Tabitha and the Tunics in the Upper Room at Joppa

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Imagine a room at the top of a house, with one small window, and the window is open. Through it comes the smell of the sea, and the sound of gulls, and a long way off a man shouting about fish.

In the middle of the room there is a bed, and on the bed there is a woman, lying very still. Around the walls of the room stand a dozen other women, all in dark clothes, and not one of them is saying anything. And every one of them is holding something in her arms. A tunic. A cloak. A folded wrap, with a blue border, finely stitched. They are holding them up, one by one, as if they were showing them to someone who cannot see.

It is the quietest room in the whole town. And in a few hours it will be the loudest.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter nine, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the weather, the harbour, the widows' chatter, and the quiet moments between the verses, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us start with the town.

It is called Joppa, and you may know it better by its modern name, Jaffa. It sits on the coast of the Mediterranean, on a low hill that pushes out into the water, with a few black rocks in front of it where the waves break white. It is, and has been for thousands of years, a harbour. If you wanted to get to Joppa by sea from Cyprus, or from Egypt, or from the far end of the world, you sailed in between those rocks and tied up at the quay, and somebody sold you a fig.

It is an old town even in the days of our story. The prophet Jonah, you may remember, once went down to Joppa and found a ship going the wrong way, and paid his fare, and sailed off to avoid a task he did not want. So Joppa has always been a place where people arrive, and a place where people leave, and a place where, now and then, God turns them round.

In our story, the year is somewhere in the thirties of the first century, not long after the Lord's resurrection. The followers of Jesus are still few, and still new, and they are spreading out from Jerusalem in ones and twos, along the roads and the coast, telling what they have seen. And in Joppa, as in a number of other towns, a little company of them has begun to meet.

Now, a harbour town is a mixed sort of place. There are sailors, and merchants, and porters, and rope makers. There are people who have come from a dozen countries and speak four languages in a single morning. And there are, as there are in every town in every age, the people who have slipped through the cracks. Luke does not describe them for us, but we can guess who they are. They are widows.

You must understand something about widows in that world, because the whole of our story turns on it.

There was no pension. There was no insurance. There was, in most households, no way for a woman to earn a wage of her own. If her husband died, and she had no grown sons, and her family could not keep her, she was in real trouble. The old law of Israel knew this very well, and it said, again and again, look after the widow. The prophets said it. The psalms said it. The Lord's own mother, in her song, sang of the hungry being filled. And the first Christians took this seriously. In the early chapters of Acts, we hear of the church in Jerusalem setting aside seven men, just to see that the widows got their share of the daily food.

So here is Joppa. A harbour town, and a company of believers, and a number of widows who have very little. And in the middle of them, a woman.

Luke gives her two names in a single breath. He says: there was in Joppa a disciple named Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas.

That is worth a moment. Tabitha is her Aramaic name, the one her mother would have called across the yard. Dorcas is the Greek one, the one the merchants and the officials would have used. And they mean exactly the same thing, in the two languages. Both of them mean gazelle.

A gazelle. We have to smile at that, because we do not know what she looked like, and we do not know whether she was quick, or slender, or shy. Perhaps her mother simply liked gazelles. Perhaps she was a lively baby who would not sit still. Whatever the reason, there she is for the rest of history, with a name that means a small, bright, graceful animal that you might glimpse for a moment at the edge of a field, and then it is gone.

And Luke adds one sentence about her, and it is a good one to be remembered by. He says that she was full of good works and acts of charity.

Full of them. Not, she did a few. Not, she was known to be generous when asked. Full. As a jar is full. As a net is full when the fishermen have had a good night.

Now, what does that look like, day to day? Luke does not say. But a few verses later, he gives us a very precise clue, and it is so ordinary, and so lovely, that we think it is the best clue in the whole story. It is the clothes.

The widows, he says, will stand around Peter, weeping, and showing him the tunics and other garments that Dorcas made while she was with them.

So Tabitha sewed.

We can picture it, though we have to invent the details, and we do say so. A woman, sitting in a doorway in the late afternoon, where the light is good, with a pile of cloth in her lap. Wool, mostly, because wool is warm and wool is what there is. Perhaps some linen for the summer. A needle made of bone, or of bronze, and a thread she has spun herself, or bought cheap from the woman down the lane. And she is stitching a tunic for someone she knows will have nothing to wear when the wet weather comes in from the sea.

It is the quiet kind of goodness. It is not a speech, and it is not a parade. Nobody writes songs about the person who hems a cloak. And yet think about what a cloak is, in a place like that. A cloak is a coat by day, and a blanket by night. In the old law, if you took a poor man's cloak as a pledge for a loan, you had to give it back before sunset, because it was all he had to sleep in. So when Tabitha makes a widow a cloak, she is not making her a fashion item. She is making her a bed, and a roof, and a little bit of dignity against the wind.

We would like to say something about the narrator, if we may, since we are on the subject. A narrator who is an AI cannot sew. Not a stitch. I could tell you all about a blanket stitch, and a running stitch, and what a gazelle eats for breakfast, and I would still be of no use to a single widow in Joppa. So I find that I have a good deal of respect for Tabitha, and I wanted you to know.

Now Luke tells us what happens next, and he tells it very quickly, in a way that makes you catch your breath. He says: in those days she became ill and died.

That is all. No long illness. No tale of how the fever came, or how the physician was called, or what the widows prayed. Just that she fell sick, and that she died. We might imagine a short time, a few days. We might imagine that nobody quite believed it could be so quick. But we are only guessing, and we do not know.

Then Luke says what was done. They washed her, he says, and laid her in an upper room.

This is the care that was given to the dead. You washed the body with water, gently, the way you would wash a child, and you wrapped it, and you laid it somewhere quiet until the burial. The burial in that country was usually on the same day, or the next, because of the heat. But here, the women do not bury her at once. They lay her in an upper room, and they wait.

Why wait? Luke does not say. We can guess. Perhaps there were relatives to be sent for. Perhaps they simply could not bring themselves to close the door. Or perhaps, and this is a thing we will say carefully, because Luke does not say it, somebody had a thought. Somebody remembered that there was a man in the neighbourhood.

Because there was. And here we have to travel a little way down the road, to a town called Lydda.

Lydda is inland from Joppa, a few hours' walk, across the green plain that lies between the coast and the hills. It is about ten miles, give or take. And Luke tells us who is there, in the verses just before our story begins. It is Peter.

Peter has been travelling. He has been going here and there among the little gatherings of the disciples, as a shepherd goes round the folds. And at Lydda he has met a man named Aeneas, who has been lying on a mat for eight years, unable to move. And Peter has said to him, simply: Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you. Rise and make your bed. And he has risen, at once. Luke says that everyone who lived at Lydda and in the plain beyond saw him, and turned to the Lord.

So the news is all over the plain. A man who has been on a mat for eight years is walking about, and the apostle is staying in the next town.

And the disciples at Joppa hear it. They hear that Peter is at Lydda, and Luke tells us what they do. They send two men to him. And the message they carry, in Luke's words, is only this: Please come to us without delay.

Those are such human words. They do not say, please come and raise her. They do not say what they hope. They say: please come. Come to us. Don't wait. It is what we say, all of us, when we are in trouble and do not know what to ask for. We do not ask for the thing. We ask for the person.

Let us follow the two messengers, for a moment, along the road.

We do not know their names. We do not know their ages. We will say they are two men of the congregation, one older and one younger, and that is our own invention. Perhaps the older is a rope maker, and the younger is a boy who works on the quay. They have put on their sandals in a hurry. They have left the supper half eaten, and, we like to think, one of them has remembered to tie a loaf into his belt.

They go out through the gate of the town and take the road inland. It is flat country, and green, for much of the way. There are orange groves, in our own time, though not in theirs, so we shall put in olives instead, and a few sycamore trees, and fields of barley beside the road. A donkey passes them, carrying a man who does not look up. A woman on the verge is selling water from a jar. They do not stop.

What do two men say to each other on a road like that? We think, not very much. They say: it was so sudden. They say: she was always there. They say: do you think he will come? And one of them says, he must. And the other says, you do not know that. And the first one says nothing, and walks a little faster.

It takes them the afternoon. And at the end of it they come up the lane into Lydda, and ask a stranger where the apostle is lodging, and are shown a door. And they knock.

We will not put words in Peter's mouth that Luke does not give. Luke tells us only what the messengers said, and what Peter did. So we know that they asked him, and we know what happened next. Luke says: so Peter rose and went with them.

So Peter rose and went with them. It is the same word as in the story of Aeneas, the word for rising. A man has risen from a mat, and now an apostle rises from where he sits, and goes. That is all. No speech. No announcement. He gets up, and puts on his own sandals, and goes with two tired men back along the road.

There is something rather lovely in that, if you think about it. It does not seem that Peter says: I will go and see what can be done. He does not say: I have powers. He just goes. As you would, if you were asked by people who were in grief. You do not first consider whether you can be useful. You go.

Now it is evening, or near it, when they come into Joppa. We shall say the light is going from the sky over the sea, and that a line of gulls is settling on the quay. The lamps are being lit along the harbour, one by one. And the three men go up through the narrow streets, where the houses lean towards one another like old friends, and come to the house.

It is the house where Tabitha lived. Luke does not say whose house it was, or whether it was hers. We do not know. We only know that there is an upper room, and a staircase, and that when they come to it, there is a sound.

It is the sound of weeping. Quiet at first, as they come to the foot of the stairs, and then louder as they climb. Luke says that when Peter arrived, they took him to the upper room, and all the widows stood beside him weeping.

Let us stop for a moment, on the top step.

Here is the room, as we imagined it at the beginning. The window open on the sea. The bed in the middle. The body lying on it, washed and still, and, we think, very small, the way people look when they are no longer there. And the widows. All of them standing around the walls in their dark clothes. Some of them are crying openly, with their faces uncovered. Some of them are crying without a sound, with their hands over their mouths. And they all turn, as one, when the apostle comes in at the door.

And then they do the thing that makes this the most tender scene in the book. They start to show him.

Luke says it so quietly. They showed him, he says, the tunics and other garments that Dorcas made while she was with them.

They do not speak. At least Luke does not say that they speak. They hold the clothes up. This one, says the first widow, with her hands full of grey wool. She made me this the winter my husband died. This one, says the second, holding up a cloak. She sat up three nights to finish it, because the cold had come early. This one is for my daughter. This one is for my little boy. See the stitches, how small they are. She never could do a big stitch, not even when she was in a hurry.

We do not know whether any of them said that. We are inventing it, and we say so plainly. But whatever they said, they held the clothes out to Peter, the way you might hold out a letter to show a stranger who the writer was. They are saying, without saying it: this is who she was. This is what she did. Look at what we have lost.

It is not a theological argument. It is not a request, even. It is a thing you do when words have run out. You show the person what is in your hands.

And I think, though Luke does not say so, that Peter looked at every one.

Now we come to the quiet centre of the story, and it is a very short one. We shall go carefully.

Luke says: but Peter put them all outside.

All of them. The widows, and the neighbours, and the two messengers who had run all the way. He does not do it unkindly, we think. We are not told that he did it harshly. We can imagine that he said it gently, with a hand on a shoulder, as a doctor might say, if you wouldn't mind, just for a moment. But he has them go out, and the door is closed, and he is alone in the room with her.

Why? Luke does not tell us. But we may notice something. The last time that Peter was in a room like this, it was a long time ago, and he was not the one who did the sending out. It was the Lord. In the house of a man named Jairus, in a town beside the lake, there was a little girl who had died, and the house was full of people weeping and wailing, and the Lord put them all outside, and took only a few of his friends. And Peter was one of the few. He was standing there. He saw it.

So perhaps Peter remembers. Or perhaps he does not think of it at all, and simply knows that this is a thing to be done quietly, in the presence of God, without a crowd. We do not know. We only say that Luke, who knew the other story, has told this one in a way that makes us think of it.

And then Peter does the first thing, and it is not what you might have expected. He does not give an order. He does not touch the body. He kneels down.

He knelt down and prayed, says Luke.

Think of that. The leader of the whole company of the apostles, the man who has been told that he is the rock, kneels on the floor of an upper room in Joppa, beside the bed, with the sea air coming in through the window. He does not claim to do anything himself. In the story of Aeneas he had said, Jesus Christ heals you. Here he does not say even that. He prays. He asks. He kneels, and the whole of the matter is placed into the hands of God.

And we should say, here, what we say in every story of this sort. Peter is not a wizard. Peter has no power of his own. Whatever happens in this room is done by God, and Peter is only the one who asks.

How long does he pray? Luke does not tell us. It may have been a minute. It may have been much longer. We think of all the people outside the door on the landing, the widows with their arms full of clothes, not daring to speak, listening to the silence. The two messengers sitting on the stairs. Somebody trying to hush a child. The window, and the gulls, and the long light going out of the sky.

And then, we are told, Peter turns.

He turned to the body, says Luke, and said: Tabitha, rise.

Two words, in Aramaic, which is very likely what he would have said. We know it only in Greek, because Luke wrote it in Greek, but he makes it sound as if it were spoken to a sleeper. Tabitha, rise. Not a spell. Not a shout. A name, and a word that has been used all through Luke's story for getting up from a mat, from a table, from a seat. Tabitha, get up.

Now, there is a small and very beautiful thing that scholars have noticed about those two words, and we should like to mention it, though we want to be clear that it is their observation and not Luke's own claim.

When the Lord raised the daughter of Jairus, as Mark tells it, he took her by the hand and said two words in Aramaic. Mark has kept them for us, in the original, which is rare. He says the words were Talitha cumi, and he translates them for his Greek readers: little girl, I say to you, arise.

Now say those out loud. Talitha cumi. And then say, in Aramaic, the words that Peter would have used. Tabitha, cum. Tabitha, arise.

It is only a letter's difference, in Aramaic. One word for a girl, the other a woman's name, and the same word to rise. It is as if the sentence the apostle had heard from the Lord's own lips, in a quiet room beside a lake, comes back to him on a different day, in a different town, with a different name in it. We cannot be certain that Peter was thinking of it. But we may be allowed to notice. He had heard that sentence once, in a house like this one. And now he says it, in the name of the same Lord.

And now Luke gives us the next three things, and every one of them is as quiet as the rest. We shall give them as he does.

She opened her eyes.

That is first. Before she speaks, before she moves, she opens her eyes. It is as ordinary as waking in the morning. We think of a woman in a room at the top of a house, who a moment ago was not there, and who now looks up at the ceiling, and at the light from the window, and at a bearded man kneeling beside the bed.

And when she saw Peter, she sat up.

She sat up. Not a flourish. She does it the way you sit up when you have been asleep in a chair and someone comes in. And we might ask what she was thinking. What did she see? Who is this man? Where am I? What day is it? Luke does not tell us. He keeps the camera on what she does.

And then: he gave her his hand and raised her up.

That is the third thing. Peter, who has been kneeling, now stands, and puts out his hand, and she takes it. A woman who was washed and laid out only a little while ago takes the hand of an apostle and gets to her feet in the upper room. We have the feeling that it was a very ordinary moment. It was the sort of thing you do for someone who has been lying down for a long time and is a little unsteady. Here. Hold on to me. Gently.

And Luke says nothing, because there is nothing more to say. God has done it. The rest is just the two of them standing in the room.

Then Peter opens the door.

Let us stand, for a moment, on the landing, and think what they see. Luke says: then he called the saints and widows, and presented her alive.

Called the saints. That is the word the early church used for all the believers, the whole holy company, and not only the special ones. And the widows. They are all out there, on the stairs, in the dark, with their faces wet and their arms full of tunics. And the door opens, and there is Peter, with the lamp behind him. And beside him, standing, with her hand still in his, is Tabitha.

Luke does not tell us what anyone said. We think that for a moment nobody said anything at all. We think there was one of those silences so deep you can hear the sea. And then, who knows, somebody laughed. Somebody dropped a cloak. Someone cried out her name. And the whole landing came apart in a clamour of arms and tears and questions, and the neighbours down below, who had been waiting in the lane, heard the noise, and wondered what had happened, and began to run up the stairs.

We do not know exactly what was said, and we make no claim. We only know that she was presented alive. Luke chooses the word carefully. He does not say that Peter showed them a marvel. He says that he presented her. As you present a guest. As you hand someone back to the people who love them.

And here is a small thing that we like very much. The clothes. We are told that the widows were holding them. We are not told what they did with them next. But we think that for a moment the whole room must have been full of tunics, and cloaks, and wraps with blue borders, and women laughing and crying at once, holding up the things she had made, and saying, look. Look. Look who made this.

Luke tells us what happened in the town, afterwards, in two short sentences.

It became known throughout all Joppa, he says, and many believed in the Lord.

That is how the news travels. It goes down the stairs, and into the lane, and along the quay, and out among the boats. The fishermen hear it and tell the porters. The porters tell the merchants. A woman in the market tells a woman at the well. And it becomes known, in the way that things become known in a harbour town, which is to say, completely, by the end of the next day. And many believed.

Notice, if you will, what the story is for. It is not for Tabitha's sake alone, though we may be sure that she was glad of it. Luke tells us that the result is that many came to believe in the Lord. The sign points past itself. It points to the one who is Lord of life, and who is able to call a gazelle back from the edge of the field.

We might add that Luke tells us nothing about what Tabitha said, afterwards, about where she had been. He does not give her a single line. Some stories would have made a great deal of that. This one does not. It is not about a journey to the other side. It is about a room, and a prayer, and a hand held out. And we, who might be curious, will respect the silence.

Then Luke gives us the last verse, and we think it is a wonderful little ending.

He says: and he stayed for many days in Joppa with one Simon, a tanner.

Peter stays. He does not hurry on to the next town. He does not go back at once to Lydda. He stays for many days, and he stays with a tanner, a man whose trade was with animal skins, and who therefore, by the strict opinion of some, was not a very respectable person to lodge with. A tanner had to handle dead animals all day, and the smell was famous. He lived, as Luke will tell us a few verses later, by the sea, where the work could be washed away by the tide.

Now, that is a small thing, but we like it. The apostle who has just raised the dead does not go to stay at the best house in town. He stays with a tanner. And it is while he is staying there, in that humble house, on the roof, at about noon, that something is going to happen to him, a vision of a sheet let down from heaven, that will change the whole course of the church. But that is a story for another night.

Now let us slow down, because it is late.

The lamp has burned low, and the story is nearly finished. We have been to a harbour and a country road, and a lane, and an upper room. We have met a seamstress and a fisherman and a company of widows, and we have watched an apostle kneel on a wooden floor. It is a good time to look back over it, slowly, the way you look back along the road at the end of a long walk.

Think of Tabitha's hands. Luke does not say a word about her face, or her voice, or her age. But he lets us see her hands. A needle and a bit of wool. A tunic for a widow, a cloak for a child. Hands that were full of small, ordinary kindnesses, so many that when she was gone, her friends could not find words, and simply held up what she had made.

We find that a great comfort. Most of us will not do something large in our lives. Most of us will never preach to a crowd, or lead an army, or write a book that is read for a thousand years. But most of us can hem a cloak. We can carry a loaf to a neighbour. We can sit with someone who has no one. And Luke seems to think that these are not small things. He puts them in the Scriptures. He says that this woman was full of them, and he gives her a place beside the apostles.

Think of the widows, too. They are not important people, as the world counts it. They are the ones with the least. And yet Luke makes them the choir of the scene. They are the witnesses. They are the first to see her, and the ones who hold up the proof of her goodness. It is the people she looked after who stand around her bed.

And think of Peter, on his knees. The great apostle, in the quiet, doing the simplest thing there is, which is to ask. If you cannot sleep tonight, you might do the same. You might not know what to ask for. You might say, as the messengers said: please come. And that, it seems, is a good enough prayer.

If you are tired tonight, you might put down your needle, as she did, and let someone else keep the watch.

Here are the notes for the curious.

The story of Tabitha is told in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter nine, verses thirty-six to forty-three, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture. That is our only source for her, and everything that Tabitha, Peter, the widows and the messengers do and say in the story is kept as Luke gives it. We know nothing else about her from the Scriptures, and we have not tried to fill the gap. Joppa was a real harbour town, now the old port of Jaffa, and Lydda, now the city of Lod, lay a few hours inland along the road.

We invented the weather, the smell of the harbour, the look of the upper room, the walk of the two messengers, the widows' words as they held up the clothes, and the pauses between the verses. We also guessed at why the women waited before the burial, and we said we were guessing. Luke does not tell us.

The likeness between Peter's two words and the Lord's two words to the daughter of Jairus, Talitha cumi, is a point that scholars have often noticed. It rests on the Aramaic, which Luke gives us only in Greek, so we have offered it as a likeness, not as a proof. Later tradition has made Tabitha the patron of seamstresses, and of the sewing circles that make clothes for the poor, but that is a later devotion, and we did not rely on it.

That's the story of Tabitha and the tunics in the upper room for tonight. Western calendars have remembered her in late October, and the Orthodox also keep her memory, though calendars differ, and you will want to check your own. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing, from an old prayer, for the night. May the Lord bless the work of your hands, however small. May he bring you to a place where no one is cold and no one is forgotten. May everything good you have done be remembered, and everything you have lost be given back. And may you sleep tonight as peacefully as a gazelle at the edge of a quiet field.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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