The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  “They strangle when they try to speak,” Barnabas said to Paul. “I can recognize a word or two, but not much more.”

  In the morning as they approached the city, its pink limestone walls topped with crenellated parapets and turrets, children and dogs began to run in circles around them. They heard the bleating of sheep and goats. Deep-throated bells rumbled over rooftops, and soon a number of men and women emerged from behind the trees and bushes.

  “There must be an occasion,” Barnabas said.

  “We’re the occasion,” Paul said. “I sense God’s hand at work in Lystra.”

  This was, as they both knew from advance reports, a city with few Jews, although they had a contact in Lystra—a woman called Eunice, a Jew formerly from Antioch, whom Phoebe knew well and admired. She and Timothy, her son, were already followers of the Way, and they had formed a tiny gathering at their house. But the name of Jesus meant nothing to most dwellers in this city, where innumerable temples and altars to pagan gods and goddesses could be found. The chief deity here was Zeus—the god of thunder, the mighty one of Mount Olympus.

  As we know from the ancient poets, who never tired of writing about this god of thunder, the mightiest figure on Olympus, nothing could restrain his erotic energies. He sired endless progeny over the centuries, including Athena, Apollo, and Artemis. Even gods who were not his actual offspring called him father, bowing in his presence.

  Now a crippled man scuttled crabwise in the dirt and mumbled to himself as he approached Paul and Barnabas.

  “What’s your name, sir?” asked Paul.

  The fellow grinned, a toothless slice of a smile. His tongue slithered in and out of his mouth like a lizard, and he spat in the dirt.

  Paul waited patiently. Then he shouted, “Speak to us!”

  “Ariston,” he said.

  Paul lit up. “Which means ‘the best.’ I do believe that’s what it means.”

  Barnabas enjoyed this. “So are you the best they have in Lystra?” he asked.

  The crowd that had gathered around them, a dozen or more, laughed, enjoying the mockery. A piece of unexpected theater is always welcome.

  “I’m from a good family,” Ariston said. “Very good, my parents, they are. But my legs never did carry my body.”

  “And do you wish to walk?” Paul asked.

  “I do.”

  Paul considered him. “Let me tell you that my God can help.”

  “Who is your God?”

  “Jehovah. He is the only God, the God of Israel.”

  “There are so many gods…”

  “There is only one God. He is here, there, and in all places around us. In the air and grasslands, in the walls of this city, every stone and crevice cries out to him. He lives inside of you, Ariston. He makes you the best of the best.”

  “In me?”

  “Feel him in your breast, I beg you. Feel him!”

  Paul put his right hand on the forehead of Ariston. This brought stillness as well as curiosity. The crowd could not imagine what lay in store, but several of them grinned in the expectation that this mysterious visitor would soon reveal his fraudulence, and everyone would laugh.

  “Rise,” Paul said, unworried that the poor fellow might prove incapable of lifting himself from the ground. “Rise in the name of Jesus the Christ!”

  A crack of thunder came, although not a cloud could be seen anywhere in the sky, and fear rippled through the crowd, moving from one person to the next, as when a cold wind moves through a deep forest and each leaf suddenly trembles.

  Ariston looked thoroughly befuddled, afraid.

  “Rise!” Paul said.

  “I can’t do it,” Ariston whispered. “I cannot get up. My legs—”

  Paul spoke sternly: “Rise and walk, in the name of Jehovah, the only God. Rise and walk in his holy name!”

  The poor man asked for a stick from a man beside him. Using it for balance, he drew his legs beneath him and, with a grimace, pulled himself to a standing position. He wobbled for a few steps, then truly walked, even casting aside the stick.

  As Paul recalled at a later time, “I saw him dancing! Dancing Ariston!”

  The crowd gaped at this spectacle, and one of them shrieked, “The gods have come to us! This is Zeus! This is Hermes!”

  A dozen of the citizens of Lystra groveled before them. One young man lay prostrate on the ground at Paul’s feet, letting his face drop into the dirt. A woman fell before Barnabas on her knees, lolling her tongue. She lifted her arms to him, as if beseeching.

  “They believe you are Zeus,” said Paul.

  “It must be the beard,” said Barnabas.

  A small girl appeared with a bouquet of yellow wildflowers, which she gave to Paul, and then a hoary-headed man, possibly a priest at the Temple of Zeus, stepped through the crowd, which opened for him with a hush of respect. A number of heads bowed in his presence and mumbles of adoration could be heard from several women in veils. The priest wore a pristine linen tunic and a necklace of glass and silver shards, and he carried a long staff. He wore no shoes, but the bottoms of his feet were as thick and brown as old leather.

  He pointed to Barnabas. “We acknowledge your presence among us, bearer of thunder. We have long expected your visit.”

  Barnabas looked at Paul with confusion, as the true meaning of this commotion still eluded him. He thought Paul had been joking when he said they thought he was Zeus. On the other hand, when did Paul joke about anything?

  “Great One, you have come to us for a reason, and you honor us,” the priest continued. “We shall sacrifice a bull.” He tilted the top of his staff toward Paul. “Oh, messenger of the gods, you are welcome, too!”

  The crowd multiplied, with townsfolk rushing to see these visitors. Rumors of this miracle of healing spread like seeds in the wind. And people began to chant and circle around the visitors, holding hands, dancing. Paul recognized the chant as an ancient hymn to Zeus, one that—he would tell me—“was known well before Homer sang of Troy.”

  The priest shouted above the canticle, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men. We are blessed, Lycaonians!”

  Several young men lifted Paul and Barnabas on their shoulders, parading them through the city gates, bearing them aloft to the Temple of Zeus with the beating of brassy cymbals and hollow drums. They set them down gingerly before what seemed like an altar, whereupon a chorus began to sing their praises in the odd language of the region, which neither Paul nor Barnabas could understand, although they could sense the veneration. One wild-eyed woman with curly auburn hair threw herself at the feet of Barnabas, weeping, mumbling.

  “She would like to kiss your feet,” said Paul.

  “So I am Zeus,” Barnabas said, “and you are Hermes.”

  Paul found it difficult to accept this confusion, or to understand what it meant for the ultimate success of their mission here, but he could do nothing. The crowd swelled, chaotic, numbering several hundred devotees of Zeus within less than an hour. A band of young men with painted faces whirled with their spears in circles, with one of them pirouetting in the middle. An old woman knelt, issuing a tremulous and unearthly howl—as if the world had come to an end before her eyes. There was a choir of small girls who sang what seemed like a sweet if inappropriate tune. And soon a pair of oxen in garlands trod to the slaughter behind a young votary at the temple in a salmon-colored silk robe, with the sound of tambourines and loud copper barrels rung by hammers.

  A thin woman in a headdress began to kiss Paul’s feet, but he pushed her away. “I am not Hermes!” he shouted. “Away, girl!”

  The woman turned to Barnabas next. Her eyes filled with tears as she began to claw at his garment.

  “Let go!” he said, as she clutched his belly.

  “I worship you, Great One! Listen to my prayers!”

 
“Don’t touch me, please!”

  Paul ripped off his own tunic, exposing his bare hollow chest. “I am Paul, a man. I am like you. I am a man!”

  It was evident that they understood little of what Paul said as they lifted him, then Barnabas, back onto their shoulders and carried them to a handsome travertine house behind the Temple of Zeus.

  “This is for you,” said a man in yellow robes, another votary, in vaguely comprehensible Greek.

  “I am not Zeus,” Barnabas said.

  The man shook his head sadly. “You must accept your greatness, my Lord.”

  They left them with baskets of food—assorted meats, fruit, honey, and bread—and amphorae of wine.

  Paul knew he must pray for instruction.

  The house was still, which came as a relief after a time of such commotion and confusion. They had been provided with soft pallets and cushions of silk, and Barnabas, exhausted by the scramble of the day, soon fell into a consuming sleep while Paul prayed.

  As often happened when he prayed, Paul slipped into a trance—eyes closed, hands apart, palms upturned. He swayed forward and back, pivoting at the waist, his lips moving. Once in a while he sighed or seemed to wince. Prayer, for him, was agonistic, an effort of listening, with his attention spiraling inward. He grunted at times. He wrestled with whatever dark angels presented themselves. Sometimes, he told me, he could actually see a brilliant rank of seraphim, with the Lord himself, the Ancient of Days, perched on the edge of an alabaster cloud.

  After a while, Paul could not help himself but fell asleep beside Barnabas. God had offered no instruction.

  They both awakened to shouts on the street below and saw dozens of angry faces.

  In an unexpected reversal, a furious mob had come to kill them, or so it appeared. Paul saw Thamyris below, with a cluster of young friends, and immediately understood that they had followed them from Iconium to seek revenge. Apparently it was not enough simply to disappear. Paul and Barnabas must suffer.

  The door had never been locked, and so a crowd seized Paul and Barnabas, taking them to separate locations in Lystra. And Barnabas found himself in a small cell with a damp floor.

  “We have done nothing,” he told his jailor. “Let me go at once!”

  “You are not Zeus,” the jailor replied.

  “I never said I was.”

  “Your friend, he was able to heal the cripple.”

  “God healed him. He spoke in the name of Jehovah, the only God.”

  “There are many gods.”

  “No, sir. There is one. Let me tell you about him. And let me tell you about his son, Jesus the Christ.”

  This jailor was a young Greek-speaking man, with a dark brown beard, and he leaned toward Barnabas. He seemed willing to listen and drew up a chair, allowing Barnabas to explain himself. Where had they come from? Why had Lycaonians ever thought they were gods?

  In the meantime, they took Paul—the devil himself, who had healed a lame man in the name of his foreign god—to the outskirts of Lystra near the city dump.

  Thinking of Jesus in his time of trial, Paul didn’t resist, not even when one of them hurled a large stone at his head, knocking him to the ground. Another man kicked him in the back so hard that he could hear his spine crack, while further stones rained on his head, and Paul believed that what happened to Stephen on the outskirts of Jerusalem would happen to him. It was not a pretty death, and not what he expected from Lystra.

  Yet Paul refused to resist. “In Jesus there is neither Greek nor Jew,” he whispered.

  But these were not Greeks, not exactly, and they were certainly not Jews.

  They stepped on Paul and kicked him in the ribs, pummeled him with stones. And left him for dead. Paul’s eyes rolled back in his head, leaving ghastly white globes without life in them. Blood poured from his left ear.

  “He’s dead,” said one of his attackers.

  In contrast, the jailor looking after Barnabas listened to him intently and then prayed with him. Soon the Holy Spirit overwhelmed his soul. Without a thought to the consequences of his action, he opened the door of the cell, saying, “Go with God!”

  Barnabas walked unmolested into the alleyway, strolled into the marketplace, then out of the gates of the city. And nobody paid the least attention to him, although a young girl with an angelic face approached and touched his hand as soon as he stepped outside of the walls. He could see that she wanted him to follow her, and he understood that God had sent her as a messenger.

  She led him to the dump where Paul lay dying.

  Blood pooled around him, dampening the dirt. One ear was battered, torn. Barnabas bent to pray over his companion’s limp body, asking God to accept his soul.

  “This is thy humble servant,” Barnabas said. “Take him, dearest Lord.”

  “Not yet,” said Paul, in a gravelly voice. He opened one swollen eye.

  “You are not dead!”

  Now three or four young men approached, and Barnabas was afraid they would finish off Paul and stone him as well. But they lifted Paul gently, settling him on a litter, and carried him along a pebble-strewn path to a racing stream. They lowered him into the cool water, and one of them washed the blood from his head, using his hand to clear the skin. Paul wakened fully now, his eyes wide.

  “God has spoken,” Barnabas said.

  The stream poured into a marshy area below, and they watched a dozen or so long-beaked white storks fishing for frogs, while buzzards circled above them on black wings.

  Barnabas and the young men lifted Paul onto a mossy bank, where he lay with a tuft of grass beneath his head. One of the men tended to Paul’s torn ear, bandaging it with muslin.

  Later that day, a couple of women brought them food and drink.

  Paul lost consciousness again, falling into an expressionless cold sleep. When after several hours he hadn’t wakened, Barnabas began to fear for Paul’s life. He put a palm to the apostle’s mouth, which was slightly ajar, and could feel a faint breath: the only sign of life. Paul lay there like a barely smoldering fire, his flames liable to flicker and turn to blue ash at any moment. But before darkness fell, his eyes opened, and he managed a single word: Jesus.

  Barnabas said to him, “Yes, Paul. Jesus. Jesus.”

  Chapter Ten

  PAUL

  I would not be beaten, cast aside, and left for dead by the evil Lycaonians without God’s intervention. He had raised me up, allowed me to proceed. I confess, though, I’d been shaken. Was this God’s way of refining my spirit, of tempering my steel? Did I need this abuse? Did I have to stare into eternity at such close range?

  One night not long after the hideous events in Lystra, I found myself cursing heaven in my prayers. Who do you think I am, God? What sort of maker would abuse his creation, allow one of his most faithful servants to suffer and nearly die?

  Those words had hardly escaped my lips when it occurred to me that Jesus himself had been more frightfully abused, beaten and scourged, nailed to a tree. His flesh had been shredded. He had bled to death. I, on the other hand, had merely been assaulted, left to die by myself beyond the city walls, abandoned. I suffered greatly but did so for his sake. And this helped me think about what had happened without rage and resentment.

  It was easy to destroy a man. We are poor creatures, all of us, readily discouraged. We fall short of our divine nature, and miserably so.

  Barnabas and I closed the circle of this journey by returning to Antioch, the city where our mission had begun a few months earlier. We had taken ourselves out, begun to test our message about the Kingdom of God. We met resistances, some of them coming from within, such as the difficulties between John Mark and myself. To a degree, I had to resist my own unwillingness to listen to God, to make myself vulnerable, and to fail. I would need to fail again, fail in huge ways, much as Jesus had failed, then found himself through fa
iling.

  I could hardly know what fruits might come of my travels with Barnabas, although I saw that we had spread seeds that might put out shoots after a period of dormancy. I would, I swore to myself, return to each of these places in the future. I was like a gardener coaxing delicate plants to life, these fresh gatherings of the Way. But for now, Antioch would absorb my attention.

  The Way flourished here, as gentiles came to the gatherings in unforeseen numbers to share the sacred meal on the First Day, to read the scriptures, talk, pray, and sing. The excitement of this drew me forward, and I knew that Luke, Phoebe, and the others would be happy to hear stories about our travels, to tell me what had happened in Antioch in the months of our absence. They did, from the beginning, encourage my presence at their meals, inviting me to offer reflections, and I would attend as many as I could.

  Hardly a few days passed without meeting Luke. He had made a little progress on his life of Jesus, and I read some passages. He had such an array of sources now and worked diligently to organize them. In the meantime, Phoebe gave me a lovely room overlooking the garden of her villa, a place where I could recuperate from my injuries in Lystra. My neck had been nearly broken, my head crushed, one ear damaged, and my back had twisted in ways that would cause trouble for years to come. In this refuge I could read quietly and write, pray, and meditate, or spend hours in conversation with Luke. Phoebe suggested I should meet with those who had recently joined us, helping them to understand the message of Jesus and how they might grow closer to the reality of God. It struck me that I could find the Christ in these conversations, as God happens when people of faith meet. “Where two or three are gathered, there you will find me,” Jesus said—a saying that Luke would quote.

  But impediments arose, threatening to overwhelm our circle. A small group led by a man named Jacob arrived from Jerusalem, sent to us by James. Like the brother of our Lord, these messengers failed to understand that Jesus was the Logos, present before and after time, and so present before his birth. They questioned the eternal and Godlike nature of his being and, in keeping with James, regarded Jesus as the mortal offspring of Joseph and Mary, a natural child of natural parents, one who gradually discovered the voice of God rising within his breast. By strict obedience to the Law of Moses, he became the Christ. James and those in his sway followed the Law to the letter precisely, as they imagined Jesus did. They insisted on circumcision for all God-fearing gentiles who wished to join the Way and enforced dietary laws, believing that Jews and Greeks could never sit happily together and share a meal. For them, the Jesus movement must be considered a reformed extension of Judaism, and all attempts to move into the Greek community troubled them.