From the housetop the muleteer merchant shouts his wares; from the housetop men call one another for various purposes; from the housetop the nowateer (men appointed by the municipality to watch the vineyards) proclaim the names of trespassers; and from that elevation the special orders of the governor of the district are proclaimed to the populace. By night or by day, whenever we heard a voice calling from a housetop, we instinctively listened most intently in order to catch the message. The voice of the crier is so much like a distant, prolonged railway whistle that in my first few years in America, whenever I heard such a sound, especially in the night, I listened involuntarily, expecting to hear a message.
How often must Jesus have heard the free and full voice of the crier from the housetop! How it must have appealed to him as the very antithesis of the whisperings of fear, cowardice, and doubt, may be realized from his command to his disciples. In the tenth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel we read Christianity's declaration of independence. Here the antagonism of the world is portrayed with complete fullness. "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves." "Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake." "Fear them not ... for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known." In the face of all hatred and danger and death the Master's command to those who carried the world-transcending message, the supreme treasure of time and eternity, was, "What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetop."
In the rainless Syrian summer the housetop is used for various household purposes. The grass which grows on the earthen roof, especially on its thick edges, withers early in the season. To this the Scripture alludes in several places where it speaks of the enemies of Israel as being "like the grass upon the housetops, which withereth afore it groweth up." In some cases the whole roof is plastered with clay mortar and used for drying grain, fruits, and vegetables. Also in the summer season the housetop is used for holding wedding festivities and funeral gatherings, which almost all the adult inhabitants of the town are supposed to attend. With solemn brevity does the prophet Jeremiah refer to this custom in the forty-eighth chapter, and the thirty-eighth verse. The more accurate rendering of the Revised Version is: "On all the housetops of Moab and in the streets thereof there is lamentation every where."
The custom of praying on the housetop, which has come down from the time when the Syrians worshiped the "hosts of heaven," still survives in the East. In the first chapter of the Book which bears his name, the prophet Zephaniah threatens with the awful retribution of Jehovah those who indulged in this practice. "I will also stretch out mine hand upon Judah, and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will cut off the remnant of Baal from this place ... and them that worship the host of heaven upon the housetops." This custom survives in Syria, although much less extensively than in the past, and it is "the God of the whole earth" that is worshiped, and not the host of heaven. With much reverential regard I still remember an old neighbor of ours, a devout Maronite, a man who really feared God and worked righteousness, whose habit was to say his evening prayer upon the housetop.
Of all the rich treasures of our Scriptures, few perhaps are more precious and dearer to Christian hearts than the record of Peter's vision while in the city of Joppa, and which is so intimately associated with that low, flat, earthen Syrian roof. The tenth chapter of the Book of Acts hints at the broader and more profound spirit which had begun to agitate the inner life of the "very small remnant" of expectant souls in Israel. The wider horizon which the Christ of God had revealed to his Jewish disciples had engendered serious doubts in their minds with regard to the exclusive claims of Judaism to the blessings of the Messianic kingdom. The spirit of the Beatitudes and the Parables was resistlessly pressing the claims of all the eager Gentiles to a share in those blessings. No doubt the soul of Peter, the ultra-conservative disciple, was rent in twain and wavered in its allegiance between the old claims of a "chosen people" and the new vision of a universal kingdom founded on purity of heart and hunger and thirst after righteousness.
It would seem that while in such a state of mind, and after the Oriental custom, "Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour;[[3]] and he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance, and saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth; wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean. And the voice spake unto him the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common."
Peter obeyed. That Oriental, who was not afraid of the mystic revelations of God's designs took the lesson to heart. Presently we see this conservative Jew again at the home of Cornelius, the Roman, and hear him interpret his own vision. "Of a truth," he said to the Roman soldier, "I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him." Here we have the sure basis of Christian unity and the unshaken foundation of a human commonwealth. "Other foundation can no man lay." When all the sects and nations who profess to be the followers of Jesus Christ respond to this Scriptural summons, and give decent burial to their divisive creeds, however "authoritative" they might think them to be, then will the world have valid reason to expect swords to be beaten into ploughshares, and to hope for the coming of God's kingdom upon the earth.
[[1]] Luke v: 19.,
[[2]] Prov. xxi: 9.