The Jesse Tree

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Solomon was David’s son, but whereas David could be stupid sometimes – downright wicked on occasions – Solomon was as wise and good as any hero in a fairy tale. One day, God asked him what gift he would like best. Now you or I might have said “money” or “peace and quiet” or “long life”, but not Solomon. He thought to himself, I’m a king and what do I know about anything? I’m as foolish as a little child. So he asked God to grant him wisdom. God was so delighted that he gave everything else to Solomon as well: good looks, victory, love, wealth – everything.

  Out of that wealth, Solomon built a temple. God designed it, and Solomon followed the plans. Together they came up with a building so immense and beautiful that in time the world came to marvel at it. And if visitors were impressed by the Temple, they were impressed still more by the king. Solomon was a poet, a statesman and a judge from the start.

  It seemed as if there was no problem he could not solve.

  So it was to Solomon that people brought their quarrels and lawsuits, their problems and complaints. It was to Solomon that, one day, the two women had come, thrusting the bawling baby into his face, demanding a judgement.

  “She is trying to steal my baby! Tell her! Tell her she can’t!”

  “Don’t believe a word she says! He’s mine! Anyone will tell you!”

  Two women. One child. Someone had to be lying. Rachel said that Miriam had stolen her baby when her own died in the night. Miriam said that it was quite the other way around. The room filled up with the feeble wailing of the baby, the swearing of oaths and the vowing of vows. Solomon put his hands over his ears. “Stop! Silence! Be still!”

  All but the baby fell silent. Solomon studied the red-faced creature mewling in his lap. Then he stood up and laid the baby on the floor. Perhaps he did not want his robes dirtied.

  “Are there witnesses?” he asked. There were none.

  “Is there any proof or evidence?” There was only the word of the women.

  “Then let the prize be shared between them!” And he called for a sword. His face was a blank, his voice as sharp and cold as a blade.

  The women gaped. The king sized up the sword stroke needed – the upswing, the force, the size of the target…

  Then he lifted the blade to cut the baby in two.

  “STOP!” Rachel dropped to her knees and leaned across the baby to shield it with her body. “Stop! Don’t! She can have him! I withdraw my claim! Only don’t hurt my… Don’t hurt him! Let him live!” Her eyes were like two deep wounds in her face. Miriam gave a yelp of victory.

  Solomon laid aside the sword. “Now I have the evidence I needed,” he said, and his voice was soft as velvet, as gentle as a woman’s. Tenderly lifting the baby, he laid it, not in Miriam’s reaching arms, but in Rachel’s. “A child’s true mother would sooner break her own heart than her child’s,” said Solomon. “I know now that he is yours.”

  The court ushers grabbed roughly at Miriam – the proven liar, the wicked stealer of babies – threatening her with fines, punishment, imprisonment. But Solomon waved them away. “Last night, this woman’s child died. Has she not lost enough already?”

  The court session was over. The palace fell silent, but for the distant bang and clatter of building work up at the great Temple. Solomon’s soul turned inward, to that quiet inner reservoir of stillness that made him so wise. This was where he talked to God, and composed poetry about love.

  Strangely enough, at the heart of Solomon’s Temple, there was just such a place. People called it the Holy of Holies – an inner room furnished with stillness, where holiness itself could be found.

  For a long time, neither of them spoke. Then the boy said, “Solomon couldn’t have been all that foolish to begin with, or he would never have asked God for wisdom, would he?”

  “True.”

  “Did he know about you and me, old Solomon?”

  Mr Butterfield narrowed his eyes. “No-o-o,” he admitted cautiously. “He wasn’t a prophet.”

  “But we know about him, right?”

  “Hmm,” said Mr Butterfield, scenting a trick question.

  “… So that makes us wiser than Solomon, doesn’t it?!” And the boy ran out of the church, laughing delightedly.

  Hearing the door reopen, Mr Butterfield retaliated, “You’re not wise, lad! You’re just too clever for your own boots!” Then he glanced up, grinning… and saw that he had insulted the vicar by mistake.

  THE IDOL AND THE STILL SMALL VOICE

  “So why wasn’t Jesus a king,” asked the boy the next day, “if his ancestors were David and Solomon?”

  The old man examined the blade of his chisel. “Solomon’s kingdom didn’t last. After he died, it was carved in two by rival kings. Some time later, Ahab came to power in one of these territories. King Ahab was as wicked as Solomon was good. In fact, there was only one person in the whole world more wicked than Ahab, and Ahab married her – a woman called Jezebel.”

  When Jezebel married Ahab, she brought her religion with her. She wasn’t like Ruth. She didn’t learn to love the religion of the Hebrews, the Israelites. No, Queen Jezebel chose to hate it. She set out to destroy the Israelite God and replace him with her own – the false god Baal. So the first thing she did was to order the death of every Israelite prophet: no mercy. No pity. No survivors.

  But Elijah escaped the terrible slaughter. With God’s help, he found himself a hiding place, like a water rat, on the bank of the River Jordan.

  No food. No friends. Nowhere to turn.

  Elijah curled up and closed his eyes, barely wanting ever to open them again. When he looked through his lashes, he saw black birds above him. Crows circling over a carcass, he thought.

  But they were not crows. They were ravens, and in their beaks they carried bread and meat. Like small jet-black angels, they waited on Elijah. For week after week, feeding him, preserving his life. The question was: for what?

  The Israelites wept. The clouds above them ought to have wept, too, at the death of so many holy prophets, but they shed not one drop. In fact, they melted away like manna at noon, and left only a brass-coloured sun that baked the country dry.

  No water. No crops. Famine.

  “Go to the city of Zarephath,” said God to Elijah, “and do as I tell you…”

  At the city gates, Elijah met a woman, thin as a stalk of corn. “Give me some water and something to eat,” the prophet said.

  “Me, sir?” she replied. “I’m here gathering wood to cook one last mouthful of bread. Tonight all our food will be gone, and we shall sit down together and starve, my boy and I.”

  But Elijah simply asked again, “Give me something to eat.”

  Out of charity or out of despair, the widow agreed, knowing this guest of hers would empty her flour bin and her bottle of oil once and for all.

  But no! After supper, she found they were both still half full! In fact, days came and days went, and still the bin and the bottle were not emptied. “You have been good to one of God’s prophets,” Elijah explained, smiling at the joy a simple miracle could give.

  Within weeks that joy was gone. “Is this how your great God rewards me?” The widow stood in the doorway, her little boy in her arms. The child was dead.

  Elijah could find nothing to say to comfort her. He spoke to God instead. “Are you really going to let this happen to a woman who befriended me?” he implored, taking the little body in his arms, stumbling up the steps of the house. Up in his room, he laid the boy down. Three times he flung himself across the little body, berating God, pleading with God.

  With a noise like a fire sucking in air, the boy began to cough, his eyes to flicker, his chest to heave. Behind Elijah, the widow laughed and wept and wept and laughed, spreading her palms to the sky. “A man of God! A man of God! Now I know you are a man of God!”

  When God put life back into that little boy, he put it back, too, into Elijah. Suddenly the prophet was filled with the certainty that he could do anything. He was simply a tool in the
hand of God (and God is a craftsman, after all).

  Elijah went to King Ahab. “Abandon your idol worship! Turn back to the one true God!” he demanded. “Summon the people to Mount Carmel, and I’ll show you the difference between a false god and the real thing!”

  Two altars stood on the mountainside, one built by the queen’s prophets of Baal, the other by Elijah. There was no difference between them, though – stones, sticks, a sacrificial ox – and neither was lit. The pagan prophets began to dance and to chant, to sway and jump and roll their eyes. “Send down fire, O mighty Baal!” they wailed. “Devour this, our sacrifice!”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Elijah, after this had gone on for a while. “Maybe Baal’s asleep! Call louder!”

  So the queen’s prophets lunged and pranced, yelped and whooped. “SEND DOWN FIRE, O BAAAAAL!”

  No spark. No flicker. No answer.

  Then Elijah raised his eyes to the sky and simply asked once for the gift of fire.

  It was as if the sun had lobbed a fireball. It was as if the stones themselves had burst into flame. With a smell of roast meat, a welter of orange fire swallowed up Elijah’s sacrifice. The sea of faces watching from the valley below turned orange in the glow, then disappeared as the crowd fell flat and cried, in one voice, “The Lord is God!”

  Elijah, his face red from the heat of the fire, looked over at King Ahab. “Go home,” he said. “The drought is over.”

  From the cloudless blue of the sky, this seemed as unlikely as… as, well, fire falling from heaven, but Ahab had learned better than to scoff at Elijah. Sure enough, as he drove his chariot back to his palace, the sky filled up with billowing rain clouds, and sharp drops of rain began to pierce the dust.

  “Where are my prophets?” Jezebel demanded when Ahab returned home.

  “They failed,” said King Ahab. “The true God sent fire; theirs didn’t. Everyone saw.”

  Queen Jezebel, however, did not fall on her face and worship God. “ ‘Where are my prophets?’ I asked.”

  “Elijah killed them after his God sent fire.”

  Jezebel’s face froze over like a pond. She called for a servant and sent this message to Elijah: “May I die, too, unless I kill you within the day.”

  Elijah’s new-found bravery melted away. He fled for his life – out of the royal city of Jezreel, out of the wet, greening countryside, out into the desert.

  No food. No water. No courage.

  How had anything changed for him? He was back where he had started, and so tired that he almost wished the miraculous fire had swallowed him, too, off the face of the earth.

  He woke to the sound of a voice in his ear, a sweet smell of baking, a hand on his sleeve. “Eat, Elijah. Drink. Then go to Mount Horeb. God is waiting.” By the time he had shaken off sleep, there was no one to be seen, but a flagon of water and a slab of cake stood beside his head.

  For forty days and forty nights, that jug and cake kept him going, as he trekked across the lonely desert towards the holy mountain of Horeb. Once there, Elijah stood on the mountaintop and listened for the voice of God.

  Lately, he had grown better at listening.

  A blustering, bullying, bellowing wind came and buffeted the mountain, uprooting bushes, wildly wailing and whipping up the dirt… But the wind was not God speaking.

  An earthquake took hold of the roots of the mountain and shook it until boulders bounced by and stones skittered downhill in landslides… But the earthquake was not God speaking.

  A firestorm besieged the mountain, licking up every leaf and twig, scouring Horeb bare. Elijah was wound in a shroud of black and choking smoke… But the fire was not God speaking.

  Last of all, in the silence that followed the wind and the earthquake and the fire, a calm, small voice spoke to Elijah. Elijah knew that this was the voice of God.

  “Find the men called Hazael and Jehu and anoint them kings over Israel. Find the young man Elisha and teach him all you know; he must take your place when you are gone.”

  Elijah bowed his head. He knew he would obey. He knew that God saw far into the future – farther than any prophet – beyond wise kings and evil ones, beyond good times and bad. Elijah would go where he was sent and speak the words God put into his mouth. He was a tool, after all, in the hands of a craftsman.

  “Was it angel cake, do you think?” said the boy abruptly.

  “Was what angel cake?” asked Mr Butterfield, confused for a moment.

  “The cake that the angels delivered to Elijah in the desert. I like angel cake.”

  “I think it’s unlikely.”

  “I expect those ravens were making up for the time when they didn’t find any dry land for Noah!”

  ‘They would have been very old ravens in that case,” said the carpenter, carving the delicate feathering into a raven’s wing.

  “Descendants, then. Ravens from the same family tree.”

  “Oh, certainly,” said Mr Butterfield, nodding earnestly. “Have to be, wouldn’t they? Anyway, where else would you find a family of ravens, if it wasn’t in a family tree? Tee-hee.”

  It was the closest he had come to making a joke for several years. Mr Butterfield began to whistle a breathy tune.

  WAR AND PEACE

  “Was Elijah one of Jesus’ ancestors?”

  Mr Butterfield folded his bottom lip over the top one. It was far too difficult to explain.

  “Well, what about Elisha, then? Was he?”

  “No, no, no. He and Elijah were prophets. Can’t you see? They have a separate bough to themselves. But they often appear on Jesse trees. It’s traditional.”

  “Why? Why are they there? If they weren’t ancestors of Jesus?”

  The carpenter dropped the little scraping tool he was using to hollow out the raven’s eye. “It’s traditional, I told you. Tradition…”

  “But you must know,” insisted the boy.

  “Of course I know. Of course I do!” Mr Butterfield mopped his forehead with a dirty rag. “The prophets are there because… because they knew Jesus was coming. Even hundreds of years before he came, they caught glimpses of him in their dreams! They pictured him in their visions. They promised God’s people that he really was coming – a redeemer, a rescuer, someone who would forgive them all their mistakes. ‘A descendant of Jesse will appear…’ – that’s what the prophet Isaiah told them. ‘A shoot will spring from the stock of Jesse and from his roots a bud will blossom.’ Long before the prophets, Joseph, Moses and all the people I’ve told you about trusted God to rescue them. But the prophets knew something Joseph and Moses didn’t. God had told them he would send a saviour. The Messiah.”

  “Someone to fight off their worst giants!”

  “Someone to guide them back to Paradise Garden.”

  “So where are the prophets? Show me!”

  Mr Butterfield pointed out a row of symbols dangling from one bough of his oaken Jesse tree. “Here, look. Here’s one of the ravens that fed Elijah in the desert. Here’s Nehemiah’s trowel… (He encouraged the Israelites to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem after they were destroyed.) And here’s a plough for Isaiah.”

  “Was he a farmer, then?”

  “I told you. Weren’t you listening? He was a prophet.”

  “I thought propheting might be a part-time job. Why a plough?”

  “Because he said there would come a time, one day, when there would be no more war, and people would hammer their swords into blades for their ploughs. Imagine. Peace. Blessed peace.” Mr Butterfield said it wistfully, wishfully. His head was spinning. “Next, I’ll carve a bear here, to represent Elisha…”

  “Ooh, a bear! Why a bear? Tell about the bear!”

  The questions buzzed like hornets round Mr Butterfield’s head. “Because a crowd of good-for-nothing small boys waylaid him and jeered at him and called him names and chanted, ‘Go on, Baldy! Go on, Baldy!’ and cheeked him and pestered him until he couldn’t stand any more, so he cursed them black and blue, and two she-bears came r
ampaging out of a wood and ate them all up! NOW WILL YOU LET ME GET ON?!”

  The boy bolted.

  A moment later, the carpenter started after him, swaying unsteadily from foot to foot, arms upraised and looking very like a charging bear. “Stop! Wait!”

  Clang! The big metal latch of the door clacked shut.

  The bear banged up against the font, making the water slop. He steadied himself, opened the latch, but the street outside was already empty. Wearily he slumped down on a big oak chest by the door.

  “I’ll bet Elisha regretted that temper of his,” he said under his breath. “I know I do.”

  The bear that he carved that day was not very fierce at all. In fact it wore an anxious sort of a smile and stood on its hind legs, stretching its neck, for all the world as if watching out for a long-awaited friend.

  DUMBSTRUCK!

  Mr Butterfield waited. He did not know what he was waiting for exactly, but he waited. Just when he finally had the chance to work undisturbed, he could not seem to get on. He had nearly reached the crown of the Jesse tree – the boughs in which he would carve the family of Jesus himself… And yet, Mr Butterfield waited, and the longer he waited, the more restless he grew. His big shoes crunched the dust up and down the aisle, and even took him up to the altar to gaze at the figures in the stained-glass windows. As the light faded behind the windows, the saints and apostles melted away. But Mr Butterfield sat down where he was, in the soft gloom, waiting.

  “Are you allowed up there?” It was the boy.

  “So long as I show respect,” said Mr Butterfield. The bones of his knees clicked as he stood up. “Once upon a time, only the priest came past the altar rail. People aren’t so strict nowadays.” He waited for the boy to ask for a story. “I mean, in the Temple in Jerusalem, only certain priests could go into the Holy of Holies, the sacred centre. It was hidden out of sight by a curtain.