"I follow you. I have from the start. It won't happen."
"But why won't it happen? Will you disappoint them? Will you utter prayers and make speeches like your cousin in the water of the river up to his knees performing empty gestures, and let them fall back into hating you because you've broken their hearts?"
I didn't answer.
"I'm offering you a victory your people haven't had for four hundred years," he said softly. "And if you do not do this thing, your people are finished. The world is swallowing them, Yeshua bar Joseph, the way that old man in Cana, that fool Hananel, said the world was swallowing you."
I didn't answer.
"It was finished for your people long ago," he went on intently, as if truly lost in his own thoughts. "It was finished when Alexander marched through this land and brought the Greek language with him and the Greek ways. It was smashed when the Romans overran this land, and they went into your very Temple, proving with a brutal fist that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, inside! If you don't give them this last chance, to come together around a mighty leader, your people will not die of hunger or thirst or by the sword or by the spear. They'll simply fade away. They're doing it already and they will go on doing it, forgetting their sacred language, mingling through wives and ambitious youths with Romans and Greeks and Egyptians until no one any longer remembers the Tongue of the Angels, until no one even remembers the name Jew. I give it what? A hundred years? Without a victory, it won't take that long. It will be finished. It will be as if it never was."
"Ah, cursed and designing Spirit," I said. "Do you remember nothing of Heaven? Surely you know that there are things unfolding in the womb of Time that are beyond your dreams, and sometimes beyond mine."
"What, what is unfolding?" he said. "The world gets bigger with every passing year and you become smaller, you people of the One True God, you people of the Nameless God who would have no gods before Him. You haven't converted them to your ways, and they eat you alive. I'm holding out to you the one thing that can save them, don't you see? And once this map the Romans have drawn for you is under your control, then you can teach them all the Laws He gave you on the Holy Mountain. I'm willing to put this into your hands!"
"You? You want to help me? And help us? Why?"
"Pay heed to me, fool. I'm running out of patience. Nothing is done here without me. Nothing. Not the simplest victory is accomplished unless I'm part of it. And this is my world, and these are all my nations. Will you not get down on your knees and worship me?"
His face crumpled. His tears flowed.
Was this how I looked when I was sad? When I wept?
He shivered as if this wind of his own creating was making him cold. And he stared out over the whole world of his own envisioning with a desperate, sorrowful gaze.
For a moment I forgot him.
I forgot completely that he was there. I looked out, and I saw something, something I'd glimpsed before, in the study of Hananel in Cana, and something I saw vividly now. Altars falling, thousands upon thousands of altars tumbling down as if the quaking of the earth itself were dislodging them, and on top of them fell their idols, marble and bronze and gold shattering, the dust rising as the fragments scattered. And it seemed the sound rolled on and on over the world he'd laid out before me, over the map he'd quickened for my benefit, but as I saw it, it was the world. All the altars going down.
Christ the Lord.
"What is it?" he demanded. "What did you say?"
I turned and looked at him, awakening from this terrible vision, this great sweep of destruction. I saw him again, vividly, in his finery, his skin no less fine than his costly robes.
"Those aren't your nations," I said. "The kingdoms of this world aren't yours. They never were."
"Of course they're mine," he said. It was almost a hiss. "I am the ruler of this world and I always have been. I am its Prince."
"No," I said. "None of it belongs to you. It never has."
"Worship me," he said gently, beguilingly, "and I will show you what is mine. I will give you the victory of which your prophets sang."
"The Lord on High is the One whom I worship, and no one else," I said. "You know this, you know it with every lie you speak. And you, you rule nothing and you never have." I pointed. "Look down, yourself, on this perspective that is so dear to you. Think of the thousands upon thousands who rise each day and go to sleep without ever thinking evil or doing evil, whose hearts are set upon their wives, their husbands, their fathers and mothers, their children, upon the harvest and the spring rain and the new wine and the new moon. Think of them in every land and every language, think of them as they hunger for the Word of God even where there is no one to give it to them, how they reach out for it, and how they turn from pain and misery and injustice, no matter what you would have them do!"
"Liar!" he said. He spit the word at me.
"Look at them, use your powerful eyes to see them everywhere around you," I said. "Use your powerful ears to hear their cheerful laughter, their natural songs. Look far and wide to find them coming together to celebrate the simple feasts of life from the deepest jungle to the great snowbound heights. What makes you think you rule these people! What, that one may falter, and another stumble, and someone in confusion fail to love as he has striven to do, or that some evil minion of yours can convulse the masses for a month of riot and ruin? Prince of this world!
"I'd laugh at you if you weren't unspeakable. You're the Prince of the Lie. And this is the lie: that you and the Lord God are equal, locked in combat with one another. That has never been so!"
He was near petrified with fury.
"You stupid, miserable little village prophet!" he said. "They'll laugh you out of Nazareth."
"It is the Lord God who rules," I said, "and He always has. You are nothing, and you have nothing and rule nothing. Not even your minions share with you in your emptiness and in your rage."
He was red faced, and speechless.
"Oh, yes, you have them, your minions. I've seen them. And you have your followers, those poor cursed souls you squeeze in your anxious fist. You even have your shrines. But how paltry are your grudging triumphs in this vast, vital world of blowing wheat and shining sun! How tawdry your attempts to rush into the breach of every petty dissension, to raise your puny standard over every hideous squabble or tenuous web of avarice and deceit - pathetic your one true possession: your lies! Your abominable lies! And always, always you seek to drive men to despair, to convince them in your envy and greed that your archenemy, the Lord God, is their enemy, that He is beyond their reach, beyond their pain, beyond their need. You lie! You have always lied! If you ruled this world you wouldn't offer to share a particle of it. You couldn't. There would be no world for you to share, because you would destroy it. You are yourself The Lie! And you are nothing other than that."