tyrant’s family were building palaces out of marble blocks! And fortresses worthy of an emperor, and military barracks and garrisons against a possible insurrection—the kind capable of bringing down even the very walls of Hell.

Not even the pharaohs!

Moses’ pharaoh was evil; the Herods were worse. And meanwhile, while the tyrant devoured a son or a brother, the people continued to endure physical and spiritual calamities—the kind that, once they’re over… you don’t even want to remember. Who would remember those lean years once two thousand years had passed? Yet the delusional madness of the Butcher of Jerusalem, the delusional madness of the Tyrant of Israel, would indeed be remembered by history: Herod the Great! That was the only thing missing for that murderer—to be granted license to kill at will. His children, his brothers, his wife, his friends, his enemies—whether they were innocent or not. Permission from Caesar himself to violate every law of Roman law.

Under the reign of that Herod, there came a time when merely moving one’s lips to ask for justice was enough to fall victim to the wheels of his murderous paranoia. The Romans—to be fair—made many mistakes; of all of them, Octavian Caesar Augustus’s decision to grant the Crown of the Jews to a Palestinian was a blunder that even the Judge of the Universe himself will find hard to forgive.

But let us return to the subject of the Life of the Virgin and her Family. Jacob of Nazareth, Mary’s father, had just died.

Precisely because Anna, the widow of Jacob of Nazareth, and her older daughters, Mary and Joanna, had already managed to almost forget the kind of battle that man—so dearly loved by them—had to wage against the elements of that endless summer, it is understandable that his loss, now that the light of hope had begun to bring forth the gold of abundance from the udders of the cows in the stable, would be infinitely more unbearable and painful for the widow, Anna, the Virgin’s mother, than the loss of her husband.

Anna and Jacob of Nazareth overcame all adversity with courage and faced hard times with the serenity of those who walk in God’s peace. Jacob of Nazareth and Anna, too, had dreamed of the days of plenty throughout the past few years, just like everyone else; and they laughed in the face of hard times by bringing six children into the world.

It so happened that, rather than allowing the hard times to drive even the slightest wedge between them, Jacob and his wife grew even closer—if that were possible—in the embrace of love that filled them with wonder at being together. They named their firstborn daughter after Jacob, the late husband; then came Juana. They were followed by twins, then another girl, and the stream of life was closed by the youngest child of the household, named Cleophas, a baby still nursing when his father died.

“Now that the sun shines again, my daughter, the Lord leaves me alone with my six children. Who will teach me to live without your father, María?” In this way, the Virgin’s mother poured out her bleeding heart. The girl gathered in her lap the tears of that mother whom she loved so dearly. Like any little girl who had gotten lost in a forest full of strangers, the Widow wept with a broken heart. In Mary’s heart, however, her father’s presence had simply fallen asleep.

Mary could still see, feel, smell, and hear her father, all smiles as he answered her and her sister Juana’s questions about the Lord of Moses, YAHWEH GOD.

Mary could still see him dealing with the reapers, the gardeners, and the herders of the village with the joy and strength of a man respected, esteemed, and considered honest from one end of the region to the other. Her father was the kind of man who looked people in the face, straight into their eyes, without guile. In the eyes of Jacob of Nazareth, one could read the sincerity that his words exuded.

When the lean years came, Mary’s father rose to the occasion. Since the land no longer yielded enough to pay extra wages, Jacob of Nazareth took it upon himself to ensure that his fields produced at least a few sacks of almonds, a few arrobas of olive oil, a few measures of wheat, and a few quintals of the estate’s famous wines. Anything at all, so long as his daughters’ bones remained healthy and strong. His two eldest daughters, María and Juana, knew just as well as their widow what kind of barren suns that man had to battle! Thank God, though they were still young, María and Juana pitched in—with the olives in winter, with the almonds, figs, and wheat in summer, and with the livestock in fall, summer, winter, and spring. What Mrs. Ana, the widow of Jacob of Nazareth, would give now to rise again at dawn and prepare milk, bread, and water for the father of her daughters!

Mary knew this all too well; seeing her father on his feet again at dawn, bidding farewell to his daughters with that smile so characteristic of him in his eyes—her mother would have given her own life for it. But nothing could be done now to turn back the wheel of time. Now she had to live, to choose between her dead husband and her living children.

Of the two girls, María and Juana, Juana was the younger, a year younger than María. María was the eldest, the head of the household. Such are the mysteries of life: it was Juana, the younger of the two, who was most drawn to the rhythm of the countryside; perhaps because Juana had inherited from her father a love for the scent of blossoming trees and the pleasure of gazing at the colors of the horizon at dawn.

Looking at them, both sisters, anyone would have thought that, judging by her build, it was María who should have enjoyed the wind in her hair most as evening fell; yet it was Juana, the younger one—whose frame was almost as small as her mother’s—whose soul her father had filled with a love for the red of the living earth. In María, the strength of life came from her mother. Her mother passed down to her all her skill in sewing and dressmaking. What mattered most to María was her family and her home.

So when hard times eventually came, and the cows all grew thin, and money became scarce, and the needs to be met began to multiply sixfold in barely two years, María proved to be a natural seamstress. At the age when one is said to be in the springtime of life, the eldest daughter of Jacob of Nazareth could just as easily mend a dress and make it look brand-new in the blink of an eye as she could knit her sisters a wool coat in a matter of days, all while never ceasing to be her mother’s right-hand woman. And a model daughter to her sister Juana. In her—as I said—an innate ability had emerged to learn from her father about the impact of lunar cycles on agriculture, why rabbits eat lettuce, how a real tomato actually grows, and why olive trees are pruned so they don’t cast shade on one another and compromise the flavor of the oil. In short, thousands of things.

The fact is that Juanita, besides being her father’s pride and joy, felt like her sister María’s other arm—one for her father and one for her mother, and the two of them together in joy—when the southerly winds raged, and the cold raindrops fell, and the droughts and winter storms in summer, and the summer heat in winter, and the rains that came and went in the blink of an eye, when the storm put men to the test, seeking to carry off to Paradise those who met it with a cheerful face—at that time, the two sisters drew closer than ever. Those hard years forced the two sisters to work hard. It was a duty they embraced in silence, written in blood, beating in time with their parents’ hearts. Each opened her soul to her own unique gifts and acted in accordance with the mystery of life within each person.

The older sister’s eyes—María’s vision—were made to find the needle in the haystack; they never failed to thread the needle, without even looking! Her sister Juana’s eyes needed the horizon, the countryside, the open sky. Instead of fighting, the sisters thanked their parents’ God for His eternal wisdom and infinite goodness. In the eyes of both of them, their father was a wonderful man.

“Why do we say that the Lord’s wisdom is eternal and his goodness infinite?” Jacob of Nazareth asked his two eldest daughters. “Because with his answers he amazes us, and with his goodness he lights up our faces,” their father replied to the two girls—the apple of his eye—with a smile in his eyes.

His daughters looked at each other, smiling at him. How much they loved the man God had given them as a father! Their father continued: “When we say that the Lord’s wisdom is eternal, we declare with all our hearts and with all our minds our joy in knowing that He does not lie. Daughters, when we worship Him for His infinite goodness, our joy is that of one who finds himself in the pit where the wicked cast the good, and upon lifting his face, sees the Lord laughing at the wisdom of the geniuses.”

“Daughters, being good is hard,” Jacob of Nazareth confessed to his daughters as they were milking the olive trees. “Doesn’t the one who is the kindest get a little gift? Are you jealous, Juanita, of your older sister because she’s better at sewing than you? When has my Juanita ever made her María feel guilty for not having her talents for farm work? When has Mother ever scolded her Juana for not knowing how to sew a dress as well as her María? What would I do without my Juana if she didn’t bring me lunch at noon—if she didn’t make me eat it, would I even eat it?”

Oh, how much he reminded them of him! Was it true that he was gone? They still couldn’t believe it. With their father’s lifeless body before their eyes, María and Juana looked at each other in silence. My God, had they really lost him?

Both sisters now embraced the Widow, their mother.

Devastated, the Widow of Jacob of Nazareth continued to weep over her misfortune:

“Now, Mary, now that the fat years are coming, now that your father could sit in his vineyard eating clusters as large as Polyphemus’s and as sweet as Bacchus’s—may God forgive me—just now. Why, Lord, why? Tell me how your servant offended you.”

God! Can one explain the connection between the rooks and the unfortunate day laborers upon whom the Fates cast their mantle of black omen? Can one understand that God is God while the Devil reigns? If only one could write the script of one’s own life and shine like a star—at least in the eyes of the fictional partners invented for the occasion! Man dreams that destiny is his own; the child dreams of the man whose heart beats within his chest—only to discover just around the corner that a single gust of wind is enough to reduce his dreams to bits doomed for the trash. In the end, human life is like a reed: if the wind picks up, it snaps, and its remains fall into the pit of oblivion. Who hasn’t succumbed to the temptation to let themselves die and end it all at once, once and for all? Or are we the strongest until proven otherwise?

For everyone, the moment of truth arrives. Every creature has its own. And in that moment, a person either stands their ground or crumbles. This was the moment of truth for the Virgin’s mother.

“What are we, Mary?” cried the Virgin’s mother, weeping over the loss of her husband. “We struggle against the elements with the strength of a creature of clay. We raise our idols in honor of the one who grants us victory. To the Most High we dedicate our glory. But does the Almighty never tire of seeing us reduced to the condition of beasts? The champion advances to claim his crown when Death crosses his path. Does the Almighty rise to save the lone runner from giving his all in the race? Why does He remain seated on His Almighty and Omniscient Throne while the remains are swept from the track by the wind? “Is that what we are, my daughter—dust that dreams of being a rock, a rock that dreams of being a mountain, a mountain that dreams of being an eagles’ nest? What will become of your eaglets now, my husband? Who will rise up and protect them when the serpent scales the cliff and their mother does not know how to defend your children on her own?”

What could one say to that woman? What madman would have dared to say to her what those ignorant visitors said to Job in the Bible?:

“Shut up already, you rotten old man. If you rot away, it’s because you’re worse than all the devils put together. You deceived us all with your handouts and your ramblings. Thank God the Lord has exposed your falsehood and your hypocrisy. For these, the God you tried to deceive—just as you did with us—is punishing you. Shut up and suffer.”

My, my, friends! They wanted to force poor Job to admit that misery stems from misery, that those who have keep what they have because they already had it, that no one is strong on a whim, but rather that a person’s happiness or misfortune determines their worth. According to these “wise men,” the poor are all depraved, corrupt, and vicious sinners who deserve what they suffer; the good are all happy, living in bliss, enjoying the good life—they have gold, they have power; they are the best, the chosen ones of providence, the race born to be happy, and they are happy because they are good, and

“The last laugh belongs to the Indestructible, the Invincible,” Job replied to them. “What are you laughing at, and why? What light have you come to bring to my eyes? Do you wish to condemn me for what I have done? You fools, I am being punished for what I have not done.”

Job’s tragedy did not lie in the collapse of the walls of his faith at the sound of Hell’s trumpets. That was not his problem. Job was a fortress built upon a rock—not just any rock, but his God. Bombproof, his faith remained intact. The problem that was tearing at Job’s soul was not knowing what was happening, or what was causing this change in his God’s disposition. Why had his God abandoned him, naked and left to fend for himself against an enemy armed to the teeth? The warrior follows his Hero and King onto the battlefield—and at a corner of the crossroads, his King turns his back on him, as if sacrificing a pawn on the altar of victory?

This dilemma—precisely this dilemma—was what had the soul of the Widow of Jacob of Nazareth in a stranglehold. Fighting against the darkness with the only divine weapon available to humans—the word—the Virgin’s mother sought the answer to why Death had taken her husband. And she could not find it.

“Why does our God do nothing, Mary? Why does He let the serpent scale the cliff, and why does He make it easier for her by taking away the father of her little ones? Doesn’t He see her approaching, my daughter? Why didn’t your father’s God reach for the bow and arrow and, with the lightning of His gaze, strike down the Beast? Did the arrow miss its mark, was it blown off course by the wind, and in seeking the dragon, did it kill the hero instead?

“Tell me, my daughter, for my soul is embittered and my eyes cannot fathom the hidden plans of the Omniscient—but what are we, María? Why is the understanding of a god demanded of a creature of clay, condemned to dust for having eaten an apple? Do not look at me with those eyes; do not reproach me for my heart bleeding words. What will flow from the wound of the Doe of the Dawn when, as morning breaks, the hunter pursues her at the hour of the first joys? Will not the arrow be cursed that pierces the breast of the dove who mounts the horse of the wind, trots through the heavens, and returns happily to her master’s house? Here it comes, my daughter; the dove is already reaching her master’s arm; the murderous dart is also cutting through the air. Her master has the power to catch her in flight, but look—he does nothing; he stands still as if that were the reward for having fulfilled his sacred mission, and already the daughter of Mercury falls into the dust at the feet of the one who turns his face away from her. “Don’t tell me to be quiet, María—can’t you see that if I don’t, I’ll die?”

All I know is that I know nothing; though they say that God created man and woman to love one another and never be parted, they also say that the Devil swore to make that love impossible. But in this world there are people who are deaf and don’t understand; they’re oblivious to everything. They laugh at the Devil’s horns and dare death to break what God has bound with ties stronger than the Serpent’s words.

Anna, Jacob’s widow, and Jacob of Nazareth, father of Mary, the future mother of Jesus Christ, lived out that challenge. Once they met, if they didn’t marry, they would die; and when they did marry, the idea of living without one another no longer entered their minds. Every year they spent together, they worshiped the God who transformed a rib—a simple rib—into something as beautiful as that love.

THE DEATH OF JACOB OF NAZARETH

Genealogy of the Savior: Genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham: Abraham begot... David; David to … Zerubbabel; Zerubbabel to Abiud, Abiud to Eliakim, Eliakim to Azor, Azor to Zadok, Zadok to Achim, Achim to Eliud, Eliud to Eleazar, Eleazar to Matthan, Matthan to Jacob, and Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

Jacob, son of Matán of Nazareth, died a few months after the birth of the son he and his wife Anna had dreamed of for so long—the one they had pursued relentlessly until they finally had him. We already know that the whole business of having a son—giving birth to a boy—is a cliché. But in those days of fiscal terror and droughts as long as the Sahara Desert, a man simply had to dream of having a son. To pass on to him all his knowledge of farm work, to lean on his young arms when his own, grown old, could no longer carry the load. Well, you always have your sons-in-law; but it’s not the same. It’s not the same to be seen as a burden as it is for the son born of your own flesh to carry you. Nor is it the same to leave everything your parents left you to your own son as it is to leave it to a stranger’s son. To anyone who thinks those men were old-fashioned, ignorant of life, who didn’t know that a woman can do what a man can do—or even better—the best thing one can offer these modern people is silence.

Turning a deaf ear to the wisdom of so many modern people—wisdom that has always faced the sun of the ages—Jacob of Nazareth and his wife ran after the boy, delighted to enjoy him in their own old-fashioned way. And they caught up with him—oh, how they caught up with him! They named him Cleophas because, upon seeing him for the first time in his mother’s arms, he reminded Jacob of his father-in- . As for his appearance, what can one say about their little boy—the most handsome boy in the world, of course.

Well, everyone was already feeling like they were in heaven at Mary’s house when suddenly his father was overcome by that dream under the fig tree. Mom and Dad were so happy! Five little girls, as bright as five suns, all healthy, all cheerful, all playing with the doll their parents had bought them. Flesh and blood. He cried, he really peed, he asked for butter, he pooped. What a joy. And suddenly, when they were all at home as if in paradise, Dad decided to die. A tragedy. What a pity! The devil himself attacking the house from all sides could not have hurt the mother of those six children so much. The widow’s grief was all the more profound because she had no one from her family by her side; in her despair, she already felt besieged by an invincible enemy demanding her immediate surrender or the total destruction of her home. If only she’d had her parents by her side, or her aunt Elizabeth. But no, no one. And who was she in Nazareth? Despite the passing years, Jacob’s wife remained a stranger—the outsider who had taken the town’s most eligible bachelor away from them.

“With how pretty they all were, she went and married a stranger—and a tiny one at that, who looks like a fool,” the young women of Nazareth consoled themselves. “So refined. So well-mannered. We’ll see what happens when she starts having children and has to run her father-in-law’s household all by herself—then we’ll see what becomes of her manners and her little Holy City princess face.” That’s just how small towns are—they don’t mean you any harm, but they don’t wish you any good either. Everyone who comes from outside has to answer to the neighbors about their intentions. Everything has to conform to the community’s norms; tradition rules.

Didn’t the Widow of Jacob of Nazareth know them all? Hadn’t they been watching her during the lean years, as if waiting for the hero to fall so they could revel in seeing those two towers bite the dust like any village bell tower? What comfort could the Widow find in those who were already doing the math and calculating how they might divide up the deceased’s estate? How much would they offer her for the vineyards? How much for the olive groves? How much for the dryland fields?

“Why do we kill the miracle of our daily existence by judging our neighbors, my daughter? Who knows how many days we have left in this world? Only the Lord knows; but the number never leaves His lips. Can you imagine if He caught you criticizing your neighbor to death, or casting the first stone? Wouldn’t it be more beautiful if our Lord God were to catch you sharing your bread with the poor?” the mother said to her daughter Mary as they sewed, alone together. And yet now it was the mother who was asking her daughter to be kind to her and not to deny her the words to express the pain in her soul.

“Let me die, Mary. Don’t worry that my soul might slip away in broken words. The Lord has taken my husband, leaving me alone with his six children. Why should my eyes hold back their tears and my heart envy the rock that serves as the heart of the Almighty?

“My daughter, it is easy from the snow-capped peaks to look down on the valley burning in the summer heat. When did the Almighty ever put Himself in the shoes of the soldier who falls naked on the battlefield, defending his life for the honor of his soul—made of tender, damp clay? How easy it is to sit on the throne of judgment and sign sentences! The Lord is far removed from human weakness; our passions do not affect Him. If it is cold, He does not shiver; if it is hot, He does not sweat; if an arrow is shot at Him, it does not strike Him; if He sleeps, nothing disturbs Him. What does the Indestructible One know of the fragility of our existence? Do you not see, my daughter, that the valley is saturated with our tears?

“Why should I suppress my grief and bind my tongue in fear? Does not the warrior run to meet death? Let God kill me, let Him restore my husband’s life—why does He do nothing, why does He stand watch on the other side of the precipice? On what grounds, my daughter, does the Eternal One base His silence and His impassive demeanor? If only He would rise like the sun and speak with the voice of the storm, and from the depths of His soul the rays of His wisdom would weave clouds pregnant with intelligence across the firmament. But no, my daughter, let the storm rage, let the earth tremble, let the mountains crumble and bury towns and villages, or let the sea run wild and sink islands along with their people—the Lord, unreachable, indestructible, does not bat an eyelid. Does He see the disaster, and all He offers is a mourning handkerchief, asking forgiveness for not having anticipated the Serpent’s move?

“Tell me, my daughter, that it was not He who shot the arrow that killed the eagle and left the nest of her eaglets at the mercy of the devil. But do not deny me the right to lament the fate of my daughters over the corpse of my deceased husband.”

Pierced by her mother’s grief, Mary comforted the Widow in this way:

“We are all equal in His eyes, mother. We are unique only in the eyes of our parents. We mortals see only as far as our eyes can reach, but He bears the weight of us all upon His shoulders. In His own time, He will rise, mother. And His feet will shine with the radiance of the hero arrayed for war against the one who took away our mother Eve’s husband. I know I am young, Mother, but believe me, for all the love I have for you: my father’s God will not allow my mother’s household to collapse. It’s all right now, Mother; dry your tears. Death takes the best of us, thinking that by leaving the wicked behind, He leaves us little ones unprotected against tyrants. He does not realize that when the good depart, they go to Heaven to take up the angels’ weapons. Father defended us as a man and raised us up. My father will now defend his daughters and his little boy with the sword of the cherubim. My mother, enough already—do not look upon his body any longer.”

The widow listened to her eldest daughter’s words as if receiving kisses from afar.

It was Mary and her sister Joanna who found their father sitting against the trunk of that fig tree. Truth be told, it wasn’t exactly harvest time; but Jacob of Nazareth liked to pick the first figs of the season; he said they were the best for making fig bread.

Jacob saddled his donkey. He set off alone for the fields in the cool of the morning. The fig grove lay on the other side of the hills, as seen from the hill of Nazareth, directly ahead. Delighted with life, that good man said goodbye to his wife. His two eldest daughters would bring him lunch and help him gather the baskets. Until then, well, that was it—a kiss, goodbyes.

Seeing him leave in such a beautiful way, who could have guessed that this man would return home… dead?

At lunchtime, María and her sister Juana arrived in the fields. María was a year older than Juana, and both were young women in their prime. María and Juana looked for their father and found him sitting in the shade of that fig tree.

“Shall we let him sleep a little longer, Juana? Let’s gather the baskets ourselves,” said María.

The two sisters set to work. They finished gathering the baskets, and their father hadn’t woken up. But he just wouldn’t wake up.

“Dad’s sleeping a lot today, isn’t he, María?” said Juana.

They kept working hard. After a while, they began to look at each other with concern.

“Is something wrong with Dad, Juana?” And so the older of the two went over to see what was wrong with her father.

I’m not going to get all sentimental here, like someone trying to win over the reader by making them cry their eyes out. Most of us have gone through the process of a funeral at one time or another and know how much it hurts to lose what Death should never have taken. But it was she—María—who, as she knelt down to wake him, discovered the truth in the pallor of her father’s face.

The girl didn’t scream; she wasn’t frightened. She cradled her father’s head in her arms, rocked his body, kissed his forehead, and looked at her sister Juana, who was approaching, tears streaming down her face. Juana threw her arms around her sister María, and María let her hold her until Juana had cried herself out, and together they were able to gather their strength.

“Go home, Juana, and tell Mom what’s happened,” María asked her sister.

Juana climbed onto the donkey and, weeping with a heavy heart, rode off through the hills. Meanwhile, María remained alone with her father’s body, beneath that fig tree, caressing the face of the man who, to her, was the most wonderful man in the world—a man who had left her without giving his wife and daughters a chance to tell him one last time how much they loved him.

“What will become of your little one now, Father? In whose eyes will he find the divine image of the man that we, your daughters, have discovered in you?” the young Mary whispered, speaking to Heaven.

As I said, a cruel and sadistic enemy razing the house would not have hurt the Widow of Jacob of Nazareth as much as the way Death chose to take her husband from her. If her husband had died defending his family in some war, or sacrificing his life to save his daughters—I don’t know—but to die that way, without warning, just when they had found happiness, after having endured a decade of years as cruel as Herod’s heart.

Why should I even tell you about the liters of tears the Widow shed throughout that entire day and all that night? Hasn’t a daughter in the bloom of youth ever died for you, or a sister in the prime of her beauty? Hasn’t Death ever snatched the apple of your eye away, leaving you in the most stormy darkness? You must have been laughing heartily, clapping your hands, your heart open to all hope, and suddenly, overnight, an hour before dawn, the dawn turns into a moonless night, the plain transforms into a bottomless pit, and as you look down, you discover the face of the Serpent welcoming you.

The thing is, Jacob and Ana had loved each other from the very day their eyes met. It was love at first sight. It was the moment their eyes met and they knew the search was over.

Jacob and Ana were born for each other; they were made for each other; they were the two halves of the same fruit. It was only natural that he should die as deeply in love with his wife as he had been on the first day, and that the Widow should lose him while being more in love with her husband than ever. And if you add to this grief the fact that the household was left without a man to tend the fields and the livestock—you’ve already read the magic formula behind the bitter tears that the Widow shed into her daughter María’s heart during the two days following her father’s burial.

MARÍA’S VOW

Like lifelong Catholics, those Jewish women were very dramatic in their mourning for the death of a loved one. I’m not saying it’s good or bad—it was simply the way it was. The Romans, on the other hand, used the funeral as an excuse for a banquet—the final banquet, the last supper of the Caesars. Cicero’s farewell banquet, depicted in the frescoes of the deceased’s mansion in Pompeii, shows his family and friends drinking to the dead man’s health. The orator’s wreath above their heads resembles a laurel wreath but is woven from vine branches. Good heavens, the Romans had such hard hearts that not even Death could wring a tear from them. They needed to be touched by Bacchus’s staff to remember that they were men, just as much of flesh and blood as the other barbarians of the world. Not until they were drunk as skunks would they shed a tear.

The Hebrews, unlike most peoples, preferred to mourn the dead with their heads uncovered, chests puffed out. Distance, separation, and absence require time to come to terms with them. I suppose custom shapes a culture, and every culture experiences it in its own way. The Hebrews, of all possible ways, chose the most painful one: they did not bury the deceased until the third day after his death.

Tears were bound to flow! And if, on top of that, the case at hand happened to be that of a young man in the prime of life—married and as deeply in love with his widow as on the first day, father of six children, a man who had never been sick, a man who never seemed to tire, who died without anyone to tend his fields, who passed away just as the storm was subsiding— put all these elements in the same shaker, give it a good shake, and the result will be explosive. You’ll soon discover the explosion triggered by the death of Jacob of Nazareth; its consequences still linger.

There was the Widow herself. From a young age, the Virgin’s mother had been quite a sulker. The day her father, Cleophas of Jerusalem, forbade her even from entertaining the idea of marrying the man who would be the father of her daughters, as certain as rain falling from the sky, the young bride ran off in search of her aunt Elizabeth, through the streets of Jerusalem, leaving a trail of broken tears in her wake.

Aunt Elizabeth, wife of Zechariah, the future father of John the Baptist, already knew her. After all, Anna was her niece. Aunt Elizabeth, looking her niece in the eyes as she dried the tears streaming down her flushed cheeks, smiled.

“Come on now, little one, are you going to tell me what’s wrong? When you run off like this, you forget that I don’t know anything. Shall we cry together, or shall I laugh at you until you laugh with me?” Aunt Isabel loved her niece Anna with divine tenderness.

That woman, Aunt Isabel, loved her niece more than the walls of Jerusalem, more than the clouds in the spring sky, more than the morning and evening stars combined; she loved her more than her dresses and more than her silverware, but every time her Anita threw herself at her like that, she didn’t know whether to join in her pouting or burst out laughing at her tears. It wasn’t as if her niece Ana were flooding the desert with streams of salt water at every changing of the guard. The truth was that when she flew into a rage like that—to the point where she couldn’t even get a word out—and you had to give her time to calm down, it meant something really serious had happened to her Anita.

The death of the father of your girls—only two of them teenagers, the others just kids, and a baby causing a ruckus—is, truth be told, a good reason to cry until your bones run dry.

That’s what happened: the Widow, the Virgin’s mother, sank into the deepest depths of despair—understandable under the circumstances. For a time, she remains speechless. She says nothing, only weeps as she holds that infant who would never know his father. With Cleopas in her arms, the Widow of Jacob of Nazareth weeps all day and all night.

In despair, she finds herself surrounded by dense, fatal darkness; crushed, she already imagines her late husband’s house swallowed up by taxes; broken, shattered, she already sees herself selling her daughters to save them from ruin.

They were all daughters of David; in times when simply being Jewish was not enough—one had to prove it—having a daughter of David as a wife was a passport to the benefits that Caesar had granted the Jews in gratitude for having saved his life from the last of the pharaohs.

Here’s the story.

While pursuing Pompey, Julius Caesar got himself into trouble. Caesar was seen running like a madman after Pompey. And lo and behold, Caesar ended up in Egypt. At that time, the Pharaoh’s brother had just killed Pompey. This very same pharaoh, who had just executed Pompey, came and got a little feisty with Caesar. I believe Cleopatra’s brother even dared to declare war on the Conqueror of Gaul.

As is well known, against all hope, that little pharaoh was on the verge of sending Caesar to the Elysian Fields of famous Roman generals. It was then that Herod’s father managed to gather thousands of horsemen, cross the Sinai Desert at a gallop, and charge at Cleopatra’s brother, breaking through the siege and rescuing Caesar from danger. As a reward, Julius Caesar granted the Jews a number of imperial privileges, such as exemption from military service, freedom of movement for the Temple tithe, and so on.

The sine qua non condition for benefiting from such privileges was to be a citizen of Judea, a Roman province.

Clever as foxes, slippery as eels, the Jews found many ways to forge documents. Of all the imaginable ways to outwit the Empire, the easiest was to buy fake documents, which any of the bureaucrats working at the Jerusalem Temple Registry would provide for a handful of drachmas.

But there was another, cheaper way.

What better way to join the ranks of the privileged than to claim descent from King David? And to really seal the deal, throw in being born in Bethlehem of Judea, “please.”

And there was yet another, even better and more pleasing option: of course, buying a daughter of King David as a wife,

The descendants of King David were in high demand for this reason; if one paid well for a daughter of David, how much would one pay for a genuine daughter of King Solomon? And not just any daughter, not merely one in name only—we’re talking about the genuine and authentic descendant of the mythical King Solomon.

Something so commonplace back then—selling daughters to the highest bidder—made the Widow of Jacob of Nazareth feel as though women were being compared to livestock. By Joshua and the seven hundred trumpets that brought down the walls of Jericho, would she sell her daughters for money? She who had married for love and knew how sweet marriage is when it is based on love and love alone?

The very thought tore at her soul.

However, the Widow could not see how she could save her daughters from being treated like the beasts that are bought and sold in the marketplace of human passions. The more she thought about it—and the corpse of her late husband never ceased to remind her of it—the more bitter her tears became at the future that awaited her little girls. There was also the boy.

“And what will become of my Cleophas without your father, Mary? What will become of your father’s house, my daughter?” The widow of Jacob of Nazareth poured out her sorrows into the heart of her daughter Mary.

Between mother and daughter—what can I say?—the daughter seemed like the mother. Mary embraced her mother and comforted her with words full of tenderness and wisdom. And yet the girl was in the prime of her youth.

Mary was a young woman who had known nothing but joy in this world. She had loved her father madly, and seeing her comfort her sisters and her own mother, anyone would have thought she still couldn’t believe what was happening.

“Dad’s sleeping, Juana,” was the first thing that came from María’s heart when they found him dead.

“Dad is in Paradise; he’s waiting for all of us there. Esther is already there; come here, Ruth; calm down, Naomi,” she told her younger sisters as she held back her tears.

The girl left her sisters with Juana and went with the widow:

“It’s all right now, Mother; Father is in Heaven. His God won’t let his daughters be sold into slavery,” she whispered in her mother’s ear, kissing away her tears.

“My daughter,” the Widow tried to say. But she never finished the sentence; she broke down in sobs and returned to her darkness—the darkness that enveloped her home and painted her family’s horizon with the somber colors of a macabre vision.

The result of the natural despair of the widow of Jacob of Nazareth was as follows.

The Widow’s grim vision of her daughters’ future matched the reality of everyday life. The death of the head of the household forced widows to give their daughters to the suitor who put the most money on the table, regardless of the buyer’s age. That was the truth, and there was no need to dwell on the matter further. From the perspective of the wealthy man, the more widows there were, the better—that way, there would be more fresh, young “stock” to choose from.

The world was shaped in the image and likeness of the passions of the powerful, and anything said to the contrary will get us nowhere. To make matters worse, with the divorce laws that had recently been enacted, female flesh was bought to be used and discarded; it was consumed at the consumer’s leisure, and then the remains were thrown away so that the next in line could gnaw on the bones. And woe to anyone who failed to follow suit! In the upper classes, having only one wife was an unmistakable sign of conspiracy against Herod.

“Has that man been married only once? And isn’t he known to have had at least a second or third wife? Surely he is conspiring against His Majesty, Your Highness.” For such absurd reasons, the heads of Jews rolled through the streets of Jerusalem in those days.

This wasn’t something the Widow was making up. She was from Jerusalem, from the upper class; she knew this reality as intimately as she knew that her husband lay dead before her daughters.

“It’s over now, don’t cry anymore, it’s not that big a deal, everything will work out, the Lord wouldn’t let that happen.” Very beautiful words, for which the Widow was grateful. She only knew that barely a day ago she had woken up with the joy of the happiest woman in the world, and not even two days had passed—and now she was… the Widow!

“Let me cry, my daughter. Can’t you see that if I don’t, I’ll die?” the Widow pleaded inconsolably with her daughter Mary.

Taking advantage of a moment of calm, while Juana and María were alone with their mother, María, daughter of Jacob of Nazareth, spoke up.

Heaven is my witness to what I am about to say, and may it send me to the dreadful Hell if I make up a single word. On the night of that day, during the wake for her father’s death, the eldest daughter of the Widow of Jacob of Nazareth bound her life to a tree that had the power to hang her if she failed to fulfill the Vow she had inscribed in the hearts of her mother and her sister Juana.

Mary could have remained silent; it was within her power to put her finger to her lips and avoid the ordeal. But it was not in the nature of Jacob’s daughter to resist the impulses of her personality. She preferred to accept the consequences to the fullest extent of the law.

No one was listening to them; the three of them were alone before God. That is why I have told you that whoever wants to be certain of what I write—there is God Himself, who took the word of the daughter of Jacob of Nazareth to confirm or refute me. That God should appear as Judge is natural; that He should come forward as Witness is something extraordinary. Yet the glory belongs to the brave.

And I continue.

There, in front of her sister Juana, Mary swore to her mother that this—having her daughters sold into slavery to the highest bidder—would never happen to her sisters; sooner would the Devil dethrone the Most High, Hell conquer Paradise, or Herod’s heart be raised to the altars.

The faith of the daughter of Jacob of Nazareth was so great, her trust in her father’s God so innocent, that she could not fathom in her heart that her Lord would abandon her family to the mercy of the Age.

So, very calmly, with the seriousness of an adult, she, María De Salomón, daughter of Jacob of Nazareth, called upon the God of her father as her witness and, in the presence of her mother and her sister Juana, swore—invoking the Law of Moses against her own head should she break her vow—that she, María De Salomón, would not remove the veil of mourning for her father’s death until she saw all her sisters married, and that she would not sign her own marriage contract until she saw her little brother Cleophas married and with children.

Moreover, she would not marry until she saw her little brother Cleophas’s children running about, all happy and content in that very room where grief now reigned triumphant. Until that day, she would not remove the mourning veil she wore for her father.

The Widow raised her head toward the infinite. Juana looked at her sister with tears of eternity in her eyes. María De Salomón continued:

“In memory of my father, I swear to you, Mother, that my sisters will know no husband. When they leave my father’s house, they will go forth joyfully in the arms of that love their parents lived and from which we, their daughters, drank our fill. No one will buy the daughters of Jacob. Take comfort, my mother. That child you hold in your arms will choose the fairest among the daughters of Eve. May the Lord do this to me if I break my word: may He give me the wickedest man in the world as my husband. Do not let your heart be torn apart any longer, Mother; do not offend Heaven by blaming our Lord for our misfortune, lest my father have to bow his head before Abraham because of the offense carried by these tears that never end. My father walks among the angels and, at the feet of his God, asks for mercy for his household. Tell him so yourself, Juana.”  

AUNT ISABEL IN NAZARETH

The news of Jacob of Nazareth’s death struck the home of his in-laws and other relatives in Jerusalem with the force of a cyclone without an eye, blindly devastating houses and crops. Cleophas and his wife, Mary’s maternal grandparents, wanted to rush up to Nazareth.

Prudence advised Zechariah and his family to keep their distance, to go up to Nazareth later, to leave it for a better time, lest going all together arouse suspicion at King Herod’s court. Any one of the king’s spies might find it strange that a figure of the stature of Abijah’s son would take an interest in the fate of a simple peasant from Galilee. And drawing the tyrant’s attention to the home of Solomon’s daughter was the last thing Zechariah could afford.

“You do as you please, man of God,” with these words Elizabeth ended the discussion with her husband about whether or not it was advisable to leave Jerusalem at that very moment. “You do as you please,” Elizabeth repeated, “but this daughter of Aaron is running out right now to embrace the child of her soul.”

Elizabeth, wife of Zechariah, future mother of John the Baptist, older sister of Anna’s mother, and consequently the Widow’s maternal aunt, was—by these coincidences of life—the Virgin’s great-aunt.

Like her husband Zechariah, Elizabeth belonged to the Aaronic priestly class, from whose ranks the members of the Sanhedrin were chosen. By this I mean nothing other than that the upbringing of the future mother of the Baptist did not conform to the upbringing typically received by other Hebrew women. And if we add to this the fact that Elizabeth was predestined from her mother’s womb to be the wife of the Baptist’s father, I believe that from this vantage point of Providence, the doors of time open to anyone who dares to step through them.

For it is true: Elizabeth of Jerusalem, the Virgin’s great-aunt, was the older sister of the mother of the widow of Jacob of Nazareth.

And so it was; Elizabeth hurried off to Nazareth accompanied by Cleophas and his wife, the parents of Anna, Mary’s mother.

Cleophas, the widow’s father, was therefore Elizabeth’s brother-in-law.

Cleophas married Elizabeth’s younger sister, and they had Anna—his niece Anna, his morning star, the light of Elizabeth’s eyes, who had wept so bitterly over her inability to have children.

By the time Elizabeth, Cleophas, and his wife arrived in Nazareth, the Virgin’s father was already lying in his grave. The people of Nazareth, for their part, had returned to their everyday lives.

The arrival of her parents and her aunt Elizabeth reawakened in the Widow’s eyes that river of tears that now lay dormant as if dead, and which, exceptionally, would well up again when visitors stopped by to comfort her. She did not know how, could not, and did not want to live without her husband.

For the widow of Jacob of Nazareth, her aunt Elizabeth was the kind of person every child misses in their parents. Parents are honored, but it is to that other person that one confides everything. It was therefore only natural that it was to Aunt Elizabeth that the widow would reveal what had happened.

As always, after the little gatherings.

El Cigüeñal, the House of Abiud—son of Zerubbabel, son of Salathiel, son of Solomon, king and biblical forefather of the Virgin’s family—was a country estate from the days of the Persian empire. Except for the granaries, the entire building was made of hewn stone.

Where the Annunciation bunker stands today, there once stood a mansion—half farmhouse, half fortress.

The main hall of El Cigüeñal in Nazareth had walls adorned with the oldest and most impressive coats of arms. There were coats of arms from every period dating from the Empire of Nebuchadnezzar II to that of Caesar I. Also, against one of the walls of the main hall of the Cigüeñal, the masons of that time had built a fireplace as large as a cave. Tita Isabel and her niece Ana were sitting by the fire in that fireplace. Cleophas and his wife had taken their grandchildren to bed.

The Widow then got things going. If the walls could talk, they’d say that in no time at all, the Widow had made enough stews to feed half of Africa.

Tita Isabel always found a way to stem those torrents of tears; after all, she was her little girl. Well, she was her younger sister’s daughter, but she was like the daughter she never had. Isabel loved her niece Ana more than if she had been her own daughter. That’s just a figure of speech. But that business of bursting into tears, falling into an eternal silence, then bursting into tears again—that wasn’t normal.

“What’s wrong, Anita?” Isabel asked, concerned. “Why did you wait until your parents left to break down like this? We’re alone now. Come on, tell me.” Isabel was trying to figure out what was wrong with her niece.

The Widow parted her lips. She parted them, yes, but she never managed to string together a coherent sentence.

“My María… Tita…”

“What’s wrong with your María, Anita?”

“Tita… I… my María…”

The Widow never finished her sentence. Given what a temper Zacarías’s wife had, it was remarkable that she had such infinite patience with her niece Ana.

“When you’ve calmed down, you can tell me, daughter.”

This happened quite a while later.

The stuffed bear occupying the corner of the main hall at El Cigüeñal—had it been alive—would have been at its wits’ end by now. Above the fireplace, a lion’s head from Assyria yawned expectantly.

Isabel continues to stare into the fire as the Widow finally finishes the story about her eldest daughter’s vow.

“Tell me that again, Anita,” asks Isabel, absorbed and amazed.

“See, Tita? I knew you wouldn’t believe it,” and the Widow launches into the story again.

At dawn, the Baptist’s mother is finally up to speed on the event that would change the course of world history.

“Yes, Tita, my María won’t take off the mourning veil she wears for her father until she sees my little one, just a few months old, married—and well married at that. What have I done, my God? And you know what my María is like; if she were a man, her word would be the last thing she’d ever break.”

How well the Widow knew her eldest daughter!

THE HOUSE OF JOSEPH THE CARPENTER

Let us now delve a little into the story of Joseph, the future husband of the Mother of Jesus.

The carpenters’ clan in Bethlehem experienced a major economic boom following Joseph’s birth. This is not the place to go into intimate details about the lives of Joseph the Carpenter’s parents. In due time, we will lift the veil and see face to face the truth of that intimacy, which for now—and until then—I will leave hanging in the air. The reason for this will become clear later. To move past this point, let’s just say that delving too deeply into the lives of Joseph the Carpenter’s parents would disrupt the flow of this story. So let’s move on.

Heli, Joseph’s father, brought many children into the world—both daughters and sons. The man was in the prime of his joy when one day his strength also failed him, and he died. Heli died as all things die—from exhaustion. Especially in those days, the cause of men’s deaths was work. They died from overwork. There were taxes, tithes, and interest payments. Workers barely made it to forty in good health; by fifty they were half-dead. By sixty they were already dead. Only the rich and the tyrants made it to seventy in good health. Anyone who reached eighty was either a saint or a monster. Helí, the father of Joseph, was neither one nor the other. Just another hard worker selling his life dearly against planks and nails. So when he died, Heaven took another of the good ones into its glory.

As we can see, Death was hot on the heels of her enemies. With no one left to wield a sword against them, Death herself struck directly at the two messianic houses. Invisible and silent, she struck with the only weapon at her disposal: the scissors of the Fates. Blind, Death wrote dark pages in the histories of her enemies’ families. Yet from the light of the One who governs the destiny of the universe, God allowed the Serpent to move as it pleased.

But let us set aside these chronicles of Hell and its defeat. Let us set our feet back on solid ground. There is always time to remember ruins and miseries.

After the death of Helí, son of Matat of Bethlehem, the Right of Primogeniture made Joseph a father figure to his brothers and sisters. This right did not entail the duty to remain unmarried until the last member of his household had started a family of his or her own. In fact, his marriage to Solomon’s Daughter—Mary was his betrothed at the time—drew nearer with each passing year. Joseph must have been about twenty years old when his father went to the Paradise of the Righteous. Mary must have been a few years younger.

It was around that time that Mary’s father died. And that was how the two men who had sworn to marry their children off suddenly vanished from the scene. All their lives they had dreamed of seeing them married, and overnight, a twist of fate robbed them of that dream.

What would become, from that point on, of the future of that vow made by Jacob of Nazareth and Heli of Bethlehem before Zechariah, son of Abijah, the priest, husband of Elizabeth, the Widow’s aunt, and Mary’s great-aunt?

With both of them gone—those who had pledged to unite Joseph and Mary in marriage when God so ordained—Mary and Joseph were free to move forward and decide for themselves whether or not to uphold their parents’ vow. What would they do? How could they compel Joseph to remain unmarried until the last of the children of Jacob of Nazareth were married?

“My son, be wise before God and His servants. No reward fulfills the human condition more fully than aligning our steps with His wisdom. We are nothing, we are nobody, when it comes to weighing the decision between pleasing ourselves or pleasing our Lord God. Place your complete trust in His Omniscience; place your faith in His almighty arm, which never misses its mark nor strikes the wrong stone. You know His will; do not turn your back on Him. I am leaving, but He remains and stays with you. He will guide you toward the victory of our Houses. His angel will write in His Book: “God said, and it was done.” Joseph was raised on counsel of this nature.  

LADY ISABEL

After the death of Jacob of Nazareth, Mary’s father, the Widow pulled herself together. Supported by Aunt Elizabeth, the House of the Virgin of Nazareth weathered the dark storm that the Widow had envisioned in her grief during her husband’s funeral.

Mrs. Isabel, a member of Jerusalem’s aristocracy and an expert in business and Jewish law, took charge of everything, moved heaven and earth, and did not leave Nazareth until everything was so firmly reestablished that it was as if Jacob had never left.

Clever as they come, and with sufficient financial resources to thwart Jacob’s brothers—who might have offered to buy the land from the Widow—Aunt Isabel preserved every last acre for Solomon’s daughter, her grandniece.

Thanks to Aunt Isabel, the Widow didn’t sell a single fig tree. Aunt Isabel was there to hire workers when harvest time came, to sign contracts, to pay the workers, to collect the proceeds from the sales, and most importantly, to take her niece Juana under her wing and teach her the ABCs of business from A to Z.

And so it came to pass that Juana, who was next in line after María, accompanied her older sister to the Vow. But Juana, unlike María—who was a talented seamstress—inherited her late father’s strong character; she never tires of learning from her Aunt Isabel how to handle men or of making her way in the world of contracts; nor does she tire of working in the fields, leading the day laborers who work for her household. Many bet that as soon as Mrs. Isabel left, the girl would fall apart and sooner or later the Widow would have to sell.

“My child, don’t pay them any mind,” Aunt Isabel advised her grandniece Juana. “Men look at us as if Wisdom were not our sister. Because they take her as their wife, they believe that Wisdom has turned her back on us. You, don’t pay them any mind, Juanita. And if the sun beats down and the harvest is poor, I’ll buy the whole crop from you at the price of a harvest of gold. This is very simple, my daughter. Always keep your word; if you agreed to pay more for something that later turned out to be worth less, keep your word—you said you’d pay that much, so that’s what you pay. The same goes when they make a mistake with you. You agreed to a certain amount, so that’s what you collect…”

Over time, the youngest of the Virgins of Nazareth learned to speak with the men she hired herself as if she were an adult.

Never were the lands of the clan of the sons of David of Nazareth as fruitful as in those years following the great droughts.

Nor had the young gentlemen of El Cigüeñal, the grand house on the hill, ever been better dressed.

Lady Isabel, like every daughter of Aaron, was a master in the art of weaving seamless cloaks. It was the cloak worn by the members of the Sanhedrin. As the wife of a prominent member of the Sanhedrin, Isabel could assure her grandniece Mary that her sewing workshop would be the most profitable in the entire kingdom.

“But Tita,” María said, “I can’t leave my mother’s house.”

“My dear, don’t even mention it,” replied Aunt Isabel.

The fact that, even though she was a great-aunt, they called her “Tita” was due to Isabel’s own sense of humor. Being called “Grandma” made her feel old.

And so, between her grandnieces Juana and María, time slipped away for Mrs. Isabel. While she taught her Juanita all the secrets of business and, in her name, hired a foreman to help her with everything—and drummed into her head that from Jerusalem she would follow her every move day by day, and by God she would go to heaven before letting another misfortune befall her granddaughters— while she put her grandniece Juana in charge of the fields, she seated her “granddaughter” María by her side and did not let her leave her side until her grandniece had learned, from the hands of an expert in sacred crafts, the most hidden secrets of cutting and sewing a seamless dress. La Niña, who was an artist in her own right—having learned the craft from her own mother—had not only inherited one of the mysteries most jealously guarded by the daughters of Aaron when she bid farewell to “Grandma,” but she also opened her own sewing workshop in Nazareth.

From the Virgin of Nazareth’s dressmaking workshop, some of the seamless robes—the pride of the princely class of the Holy City—were sent to Jerusalem. These robes were paid for in hard cash. One could own only one, and it was for life.

“But Tita, where will I get the money for the silks and the gold threads?” she once asked her.

“Don’t get all worked up over nothing, my daughter,” Señora Isabel replied. “When I place the order, I’ll send you silks so you can dress all your sisters, and a sack of threads so you can make your brother a braid of silver hair. If the Lord hasn’t given me children, it must be for a reason. What do men think? For Nathan’s son, everything.” “My daughter, they’ve given your José an Iberian colt that even a Roman general would want for himself. With him—with your José—they let their guard down, and your Betrothed already looks like a prince among beggars. Who’s going to stop me from giving Solomon’s daughter the moon and the stars, wrapped in silk and tied with gold thread?”

And so it was. Indeed, the way the daughters of Jacob of Nazareth came to be dressed was a source of admiration for all the members of David’s clan in Galilee. When it came time to marry them off—as you can imagine—the dowry the Widow demanded for Esther and Ruth, the twins, was considerable.

“Dowry? Who here has mentioned money? Do you love him, my daughter?” was the Widow’s reply to her daughters’ suitors.

They were wrong—and how wrong they were. Buy a daughter from the Widow?

Impossible.

The best catch in the whole region?

None.

The fields of Jacob’s Daughter yielded a hundred percent. From the workshop of the Virgin of Nazareth came the finest, prettiest, and cheapest dresses in the region. And the youngest son of the house? Cleophas, the baby of the family! All he needed was a crown to put Herod’s sons on par with common thieves. So, whoever wanted to marry one of her daughters had better not come to Jacob’s Widow talking about money. It was their heart they had to lay on the table—wide open, open like a full moon, bare as the sun on a forty-day-old May day. And then let Heaven decide.

MRS. MARÍA

Upon the death of her grandparents, Cleophas and his wife, María De Salomón inherited her mother’s house in the Holy City. We are speaking of the home of the heiress to a Doctor of the Law whose mentor in his bureaucratic career was the head of the most powerful faction in the nascent court of King Herod. We are speaking of a fine house.

We are speaking of a Lady, Lady Mary of Nazareth, daughter of Anna, daughter of Cleophas, brother-in-law of Zechariah, son of Abijah—Abtalion according to official historiography. We are speaking of a Mary… a legitimate member of the Jewish priestly aristocracy on her mother’s side. (In this first part of the story, we will not delve into the life of the household of Cleophas, father of the Virgin’s mother. In the second part, we will delve deeper, seek permission, and see with the eyes of the spirit what I mean when I say that Cleophas, father of the Widow, belonged to the Jewish aristocratic group that, though not Herodian, was the most influential at the court of King Herod. For now, let it suffice to place our trust in building, upon the rock of our Faith, the pillars upon which the edifice of this story rests.)

Without going any further, we see the “Lord” Jesus in the prologue to the Last Supper sending one of his disciples to announce his coming to one of his servants. The man does not protest; and he does not protest because he knows the messenger—he knows who the “Lord” is who is urging him to have everything ready for the “Supper.”

The legend of Jesus the Carpenter—let’s be frank—had its origins in the mindset of small towns. A father’s local title passes to his son. The father was a carpenter; the son is “the Carpenter” for life, even if he comes to own more land than a marquis; his father was the carpenter, and his son will be the carpenter’s son until the day he dies.

It’s true—let’s keep laying it all out—Joseph arrived in Nazareth following the nomads’ route. The man settled in the village, rented a plot of land from the Widow to set up shop. He set up his workshop. Joseph ended up liking the atmosphere—or so he said to outsiders—and eventually fell in love with the Widow’s heiress. By that time, the Virgin owned fig groves, vineyards, olive groves, fertile land, livestock, and was also the owner of a dressmaking and sewing workshop that was booming thanks to the nationalist wave.

Until then, traditional costumes had to be commissioned from a workshop in Judea. Jewish women, especially those from Jerusalem, had jealously guarded the secret “ ” of making bridal gowns and dresses for national holidays. Then the Virgin of Nazareth went and opened her own dressmaking and sewing workshop.

Amid such circumstances, the Virgin of Nazareth’s workshop, to tell the truth, took off right away. Thanks to the family ties her relatives maintained throughout Galilee, the necessary publicity—without her having to wait for things to happen—spread like wildfire. You just had to look at how her sisters dressed. Then there was the price; the Virgin of Nazareth was a saint; if you didn’t have money, you could pay her when things started looking up. She’d adjust the price to fit your situation and never send a debt collector after you to demand payment. A true saint. Of course, when her wedding to the Carpenter was announced, everyone was left speechless.

The Virgin is getting married!?

The truth is that Joseph and Mary first waited for Cleophas to get married.

The youngest son of the family married Mary of Canaan, also from the House of David. A year later, Cleophas and Mary of Canaan brought James into the world. (This James would go on to become the First Bishop of Jerusalem. History knows him as James the Just, brother of the Lord—one of them—who was later murdered by his own kinsmen. The fate of Jesus’ brothers is part of the history of Christianity. A journey through the memory of the fascinating adventure of the early Christians, I’m sorry to say, is beyond the scope of this account. The fact is that the fate of Jesus’ brothers was sealed on the Night of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents. Were not Joseph’s nephews crushed under the feet of Fortune? The Beast pursued the Child, and in its helplessness to find him, it spewed fire from its eyes against all his relatives. How many nephews were taken from Joseph in a single night? How many of Cleophas’s sons were taken? As I said, in the future, God willing, we will delve into the tragedy of the famous brothers of Jesus, the sons of Cleophas and Mary of Cleophas. Well then, the year after the birth of James the Just, Cleophas and Mary of Canaan—Mary of Cleophas, as she is known in the New Testament—brought Joseph into the world. And they continued to bring cousins to Jesus.

THE NOMAD

Of all the children in Nazareth, none took to Joseph quite as much as Cleophas did. But that was from the very day Joseph arrived in Nazareth. It’s no lie that Joseph made a spectacular entrance into Nazareth. His Iberian horse, black as night, and his three Assyrian lion-hunting dogs brilliantly broke the monotony. Then there was the rider: a giant on his Bucephalus, son of Pegasus, the horse of the super angels; his hair neither long nor short, with Goliath’s very own sword at his belt.

And the stranger said he was a nomad on an adventure through the provinces of the kingdom.

The people of Nazareth looked at him and could hardly believe their eyes. A nomad like any other, venturing along those paths of God on the back of a colt of that breed—as beautiful as an archangel’s horse in the heat of battle—guarded by three beasts, as beautiful as cherubim and as fearsome as dragons?

That giant was a complete mystery. His psychological and physical traits did not match the popular image of the rootless nomad—always drunk, always quarrelsome, rather skinny, with wine-red lips, his brain scorched by sun and cold. No, sir, that nomad was no ordinary man. Nomads traveled on donkeys, or at best on old mares, with bedbugs, fleas, and stray dogs for company. No, sir, that Joseph was a complete mystery.

Secret or no secret, the fact is that Cleophas, the Virgin’s younger brother, grew so fond of that nomad born in Bethlehem that he ended up spending more time in the Carpenter’s tent than in his own home.

But I know that what that boy wanted more than anything was to make his dream come true: to climb onto Joseph’s horse and trot through the hills, kicking up stardust into the eyes of his dream girl. Boyish things!

And that’s exactly what happened. That’s what happened. All of Cleophas’s sisters got married—except for his two older sisters, Mary and Joanna, who had remained virgins since their father’s death. It’s true: all his sisters had already married, started families, and had children of their own. He, Cleophas, was the only one of Jacob of Nazareth’s sons who still lived in his mother’s house.

From the outside, to outsiders, Cleophas was the town’s young master, the spoiled son of his sisters, the Virgins. While all the other boys were busy helping out in the fields, young master Cleophas lived like a prince, without ever knowing what a sickle or a hoe was. So if he spent his days at Joseph’s carpenter shop, it wasn’t because he needed to earn a living. Not at all. If he decided to become his apprentice, it wasn’t because the Virgin’s brother needed to learn a trade. What Cleophas truly longed for was to rise in status in the Carpenter’s eyes, earn his trust, and receive his permission to make a break for it—to climb atop that Iberian horse and treat himself to the joy of seeing the world from the back of that magical creature.

And so it was. Cleophas rose from altar boy to friar, and there he roamed his world from festival to festival on the back of his boss’s marvelous horse. The townspeople were suspicious that the Carpenter gave the boy so much leeway. A horse like that isn’t something you just lend out—and certainly not, so to speak, to a child.

José’s response to his new neighbors’ suspicions was to lend his apprentice, in addition to his horse, two of “his puppies.” Every time he sent his assistant and apprentice carpenter to a neighboring village, José gave him a pair of his puppies as traveling companions—two dogs on the verge of extinction that his Babylonian godparents had once given him as gifts.

Cleophas begins by riding his horse to the neighboring village on an errand, naturally. And he ends up treating his employer’s horse as his own when, on the occasion of a local festival—a grape harvest festival, for example—his married sisters call for his presence. That is how Cleophas met Mary of Canaan, the future mother of his children… the famous brothers of Jesus.

Cleophas and his wife met, married, and settled into the house of the Daughter of Jacob, where they had their children.

Let’s be honest: the Nomad’s Carpentry Shop wasn’t a multinational furniture corporation, nor did it aspire to be an industry leader, but to Cleophas, José was the best. As a man in love and a father to his children, his boss’s workshop was all he had, and Cleophas was willing to work his fingers to the bone rather than see it go under. In any case, his boss was a strange man. He was never short on money. Whether he made sales or not, he always made enough to pay the rent. Nor did he ever burden him with his problems. Never! In fact, José’s only problem was that he didn’t have a wife. He didn’t even have a known suitor. No, it wasn’t for lack of women. No. It was him, José. He didn’t have a wife because God hadn’t given him one yet. And José said this with the air of mystery of someone who harbors an unspeakable secret.

“God will provide, brother, God will provide…,” José would reply to the boy.

Shortly after the birth of José—his nephew, the second son of his younger brother Cleophas—the Virgin Mary of Nazareth ended her mourning for the death of her father.

The Virgin has triumphed. She made a vow and has fulfilled it. Now she is free to marry; and by marrying, she will fulfill the oath her father made to the Lord—an oath he was unable to keep because Death crossed his path.

In the presence of sacred witnesses, Jacob of Nazareth once swore—at the cradle of his firstborn daughter Mary, the rightful heiress of King Solomon—that he would give his daughter in marriage only to the son of Eli, son of Resa, son of Zerubbabel, son of Nathan the prophet, son of King David.

Shortly after the birth of Cleophas’s second son, Joseph the Carpenter asked Jacob’s widow for the hand of her daughter Mary. The widow accepted the proposal, and shortly thereafter the marriage contract was signed between Mary, daughter of Jacob, daughter of Matán, daughter of Abiud, daughter of Zerubbabel, daughter of Solomon, daughter of David, king, and Joseph, son of Heli, son of Resa, son of Zerubbabel, son of Nathan, son of David, the prophet.

The news of the wedding of Joseph the Carpenter and the Virgin Mary took Nazareth by storm.

“The Virgin is getting married.”

“With the Carpenter? I knew it.”

The bride was an exceptional catch. She owned the house on the hill, possessed the best land in the region, and founded the tailor and sewing shop in Nazareth that sold the finest, prettiest, and most affordable wedding dresses in the region.

Who was the groom? A nobody from Bethlehem, an adventurous drifter who found what he’d been searching for. Who would have thought that where so many good matches had failed, an outsider with no future would succeed!

So if, on his mother’s side, our Jesus is the heir of Cleophas of Jerusalem, a Doctor of the Law and his grandfather, and if, also on his mother’s side, all the properties of his grandfather Jacob of Nazareth belong to him, then we are talking about a wealthy young man named Jesus of Nazareth. Or do you perhaps believe that the one who asked the wealthy young man to leave everything behind and follow him did not Himself perform this act of renunciation and abandon all His possessions?

As the son of his parents, during his tenure our Jesus raised his family’s financial situation to its peak of comfort and prosperity. During the days he was in charge of his Mother’s household, the cellars were filled with excellent wines, and the storehouses overflowed with wheat, oil, table olives, figs, pomegranates, milk, meat, and fish brought to his home from the Sea of Galilee—when our Jesus did not go personally to fetch them. The wines from the vineyards of Jesus of Nazareth were sold throughout Galilee; scarce but excellent—the very best. It gladdens the heart and never makes you aggressive; the next day you wake up with a clear head and a lively soul. “Wine of Nazareth, wine of Bacchus,” said the Romans at the garrison in Sepphoris, two hours away.

Her mother’s maternal grandparents, Elizabeth and Zechariah, bequeathed their properties—both within and outside Jerusalem—to the daughter of Anna, the widow of Jacob of Nazareth, Mary’s father.

The natural heir of Zechariah and Elizabeth was John. Before John the Baptist was born—since they had not expected to have children—Elizabeth and Zechariah bequeathed everything they owned to Mary’s mother. This will was never revoked due to Zechariah’s violent death and the disappearance of Elizabeth and John in the caves of the Dead Sea.

So in the Jerusalem of money, the Young Nazarene was known as one would know a mystery. In reality, no one knew who he was. What everyone seemed to agree on was that this Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Lady Mary, was a young man of prudence and wisdom far beyond what was normal for a man of his youth. He handled money, but he had no interest in power. He was accustomed to giving orders and being served, and yet he remained unmarried. He was educated, spoke the languages of the empire—do you think they provided him with an interpreter to speak with Pilate? He knew how to write, and had a knack for business. His mother was the Young Nazarene’s weak spot. But who isn’t forgiven for that?

WEDDING AND BIRTH OF THE CHILD

Mary and Joseph became engaged. The general rule was that the groom’s father would go to speak with the bride’s parents about his son’s desire to marry her. They would discuss the dowry and finalize the arrangement. In the case of Joseph and Mary, it was Joseph himself who spoke with the bride’s mother, asking for her daughter’s hand in marriage. The bride’s mother accepted, and the marriage contract was signed.

In those days, tradition dictated a one-year engagement period from the signing of the contract until the wedding day. After a year, they could marry. During the year of courtship, however, the betrothed were bound by the law against adultery. It was the norm, but by no means a sacred law. Moses had not issued any commandment prohibiting marriage immediately after the marriage contract was signed. It was the Jews themselves who imposed this year of waiting upon themselves.

It’s unclear whether they blamed God for being so lenient, but the fact is that, not content with the mountain of laws He had given them, they took it upon themselves to add another mountain of prescriptions, laws, traditions, commandments, canonical rules, and who knows how many other obligations. So, since these were “real” laws, no one batted an eye if the process was rushed due to… weakness of the flesh? The child was born at seven months. But then again, it’s not exactly cause for a scandal. Doesn’t a proper wedding atone for sin? Of course it does!

The downside was that, even though it wasn’t the law, weakness of the flesh could be punished by death if the sin hadn’t been committed by the groom. In this case, the full weight of the law on adultery fell on the bride. Convicted of adultery, she paid for her weakness with the death penalty… by public stoning.

A marriage contract could be dissolved for many other reasons as well. It wasn’t common, but such cases did occur. Incompatibility of temperaments, for example. The money was returned, and each went their separate ways.

In the more common case of pregnancy during the year of waiting, things didn’t get that far either. They’re young, but a grandchild is always welcome. It’s not the young couple’s fault! A wedding banquet, a grand celebration, let bygones be bygones—the child will be born seven months early. So what? Blessed glory. What begins well ends well—that’s what matters.

The Virgin’s case was of a different nature. One day—as She confessed to the Apostles—the angel of God appeared to Her, and the very next day She was already in a state of grace. The Apostles told their successors, who in turn told theirs, and thus the Virgin’s Confession continues to be passed down by word of mouth.

“Conceived by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit” is easily said.

“I am with child by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit!” the Virgin must have confessed to herself one of those days.

No one will believe that the Virgin ran off in joy, shouting the story of the Annunciation to the whole world. It’s not something that happens every day. In fact, throughout all of world history, humanity has never known an event like it. The case most similar to a “supernatural conception” of the kind described in the Gospels is found in the world of mythology. Alexander the Great’s mother went around openly declaring that she had conceived her son with one of the gods of the classical world. Whether out of respect for his mother or out of pride, her son maintained his semi-divine origin. As far as I can recall, this is the closest parallel to the story the Virgin brought to light over the centuries.

Well, why not? The God of the Hebrews had performed many extraordinary deeds from the days of Moses to those of Mary. The Prophetic Scriptures had been announcing for centuries the Conception of a Child born of a Virgin: “Emmanuel, God with Us.” As an example of fantasy taken to its highest extreme of imagination and genius—that the God who created the Heavens and the Earth could perform a work of this nature—it lives up to the Image that the children of Adam and Eve formed of His Nature. Why shouldn’t One possessing the Attributes ascribed to the God of Moses—all-power, omnipotence, omniscience—be capable of bringing about an Event so impossible to believe?

OK, Mary, now run and explain this to your mother. Run, find your husband, and tell him that you are the Virgin who was to conceive that Son “born to bear upon his shoulders the mantle of Sovereignty, and to be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father.”

Good heavens, what luck!

And now sit back and wait, trusting that your husband will say “Hallelujah, Amen, Hallelujah,” jump for joy, lift you up in his arms, and shower you with kisses.

Haven’t you had enough yet? Well then, go and tell your dearest sister, and keep in mind that your sister Juana loves you more than the Jordan River, more than the Sea of Miracles, more than the Mountains of Galilee. Come on, Mary, go, run and tell her.

I say this because—regardless of what everyone else thinks—the weeks went by and what had to happen happened. The Virgin began to feel strange dizziness; she’d feel faint, then come back to herself. Was it the excitement? Was it the heat? No, woman, those are the typical symptoms of pregnancy.

With any other woman in the world, her neighbors might have expected that a man as sturdy as a castle—take José the Carpenter, for example—would have breached the bride’s fortress of virtue before the wedding. With any other woman, of course, but with the Virgin Mary… it simply didn’t occur to her neighbors.

The fact is, once they could wrap their heads around it, they had to concede to the evidence.

“May the Lord grant you a healthy child, son”—with these words and others like them, the neighbors congratulated the groom, a man named Joseph who didn’t know what the hint was about. To be honest, he didn’t get it. He thought they were offering him their blessings in advance.

“May it be a boy, and may the Lord grant him good health, Mr. José,” the neighbors kept teasing him. Mr. José still didn’t get it.

It’s true—a few weeks after the Annunciation, the bride began to show the classic symptoms of early pregnancy: dizzy spells and sudden hot flashes. Since these are things beyond one’s control, the Virgin Mary couldn’t help but be taken by surprise. However, the last thing she could do was shut herself away or hide. She had to carry on with her life; going about her daily routine was the best way to neither confirm nor deny her neighbors’ rumors. At least until she decided to tell her mother the truth.

It took the Virgin’s mother a while to catch on. She was, aside from Joseph, the last person to learn of the rumor that had begun to cause a stir among her neighbors.

In the Widow’s eyes, her daughter’s immaculate chastity remained as inaccessible to human passions as it had been before she became engaged. Except for the groom’s freer access to the bride’s home—and this freedom being conditional on the necessary presence of a relative of the bride between her and the groom—her daughter Mary continued to live her life just as before, that very life that had earned the Virgin of Nazareth her fame from one end of Galilee to the other. How could she suspect anything wrong of her daughter!

“May the Lord grant you the most beautiful grandson in the world,” the Widow’s neighbors teased her.

“Your María deserves it all; may the child take after her grandfather Jacob, may he rest in glory,” they continued to tease the Widow, just in case she hadn’t caught on.

The Widow was from Jerusalem; she had been raised in a different environment. But she wasn’t a fool. Had it not been her own daughter, the Widow would have bet an eye out of her face that that woman was several weeks pregnant. The problem was that she simply couldn’t wrap her head around the idea that her María could be pregnant.

The Widow’s faith and trust in her eldest daughter were so great that they had blinded her. Thank God, the Widow’s blinders came off before José’s did. Finally, the Widow had to admit it, even though her daughter neither confirmed nor denied it.

“What’s wrong, my daughter?” the mother asked.

“Nothing. It’s just the heat, Mother,” the daughter replied.

The Widow’s dilemma began when the neighbors started talking about serious matters… adultery. They didn’t say it to her face, but among women and neighbors, as you know, words go a long way. So the Widow began to panic.

“My María is in a state of grace. How is that possible?” the Widow finally confessed.

And her beloved daughter neither confirmed nor denied it. Desperate because of her daughter’s silence, she went to see her son-in-law, hoping he would answer this simple question: Should they move up the wedding date?

And so she did. The Widow went to find “her son” José. Bringing José around to the subject was going to be a real struggle for the Widow. Since she didn’t know what situation he was in, or what his role in the story was, the Widow told herself she had to bring José around to the subject without revealing the crux of the problem to him. A very strange situation. She had to broach the subject, but the problem was doing so without straying from the periphery of the issue. Clever as ever, without telling him outright, the Widow would spell out exactly what was going on: his wife was pregnant. What was he, the groom, supposed to say?

After a long while of beating around the bush, the Widow realized that either José was playing dumb to perfection—a side of her saintly son-in-law she hadn’t known existed—or he simply didn’t know a thing and had no idea what his mother-in-law was talking about.

José looked at her with such an innocent, guilt-free air that the Widow began to lose her bearings. For a moment, she felt as if the ground were opening up beneath her feet and she didn’t know which was better—to fight or to let herself be swallowed up. Even her soul shivered with cold under the effect of the tremor that crept into her bones as the truth became an increasingly crushing burden. Her son-in-law knew absolutely nothing, and she knew only that she had to get out of that hell; she had to talk to her daughter and have her, for God’s sake, tell her what was going on.

What was happening?

Something unbelievable had happened—something impossible to put into words. Entire generations and centuries themselves would be split in two, just as the flow of the sea is divided when it encounters a gigantic cornerstone in its bed. And her daughter, unable to find a way to reveal to her the story of the Annunciation.

María can’t find the right moment. Well, as far as a “moment” goes, she did have one. She and her mother used to sit together and sew. During that time, they would talk and talk. They talked about everything. Or they would simply remain silent.

In that silence—which had settled between mother and daughter over the last few days—two hearts beat, on the verge of shattering into pieces. The mother wants to ask her daughter, “Are you pregnant, my daughter?” but can’t find the words. The daughter wants to answer with a “Yes, my mother”—a wonderful, divine “Yes”—but couldn’t find the right moment.

The fact was that the Child was growing within her, that the evidence of her condition was becoming more apparent every day, that if Joseph found out from the neighbors… She didn’t even want to think about it.

She needed to reveal the truth to her mother. Her mother was the only person in the world to whom she could entrust such a great Mystery. She had to do it, but since she couldn’t figure out how, the right moment never came.

Well, it so happened that one of those days, mother and daughter sat facing each other. Both women knew that the time had come, that this was the moment. The Virgin was the first to speak.

“Mother, do you believe that God can do anything?” she asked tenderly.

“Daughter,” sighed the Widow, who just wanted to get straight to the question: “Are you pregnant, my daughter?” but the words wouldn’t come out.

“I already know that, Mother. You’ll say to me: God is our Lord—how can we measure the strength of His Arm? And I, my mother, am the first to repeat your words. But what I mean is, does His Power end where the limits of our imagination begin, or is it precisely on the other side where His Glory begins?”

“What are you trying to tell me, my daughter? I don’t understand,” caught up in a line of thought different from the one she was dying to pursue, the Virgin’s mother tries to calm the fluttering in her heart,

“I don’t really know how to get where I want to go or what I want to say either. Please be patient with me, Mother. After this, we’ll go to Heaven, and from up there, the things of Earth won’t affect us; so what we must do is try to discover the nature of the God who called us to dream of Heaven while we’re still here on Earth. Isn’t it true that God can turn stones into children of Abraham? But what I’m wondering is whether, by speaking this way, the prophet meant to imply that our heads are as hard as stone. Can a stone know God? Between a man who doesn’t want to know God and a stone, what’s the difference?”

“Where are you trying to take me, my daughter?” the Widow asked, doing her best to contain her impatience.

“To a marvelous truth, Mother. But since I don’t know the way, don’t be angry with me if I explore on my own, like those mountaineers facing a virgin cliff for the first time. The worst that can happen is that, overcome by my ignorance, I’ll fall at your feet.”

“Don’t say that, my daughter. You’re not alone; even though I’m old, I’ll follow you. Yes, María, I know that God’s glory begins where human imagination ends. Go on.”

The Virgin then set off in a direction that seemed even more contrary, saying:

“Mother, what did the messenger from my grandfather Zechariah tell you? Why haven’t you wanted to tell me yet? Why haven’t you sent me to my grandmother Elizabeth’s house? Now that you can, answer me: Can our God—or can He not—cause elderly people to give birth?”

The Widow and Joseph had not yet wanted to reveal to Mary the nature of the message that Zechariah and Elizabeth had recently sent them; in fact, the Widow had decided to send Mary to them. The question of the state of grace in which her daughter suddenly found herself erased everything else from her mind.

Indeed, the messenger whom Zechariah and Elizabeth sent to Nazareth described to the Widow and her son-in-law, in minute detail, what had happened to Zechariah in the Temple. Especially the image of the most beautiful angel who punished Zechariah’s lack of faith by taking away his speech.

Good Lord! His daughter Mary was describing that angel to him as if she herself had seen him with her own eyes. How was that possible?

At first glance, it was impossible. The messenger from Elizabeth and Zechariah had not spoken to her while he was in Nazareth. Of course, Joseph could have told her.

Had Joseph told her? Joseph had given her his word that he would not be the one to break the news to his Mary. The widow knew that Joseph’s word was as pure and unblemished as the purest gold. He never broke it. No, Joseph hadn’t told her anything yet either.

She was wondering how her daughter had found out when her heart was suddenly transported back to the memory of the day her daughter took her Vow of Virginity.

Back then, in those days, the Widow wondered why the Lord’s favor had departed from her home, why He had turned His back on them as one abandons the spoils to the enemy. In the secret of her heart, the Widow found herself caught in the snares of Job’s dilemma. But unlike the saint, she did not find the answer right away. Nor did she find it in the years that had passed since her husband’s death up to that very day.

The time had come to learn the reason why the Lord had taken her husband then. Astonished, absorbed, out of this world, her being floating on the very waves that would one day become hills beneath the feet of the Spirit of God, the Widow continued to look at her daughter, her eyes fixed on her words.

Then the Virgin changed the subject again.

“Mother,” she says, “didn’t God swear that a son of Eve would crush the Serpent’s head?”

“That is true,” replied the Widow, her voice lost somewhere in the infinity where her gaze had become trapped.

“And don’t our sacred books also say that of all the men who have ever lived on the face of the earth, none was ever as great as Adam?” Mary continued.

“That’s what my father taught me, and that’s what yours taught you. I’m listening to you, daughter.”

Mary continued:

“When God promised us the birth of a Son born to bear sovereignty upon his shoulders, was He thinking of the Champion He would raise up to free us from the dominion of the Serpent?”

“Yes, He was.”

“But if the Evil One once defeated the greatest man the world has ever known, isn’t the holy Job right to present the murderer of our father Adam before the Throne of the Almighty, completely at ease as he waited for the next one?”

“He certainly was.”

“Of course he did. He who defeated the greatest man in the world—why wouldn’t he defeat the Son of Man?”

The Virgin lowers her eyes and takes a breath as she threads the needle. Her mother remains watching her without saying a word. A moment later, Mary leaped back onto the battlefield.

“So, Mother, tell me, did God swear a false oath? I mean, who was the Lord thinking of when He made that blessed oath? David hadn’t been born yet; neither had our father Abraham. With his young son dead, our father Adam bleeding to death at His almighty feet, what Champion was our God thinking of when He promised us under an everlasting oath that a son of our mother Eve would crush the head of the Evil One?”

This time it was Mary who fixed her gaze on her mother. Her mother, looking at her daughter’s face, knew only one thing: that her daughter was pregnant. The sweetness on her face, the tenderness in her speech, the sparkle in her eyes. All she had to say was: “Mother, I am in a state of grace”; but instead of getting to the point—without even realizing how her daughter had been leading her to the top of a mountain from which one could see the future of the world, according to the woman born to be the Mother of the Messiah, that Son of the Promise who was to be born to crush the head of the Evil One.

“Who was God thinking of on the day He swore, upon the blood of His son Adam, the Birth of the Champion by whose hand He would exact Vengeance?” the Widow thought aloud. “My daughter, I will not be the one to set limits on the glory of my Creator. I only want you to tell me.”

“Do you remember, Mother, what the prophet wrote? ‘A Virgin shall give birth, and her Son shall be called God with us.’”

Mary lowered her gaze again. Then she raised her head and looked her mother straight in the eyes.

“Mother, that Virgin stands before you. That Child is in my womb,” she confessed.

As her daughter revealed the story of the Annunciation, the Widow gazed at her daughter with the vision of one who is contemplating the Heart of God on the day of her son Adam’s murder.

When she finished, inspired by the great love she had for her daughter, the Widow poured out blessings:

“Blessed be God, who has chosen my husband’s daughter to bring salvation to all the families of the earth. His Omniscience shines like an inaccessible sun that, nevertheless, everyone believes they can reach with the tips of their fingers. He squeezes, but does not suffocate; He strikes, but does not crush those He loves. Blessed be His Chosen One, whom He has formed from the womb of her parents to give us His Savior, to all the peoples of the earth.” And immediately she said to her daughter: “Blessed will be all the families of the earth in your innocence, my daughter. But now, Mary, you will do as I tell you. You will do this, this, and this.”

The next problem was Joseph. She, the Widow, would take care of Joseph. What the Mother of the Messiah had to do was set out on a journey immediately and stay at the home of Elizabeth and Zechariah until the Lord decreed otherwise.

And so it was done. The Widow took her son-in-law aside and told him the whole truth, point by point. She did not recount the Annunciation to her son-in-law as if she had something to hide and were lowering her head in shame. Not at all. Obviously, she spoke with the humility and certainty of someone who knew that the Event would cause Joseph an agonizing dilemma—one he would have to overcome, and would overcome, but through which he would inevitably have to go through hell.

And so it was. Joseph triumphed.

Nevertheless, as you can imagine, after the Annunciation, Joseph spent some time morally sinking into a limbo of quicksand. What had gone wrong at the last minute? How could a woman of Mary’s moral character and strength have been deceived by…?

By whom? Without anyone intending it, she was under constant supervision all day long. When she wasn’t with her mother, she was with her nephews; when she wasn’t in the workshop with her female workers, she was with the families of her father’s brothers. The Lord had woven around her a web of relationships so all-consuming that the very idea of adultery was an offense.

And then there was she, Mary. She was, in the flesh, the best defense God had chosen for the Mother of His Son.

“She said it, and we didn’t believe her: ‘A virgin will conceive and give birth to a child.’” Upon saying this, Joseph saw the light and rushed off. He returned to his wife, the wedding took place, and everyone forgot about the incident.

One memory, however, did remain. I’m referring to that other incident between Jesus and the Pharisees.

The Pharisees and Sadducees grew tired of hearing that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of David. Since they didn’t know how to get the better of him, they dug into his past. They poked at his weak spot and uncovered that strange incident involving his Mother’s disappearance during the first months of her pregnancy—and how Joseph went in person to look for her… to…

“Ahhhh, here’s his Achilles’ heel”…

With this secret weapon tucked up their sleeve, the Pharisees steered Jesus toward the topic of firstborn sons and only children. Then one of them pulled out the playbook of low blows and dropped the bombshell.

“Our father is Abraham; who is yours?”

Jesus’s consuming zeal for his Mother went to his head.

“You are children of the Devil,” he replied with the force of a hurricane compressed in his throat.

Just once more—just on one other occasion they no longer wish to remember—they saw the Son of the Virgin with lightning shooting from his eyes. And he never stopped, never paused, until he had poured every last atom of the Almighty’s wrath into the river of his own fury.

From then on, the game between Him and them would be played as heads or tails. Heads, He would take them down. Tails, they would get their comeuppance.

THE CHILD JESUS IN ALEXANDRIA ON THE NILE

Shortly after these events, Joseph the Carpenter and his brother-in-law Cleophas gathered their families, bought tickets, and set sail for Alexandria on the Nile.

Mystery has always surrounded this matter of the Flight. Documentarily speaking, the truth is that there is no evidence anywhere that Alexandria on the Nile was the place chosen by Joseph to save Mary’s son from the persecution against the Child decreed by Herod. So, if pressed, the author of this story could be accused of inventing the fugitives’ destination to serve literary purposes. Which, to a certain extent, seems logical to me. I myself cannot forget that the classical iconography on this subject is quite sparse—even cautious, I would say—and I would even dare to confess that it is a caution bordering on cowardice.

Joseph’s choice of Alexandria on the Nile was not accidental; nor is it on the part of the one who recreates his movements in these pages. Fortunately or unfortunately, the only evidence I can provide is God’s testimony. By course, the “unfortunately” is just a figure of speech. For those who know God, a single word from Him is worth more than all the discourses of all the sages in the universe engaged in an endless series of lectures. Unfortunately, God’s word is not enough for everyone.

The fact is that the only real proof history offers us in this matter is God’s testimony: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

Before me, many have staked their lives in defense of the affirmative answer this question deserves. From the apocryphal distance of the non-believer, however, there are two insurmountable objections against whose bombproof walls our rhetoric shatters. One is that the statement “Out of Egypt I called my Son” was written long before any of the events we recount had even taken place; therefore, to pause and believe that centuries and centuries before the Nativity, the Flight had already been established as part of the messianic plan is, truth be told, a stretch.

The other objection is that this prophetic passage was not written “a futuriori” but a posteriori. According to these geniuses, it would not be the first time the Jews had falsified their sacred texts. Hadn’t they been doing so for centuries? Nineveh fell, and they came along to write on its ruins that they had already foretold it. And just like Nineveh, so it was with all other events. The prophet Daniel, too, foresaw Cyrus the Great’s rise to power—and even the fall of his empire under the hooves of Alexander the Great’s horse. For heaven’s sake, who were they trying to fool? Is there any nation more foolish than one that deceives itself?

In short, this view—that the prophetic texts were created after the fact—gained many followers in its heyday. Ignoring its cunning—as is natural for those who have been immunized against the cunning of geniuses— the rest of us—those who continue to uphold the divine value of the prophetic texts—still maintain that such ways of thinking would be logical for an ancient thinker, because to attempt to align the Creator’s thought with that of the creature—which is what one does by denying divine omniscience as the source of Scripture—is to deny what separates the creature from its Creator.

On a speculative level, it is true that some men see the future—in the stars, in dice, in coffee grounds, and above all in a bullet with a name written on it. On the level of reality, however, human nature is far from being granted such an attribute.

That’s one perspective.

On the other hand, isn’t it true that history is written by the victors? Well, if that were the case, something must be wrong with the system when we see it written by a people of losers. They lost to the Egyptians. Or is there still anyone who believes that one can go from freedom to slavery without fighting a terrible battle? They fought against the Assyrians and lost the war. They were crushed again by Nebuchadnezzar’s Chaldeans. They lost to Rome. They were enslaved again by the Arabs. How curious—very curious—that the historical memory of half the planet is based on the military exploits of the quintessential losing people, the Jews!

I would say that history writes itself at the pace with which God uses the hand of man as a pen. God, our Creator, dips the pen in our blood and writes our future according to His omniscience, foreknowledge, and creative genius. In other words, we do not see the future; God, on the other hand, not only sees it but also writes it. Now, if this divine capacity to create the future is not acknowledged, then we will have to rely on the nature of the events themselves—or run the risk of closing this history and opening a completely different book.

Thus, the farewell was very brief. The Devil’s Wolf had caught the Child’s scent.

Safe in Egypt, Joseph the Carpenter opened his workshop far from the Jewish Quarter, in the Free City. Over the years, his workshop came to be known as “The Jew’s Carpentry Shop.”

On this particular point—the event of the Massacre of the Innocents—I say the same. If doubt stems from the impossibility of anyone being capable of committing such a crime, then we can take that doubt and throw it in the trash. If, on the other hand, the doubt stems from the ignorance of the peoples and their inhabitants—considering the social and political circumstances experienced by the Kingdom of Israel at that time—then in this case nothing more can be added to what has already been written, except perhaps to say that it is inexplicable how, given that happiness lies in ignorance and there are so many ignorant people in the world, the world can continue to be so brilliantly miserable.

But let’s get back to the matter at hand.

Was it an easy decision for Joseph to have to pack up again and emigrate to Egypt?

Perhaps it wasn’t an easy decision, but it was certainly a courageous one.

The story of the Adoration of the Magi opens our minds to the past and paints a picture of the Holy Family fleeing to the second-largest city in the world, Alexandria on the Nile—an open and cosmopolitan city where Joseph and his family arrived with their backs covered, “economically speaking.” Gold, frankincense, and myrrh were the gifts the Magi gave to the Child.

Why Alexandria on the Nile and not Rome?

Well, Alexandria is just a stone’s throw from the coast of Israel. With the Massacre of the Innocents already carried out and the murder of Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, already consummated, the last thing Joseph could afford was to endanger the Child’s life. In fact, days had passed between the Birth and the Child’s presentation in the Temple; it was now or never. Return to Nazareth, pack up, catch the ship in Haifa, and say goodbye to the homeland.

This decision by José, forced by the bloody circumstances, changed him completely. Among the Holy Innocents, his brothers’ children fell into the trap. The man who, from the deck of the ship carrying the Holy Family to Alexandria, gazed at the horizon alone, with his back turned to everyone, carried that secret hidden in his heart—a secret he would not reveal to his people until his death. When he disembarked on the Egyptian coast, the Joseph who had existed before the Massacre and the murder of Zechariah had sunk into the waters of the Mediterranean.

His compatriots?

The farther away from him, the better. He didn’t tell anyone the reason for this complete change—not his wife, nor his brother-in-law.

And now we are in Alexandria on the Nile.

The environment in which Jesus grew up, thanks to his father’s strange behavior toward his own people, was extraordinary. Joseph, his father, refused to settle in the Jewish Quarter; he preferred to find a place among the Gentiles, right in the heart of the Free City. He bought a house and opened his workshop. Over time, his workshop would come to be known as the Jew’s Carpentry Shop.

The Child’s aunt and uncle, Cleophas and Mary the daughter of Cleophas, continued to have children.

Clever as only he could be, as soon as Jesus was as tall as his cousin James—even though James was two years older—Jesus would grab him and take him to the Roman port. The Boy wasn’t shy around anyone; his thirst for news from the Empire was never quenched. His knack for coaxing news out of the sailors—about Rome, Athens, Hispania, Gaul, India, and deep Africa—won the sailors’ sympathy. They’d look the two boys up and down, see them dressed in clothes befitting children of the upper class, and then they’d tell Jesus and his cousin James all about what was going on in the world.

Thanks to this natural gift, by the time he turned twelve, the Boy spoke Latin, Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, and Aramaic perfectly. I insist: or do you think they found him an interpreter for the hearing with Pilate?

As I said, Jesus was a prodigy in every sense of the word. A prodigy who was fortunate enough to have an extraordinary man as his father. However, even prodigies feel, suffer, have moments of weakness, grow sad, and weep over the loneliness that weighs them down.

THE SILENT DOVE OF THE DISTANT HORIZONS

Jesus sank into despair. That divine Child who used to turn the whole street’s kids upside down—who would wander off, get lost among the boats in the harbor, and then, as evening fell, come running back to sit on his father’s lap among his friends—that whirlwind of a Child sank into despair. Jesus stopped leaving the house. He began to sit at the door of the Jewish Carpenter’s Shop, watching life go by. The Child hardly ate. Jesus would let himself sink into his mother’s lap among her friends—when, as evening fell, the women would sit in the street, under the Mediterranean sky, sewing and chatting—and then he would leave.

It was as if that flame from the Burning Bush were burning away in Mary’s arms. At first, she did not realize the loneliness that had opened a black hole in her Child’s chest and was swallowing him up a little more each day through it. Little by little, the Mother opened her eyes and began to see what was in her Child’s Heart.

She could not bear that indescribable agony that was snatching her Child from her hands. She loved him more than the world, more than time, more than the waves of the sea, more than the stars, more than love, more than her very own life. And he was slipping away from her. Night after night, and each night a little more. The Child did not speak, did not laugh; he would slump against his Mother’s chest, his gaze lost in the sky over that Alexandria on the Nile, and there he would sink.

“What’s wrong, my son?” she asked him.

“Nothing, Mary,” He would reply.

“I know what’s wrong with you, little Jesus.”

“It’s nothing, Mary, really.”

“My darling, you miss your Father. Don’t cry, my love. He is here, right now; when I press my lips to your cheeks, He kisses you; when I hug you, He holds you close.”

To the Child, that woman who listened to Him with the sweetest smile in the universe on her face while He spoke to her of His Father’s Paradise, of His Father’s City, of His brothers—the superangels Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael—that woman… that woman was His Mother. He loved her more than anything in the world. She was the only person to whom He could tell everything. He loved to feel the beating of her heart when He spoke to her of His Kingdom. And that radiant look that lit up her face when He told her the whole truth! It was never erased from His memory.

“Yes, Mary,” the Child said to her. “I am He.”

“Tell me again what Heaven is like, my son,” she asked him once more.

“Heaven,” the Child confided, “is like an island that became a continent, and which continues to grow beyond the eastern horizon. The Rock upon which it is founded is the highest mountain any man could imagine. The Mountain of God, Zion, raises its summit to the clouds, but where the clouds should be there are twelve walls, each made of a single block, each block a different color, each wall shining as if it had a sun inside it. And they are like twelve suns illuminating the same firmament. The twelve walls form a single rampart surrounding the City they contain. God called His City Jerusalem, and His Mountain Zion. In Jerusalem the gods have their Dwelling, and among the gods my Father has His House. From the walls of the City of God, the edges of Heaven fade into the horizon that borders the sunrise on the other side of Paradise’s frontiers.

“You see, Mary, Heaven is like a marvelous mirror that reflects the history of the peoples who inhabit it. Take this world, the Earth, for example. You record the memories of your ancestors in your books; but Heaven records them in real time, because what is reflected on the surface of the Universe materializes on the surface of Heaven. So if you set out to explore the Abode of mankind in my Father’s Paradise, you will find that all the Ages of Mankind are captured in its geography. When you go to Heaven, you will see with your own eyes that all kinds of animals and birds and trees and plants and mountains and valleys that once existed down here exist forever up there.”

“Since my Father has created other worlds—and will continue to create more—Heaven is a Paradise brimming with wonders that never end. To explore it all, you’d have to walk for an eternity, and every step of the way would be an adventure. How can I explain it to you? My Father sows life among the stars. The stars of the Universe are like the ocean surrounding an island, and this ocean of constellations also grows, extending its shores in step with the boundaries of Heaven. Life becomes a tree, and my Father and I gather it in our Paradise so that it may live forever. The species of animals and birds are countless. A great river springs from the heights of the Mountain of God, and on the plain it branches out to cover all the Worlds and their territories. Do you see all the stars? Heaven is higher still.”

“Is that where you came from, my Son?”

“I’ll tell you, Mary.”  

THE JEW’S CARPENTER’S SHOP

The Child told Mary many things. He told her so many that the poor immigrant woman no longer had room in her head and had to begin storing them in her Heart. If I were to retell them all to you, I’d surely be sitting here until next year, and that’s not the plan.

What I can tell you, though, is what you already know. You know that the Holy Family returned to their homeland about ten years later, or perhaps sooner. But you don’t know what happened to them that led good old Joseph and his brother-in-law Cleophas to decide to sell the Jew’s Carpentry Shop—a business that was extremely prosperous, sailing full steam ahead, cutting through the sea, not just sailing but flying, and so on.

The Jew’s Carpentry Shop was right in the heart of the city. In those days, there was only one real city in the entire world. It was Alexandria on the Nile. Rome was the heart of the world’s largest army. The imperial senators lived in Rome. But it was in Alexandria on the Nile where all the wise men of the Empire were to be found. We could say that Alexandria was the New York of those days. Power is in Washington, but money is in New York. Alexandria and Rome maintained a relationship of this nature.

So why did they have to go back now? And just when business was going swimmingly—sailing with the wind at their backs, flying across the sea, and so on? Go back to what? To survive like a fly in a spider’s web? There was plenty to think about. A business less than ten years old is like a young guy just starting to grow a mustache. From his perspective, the world has the fewest faults. The world may be as bad as you want it to be, but he—the kid—is a champion. In short, it wasn’t nonsense. It had taken José and his brother-in-law a lot of effort to get ahead, make their way, and find a niche—and a big one at that—among the Gentiles, because José wanted to know nothing, or very little, about his compatriots. In this chapter, Mr. José was a very unusual Jew. He didn’t want to know much about his compatriots, nor did he like having them too close. No one knew why, nor did he say much himself. Perhaps it was because Mr. José had spoken Latin and Greek— —from a very young age and seemed to be in his element among the Gentiles.

It must be said that José’s mastery of the Empire’s two languages paved the way for him in the business world. Unlike his compatriots—who were racist toward everyone, believed themselves to be a superior, chosen race, and looked down on the rest of humanity—Mr. José was open-minded, intelligent, and a man of few words; yet every word he spoke was that of a man of his word who would never break his promise for anything in the world.

How a provincial cabinetmaker, who had escaped from a remote village in the mountains, had managed to master the two international languages of the time to such an extent—well, that was another mystery!

This was yet another of the many traits that made the owner of the “Jewish Carpenter’s Shop” a unique, introverted, and indefinable figure. His compatriots from Alexandria criticized Mr. José precisely because of his distance from his own people.

Unlike José, Cleophas, Mary’s brother, was deeply rooted in his homeland and gravitated toward his own people. This balanced the scales and kept the family’s relations with the nationalists in equilibrium. On occasion, between brothers-in-law and business partners, Cleophas would bring up the subject of his estrangement and the reasons behind such an unyielding stance. But José always found a way to brush the matter aside.

José didn’t impose anything on his brother-in-law Cleophas; he was free to raise his children as he saw fit; he wasn’t going to forbid his nephews from going to the synagogue and participating in the life of the Jewish community, fulfilling their duties as good children of Abraham. It was just that the very freedom José offered Cleophas, he wanted for himself as well.

Faced with this line of reasoning, Cleophas would laugh and drop the subject. Because if he asked his sister Mary about her husband’s strange behavior, she wouldn’t get any further either.

The same mystery that Joseph’s manner posed for Cleophas had puzzled Mary ever since they left their homeland. And Cleophas shouldn’t think she was hiding anything from him. Joseph was as kind as could be, but when it came to opening his heart, he wouldn’t say a word—not even to his own wife.

All in all, Cleophas and his wife had already brought a whole brood into the world by this point in the story. Joseph and Mary, however, had kept only the first and the last—the firstborn and the only child rolled into one.

“What’s going on, brother?” Cleophas asked. “Why the rush to sell a ship that’s sailing full steam ahead?”

Joseph didn’t want to tell his brother-in-law the whole truth—or at least the truth as he experienced it.

THE RETURN TO NAZARETH

The Child overcame that sadness that had nearly plunged him into the darkness of infinite sorrow. His Mother stood between the Child and that unknown darkness; she called on her Husband for help, and together they drove the devil back to hell. But they had not forgotten that battle when the Child opened a new chapter in their lives. Jesus was already nine or ten years old. It had gotten into the Child’s head that he wanted to leave Egypt and be taken to Israel.

You can imagine how angry Joseph must have been. His wife was on her son’s side. Naturally. For Mary, there was no problem at all. But for Joseph, things weren’t so simple.

Of course, Joseph had heard the Divine Story from Jesus’ own lips while He was in His Mother’s arms. And precisely for that reason, now more than ever, he could not afford to make the wrong decision. As long as he didn’t know who he had in his home, the problem seemed under control; but now that he knew the identity of Mary’s Son, now more than ever he could not afford the indecision he’d shown when he’d laughed off the Magi’s advice.

“Go, Joseph, or the Herods will kill him,” they pleaded with him.

Return to Israel while Herod the Younger is still alive?

“Tell your Son that the time has not yet come,” Joseph replies to his wife.

Words carried away by the wind.

“Tell your husband that I must attend to my Father’s business,” the Child insists.

A reply carried by the wind.

“Mary, for God’s sake, he’s just a child. No one is leaving here. At least not until that son of Satan is dead.”

I’ll cut to the chase. That’s how Mr. Joseph was. Very few words, but when he spoke, there was no one in the world who could make him change his mind.

And they could have gone on like that their whole lives if the Child hadn’t set “his plan” in motion. I won’t get lost in the details, but the truth is that the Carpenter’s son uncorked the bottle of his prodigious intelligence and enjoyed himself like a little boy, drenching the rabbi of the synagogue with the champagne of his glory.

“The list of kings? The one from Before the Flood or the one from After the Flood, Rabbi?”

A monster. He knew everything. The utterly astonished rabbi ended up taking a deep interest in the Child.

“And whose son are you, child?”

“I am the son of David, Rabbi.”

“Is your father the son of David?”

“And so is my mother, Rabbi.”

“And your mother too? How curious!”

“And so is my cousin here, Rabbi.”

“You really are a rabbi through and through,” the man thought to himself.

So one fine day, the rabbi walked into the Jew’s Carpentry Shop demanding an explanation from José. As if he were entitled to something just because he was a servant of God.

Joseph looked him up and down and kicked him out onto the street. And right in front of the Child himself. Because, of course, the whole mess was the Child’s doing.

You’ll understand that after the scare he had during the Nativity, Joseph was forbidden to make even the slightest mention of his family’s Davidic origins. And if the occasion arose, he had to brush off any talk of his Davidic origins as if he weren’t willing to stake his life on it. They certainly were; but who knows? Their parents had told them so, and they weren’t about to question their parents’ authority.

The Child was breaking this family rule. And he was doing so with full knowledge of the consequences. He knew—because he knew Joseph as if he were his brother, his friend, his father—that as soon as Joseph detected the slightest danger that might endanger the life of the Son of Mary, Joseph would call it quits and move elsewhere.

Joseph had won the first round. But the second was yet to come.

The Child was back to his old ways. Not only was he the son of David—as if it were no big deal—but his mother was the Daughter of Solomon.

“Yes, indeed, Rabbi. The Daughter of Solomon herself.”

“And you say your father can prove this with documents on the table?”

“Yes, sir.”

That rabbi, who had the good fortune—or misfortune—of having the Boy as a student, was on high alert. Confused, bewildered, and utterly astonished, the rabbi took the matter to the chief rabbi.

“It’s just as I said. If it were any other child, I’d take it as a joke, but when it comes to the Carpenter’s son, I’ll believe anything. He knows more than all the wise men of Solomon’s court put together. Including the wise king himself,” with these words, the rabbi from Jesus went to his superior.

And one fine day, the two of them showed up at the Jewish Carpenter’s shop, determined to get to the bottom of the matter.

They went to see Joseph. They went to demand that he show them the documents the Child had been telling them about. Jesus had told them that his father kept the family’s genealogical records—documents dating back to the days of King David himself, reissued by the prophet Daniel during the Babylonian Captivity.

Joseph suddenly found himself facing a masterstroke—checkmate. The Son of Mary was playing hardball. He wanted to take them all to Jerusalem, and nothing and no one was going to stop him.

The argument Joseph had with the two rabbis was very heated. I won’t recount it here so as not to give the impression of fabricating fantastical events.

“The impression that the Son of Mary made on his teachers was so overwhelming that they had believed the word of a little boy”… blah, blah, blah. The Carpenter brushed it off.

Had they known him, they would have understood that for Joseph, to affirm something was to have the final say.

Joseph was absolutely certain. The Son of Mary might be the Son of God himself, but it was to him—to Joseph—that his Father had entrusted his care, and it fell to him, and him alone, Joseph, to decide when the Holy Family would return to Israel.

Could he be the Son of God?

Could it only be…?

“What are you thinking about, Joseph?”

The rabbis believed they had the Carpenter cornered, and even the Child himself, listening behind the door, came to believe it. Words like swords in a duel to the death were clashing when the Child peered through the door with the air of a victor asking his fallen enemy: “Do you still want more?”

It was the first time in his life that Joseph saw the Son of Mary through the eyes with which his Mother saw him. That was the Son of God in person. It was no joke. It just so happened that He had the body of a child. But the One standing before Joseph was the Firstborn of the Lord God YAHWEH. It was the Son of God in person who was speaking to him through his thoughts.

Yes, sir, He was speaking to him through his thoughts with the same certainty that you are reading this book.

The rabbis were shouting at the top of their lungs at Joseph in his own home, but Joseph’s mind was elsewhere, in another place. They were demanding the Child’s genealogical records, and he was in another place, in another time. The Child was standing against the doorframe of the carpenter’s shop, saying to him without opening His mouth: “Don’t you believe Me yet, Joseph? Don’t you see that I have to attend to My Father’s business?”

But the Child’s plan backfired.

Once the moment had passed and the rabbis had left, Joseph closed himself off once again—and now more than ever. They would never return to Israel until his God gave him the order to return. And that was it; Joseph didn’t want to hear any more.

And that was how the Child was defeated once again. He stopped speaking to Joseph. He had played his hand and lost. No one would leave Egypt until God gave Joseph the command to return to Israel—it was that simple, that tragic.

Simple to say, yes; but to live through it—not at all. Father and son stopped speaking to each other—and even looking at one another. Little Jesus wouldn’t even eat. He would slump to the ground against the wall of their house, watching life pass him by, weighed down by the sorrow of one who can do anything yet is commanded to do nothing.

Mary didn’t know who was suffering more—whether the Child, for failing to impose his will, or her Husband, for being unable to bear the silence and his son’s estrangement. They didn’t even look at each other. Joseph didn’t dare, and the Child couldn’t.

Cleophas was the only one who seemed to enjoy the situation.

“What’s wrong with you, brother? Why are you so stubborn?” he says to Joseph.

“He’s just a Child, Cleophas,” Joseph replied.

It so happened that one day like any other, Joseph returned home after closing a deal. Jesus had already lost all hope of convincing good old Joseph. How long had it been since they’d spoken to each other?

Joseph the Carpenter returned from closing that deal, looking very serious, but with eyes that sparkled. As soon as Mary saw him walk through the door, her heart leapt, but she didn’t say a word. She waited for her husband to speak to her.

“Wife, tell your Son that we’re leaving.”

He said no more.

The Mother took the Child and went to distract him at the market. She was going to buy him whatever he wanted, to cheer him up and lift his spirits, she told him. Jesus followed her as he might have followed a cloud with no destination. Ever since the incident between Joseph and the rabbis, he didn’t want to know anything; he had no desire for anything. And there was nothing his own Mother could say to lift his spirits.

Nothing?

Well, there was something. He had two signs, and it was a single word. Joseph was denying it to him, and Mary couldn’t give it to him.

Couldn’t she give it to him?

They would never forget that stroll through the market at the port of Alexandria. She couldn’t stop smiling at him, tickling him, and saying with her gestures: “Riddle, riddle, what’s wrong with me?”

Naturally, the Child got a little annoyed for a while, until he finally opened his eyes. He took Mary—he always called her by her name—sat her down on one of the benches on the pier, and, looking her in the eyes, read her heart as easily as you read these lines.

“María, right?” was all the Boy asked her.

She nodded, utterly overcome with happiness. And right there, against the backdrop of the Mediterranean horizon, they danced wildly with joy.

They ran back home. Joseph was working when they came in. Mary walked right past him, but Joseph caught the light shining in his wife’s heart. His eyes lit up, and he turned his head. Before he could say a word, the Child ran out and threw himself into his arms. Giant as he was, Mary’s husband caught him and lifted him up just as all fathers do with their little ones. Now, truly, both of them had triumphed. The Child had what he wanted, and Joseph had received God’s command to set out on his journey.

Cleophas didn’t protest. Nor did he say a word. His brother-in-law was the head of the clan; he made the decisions, he gave the orders.

Jesus ran off in search of James, his cousin, shouting down the street, “To Jerusalem, James, to Jerusalem!”

BORN AGAIN

The emigrants returned to Nazareth, so to speak, rich. Joseph sold the Jewish Carpenter’s Shop for a very good price.

“Farewell, Alexandria, farewell,” whispered Joseph’s lips as he left behind friends, his business, happy years, new prospects, a wise city, and the joy of having experienced wonderful things and heard others so incredible they would be hard to believe had he not heard them from the Child’s own lips.

On the other side of the horizon awaited the return of pain that had lain dormant beneath the thick sheets of a cruelly wounded subconscious. Return to Nazareth? Settle in Bethlehem, his hometown? What would he do?

During the absence of the Mistress of the Stork of Nazareth, the large house on the hill, Joanna, Mary’s sister, had kept her nephew Jesus’s estate in good standing. In this regard, Joseph had no problems. Everything that belonged to his wife was his; so Joseph could devote himself to living off the income and begin to enjoy the good life. But no matter how prosperous his wife’s inheritance might be, this way of thinking did not sit well with him.

As a father, Joseph was more concerned about the future of his nephews than about the future of his son Jesus.

By that time, his brother-in-law Cleophas had fathered a whole brood of children. Had Mary remained unmarried, it would have been more than likely that the inheritance of Jacob of Nazareth and his messianic legacy would have passed to the male head of the household; in which case, the future of Cleophas’s children would have been tied to Mary’s property.

That was not the case. Sooner or later, Cleophas’s sons would have to leave Aunt Mary’s house, settle down, and start their own families. So, without a second thought, Joseph made the final decision to start over, just as he had when he first arrived in Nazareth—unknown to all who did not know him, with no ground to fall dead on, the sky as his roof, the horizons as the walls of his home, Mother Earth as the floor upon which to rest his body, a stone as a pillow beneath the stars, his faithful Assyrian dogs standing guard around the fire, the dawn breaking, the morning star beneath the moon, Jerusalem above, on the road to Samaria like one who enters a body and travels to the heart through the unknown arteries of the earth. Why not? Did God not endow us with His strength to keep the spirit forever young? Our physical strength may fail, but our will endures beyond the weariness of our bones.

Of course, reopening the carpentry shop was going to be serious work, but since those two men lacked neither the strength nor the courage to start over from scratch, well, that’s just how it was. Besides, the sinister creatures who ordered the Massacre of the Innocents had already passed on to a better place, and—truth be told—even though Joseph didn’t seem all that eager to return to his homeland, he, too, was feeling the pull of family: to see his brothers and sisters again, to see his wife and brother-in-law happy in the arms of his children’s grandmother. In short, human nature was woven from the fibers of divine love and needs to be bathed in tears of joy to overcome its innate tendency to resemble beasts, which neither laugh nor cry.

As for work, man, José could have gone into farming, but that wasn’t his thing. The trade of carpentry and cabinetmaking was in his genes; it coursed through his veins; it was his calling—he could hammer a nail without looking, polish the roughest surface while chatting. The countryside? The countryside wasn’t for him, nor was he cut out for the countryside. Had his sister-in-law Juana’s skills failed to keep the property thriving?

Yes, his sister-in-law Juana was there to handle the farm affairs. And as for the sewing workshop in Nazareth, matters were in the hands of his wife’s workers, and she—now devoted to her family—did nothing but leave things exactly as they were.

The Boy, for his part, as soon as he set foot in Israel, was already dying to see the day of his admission into the community with all the full rights of adults—something that usually took place at thirteen or fourteen. In his case, things were moved up to age twelve because his mind worked better than that of an older person. Let it be noted that I am not saying this to impress the reader. The truth is that the Boy remained hyperactive throughout the entire journey from Egypt to Israel; if it had been up to him, he would have taken flight or run across the water and wouldn’t have stopped until he reached Jerusalem. He was already picturing it all. He would make his way to the Temple Courtyard, ask to speak, and let the truth—the whole truth and nothing but the truth—flow from his mouth.

“Here I come, Jerusalem,” whispers the Child as he leaves Egypt behind.

The Child’s vision of his messianic destiny is the classic one found in popular tradition at this time of year. The Son of David appears riding his horse of glory before the powers of the Temple, gathers around him all the children of Abraham from across the world, and leads them to conquer the ends of the earth.

With these holy intentions in mind, following the ceremony marking his admission into the community upon turning twelve, Jesus goes to the Temple to put his strategy into action.

On the first day, he draws attention to himself; on the second, word spreads; and on the third, all the Sages of Israel will be revealed in the immensity of his divine reality. On the fourth, the Messiah will be on his throne, summoning all the armies of the Lord throughout the world to his ranks.

And so it was. At least for the first two days. But on the third, something happened that would mark his entire existence.

Amazed by the wisdom of that Child, who knew more than all the sages of Israel combined, the Temple authorities eventually gathered to decide what was happening.

Among them, seated around Jesus—who was in turn surrounded by the Doctors and Princes of the Temple—was a man named Simeon. This Simeon was the elderly man who had greeted the newborn Child and told his God that He could now let him go to be reunited with his parents, for he had already seen the Christ.

God did not seem to agree with Simeon. Instead of taking him to Heaven, He left him on Earth for the time being.

As soon as Simeon saw the Child, he recognized the Son of Mary. Awed by what he was witnessing, he spoke up just as everyone else was convinced they were standing before the Son of David.

“Tell me, son,” Simeon broke the silence.

And he went on to speak words of a wisdom unknown to the Child and to everyone else.

“What will happen when you leave? Because you will have to leave. Will we humans return to our old, everyday world, or do you perhaps believe that the Christ will remain with us forever?”

What was that old man talking about? the Child wondered.

Amid the protests of all his colleagues, the old man was telling him that the Christ would be surrounded by a pack of dogs, would bear all the sins of the world, and would offer himself as a Sacrificial Lamb.

“But if he takes his seat on his throne, how can the Scriptures be fulfilled?” Simeon added pointedly.

The Child froze. Was he the Servant of Yahweh from the prophecies of Isaiah?

It wasn’t that the Child didn’t know the prophecies. He knew the prophetic books by heart. What was striking Him was the interpretation Simeon was giving them. It was a wisdom as new and unfamiliar to Him as it was to the others who were listening.  

DAVID’S SWORD

Legend had it that the great warrior danced a victory dance around the enemy’s corpse. It also said that those barbarians stole the secret of iron from the heroes of Troy before Aeneas fell victim to the Achaeans’ cunning.

Among those soulless monsters, the most horrible was always the leader. The leader was not always the tallest, but he was always the cruelest, the most terrible, the most ruthless, the most lethal, and the most evil. On that occasion, the tallest and the cruelest and most ruthless barbarian conceivable had come together in a single body. His name was Goliath. His sword was as large as that of the other warrior whom the Spaniards called Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar—the one that could sever five Moorish heads lined up in single file with a single stroke. No one dared come within three meters of El Cid Campeador; those three meters were the length of his weapon from the shoulder to the tip of that Spanish steel sword. Arm and sword, one with that Castilian warrior, whose stature was every bit as imposing as that of the brawling, babbling Philistine who made the terrible mistake of removing his helmet in front of the young shepherd with the sling.

Legend has it that David picked up the giant’s enormous sword and with it cut off his head in a single stroke. And it goes on to say that the Hebrew warrior fought with it at the head of his armies. From this we must deduce that, though handsome of face, this David was by no means short in stature nor did he have delicate, slender arms. He was no giant, but he certainly bore no resemblance to a dwarf.

From the beginning of his reign, Goliath’s sword was the royal symbol par excellence that granted the throne of Judah to whoever possessed it. Solomon received it, and Solomon passed it on to his son. Rehoboam passed it to his son, who passed it to the next, and so it passed from hand to hand over the five centuries that elapsed from David’s coronation to the last king of Jerusalem.

Nebuchadnezzar snatched it from the hands of the last living king of Judah and cast that museum-piece sword among the other treasures his armies had gathered from around the world. He saw that it was so large and heavy that he mistook it for a decorative object. He forgot about it, and it would have remained there forever had Cyrus the Great, after conquering Babylon, not handed it over to the prophet Daniel so that he might do with that sacred symbol of the Hebrews whatever his spirit prompted him to do.

By rightful inheritance, the sword of David—the sword of the kings of Judah—belonged to Zerubbabel. But the prophet Daniel denied it to him because it was not with that sword that he was to reconquer the Lost Homeland. Goliath’s sword would remain in the Great Synagogue of the Magi of the East until the Son of David was born.

We do not know how Goliath’s sword came to be in the hands of El Cid Campeador. What we do know for certain is that that sword was the one Joseph wielded on the day he entered the Temple in search of the Son of Mary.

David’s sword was a gift from the Magi to the Messiah’s father. It fell to him to safeguard it until the day of his son’s coronation.

The Magi gave Joseph many gifts. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh were the last three gifts they gave him; but these were for the Child. Earlier, they had given Joseph an Iberian horse that flew like a shooting star and was capable of crossing Samaria without drinking water or resting. And three dogs from the same litter, a relic of the hounds that the kings of Nineveh took with them on their lion hunts. One was named Deneb, another Sirius, and the third Kochab. Joseph never took them out together. They looked so much alike that anyone who didn’t know Joseph would have thought he owned only a single specimen of that endangered breed. They were as gentle as little lambs at their master’s feet, but fiercer than the most evil demon in the most horrific hell if they sensed danger. His three dogs, his Iberian horse, and Goliath’s sword were the three things José took with him from Bethlehem the day Isabel told him:

“Son, all your sisters have married and are happy; the boy is now in his prime and has all his father’s charm. Cleophas is strong, tall, and clever—it won’t be long before he finds someone who loves him madly. Very soon the Daughter of Solomon will be released from her vow—isn’t that what the Son of Nathan has been waiting for all these years?”

And Joseph took a fourth thing with him to Nazareth, which was the most precious of all to him: the genealogical record of his House. But let’s get back to the point.

Only twice in his life did Joseph’s hand instinctively reach for the sword of his father David. That his arm moved so instinctively tells us a great deal about the stature of the man and the strength of his arm. The first time was when Joseph went to fetch Mary from the home of Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. The second was when Joseph entered the Temple to look for the Son of Mary.

What would have happened if, instead of telling his parents what he did, the Child had said to Joseph: “Son of Nathan, give me the sword of the kings of Judah”?  

YOU ARE DUST, AND TO DUST YOU SHALL RETURN

What, in the end, did that old man reveal to the Child? What did that man show him that caused the Son of Mary to renounce his plans? What did he say to him? Why did that Child remain silent and give up his plan to mount the horse of the Son of David—the brave and impetuous prince who, according to the popular interpretation of the Scriptures, was to lead his armies to bring God’s peace to the whole world? Why did the one who entered the Temple ready to reveal himself and claim what was rightfully his by human and divine right suddenly abandon his messianic plans and go after “his parents” without uttering a word?

That that elderly man—whose identity we will discover in Part Two—revealed to the Child the wisdom that you have all known through the Catholic Church since the days of the Apostles—that much is certain. But there was more, much more, as well.

And the only way to discover what went through his mind is to put ourselves in his place. But not in whatever arbitrary way we feel like, or in a way that seems to fit our nature. For a moment, let’s forget everything we’ve heard and step into his shoes. And to do that, we’re going to accept the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation of the Son of God. We’re going to embrace it on every level and take it to its ultimate conclusion.

Let’s consider the possibility that that Child was the Son of God in person. Not just any son in our image and likeness, by adoption; not even a son of God in the image and likeness of the angels whom we see in the presence of God in the Book of Job. No, let us take it for granted that that Child was a son of God in the sense that He is the Only-Begotten of His Father because He was begotten of His Being. And that, in His capacity as the Only-Begotten, He fulfills all the requirements set forth by the Catholic Creed: Light from Light, true God from true God. It is a possibility—a possibility we will consider in all its magnitude.

The first to embrace that possibility was Jesus himself. In his teaching, he proclaimed himself the Metaphysical Cause of Creation—that is, the reason why God creates all things, including our universe. From this position as the Only-Begotten Son, Jesus replied to the Jews who asked him his age that “He already existed before Abraham”—which is logical if one considers that, as the Metaphysical Cause of Creation, his presence was required at the Beginning and before action began. Consistent with himself, Jesus once again proclaimed for himself this status as Metaphysical Reason when he affirmed that “his Father shows him everything he does.” The other point—that he invited us to witness the Spectacle in the coming Acts of Creation—is simply incidental. It is something that is irrelevant at this moment. The thesis we are presenting is that when God ushered in the Beginning and created the Heavens and the Earth, His Only-Begotten Son was at His side, and it was out of love for Him that He set out to create us, the human race.

Everything was perfect—until Adam made the mistake of letting himself be led astray by the Serpent’s cunning.

Regardless of the dilemma that divine perfection and human freedom present to us, what is truly important is that the Son of God experienced Adam’s condemnation as something that directly affected Him.

It follows from Scripture that God and His Son left Adam and Eve for a time. When they returned, they were faced with a fait accompli. Their Father understood everything that had happened, judged the case, and in the wrath of the Judge of the Universe, pronounced judgment against all those involved. He swore to the Serpent that a son of Adam would rise up and crush its head. He condemned Adam and Eve to death.

Stunned, bewildered by that rebellion against God, His Son—the brother of the dead Adam—felt the blood rush to his head and dreamed of Yahweh’s Day of Vengeance.

But that Day of Vengeance was not for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. In reality, no one knew when it would come. The Son of God knew only that, as time went on, the loss of identity among the men God had created grew ever greater. It grew so great, and the hatred that, because of them, had been building up against the rebellious angels became so immense, that with his whole being he asked his Father to send him to Earth in person to confront the Devil himself. Once the Devil was defeated, Adam’s crown would belong to the Victor; and since the Victor and the Son of God were one and the same during His reign, the human race would emerge from the Hell into which it had been cast and resume the path for which it was created—a path from which Satan’s betrayal had led it astray.

So the Son of God came to Earth with His blood boiling, ready to wipe away the tears of our world. His sword was in His mouth; it was His Word. To conquer the world, He did not need Goliath’s sword; He only needed to open His mouth and command the winds to rise and the armies to lay down their weapons. He brings Peace; His banner is one of Health that overcomes Death and leads mankind to Immortality.

Immortality?

Did I say Immortality?

“Yes, my son, but are you going to rebel against your Father’s judgment?” said Simeon. “Are you going to condemn yourself to save us? To save the Present, are you going to condemn the Future? Certainly your Father has sent you to confront the Evil One and you will crush his head, but if you break down the walls of our prison against divine judgment, how will you differ from the one against whom you have come to avenge the death of our father Adam? For God’s judgment is firm: You are dust, and to dust you shall return. Such is our lot. Has your Father and God perhaps told you: “Go and announce to them the end of their imprisonment; set them free and grant them the immortality for which they have longed ever since I created them”? Do you not see, my son, that by allowing yourself to be swept away by the love you have for us, you are dragging yourself to ruin and dragging all of Creation down with you? Who but the Judge of us all can grant us our freedom? But if He has given that Power to His Son, then do as you will.”

THE THOUGHT OF CHRIST

The evangelists showed us in the episode of the Transfiguration that the Son of God did not need to be crucified to regain his supernatural state. The Transfiguration they speak of was precisely that: the answer to this very simple question. The “necessity” of Christ’s death, as described in their Gospels, refers to the premises of the Doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven. If there was a necessity for Christ’s death, it was not due to Jesus’ inability to regain his divine status. To regain his divine status, Jesus only had to desire it.

When he returned to Nazareth, what truly happened to the Child was that he was born anew. The Son of God, who became man and was dying to grow up—yet never saw the day when he would sit among the adults—finally stepped into our shoes. God is above and we are below, and the entire dilemma of humanity crosses a bridge over quicksand. How can we know God’s thoughts? How can we discover his plan for universal, eternal salvation?

Now it was a man who was asking himself all the questions that all men asked—and none could answer. Now it was Christ who lifted his eyes upward and looked at God face to face, seeking to know His thoughts. Now it was the Son of Man who acknowledged his ignorance and looked to God, seeking His wisdom

But you are twelve years old. And you have your whole life ahead of you. And every day you wake up, you wake up with that Cross. And with every passing year, with every passing year, that Cross weighs heavier on you. And whether you want it to or not, the weight will bring you down more than once.

You can do everything and yet do nothing; you see the world around you living in hell, and you can do nothing even though you have the power to do everything. You can save the Present and condemn the Future, or let the Present live out its Destiny and save your Freedom for when the prisoner is released from jail. You will wait for him on the other side of the door to guide him toward a New Day of freedom that will never end. Until that Day, the world must continue on its path, and until your Hour arrives, you’ll sink many times into deep depression, and you’ll have no one to support you; there’ll be no one by your side with whom to share your destiny; no one will give you a hand; no one will reach out to you because no one will be with you to know what’s happening to you and why you’re sinking until you drown.

You are Jesus of Nazareth, a young and wealthy man; you have everything a man could desire, and you take only what you want. You need nothing from anyone. Doors open for you wherever you go; you are treated as a lord, and your word is worth its weight in gold to those who do business with you. No one knows your secret—except one Woman. Her husband died when you were about twenty, and so did Cleophas. Only they remain—your Mother and her sister Joanna; only they know who you are. But neither of them knows where you’re going or what your plans are. You’re alone. When storms rage in your mind, you’ll have no one to hold onto and fight the storm with. If you do not go mad, it will be only because you are who you are, but even being who you are, you must endure the storm out in the open, without a roof or shelter from the rain that will pour down in torrents under a sky shrouded in darkness upon your mortal body. The sweeter the life you lead, the more bitter what you are about to do will be.

To the starving man, stale bread tastes like heaven, but if you give that same bread to someone who eats pastries, it will break his teeth. Yours, Jesus, are accustomed to eating the finest bread. Your body is accustomed to the finest garments. And you are going to lead an army of men to your own fate. Won’t you be crushed? Won’t their ghosts attack you in your dreams? Won’t you wake up in the deserts on your knees, begging for mercy? Won’t you be tormented by visions of their bodies torn apart by the wild beasts of the Roman circuses while you look up to Heaven, pleading for an end to the sentence against Eve and her children? How long will each year you live last for you? Won’t the twenty years that await you be an eternity for you? You have them before your eyes. They are all pure. One by one, they are all innocent. Their only crime is to love you above all things. They love you more than time, more than immortality, more than all the treasures of the universe. You are their life. And there they are, hanging on their crosses, actors in a bloody spectacle, an ode to madness, singing in honor of the tears that you, Jesus, shed for them in the desert, when you would mysteriously disappear and return without telling anyone where you had come from or what you had been doing. They saw your tears and softened your heart on the day of their martyrdom so as not to stir up a cry for vengeance within you. Will you not suffer in your own flesh the crime committed against your hundreds of thousands of little brothers and sisters, whom you will lead to the cross for no offense by which they might be found guilty? To love you will be their crime. Will you not implore your Father for mercy? Will you not seek another viable alternative? And yet the Chalice is full, and you must drink it to the very last drop. A Hope sustains you, but you cannot tell anyone about it; with no one can you share the infinite joy in which your whole being rejoices when, looking toward the One seated on the Throne of the Last Judgment, you see, you contemplate, and you see yourself.

JESUS CHRIST

We do not know at what point in life we cross the threshold from childhood to adolescence; nor at what point we have ceased to be young and become adults. There does not seem to be a general rule; it is something each person discovers for themselves and experiences in their own way.

If this is the case for us, how much more complex it is to apply our psychology to someone like the Jesus of the Gospels!

Having adopted the stance of seeing him as he saw himself—and having experienced, to the extent that our understanding allows, what was going through his mind—let us move forward. There are still many areas that remain closed to the understanding of past centuries, and which, subjected to the imagination of those who sought to penetrate their innermost depths, have come down to us distorted—like paintings tainted by the passions of the copyists.

If at any point I have allowed my own passions to run wild, the reader, as a free being, owes it to himself to recreate the historical narrative based on the characteristics of his own intellect. The author can only point to the horizon and paint what he sees with his own eyes, and although the structure of the eye is the same for everyone, the way of seeing things takes on a personal and non-transferable form. It is from this platform of personal vision and individual understanding that the author recreates the things he writes; the reader will have to adapt them to his or her own way of laughing, crying, hating, loving, understanding, and even ignoring.

Let us then return with Jesus to his parents’ home in Nazareth, and from there—in light of what he had just discovered, the Cross of Christ, his Cross—let us try to open up the horizon of his memories to the pure reflections of reality as he and his family experienced it.

The Child who went down to Jerusalem was, in every respect—as seen through the eyes of a stranger—a young gentleman. Take his cousin James, for example. James was a couple of years older than his cousin Jesus, and yet while the latter had not yet picked up a hammer or even known what it meant to drive a nail, James, son of Cleophas, was already quite skilled, the boy fully immersed in his role as a carpenter’s apprentice. As the father of that Jesus—a tall, exceptionally intelligent boy—Joseph had to endure more than a few criticisms for the way he raised his only son. He was spoiling him, they told him.

We won’t speak of envy or bring to light passions we all wish we’d never known. The truth is that the mindset of small towns has always been a hotbed of the most glaring and tedious ignorance.

The criticism directed at Joseph for the way he raised his firstborn meant nothing to Mary, nor could it be taken too far, given who the Child was. That Child they criticized was the heir of Jacob’s daughter. A large part of everything the Nazarenes saw around them belonged to “young Master Jesus.” If his parents didn’t want him to touch the nails and hammers, who was anyone to reproach them for anything?

The truth is that upon returning from Jerusalem, that Child broke away from the “young master” role he was supposed to play and clung to his father with the obedience and diligence of the good, energetic boy every father wishes for as a son.

Mary watched him work late into the day. In her entire life, her Child had never lifted a single plank, and suddenly he couldn’t stop asking for work. All his father had to do was open his mouth, and he would obey. Even Joseph himself looked at him, wondering: “What’s gotten into you, my son?”

But it wasn’t just at the carpenter’s shop. If Aunt Juana needed something done, there was her sister’s son, ready to help with whatever was needed. If they had to go out to the fields to pick almonds or harvest wheat, his nephew Jesús was always the first one there at the crack of dawn. He never complained, never talked back, and never said no—not to his own family, nor to anyone who asked him for a favor. How could he not end up overworked!

It was as if he didn’t want to think, as if he needed to forget something. He needed to throw himself into physical labor. His arms ached and his tendons trembled with exhaustion, but he never said no or backed down. He was the first to get up and the last to go to bed. He no longer played with the village children. Nor did he speak unless asked. The change was so sudden, so colossal, so surprising that his Mother would sit on the edge of his bed while her Child slept, wondering what was going through that head of his. Before, her Child would talk to her, telling her everything. Ever since they returned from Jerusalem, her Child had been a different person; he was like a stranger to her. To everyone else, he was just as he should be—an obedient, quiet boy who never interrupted his elders or talked back when scolded for anything. But to her, her Child was becoming a stranger.

“He’s becoming a man,” they told her. That wasn’t enough for her. She knew that whatever was happening to her Child could not be explained by human experience. Hadn’t she witnessed her Child’s breakdown in Alexandria? To those who saw him sitting at the door of the Jewish carpenter’s shop, the Child’s sadness could be explained by some whim his father had denied him and forbidden him from asking for again. Was it that simple? Not at all! She knew that her Son didn’t function like other children.

On that occasion, back in Alexandria, Mary had found a way to make her way into her Child’s heart. But this time, it was utterly impossible for her. All she could do was lie down beside him and fall asleep, guarding his dreams, because whatever he was going through, this time her Child would never open the doors to his mind for her, nor would he allow her to find the way to his heart.

It wasn’t that he was sad or that he was carrying such a heavy burden that the very idea of sharing it seemed impossible to the Child. She knew it was something deeper—so deep that even when she looked into his eyes, her gaze got lost in the vastness of Jesus’ eyes, never reaching the horizon behind which her Son hid his thoughts.

“What’s wrong, my son?” she asked herself, knowing that her Child would never give her the answer.  

THE DEATH OF CLEOPHAS

Cleophas, the father of James the Just and his brothers, was a blessed man. If it is true that before death a person relives the years spent in this world, then the final moments of Mary’s brother were happy ones.

The only sorrow that might have cast a shadow over his luminous memories—the fact that his father had died shortly after his own birth—could not even cloud his final moments. His sister Mary transformed that physical absence into an angelic presence that was always watching over her child.

Now that he was one step away from crossing the threshold of death, Cleophas could smile as he recalled how his older sister had eased the absence of their father by turning him into his very own guardian angel. How could he have doubted the innocence of his sister Mary on the day their mother told him about the Annunciation?

He was the first man in the world to learn of the Mystery of the Incarnation, and the first to believe, without a shadow of a doubt, in the Virgin who would conceive the Messiah King. It was his mother who took him aside and told him everything in so many words. “Son, this, this, and this will happen, and I want you to do this, this, and this.”

Cleophas forgot about his wife and his two young children, saddled his horse—and the mare for his sister—and, without giving his brother-in-law any more explanations than were necessary, cleared the way for the Virgin through Samaria.

Good heavens! How beautiful he looked, a cherub on his fiery steed with the gaze of an eagle scanning the horizon, his sword ready and sharp to draw around his Sister the circle that the unknown Roman soldier drew around the great king of Asia. “If you cross the line, you declare war on Rome; if you turn back, go in peace. If you want war, you’ll have it.”

Her brother-in-law gave her two of his hounds, Deneb and Kochab, for company. These last specimens of their breed seemed to have caught the tension of their young human brother; Deneb led the way, while Kochab watched the rear.

The Virgin would have gone down to Judea alone, with no protection other than the trust she placed in the Lord through her angel Gabriel. But how beautiful it was to see her Cleophas enveloping her in the mantle of his absolute faith in her innocence.

Some time before the Carpenter’s wife’s state of grace—a state of grace on everyone’s lips—became known in Nazareth, a young man from Judea, from Jerusalem itself, arrived in Nazareth looking for Joseph. He brought a message from Zechariah. Its content left Joseph speechless and deep in thought. “Elizabeth was pregnant.”

When, shortly thereafter, his mother-in-law decided to send Mary to Elizabeth to help her during the final months of John’s pregnancy, Joseph saw this as natural. But what he no longer found quite so logical was that it was Cleophas who beat him to it and accompanied Mary south. Now, on his deathbed, Cleophas fondly recalled the look of surprise on his brother-in-law’s face when he heard him—a boy in his eyes—speak the words of a man of integrity.

“Say no more. All conversation has ended. My mother commands, her daughter obeys, and I, her son, comply. Until the day of your wedding, your fiancée is subject to my mother’s authority. There is nothing more to discuss, Joseph. We’ll see each other again when we return.” Joseph stared at him with the eyes of one who sees the man in the boy and is delighted that this is so, because that is how things should be.

Zechariah and Elizabeth had retired to their country home in the mountains of Judah, far from Jerusalem. It had been some time since Abijah’s son had retired from the official position he had held throughout his life in the Temple’s bureaucratic hierarchy. And he had not left the Temple itself until just a few months ago because, since the priesthood was for life and he had no children, his shift bound him to his post until death or until illness prevented him from continuing.

Healthy and long-lived in an era when the average human lifespan barely exceeded fifty, Zechariah—even though he could have made his father’s shift available to the Temple—preferred to remain in his sacred post until death or illness forced him to retire. And this is exactly what happened. For when he became mute, he could no longer maintain that stance of immovability that had earned him so many enemies.

The administration of the Temple treasury fell to the priestly families that held the twenty-four shifts of worship. The president of this governing council was the high priest, who in turn was elected from among those twenty-four families. As a general rule, the position was passed down from father to son. But every now and then, what had happened to Zechariah would occur.

Zechariah had no children to whom he could pass on his seat. The natural course of action in this case was to make the Turn available to the Council of Saints and choose a successor from among the families. As one can imagine, there was bound to be someone willing to put up the money needed to purchase that vacant position.

Contrary to nature and without any need to do so, Zechariah made many enemies by flatly refusing to sell his Turn. No one could force him to make his father’s Turn available to the Council. And he did not do so.

No one ever knew what the angel said to Zechariah, but the consequences of that Annunciation were miraculous for his enemies. Having been struck dumb, the son of Abijah was forced to make his turn available to the Council, sign his resignation, and step down from office.

Zechariah retired to the villa that he and his wife owned in the hills of Judah. It was a country house, far from the world and its hustle and bustle, to which only Simeon the Younger—the sole surviving member of the Lineage of the Forerunners—had access. Aside from Simeon the Younger, they received no visitors. The reason?

Well, the reason was the miracle that the parents of John the Baptist were experiencing firsthand.

On his deathbed, Cleophas recalled the marvel he had experienced the day he met his “grandparents.” Zechariah was bouncing off the walls, and if it hadn’t been for her snow-white hair, no one would have been able to swear that Elizabeth was already over sixty. The boy looked just like him, his grandfather. He didn’t speak, but he wouldn’t stop moving. Only one other couple in the entire history of the world had experienced a miracle of this nature—Abraham and Sarah, of course.

From the porch of his grandparents’ country house, Cleophas remembered looking out at the horizon and saying to himself, “What’s the matter with you, Joseph? Why are you taking so long?” How can one recreate the joy of that boy when he saw Joseph appear in the valley, galloping across the plain! Didn’t tears well up in his eyes when he saw that giant kneel at the Virgin’s feet, asking her forgiveness for having doubted her innocence?

The day Joseph told him he was taking Mary and Jesus far away from Herod, Cleophas looked him in the eye as if to say, “And you actually thought I was going to stay behind while you take my sister to the ends of the earth.”

From the very first time he saw that lanky boy, Cleophas took an instant liking to Joseph. And they were never apart again.

As the father of a large family that seemed to go on forever, Cleophas never criticized Joseph for his son Jesus’s behavior or for the way Joseph chose to raise him. If his son Santiago bruised his fists on the corners of the planks while his nephew Jesus went off to roam the hills, Cleophas viewed this through the eyes of someone who, after all, had once been the young master of El Cigüeñal. That was how his own mother had raised him.

Of all the children in Nazareth, Cleophas was the little prince who neither worked nor had to slave away to help out the family. His sister Juana managed the fields all on her own; his sister Mary ran the most profitable dressmaking shop in the area. Every now and then, Great-Aunt Isabel would come up from Jerusalem loaded with gifts. Was she going to forget the child of the house?

What was his mission in this life? To live life to the fullest!

His nephew Jesús reminded him so much of himself that Cleophas laughed when he saw José go through such a hard time having to defend his Jesús in front of friends and neighbors.

He, too, was taken by surprise—and left in awe—by his nephew’s sudden change upon his return from Jerusalem. Like his sister, he couldn’t figure out what was going through his nephew’s mind. The only one who seemed to understand the Child was Joseph.

Joseph was the only one who didn’t seem surprised. He was the only one who seemed to know exactly what was happening to him, and, like the Child himself, Joseph followed the policy of not saying a word to anyone. With his Mother and his uncle Cleophas, Jesus felt uncomfortable because he could read in their eyes what they were thinking. With Joseph, however, the Child felt at ease. He was the only one who didn’t look at him with questions in his eyes, and the only one who knew how to handle him in such a way that Jesus forgot his troubles and became the active, intelligent, and hardworking boy that everyone praised his parents for raising.

Yes, of course, Cleophas had lived a wonderful life before meeting Joseph. But that giant nomad on the back of his Iberian horse, roaming the provinces of the kingdom—with his three Assyrian cherubs plucked from a lost fresco in some palace in Nineveh—that nomad gave his life what it had been missing: the image of the father and the brother he had never had. And now, on his deathbed, he would be the father his sons and daughters would miss.

Yes, if it is true that before dying the mind reviews the years lived, one by one, Cleophas relived those unique, wonderful years. The Virgin as his sister, King Messiah as his nephew, a Cherub as his brother-in-law, a wonderful woman who had given him sons and daughters—all healthy, all strong.

“Joseph…,” he began from his bed.

“Brother,” Joseph interjected. “Your sons are my sons, your daughters are my daughters. Of all of us, you are the blessed one at this moment. Our father David awaits his prince Cleophas in the bosom of that light that will shine when you close your eyes. We’ll meet there, brother. Come and take my hand when it’s my turn to close mine.”

And so it was. Cleophas died young, like his father Jacob.

“Just like our father, Juana, in the prime of life. How we will miss you, brother!” wept the Virgin.

They buried him in Nazareth, in the tomb of his father Jacob, beside his grandfather Matán, above the remains of Abiud, son of Zerubbabel, son of Solomon, son of David.

THE DEATH OF JOSEPH

The life of Joseph the Carpenter was extinguished shortly after Cleophas’s.

If Cleophas’s life was beautiful and worth living, that of Joseph the Carpenter was that of a warrior always teetering on the edge of a precipice, his muscles constantly tense, his nerves on edge to the very last atom, always vigilant, always ready to adapt to the next twist of fate.

“Nothing is predetermined; who knows what tomorrow will bring? When the book of life turns the page, we’ll see what it contains. And let each day have enough of its own cares.”

“It falls to the children of the Spirit to respond swiftly to the sound of the trumpet calling them to action.”

“Death always strikes from behind, but he who faces it head-on takes that so-called ‘element of surprise’ right out of its hands.”

Proverbs of this nature were the daily bread of Joseph the Carpenter. Zechariah, the future father of John the Baptist—his tutor, mentor, teacher, and everything good rolled into one—dedicated his talent, his genius, his wisdom, his artistry, and all the best he had to shaping the mind of the young Joseph. Thanks to his patience and dedication, the fearless warrior who ran in young Joseph’s blood learned to look Death in the face—and, with the gleam in his eyes of a hero who knows he is invincible, even Hell itself.

But what they never imagined was that he would find himself entangled in the webs of God Himself.

His long-held view of the birth of David’s son was also the classic one: dad, mom, they get married, they become one—two different people, yet one entity—the call of blood, the power of the flesh. Could he have imagined that God would intervene through the Incarnation of His Son? Well, honestly, no; he never imagined what happened next.

Looking back, reliving those days, Joseph the Carpenter laughed heartily.

On this occasion, the warrior had reached the other side of the battlefield. Around his deathbed, his nephews and his people wept as they bid farewell to the cherub who had never let his guard down—the death of the hero who had never taken off his helmet and armor. He was already preparing to give up his soul.

Everyone already believed that his strength had waned, that his breath was fading into the vastness between Heaven and Earth, when Joseph the Carpenter awoke from his sleep. He was roused by the memory of his reply to his Master Zechariah on the day that Elizabeth had shared with them the news of the Virgin’s Vow.

“May God’s will be done. My people have been waiting a thousand years for this day; I can certainly wait ten,” said Joseph.

God, what an unexpected turn you have given to the life of your servant!

The young Joseph grew up dreaming of the day he would see his wife give birth to the Messiah King, the master of the sword of kings, the rightful bearer of the two messianic scrolls.

His brothers and sisters did not understand why their Joseph did not marry at the age when everyone else usually did. Life was short. Life was very hard. At this point in history, no one could afford the luxury of letting the years slip by in the style of the Patriarchs, who married at forty or older. Many were already grandparents by the age of forty. What was the head of the Bethlehem carpenters’ clan waiting for to choose a wife and honor them all with fresh blood?

Joseph the Carpenter remained silent. He answered his brothers with the silence of one who, unlike other mortals fashioned from clay, seemed to have been forged from iron.

Far from having a heart of stone within his chest, but you, Holy God, left him no choice but to adopt that attitude for the good of all; for if the slightest news of the Davidic plot being hatched behind his back had reached the ears of Herod’s assassins, how long would it have taken that serpent to order the death of all your servant’s brothers?

Joseph the Carpenter awoke from his dream, reliving that unforgettable day—the day he went to the house of his mother-in-law, Anna, to ask her for an explanation regarding the rumor that had scandalized everyone in Nazareth.

What was going on?

What was reaching his ears?

The neighbors were dropping some pretty pointed hints.

“What will you name the child, Mr. Joseph? For it will be a boy.”

The Carpenter finally felt the sting; he stopped hesitating and went straight to speak with his mother-in-law.

The Widow, who had been expecting his visit, went and opened the door for him.

The Virgin’s mother had been preparing for this meeting.

She had feared it. She had longed for it. She dreamed of him, yearned for him, trembled at the thought of him.

Would she be up to the task? Had the grace that radiated from her daughter’s innocence rubbed off on her, her mother?

As a mother, she was ready to gouge out the eyes of anyone who uttered the word “adultery.” Her son-in-law Joseph was a saint, a man of the utmost goodness—but what man wouldn’t be scandalized upon hearing that his wife was in a state of grace through the work of the Holy Spirit?

With her heart in her throat, the Widow opened the door to her son-in-law.

“Sit down, my son,” she said. “This is a great day for all the families of the earth.”

What a way to break the ice!

The Carpenter sat down. As for opening his mouth, he didn’t. Nor would he have needed to. His gaze said it all.

Well, perhaps a thousand images are worth less than a single word from God, and a single image is worth more than a thousand words from a man. In this particular situation—the Virgin’s mother face to face with the man directly affected by the Incarnation of the Son of God through the work and grace of the Holy Spirit—neither words nor images seemed sufficient to that mother caught in the nets of a God who asks no one’s permission to enter the lives of the creatures He creates from clay.

A glance was enough. Their gazes said it all.

The Widow knew why her son-in-law had come, and her son-in-law knew that she knew why he had come. The question was who would break the ice.

The Virgin’s mother, inspired by the infinite love she had for her daughter, on the one hand, and by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit Himself, on the other, blurted out:

“My son, do you believe that Yahweh is God?” she blurted out to her son-in-law without giving him a chance to say a word. She knew that an opening like this was the last thing Joseph could have expected.

The Carpenter didn’t bat an eye. A man made of ice would have been more unsettling than the Carpenter at that moment.

Well, he already knew his mother-in-law, Anna; he knew what mark had left its imprint on that woman’s soul. Zechariah had raised him, Joseph; but his mother-in-law, Anna, had been shaped by her own hands by Elizabeth, the wife of his Master. So if what the “ ” the widow of Jacob of Nazareth, was doing was defending her daughter Mary—and she was undoubtedly doing just that—the Virgin’s mother was off to a good start. Time would tell where all this philosophy would lead.

The Virgin’s mother, without losing her composure or feeling disarmed by her son-in-law’s stony seriousness, continued:

“Forgive me, man of God, for coming through this door, but circumstances demand it. I mean, do you believe there is anything impossible for God?” Then she gazed at her son-in-law as if, at that moment, the mystery of God’s eyes had been revealed to her, allowing her to read Joseph’s thoughts.

Another man might have found that gaze intimidating. The Carpenter held her gaze without moving a muscle.

Although he still hadn’t grasped where his mother-in-law was heading, Joseph remained calmly seated. He had come seeking a single word—a “Yes” or a “No.” Period. And he wasn’t going to leave the house without that “Yes” or “No.” Was his wife with child? That was all he wanted to know.

The Virgin’s mother held the upper hand; she knew that her son-in-law, José, would not budge from his spot until she gave him the “Yes” or the “No.”

The truth—the whole truth and nothing but the truth—was a “Yes,” a marvelous “Yes,” a divine “Yes,” an eternal, infinite “Yes,” an unqualified, indescribable, inexplicable “Yes.”

It was also a “No”—a total “No,” an uncompromising “No” with no room for debate of any kind, a profound, non-negotiable “No,” with the Life of the Messiah in one hand and the Death of the Son of David in the other.

What would you choose, my friend? Would you opt for mockery, would you laugh in God’s face, would you deny God the power to perform that extraordinary, supernatural Work?

My friend, everything is nothing when everything is too little. But if the creature were to reject knowledge of his Creator and reduce Him to his own level of natural intelligence, the extraordinary task would be to pull such a fool out of the well of fools.

The dice—for grace blows with the wind—are still waiting for the next move. It is every man and woman’s turn to give their answer. To stand firm in the “Yes” or the “No.”

If you held all that is good in one hand and all that is bad in the other, which of the two would you choose?

Joseph the Carpenter once held the dice of the Son of Mary’s destiny in his hand. Never in the history of the universe has any man faced a similar or comparable ordeal. His decision would change the future of the world. His “Yes” or his “No” would either uphold or bring down his Creator’s entire Plan of Universal Salvation.

From her lips, however, the Virgin’s mother could expect nothing but words of wisdom. With the strength and courage befitting a daughter of Eve, the Virgin’s mother pressed on with her revelation

“Let’s see, man of God. Imagine that the Lord challenges you to put Him to the test. Yes, just as it sounds. Imagine that our Lord offers you the opportunity to challenge Him to prove to you that He is the True God—not just in words, and not just because He can perform a few more tricks than Pharaoh’s magicians.

“Let’s say it’s not enough for you to believe on His word alone that He is God, and you want—you need—to see Him with your own eyes. You want to see His Omnipotence and His Omniscience; you want to see them in action, overcoming the most difficult challenge yet, passing the greatest test you can imagine.

“Man of God, I already know that your faith is stronger than a rock, that even without seeing, you are content and find it more than enough to rely on the Word that has traveled from mouth to mouth through the firmament of the ages to believe in the Truth of our Lord. Nevertheless, grant yourself this opportunity. Answer me without prejudice. Tell me: with what test would you challenge God to give it His all? What test would you set for God that would be worthy of His Omnipotence and force Him to lay all His Omniscience on the table? Son, don’t hold back; don’t let your tongue stick to the roof of your heart for fear of finding the words. Dare to do it; challenge your Creator, because you deserve it—for all the suffering, all the pain, and all the cruelty that our ancestors have endured. What were we, my child, before the Spirit of God hovered over the waters of our seas? Animals without intelligence. Then one day we were loved by our Creator, and He bestowed upon us the gift of speech. Now, then, do not deny this to yourself; speak, lift your head to the Almighty, lay your soul at His feet, and ask Him to perform an extraordinary, unique, unrepeatable, and marvelous work—a work commensurate with His Great Spirit—that will quench your thirst for knowledge and your hunger for wisdom. He is on your side. Ask yourself what test you would set for your Creator—just one, and no more, Saint Isaac—but one that fills your soul with infinite happiness and your being with eternal joy. Come on, don’t be shy.” And the Mother of the Virgin fell silent.

Although it may seem strange to you, Joseph the Carpenter remained in a state of astonishment. He had come seeking the answer to something as simple as the truth about the rumor that his wife was said to be in a state of grace, and his mother-in-law had met him with a full-fledged theological discussion.

Joseph stared at her, trying to figure out what was going on. Was it a “Yes” or a “No”?

His mother-in-law took advantage of the confusion to take her Revelation one step further.

“Son, answer me,” she pleaded. “Don’t lie to me or stay silent for fear of offending the Lord. Tell me the truth: would you dare to challenge your God? Or would you back down and not open your mouth for fear of offending your Creator?”

Without pausing for breath, the Widow took a breath. She immediately returned to the battlefield.

“Man of God, I know I’m taking you by surprise, but grant me these few minutes of your life. I ask you again: What test would you set for God? Or let’s put it this way: What would be the greatest test for a God that a man could conceive of? For example, you want Him to prove to you once and for all that He is the True God, that He has not claimed for Himself the glory of the Uncreated Being. Do you want Him to wipe all the stars from the sky? Do you want the sun to never set? Do you want donkeys to fly? Do you want whales to walk? I don’t know—what do you want? Anyone can be an emperor. Anyone can be Midas. Don’t ask God for things a man can do. You’re going to challenge Him with an extraordinary, superior feat; you’re going to set before Him a task that not even Hercules at the height of his glory could have tackled. Do you see what I mean? … And what was I trying to tell you? Oh yes, you see, what worries me is that, knowing human nature, are you sure that once the stars have been erased from the sky, you won’t seek a natural explanation for such a divine phenomenon? When faced with a Sun frozen in the dome of the firmament, aren’t you sure that you humans won’t turn it inside out and find a natural cause that fits within your own minds?”

Having deflected the question, the Widow of Jacob of Nazareth fell silent. Joseph the Carpenter didn’t take the bait.

I would say that anyone who had seen him sitting there in front of his mother-in-law at that moment would have sworn that this man of God had ice instead of blood in his veins.

Joseph the Carpenter didn’t bat an eyelid. With his gaze fixed on his mother-in-law, he looked more like a stone statue than a creature of flesh and blood.

The Widow held his gaze. She knew full well that her son-in-law wasn’t going to say a word; after all, her daughter’s husband was cut from the same cloth as her Aunt Isabel’s husband.

Inspired by the great love she had for her daughter, the Widow acted as if José’s silence were an acknowledgment of the merit of the idea on the table.

José, who was beginning to marvel at the direction the conversation was taking, broke his silence with these first words:

“Tell me, Mother. Why would I deny my Creator the glory of His Arm?” And he fell silent.

The Virgin’s mother took the final step. The moment had come.

“Son. I am not a man.”

She had taken a step forward, yes, but in the direction that suited her.

“I don’t know how men think,” she insisted. “I was created from a man’s rib. What may be the greatest test in the universe for a man may not be so great in the eyes of a woman. The only thing I wonder is: in the eyes of a woman, could there be a greater test for God than to conceive without the intervention of a man? I mean, not in the manner of those sons of God who slept with the daughters of men and had offspring. You know that among the Greeks, the Romans, and the barbarians, their gods slept with their women and sired heroes—the last of whom was Alexander himself. No, son, I’m talking about something else. That a Virgin should give birth to a Child without knowing a man.”

Now Joseph the Carpenter really opened his eyes wide. What was his mother-in-law hinting at? Where was she leading him with this metaphysical detour? Was she wrapping the “Yes” he had come to seek in a sort of theological knot impossible to untie? The subject was so mind-boggling that Joseph remained motionless.

“Son, do you think such a trial would exceed the limits of Divine Power?” The Widow continued her attack without giving her son-in-law time to prepare a counterstrategy.

In any case, her son-in-law finally spoke up. “No. Never,” he said, completely serious.

And immediately he returned to his role as a son-in-law in a state of bewilderment at the twists and turns his mother-in-law was giving to the simple, short answer he had come seeking: Yes or No.

It seemed like “Yes,” but it was actually “No.”

Apparently, they were sugarcoating the “Yes” so that the bitter pill of recent events wouldn’t be too hard to swallow. But the idea his mother-in-law was challenging him with seemed so fantastic that his body refused to leave without first hearing with his own ears the conclusion of the argument they were crafting for him.

“I expected nothing less from you, son,” interrupted the mother, ready to defend her daughter tooth and nail. “Now let’s take another step forward. The Lord accepts your challenge. The Lord is going to give you the proof your bones long for: He is going to cause a Virgin to conceive a son through the work and grace of His Infinite Power. Do you remember the prophecy, son? I know you do.”

-The prophet Isaiah said to King Ahaz, “Ask Yahweh your God for a sign—whether in the depths of Sheol or in the heights above.”

-And Ahaz replied, “I will not ask; I do not want to tempt the Lord.”

-Then Isaiah said to him: “Hear now, O house of David: Is it not enough for you to trouble men, that you must also trouble my God? The Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, the pregnant virgin will give birth, and she will call him Immanuel.”

The Widow paused in her speech and fixed her gaze deep into Joseph’s soul.

The Carpenter still could not believe his ears. Was she telling him that the Sign had come to pass? Had the Widow gone mad, or was she trying to drive him mad?

As if reading his mind, the Widow brought up the subject again.

“Son, you’re thinking to yourself: ‘Get to the point, ma’am.’ And I ask you not to lose patience. We’re not talking about something trivial; the glory of the Eternal One is at stake. Be patient. If, by running too fast, an athlete fails to see the markers, skips them, and reaches the finish line via an unmarked path—even though he would have won anyway had he stayed on the official track—will the judges award him the laurel wreath? Surely not, right? Indeed, my son, the Eternal One is already on the move, searching for the Woman, the Virgin in whose womb His Sign will take shape. I ask you: upon which blessed woman will God rest His Arm? Upon which unique and special woman among all the daughters of David will the Most High spread the mantle of His Glory? Which one will He love as one loves a one-and-only, adored wife? You will tell me that, in this case, the Most High Himself will conceive her and predestine her from her parents’ womb to be the Mother. And you will say to yourself, “That is true.” Or does He not anticipate the one who asks by conceiving him so that he may make his request? It is the Lord’s Omniscience that moves every soul that breathes in His presence. Is not His Spirit the source that inspires every word that reaches his ear? Of course it is, my son. He opens the mouth of the one who asks: “May a Virgin give birth without the intervention of a man!” The Lord smiles to Himself. He opens His mouth and says: “So be it; I will amaze you all by performing a work that will be remembered for all eternity: The son of Eve will be born of a Virgin. It is already done, my son. Tell me now, of all women, which woman will the Most High choose to be that blessed Virgin?”

For a moment, Joseph the Carpenter thought he had already heard everything he had come seeking, but the idea his mother-in-law was putting before him was so mind-boggling that he remained motionless.

What was the Widow telling him—that his Betrothed was with child by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit?

The Virgin’s mother didn’t give him time to dwell on it too much.

“Put yourself in their shoes, son. God announces what the Sign will be through which He will reveal the Glory of His Son before all of creation. From the womb of their parents, He forms the couple who will carry in their arms the Child born of the Virgin. But now there is a problem to overcome; there is one last obstacle to surmount. Yes, my son, male pride. Will you let male pride blind your judgment?”

Joseph finally understood his mother-in-law’s reasoning.

“Are you telling me, Mother, that this has happened?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, my son. Let me recap the path we’ve taken so far. Better yet, let’s look at it from another angle. What did the Prophet say later when speaking of the Child born of the Virgin?:

‘A Child has been born to us, a Son has been born to us, upon whose shoulders rests the sovereignty, and he will be called Prince of Peace, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father…’

“What has been born, you say, Mother?” Joseph interrupted her. For the first time, Joseph the Carpenter stirred, revealing that his patience was wearing thin. The Virgin’s mother resumed her attack before losing her hold on him.

“Don’t let male pride blind your intelligence, son. For if He neither deceives nor lies and fulfills all His promises, what will we say? That the prophets of Israel were all liars and impostors? That, just to glorify themselves, they wrote the Holy Scriptures with no other purpose than to recite poetry? You tell me. I await your answer.”

Joseph the Carpenter followed her line of reasoning. He thought that, viewed this way, the Widow was absolutely right. Either his people were a nation of impostors with an infinite capacity for self-deception, or—since the Child had certainly not been born—there could be no Nativity. So far, so good. What was already sticking in his throat, however, was the conclusion his wife’s mother was leading him toward. She was telling him that the Virgin was his Mary. She hadn’t said it in those exact words yet, but it was clear that this entire discourse was building up to that final declaration.

Clever as ever, inspired by faith, his mother-in-law cut him off mid-thought. One might say she was divine rather than merely inspired. She read his mind faster than he could read his own. Seizing the moment, the Virgin’s mother went right to the point.

“My daughter, your wife, is the Chosen One to conceive in her womb the Child who was to be born of that Virgin of whom the Prophet spoke to us. You, Joseph, are the Man.”

For a fleeting moment, Joseph was on the verge of standing up and bringing that unforgettable conversation to a close with a “that’s enough.” But he remained seated. His mother-in-law continued.

“Before you, my son, God has opened two doors. These two doors will remain open before the generations that will follow us when you and I are but a memory in the annals of the ages. One is the door of faith; the other, the door of unbelief. If you choose the latter, you will act like the one who defied his God, and upon discovering that the Virgin chosen to reveal His Glory to him was his own wife, rebelled against the One whom he himself had defied. But I know you will not do this. My son, I am, before all others, a witness to my daughter’s immaculate innocence. Her angel will lead you out of the darkness of doubt that overwhelms you. The other, my son, is the door of faith. My heart tells me that you will choose this one. And that you will rush to seek out the Mother of the Messiah for whom our people have been waiting for so many millennia.”

Inexplicably, on his deathbed, Joseph the Carpenter smiled. Is there a more beautiful death than that of a child of God who bids farewell to this world with a smile on his lips?

Well, just as all his nephews and his people believed that at any moment Joseph would close his eyes forever, Joseph sat up and begged everyone to leave and let him be alone with his wife and son. Once they were gone—the three of them alone—Joseph took a breath and began to speak.

“Wife, my lips have remained sealed until this day for reasons you yourself will understand once everything is over—reasons that no longer prevent me from sharing this with you and your Son.

“Son, what shall I say to my Lord? My soul stands before my God. I am going to meet my Judge, before whom I must give an account of my life. But there is something you must know before I leave this world.

“Your Mother has already told you about her great-grandparents, Elizabeth and Zechariah, whom you never knew and to whom your Mother and I owe so much. Be patient with me in this final hour, and remember my words on your Day.

“Where shall I begin? How can I open the door for you to understand the men and women who laid their lives at the feet of their God so that your Light might dawn upon the darkness? If I have never revealed to you the events I am now disclosing, it was for your own good. Do not blame me for having kept you on the sidelines of the story of those men and women who lived their days on a knife’s edge, their lives hanging by a thread every day so that your Coming might be fulfilled. You will know, my son, what you must do when your Eternal Father declares your Day to have begun.”

PART II:                                                                                                                                

                “ IAM THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA”

THE HISTORY OF THE PRECURSORS OF THE MESSIAH