Gamaliel and the Expected Sign

See also: Gamaliel, Gamaliel and Jesus: Authenticity of an Encounter.

---

In the month of Nissan 3769 (9 AD) Jesus reached the age of His legal majority (12 years). A few days before Passover, taking advantage of the mandatory pilgrimage and in accordance with legal prescriptions, Joseph presented his son to the doctors of the law for his majority examination.

A few days later, escaping the supervision of his parents, Jesus finds himself before the doctors of Israel. Maria Valtorta recounts the scene mentioned in Luc 2:41-47 Luke 2:41-47 by detailing the context, the participants, and the dialogues

"Amongst the «doctors» there is a group headed by one whose name is Gamaliel and by another old and almost blind man who is supporting Gamaliel in the dispute. This man, whose name I hear is Hillel (I am writing it with an «h» because I hear an aspiration at the beginning of the name) seems to be a teacher or relative of Gamaliel, because the latter treats him with familiarity and respect at the same time. Gamaliel’s group is more broad-minded, whereas another group, and it is more numerous, is led by one whose name is Shammai, and is noticeable for its conservative, resentful intolerance the Gospel has clarified so well."

Christ among the Doctors, Vasily Polenov, 1896

The prophecy of the sign

The young Jesus intervenes by opposing Shammaï and siding with Gamaliel and, supported by biblical quotations, demonstrates why the announced Messiah has already been born, which Shammaï disputes. He concludes his debate with a prophecy that will strike Gamaliel and whose fulfillment he will await as confirmation that Jesus is the Messiah:

"'Wait for Me in My hour. These stones shall hear My voice again and vibrate hearing My last word. Blessed are those who in that voice will have heard God and believed in Him because of it. To them Christ will give that kingdom which your selfishness imagines to be a human one, whereas it is a heavenly one [...]’"

Evolution of Gamaliel's state of mind

This journey of a righteous man shows, in its own way, the teaching of Jesus according to which "No one puts a piece of new cloth on an old garment, because the patch added pulls on the garment, and the tear gets larger. Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wineskins burst, the wine spills, and the wineskins are lost. But new wine is put into new wineskins, and both are preserved."

• GRM 85.4 Nicodemus reports the words of Gamaliel:"'We already have the Baptist and according to the doctrine of the Scribes there must be at least one hundred years between this one and that one, to prepare the people for the coming of the King. I say that it will take less', he added, 'because the time is now complete'. And he concluded: 'But I cannot admit that the Messiah should reveal Himself thus… One day I thought that the Messianic manifestation was about to begin, because His first ray was really a heavenly flash. But after… there was a great silence and I think I was mistaken'”.

• GRM 114.8/9: Jesus: "Which words did you hear? Who spoke them?" - Gamaliel: "One… a little more than a child… but God was shining on His innocent gentle face… I have been thinking of it and remembering it for the last nineteen years… and I try to hear that voice again… that spoke words of wisdom… In which part of the world does He now live? I wonder… He was God. In the appearance of a little boy in order not to frighten men. And like lightning that dashing across the sky appears flashing northwards, southwards eastwards and westwards, He, the Divine Being, in His appearance of merciful beauty, with the face and voice of a child and a divine mind, wanders on the earth to say to men: “I am”. So I think… When will He come back to Israel?.. When? And I think: when Israel will become the altar for His feet; and my heart moans seeing the abjection of Israel: never. Oh! What a harsh reply! But true! Can the Holiness descend into Its Messiah as long as there is abomination amongst us?"      
• GRM 160.4: Jesus: – "One in Whom you believed said to you: “The stones shall vibrate hearing My last words”. But why wait for the last words of the Messiah? Will you not regret that you did not follow Me before? The last!… Sad words, like those of a friend who is dying, and to whom we have to listen, but too late. But My words are more important than the words of a friend." - Gamaliel: "You are right… But I cannot. I am waiting for that sign, that I may believe."
• GRM 354.4: "So, according to Gamaliel, this man is the Christ? Is that what he says? If rabbi Gamaliel says that, the matter is settled. He is the Christ!" - Hermas: "He does not say that. He cannot yet believe that, unfortunately for him. But he says that the Christ is on the earth because he spoke to Him many years ago. Both he and wise Hillel. And he is waiting for the sign that Christ promised him so that he may recognise Him"
• GRM 364.8: After the gift of the Our Father: Joseph of Arimathea: "Well, Gamaliel? Do you still not think that this is the word of the Lord?" - Gamaliel: "Joseph, I was told: 'These stones will shake at the sound of My words'" - Stephen with impetuosity: "Work the miracle, O Lord! Give the order, and they will tumble down! It would be a great gift, if the building collapsed and the walls of Your Faith rose in their hearts! Do that for my master!" - A group of furious rabbis: "Blasphemer!" - Gamaliel: "'No' shouts in turn Gamaliel. 'My disciple has spoken an inspired word. But we cannot accept it because the Angel of God has not yet cleansed us of our past with the live coal taken from the Altar of God…'"
• GRM 478.10: Simon of Alphaeus: "Stephen said that the rabbi (Gamaliel), when he heard what hap­pened at Chuza's house (attempt to crown Jesus as king), exclaimed: 'My spirit startles as I ask myself whether He can really be what He says. But no such ques­tion would ever cross my mind, if He had agreed to that proposal. The Child Whom I heard said that slavery and royalty will not be as we believed them, misunderstanding the prophets, that is, material, but spiritual, thanks to the Christ, the Redeemer from Sin and founder of the Kingdom of God in souls. I remember those words. And I judge the Rabbi by them. If in judging Him I should find out that He is inferior to that height, I would reject Him as a sinner and a lier. And I trembled seeing the hope, which the Child had put into them, dissolve into nothing'" - Joseph of Alphaeus: "Yes, but in the meantime he does not say that He is the Messiah".
• GRM 487.10/11: Dialogue between Gamaliel and Jesus: "The stones which are to vibrate, are they perhaps those of our hearts?" - "No rabbi. These (and He points at the walls of the Temple with a rotary motion of His hand). Why are you asking Me." - "Because my heart vibrated when the words You spoke at the banquet and Your replies to the tempters were related to me. I thought that throbbing was the sign…" -  "No rabbi. The throbbing of your heart and of the hearts of a few more people is too little to be the sign which leaves no doubts…"
• GRM 548.14/15: Brief reply to the resurrection of Lazarus: "Be ready, rabbi. The sign will come soon. I never lie."
• GRM 549.9: (passage where, in the last paragraph, Gamaliel describes his own state of soul). Dialogue of Gamaliel with the Sanhedrin: "But then for you He is the Messiah?! Say it!" - "He is not the Messiah." - "He is not? Then what is He according to you? Not a demon. Not an angel. Not the Messiah…" - "He is He Who is." - "You are raving! Is He God? Is that madman God according to you?" - "He is He Who is. God knows what He is. We see His works. God sees also His thoughts. But He is not the Messiah because Messiah to us means King. He is not and never will be king. But He is holy. And His works are those of a holy man. And we cannot threaten the Innocent without committing sin. I will not assent to sin." - "But with your words you have almost said that He is the Expected One!" - "I have said so. While the light of the Most High lasted I saw Him as such. Then… as the hand of the Lord no longer held me uplifted in His light, I became man again, the man of Israel, and the words were only those to which the man of Israel, I, you, those before us, and, God forbid it, those after us, attach the meaning of their, of our thoughts, not the meaning they have in the eternal Thought that dictated them to His servant."
• GRM 560.5: Speak the real truth: apart from the joy of your hearts for the resurrection of your friend, would you not have preferred to such joy that I should have arrived in Bethany [...] making stones and walls collapse on My enemies with My voice, as Joshua’s trumpets did with the walls of Jericho [...] Yes, that is what you would have preferred because, although you love Me very much, your love is still impure, and it is kindled, in wishing what is not holy, by your thoughts of Israelites, by your old thoughts. What is in Gamaliel as well as in the last man in Israel [...]"
• GRM 570.5: "Are you not Eleazar ben Parta? Are you? Then you will certainly see Gamaliel before I see him. Tell him, in My name, that I will give him also, after twenty one years, the reply for which he is waiting. Have you understood? Remember this carefully: after twenty one years I will give him also the reply that he awaits. Goodbye."  

• GRM 592.20: "[...] the time has come when all the signs will be given. Those mentioned by the prophets and indicated by the symbols of our history, and those which I announced: the sign of Jonah; do you remember that day at Kedesh? It is the sign that Gamaliel is awaiting."

• GRM 602.5.7: On the evening of Holy Thursday: "Gamaliel is at Bethphage this evening. I know. When we arrive at Gethsemane, you (Simon the Zealot) will go to Gamaliel and say to him: 'You will shortly have the sign that you have been awaiting for twenty-one years'. Nothing else. Then you will come back to your companions."
• GRM 604.10: Brief dialogue during the arrest of Jesus: "Who are You? Tell me." And Jesus, softly: "Read the prophets and you will have the answer. The first sign is with them. The other will come."
• GRM 609.28/30' (After the death of Jesus, while going to Golgotha, and then at the foot of the Cross): Gamaliel: "Dreadful things! I was in the Temple! The sign! The Temple door unhinged! The purple hyacinth veil is hanging torn! The Holy of Holies is open! There is anathema upon us!" - Gamaliel: "The sign! The sign! Tell me that You forgive me! A whisper, even only a whisper, to tell me that You hear me and forgive me." - Gamaliel: "It was You! It was You! We can no longer be forgiven. We have asked Your Blood upon us. And It cries to Heaven, and Heaven curses us… Oh! But You were Mercy!… I say to You, I, the destroyed rabbi of Judah: 'Your Blood on us, for pity’s sake. Sprinkle us with It! Because only Your Blood can impetrate forgiveness for us…" and he weeps. And then, in a lower voice, he confesses his torture: "I have the requested sign… But ages and ages of spiritual blindness are upon my interior sight, and against my present will rises the voice of my proud thought of the past… Have mercy on me! Light of the world, let one of Your rays descend on the darkness that did not understand You! I am the old Judaean faithful to what I thought was justice, and it was error. I am now a barren land, no longer with any of the ancient trees of the ancient Faith, without any seed or stalk of the new Faith. I am an arid desert. Work the miracle of making a flower, that has Your name, spring up in this poor heart of an old obstinate Israelite. Since You are the Liberator, come into my poor thought, which is a prisoner of formulas. Isaiah says so: '… He paid for sinners and took upon Himself the sins of many'. Oh! also mine, Jesus Nazarene…"
• GRM 644.5: Lazarus evokes Gamaliel’s conversion struck by the sign: "Yes. The sign, the famous sign that he was waiting for, to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, has shaken him. No one can deny that the sign was such as to crush even the hardest heads and hearts and make them surrender. And Gamaliel was shaken, crushed and demolished by the most powerful sign, more than the houses that collapsed on Preparation Day, while the world seemed to perish with the Great Victim. Remorse has torn him, more than the veil of the Temple was torn, the remorse for never having understood Jesus for what He really was. The closed sepulchre of his spirit of an old pig-headed Jew has opened, like the tombs that let the bodies of the just appear, and he is now anxiously seeking truth, light, forgiveness, life. The new life. The one that only through Jesus and in Jesus can be obtained. Oh! He will still have to work hard to clear his ancient ego completely of the rubble of his past way of thinking! But he will succeed. He is seeking peace, forgiveness and knowledge. Peace for his remorse and forgiveness for his stubborness. And full knowledge of Him Whom, when he could, he did not want to know fully. And he goes to Nicodemus to reach the aim that he is now determined to reach."
• GRM 645.5.10: Gamaliel tells Saul (Paul), fierce adversary of Christ, of his encounter with the young Jesus: "I have had the privilege of hearing the Most High speak through the mouth of a child, who later was a just man, wise, mighty, holy, and who was put to death, just because of these qualities of his. His words of that time have afterwards been confirmed by events that happened many years later, at the time mentioned by Daniel… Poor me, as I did not understand sooner! As I awaited the last terrible sign to believe, to understand! Poor people of Israel, who did not understand then and does not understand even now! The prophecy of Daniel and those of other prophets and of the Word of God continue, and will be fulfilled for Israel stubborn, blind, deaf, unjust, as it continues to persecute the Messiah in His servants!"
• GRM 647.2/5: Gamaliel, grown old and blind, turns to the Virgin Mary to perfect his conversion: "Gamaliel, can you believe that I, Who am the Seat of Wisdom, the Full of Grace, Who, both because of the Wisdom Who took Flesh in Me, and of the Grace He gave Me, have the fullness of knowledge of supernatural matters, can give you good advice?" - "Oh! of course I believe it! Just because I believe that that is what You are, I have come to You to receive light. You, Daughter, Mother, Spouse of God, Who certainly since Your conception filled You with His sapiential lights, can but show me the way that I must take to have peace, to find the truth, to conquer the true Life. I am so aware of my errors, so crushed by my spiritual misery, that I am in need of help to dare to go to God."