Sand and See

Sand and See | The Unnamed Ones

Hope is a dangerous thing for men like us.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Ben-Oni smirked, his face turned to the sandy street and away from his friend. “It happened exactly the way I said it did.”

They were sitting on the ground, their backs against the wall that lived on the edge of the market and the start of the road toward the temple. Ben-Oni could feel Madai’s disbelief before he responded. There was a particular quality to Madai’s silence: a sharp breath and a long pause, an obvious attempt at patience. Then it was followed by either laughter or argument. Sometimes both.

“Ben-Oni,” he said, half laughing, half exasperated, “with those unfortunate eyes? You do not know how I’m looking at you, and you did not see what happened!”

Ben-Oni lifted a finger. “First of all, your breath is on my face, Madai. We’ve been through this. Second, you can’t miss much when the teachers start throwing stones. Not very educated of them, if you ask me.” His smirk deepened into a smile.

“They were not throwing stones.”

“Not yet,” Ben-Oni said. “I started to make my way out when they were picking them up. You can hear that sort of thing.”

“You heard them picking up stones?”

“You’d be surprised what people hear when they’re not busy looking.”

Madai, a man who had lost the use of his right side but not the ability to roll his eyes, let out an exasperated sigh that put a grin on Ben-Oni’s face.

People forget how much they give away when they think no one is watching. It was one of the great advantages of being what they were. Between the two of them, they missed very little. Ben-Oni heard and felt what the crowd concealed. Madai saw what the crowd revealed. Together, they had survived the streets of Jerusalem on this combination for years.

Ben-Oni usually avoided the temple when he could help it. He had a particular distaste for the leaders who blamed his blindness on the sins of his parents. The distaste had an origin, the origin had a voice, and the voice brought a feeling of sadness that clung to the back of his neck like sweat on a hot afternoon.

_____

He had been perhaps nine or ten years old, standing just outside the temple entrance while his parents spoke with one of the leading teachers inside. They had spent every coin they had on doctors who promised that his blindness was temporary. Now, with dwindling enthusiasm and the driest of pockets, they stood before what his mother called their last hope; a sentiment she whispered to his father, unaware that Ben-Oni caught it.

Young Ben-Oni took in the smell of incense and the low murmur of men with intense faces. He remembered the way sound carried differently around this building. It was flattened and official, like a rehearsed speech. And he remembered going very still when he heard his name used the way people use a problem they are tired of discussing.

“You have only yourself to blame,” the teacher had said to his parents. Scolding.

He talked fast, and his voice carried the flat certainty of a man who had never once questioned his own conclusions. “He was born like this, for Heaven’s sake. If doctors cannot help you, and prayers have gone unheard, you must have lived lives of unforgivable sins. Maybe one or both of you. I am sorry to be harsh, but the boy is suffering because of you. It is the truth, and you need to hear it.”

What followed was his parents’ silence, too deliberate to be empty.

And then he heard his mother begin to weep. He could not see her face, but he felt the shift in the room. It was heavy with guilt, moving through the air with no place to land.

The walk home was silent. But the words danced behind his eyes, settled into the corners of his mind, and stayed there. Along with them came the thoughts of whether his parents’ lives might have been simpler, lighter, maybe a little more joyful, without him around. They had done so much, and they were all tired.

_____

Since that afternoon, Ben-Oni found nothing but tension in his body when he approached the temple. He went anyway, sometimes, because the debates drew crowds, and crowds were good for coins. He always found a spot at this wall, close enough to catch the words without being swept into its shifting edges, which had a way of turning dangerous when the wrong thing was said.

And lately, the wrong things were being said more and more often.

It didn’t come from the teachers. It was said to them.

Good.

There was a new voice in those debates. One that had called the religious leaders “children of the devil,” a declaration that drew a grin on Ben-Oni’s face and a great deal of noise from everyone else. But it was not only what the man said.

It was the texture of his words.

He spoke with a layer of pity beneath the conviction, the tone of a man cleaning a wound on a child who had been warned and hadn’t listened.

He clearly had a mind that understood the law, but he did not make his listeners feel small the way the other teachers did. At least not the listeners who liked him. To Ben-Oni, the others were cruel men who had confused authority with understanding. This man was honest in the way that costs something to say.

And his voice carried the wind.

Ben-Oni had been thinking about that voice for several weeks. He had not mentioned it to Madai. There was a feeling attached to the voice that he did not entirely trust — a familiar loosening in the chest, the slow arrival of something he recognized and had learned to be careful of.

Hope.

In his experience, hope preceded either relief or disappointment, and the two were difficult to tell apart until the moment it was too late. He had been given hope before — three teachers and seven physicians, the last of whom had taken a considerable sum from his parents and left behind a jar of liquid that smelled expensive and accomplished nothing. He had sat through each of those consultations with his face arranged into polite attention, rationing hope underneath so there would be enough left afterward to live on.

He adjusted his position against the wall and settled his hands in his lap. The market moved around them, loud and indifferent, and Ben-Oni let it. He would sit here, as he always had. He would not reach toward the voice or the feeling it brought. He would simply be as he always was.

Hope is a dangerous thing for men like us, he thought.

He had almost convinced himself when Madai spoke.

“What is bothering that big head?”

Ben-Oni blinked. “What?”

“Come on, Oni.” Madai’s voice carried the particular warmth of a man who has earned the right to be direct. “You are not the only one who can see through silence. You have been a little less annoying lately. And you look to your left for a long time when you are thinking deeply.”

“No, I don’t,” Ben-Oni retorted.

“Ha.” A pause, dry and satisfied. “See how that feels?”

Ben-Oni smiled but was quiet for a moment. Then his smile faded. Around them, the market shifted and murmured. A child ran past close enough that Ben-Oni felt the rush of air. Somewhere to the right, a merchant was arguing with a customer about the weight of something. The afternoon was moving along without them, the way afternoons did.

“Yeshua” Ben-Oni said finally, and his voice came out quieter than he intended. “The new teacher. From Nazareth.”

The sound Madai made was not quite a laugh. “Nazareth.”

“I know what you are going to say.”

“I was not going to say anything.”

“You were going to say something about Nazareth,” Ben-Oni said. “Everyone does.”

Madai said nothing. And Ben-Oni understood. Because what was there to say?

Don’t think about it? That ship had already sailed.

You are setting yourself up for grief? They both already knew.

There were some warnings that arrived too late to be useful, and Madai knew as well as he did that this feeling would pass.

The silence between them settled; the comfortable kind that belongs to friends who become like family. The coins were light today. The dust was thick. The sun was beginning its slow lean toward evening.

And Ben-Oni looked to his left.

_____

The Sabbath was approaching.

By the afternoon before it began, Ben-Oni would make his way to his usual place, and Madai would join him after the Sabbath, as usual. No problem, Ben-Oni would think to himself, more coins for me!

Only moments after he settled in, he heard them. The first group of the day.

An early bunch, he thought. But he didn’t think much of it. Until he noticed their movement.

They had deliberate footsteps, like Madai walking toward him. They felt closer than the usual passers-by. Ben-Oni’s back straightened, and his fingers clutched his garments. He had spent his entire life reading footsteps the way other men read faces, and something in these was different. The air around them was unhurried. They slowed, and Ben-Oni waited.

The footsteps stopped in front of him.

Ben-Oni felt it first in the air. The subtle shift that happens when a body interrupts its movement, when space is no longer empty.

He could hear the soft adjustments of footwear on packed earth and the quiet of men who had chosen to be still. He gripped his garments tighter.

It was too quiet, and they were too close.

Robbers, he thought.

Then a voice spoke.

“Rabbi,” the voice was young and vaguely familiar, like the younger son of a fisherman his parents knew. “Why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or his parents’ sins?”

The words did not strike him as new.

They rarely did.

A pause, and then a response.

“It was not because of his sins or his parents’ sins,”

Ben-Oni furrowed his brows, his head tilting slightly. The answer was a new one, yes. But even more striking was the voice.

It was… him.

Ben-Oni's insides twisted, his brows lifted, and he began to shake.

The Rabbi who stirred more dust than Ben-Oni’s garments could catch in a day. The voice that had lingered at the edge of his thoughts.

He was… here.

The air felt warmer now, like the man had lowered himself in front of Ben-Oni and stayed there for a while.

Something unwelcome loosened in his chest.

Hope.

And the voice continued.

_____

“This happened so the power of God could be seen in him. 4 We must quickly carry out the tasks assigned us by the one who sent us. The night is coming, and then no one can work. 5 But while I am here in the world, I am the light of the world.”

6 Then he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and spread the mud over the blind man’s eyes. 7 He told him, “Go wash yourself in the pool of Siloam” (Siloam means “sent”). So the man went and washed and came back seeing!

John 9:1-7