After that, though John’s other disciples continued to baptize, Yochanon and Jesus departed, Yochanon taking his cousin by the arm and leading him out of the river and then away from them all. As they looked on it was Andrew who said, “What did we see… What has happened?”
“I don’t understand,” John shook his head, sounding a little confused.
Magdalene ignored him, looking after the prophet and the one he had prophesied.
“What has happened is what we were waiting for.”
“All of these weeks and months with Yochanon.”
“All of these years,” Magdalene thought, “while we ignored little things, while our minds were veiled with the wings of angels and the angels whispered not now, not now. Forget forget. Hide this in your heart, hide that. This is nothing new, nothing we have not expected; only we waited for the sign, did we not? We waited for the day.”
In the distance Yochanon and Jesus were small, almost black figures in the fields, talking one to the other.
“Then he is it?” Andrew said. “He is…”
“Why do you fear to say it when you have waited so long for him?” Magdalene looked at the shaggy man. “He is the Christ.”
It was John who said, “If it is so… Yochanon says it is so… We have waited so long. We have hoped. And yet… what even is the Christ? What is a Messiah? What does he do? It is like… It is like spending so much time making yourself ready for something and then it arrives and you know not for what you are waiting.”
Magdalene nodded more contemplative than troubled.
“Doubtless we do not really know. Doubtless he will show us.”
In the night, Magdalene walked through the encampment and along the caves until she arrived at one, entered and, after sweeping away dust, sat down.
“I knew you would be the one to find me,” Jesus said.
“Brother, I will always find you,” Magdalene said. “Were you hiding?”
“No,” Jesus said then shook his head.
“Yes. I am not sure. It is all beginning. It is time for it to begin. I am terrified, but I couldn’t bear for it not to begin. We’ve waited so long.”
“Your mother thought it would begin when Joseph died. But you went into yourself.”
“It was beginning then, only not how any of us thought.”
“What will you do?”
“Go. Into the desert.”
“But I thought you were going out into the world. You said it’s all beginning.”
“Beginnings are not the way everyone thinks they are. You must go back to go forward.”
“The same thing I thought when I saw Yochanon for the first time, his encampment by the river like the Israelites waiting to cross the Jordan.”
“I must go further back even than that.”
“Further?”
Jesus lifted his head in the semi darkness of the cave that was lit only by Magdalene’s small lamp.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
“I will go into the desert,” Jesus said.
“You just came here.”
“To make my theophany.”
“But you will come out of the desert.”
“Aye.”
“You must. And you must speak to John. Whatever you have become—”
“Mary,” Jesus said with insistence, “I have not become anything. I am what I have always been.”
“Whatever you are,” Mary dismissed this, “you must speak to John. He is confused, and his heart hurts.”
“He doesn’t understand.”
“We will understand. He will understand because he loves you so,” Mary said.
“But at the moment he cannot understand… Because he loves you so. So you must go to him.”
“Where did you go?” John asked. “When we traveled back to Galilee, when we journeyed down here and lived in caves and in tents, where did you go? I was waiting for you. I know that now. I know none of it is a surprise. That when Yochanon said the New World was coming, when he said the Messiah was coming, when he talked about one who would set the world on fire, and would carry a winnowing fan, the whole time I knew I was waiting for you.
“But you know what, Yeshua ben Yosef? I cannot imagine you with a winnowing fan. I cannot think of you setting anything on fire. Last time I was with you, you were sending us packing, off with that green eyed Judas to see the world. Did you see it?”
“I saw some of it.”
“And where is that Judas? What happened to him, or is he bringing in the New World with you? Will you bring it about in the dark rooms of the temple of Eshmun, or in the corners where men shag each other?”
“Judas left days after you,” Jesus said. “He had business. He had to return to Kerioth. Yes—” Jesus said when John opened his mouth to speak “—we did many things, had many adventures. But I have journeyed alone all this time. And I invited you, Jonni. I asked you to come with me. You were the one who said you wanted to return to Galilee when you knew I could not.”
John remained silent.
“And all this time, all your journey back, on the horseback, through hills, on a ship, at my mtoher’s house, traveling down to where the Jordan empties into the Salt Sea, were you thinking of me and Judas? Were you saving up all of your anger for that? Making an image of me, the unfaithful lover who left? Well, for that I am sorry. I will take the blame. I should have insisted you come with me.”
“But where were you,” John bent down, playing with his toes. “I am serious now, and no longer angry. Where did you go?”
Jesus sighed. “Oh Jonni, I have so many things to tell you. So many things I saw and I can barely speak of them. I traveled north until I traveled west. I joined a caravan and went into past Parthia itself. I learned that God has many faces, and many chosen people, and they are all waiting for him. Waiting for God in flesh, the God in heaven dwelling with men, becoming the God of Earth. The God who is born, who lives, who dies.”
“God is eternal,” John said. “We are not like the pagans. Zeus, born on Crete, Apollo, full of human lust, Adonis slain, blood spurting from his body.”
“But we were like the pagans. We were pagans, once. And not long ago. Before God was nameless in heaven and above all things, with no form, he was El of the Mountain, cow horned with erect penis. He was Zadek the Father of the Eight. He was She. He was the Mother, Astarte of the Sea, Asherah of Heaven. And in time he must be again.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’ve said it. That is the good news. That God in hidden majesty dwells in all this world, burning, bright, shining in this world.”
“Say it!” John’s voice was hoarse. “Say it, goddamnit. Say it!”
He gripped Jesus’s arms.
“If you must equivocate around others, hint, make whispers, then tell me what I already know, what I have known since the day you made those clay birds fly away. Since….” John lowered his eyes, “since the first time we were in the fields and you undressed me and I undressed you and… holding you was like holding a flame, and I felt as if I were turning to air. Perfect… perfect love and perfect trust… When I knew that someone who only had love in him loved me more than he loved anyone else and I was humbled and holy all at once. Say it.”
And Jesus, voice trembling, declared, “I am the light that is above them all. I am the all; the all came forth from me, and the all attained to me.”
He stopped talking, as if he did not dare to say more. But then he did.
“Cleave the wood; and I am there. Raise up a stone, and you will find me there.”
John was trembling, and tears sprang to his eyes and he took Jesus’ hands in his and went from sitting on his bottom to kneeling, kissing his palms, his lips lingering on the rough lines on the inside of Jesus’s hands.
“My Lord…” he began.
“Jonni!” Jesus’s voice warned him.
John continued.
“And my God.”
The next part is hard for them all to remember because later, when everyone told it, it made little since. With all that was wrong in the world and with all the powerful he could decry, why did Yochanon begin to cry out against Herod’s marriage to Herodias? Herodias was a noble princess, for bloodlines mattered. The Herod’s had been powerful, but upstarts. Generations ago, in the time when their grandmothers were girls, Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the last of the Queens of Egypt, had supported the original Herod as he had gone for more and more power. He had represented what it meant to be a Jew now, for Jew that he was by faith and even by birth, he was an Idumean, a descendent of Esau, Jacob’s twin, and in the century before that whole land had been captured and forcibly made Jewish, that is, its men all circumcised. It was a strange thing to do, not killing off a people, but making more, and many suspected or out and out knew, that Israel had done this for years, that in the holy books, where it spoke of nations murdered, these were nations absorbed.
But at any road, Herod had ridden the wave of Antony and Cleopatra and wisely, at their defeat, made his way into the graces of Octavian who would become Augustus, acknowledged Ruler of the World. There was Herod, still alive and in power, appointed as King of the Jews by Augustus, but he needed to be king by blood and this meant marrying Miriamne, the granddaughter of Hyrcanus, the heir ot the Maccabee kings and queens. He had brought about that old man’s death and the death of Miriamne’s brother, Aristobulus, the last Hasmonean heir, seeing that in Miriamne’s line the Hasmonaens were preserved. But his fear and anger had extended to Miriamne and even her sons so that, in the end, it was Herodias and her brothers who had been left, the last of those with the noble Maccabee blood. A Herod married to one of of these was noble indeed.
At first she had been fated to marry her full cousin, Young Herod, also her cousin and her grandfather’s chosen heir. His mother had been another Miriamne, born from another priestly family. But Young Herod had been dispossessed in another plot until finally she was wed to Philip, her uncle, who had lived out her days in dullness with only a daughter, Salome. Herodias began to remember those days when her fearful grandfather had been king. She had been eleven when the evil old man had died, and though she had been horrified, she had also understood what it was to be part of a powerful family which shielded Israel from Rome and Rome from Israel.
Herod Antipater, whom she had known from afar, who was given Perea and Galilee, and on good terms with the Roman governor, seemed the only one of his generation who might come close to her grandfather’s power. He was a man who loved power, a real fox, and his desire for gain was an aphrodisiac. It was not solely that she married him for power, but that his power increased her lust. Down by the Dead Sea, the Essenes spoke out against the whole Temple and its illegitimate lines of priesthoods, and all about the Jordan, many spoke against the unwomanly woman who had divorced one brother to marry another, compounding the sin that both were her uncles.
Why Yochanon began to specifically speak out against this and make his teaching less vague, less about valleys being exalted in the near future, probably had something to do with the arrival of a real flesh and blood Messiah accompanied by a voice from heaven like a dove’s. But as already stated, these were strange days, and it was often difficult to make sense of them
We've broadened our scope for Christmas time around my downtown, so please give what you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/Fundraisingforhousing
