The Mystery of Unbelief

Even I cannot truthfully tell you how my hand became so hopelessly disfigured. More than half my life has been spent begging on the streets of Jerusalem, and I am now an old man. Even I have come to believe the stories I feed the pious.

But, how it got this way matters little to me anymore. Whether it was really crushed beneath the hoof of an ox when I was an infant or cruelly broken by the Romans to keep me from ever raising a sword against them, one thing I know; my hand remains as it was because I am afraid.

They say he is risen from the dead; this man who touched my hand. They say that truly he was the Son of God. There were many others with me that day at the temple; beggars like me that he touched. I saw their expressions for myself as they cast away crutches and tore bandages from their eyes.

I ran away in disbelief. Was I truly healed? What would happen if I tried to open my hand? Never, in all my life had the streets of the Holy City seemed so confining or so clamorous. I could still feel the warmth of his hand on mine; the sweetness of his words in my ears and his gaze into my soul!

In that single, terrifying instant I knew. I knew that if I were to stretch out my hand as he had commanded; to lay hold of what this Jesus had done for me, I would have no choice but to go back to him and follow wherever he would lead. How could one reject such power and authority; such love for even the least of us his brethren?

Surely, you cannot.

That is why I have chosen to remain much as I was on that frightful day. I am not alone. There are others like me; beggars who have chosen the comforting certainty of our present poverty over the forbidding horizon of all that might have been.

Every now and then I am seized by an impulse to reach out, particularly when I see a passerby stumble and fall. But, I remind myself that I am crippled and it soon passes.


And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief. -Matthew 13:58