THE CHRIST
CONCLUSION
“What in the world was all that about?” Magdalene whispered to her brother.
“You forget,” Lazaros said, “Marta is the Baptist’s wife, and she promised to never wed another. He is a prophet, is he not?”
Mary acknowledged that he was.
“She is a prophet’s wife. Some of his vision clings to her, no doubt. And anyone can see it, he has changed,” Lazaros gestured to Jesus.
“He is not the same as he used to be.”
“Yes,” Magdalene acknowledged as she passed the platter of cheese across the carpet to John.
“But…” Lazaros said, “it is the most extraordinary thing. He has changed… into himself. He is… more himself than ever. If that makes any sense.”
“Brother,” Magdalene said, “it is the very thing that has passed through my mind since he came to Yochanon, and especially since he went into the desert from which he so recently returned.”
Across from them, Marta sat talking to Jesus, looking something between a serious student and a girl in love as she twisted a strand of hair about her finger.
“Sara, that’s enough, sit down and rest, my dear,” she said to the servant girl, patting the seat beside her. “Hearts will be light and work less.”
The girl with the wide dark eyes sat down beside Marta who asked, “But what did he say to you, when you all were speaking?”
“He said that he did not believe he was long for this life. I… I do not have it in me to lie or to fill the air with words so I merely listened. He said that men like him—no, he said men like us—burn so bright our stars cannot last happily in this world for long. And when he spoke to me, Marta,” Jesus said, shaking his head, “I… it was like someone had opened my mouth and placed a coal in it, sent it burning all the way down to the pit of my stomach where it turned to lead. And it is still with me.”
“I fear for him,” Marta said.
“It is almost as if I am in mourning before anything happens.”
Magdalene immediately put out of her mind the idea of telling her sister about Yochanon engaging Herod’s troops as they returned from Machaerus. There was no need for it, but she did tell her sister, “He had a message for you.”
Marta’s face changed, frankly alert.
“He said that he had never stopped loving you, but he was driven into the desert, and had he been able to drag you out there, he would have. But he could not dare.”
At this, Marta’s face closed and her eyes were tight before she shook her head and now tears fell down her face.
“Oh, that fool! That fool…” she shook her head, weeping.
“He could have taken me anywhere, and I would have followed.”
“I didn’t know if you’d approve,” Magdalene said as the sisters sat together on the roof of the house. “I do so many things.”
“You do good things,” Marta squeezed her hand. “I would love to be half the woman you are.”
Then she said, “No, it is good that you brought them. Good. And he is a good man. A good man with so much on him.”
Marta shook her head and was silent for a time.
“It breaks my heart,” she said.
They watched, down below, Jesus walking alone, almost invisible because of his dingy robe in the dark of the night.
“What do you think is going through his mind?” Magdalene asked her sister.
Marta sighed.
“Whatever it is Messiahs think about.”
“Must be lonely.”
“Must be lonely indeed.”
John sat in the courtyard waiting for Jesus until he could wait no longer. He took up the staff he had been using all day, and in the cool of the night he left the house and moved through the large night quiet homes of Bethany to follow his Jesus down the slope of the city and into the valley. Jesus went up and up, coming past sheepfolds in the night and through the olive presses and little farms, up and up where the trees grew thicker, up and up the Mount of Olives, and when John found him, he was lying under a tree.
“What is this?” he demanded.
At first Jesus did not answer, and then he said, “I could not sleep. So I walked and walked, and then I was too tired to go on, so I lay here. Let me rest, Jonni, I promise I’ll get up.”
With the limberness of youth, John lay down beside Jesus in the grass. He spread his cloak over them, and said, “We’ve no need to go anywhere. Here is fine, and I imagine we’ve much traveling to do sooner or later. We’ll get used to the ground soon enough.”
“We can’t drag Magdalene with us, sleeping at the side of dirt roads, lacking enough food for the day, tattered and in rags.”
“Why not? Because she’s a woman?”
Jesus did not answer.
“You know she would never allow herself to be separated from us. Or from an adventure for that matter.”
“Andrew, and those who will come next,” Jesus said, “what will they want of me? What in the world do they expect me to do?”
John threw his arm over Jesus and embraced him.
“She did well, that Sara did, to wash our feet. But you really stink.”
“You’re no treat yourself,” Jesus murmured with a laugh in his voice.
Jesus turned on his back and saw the moon, a disturbance of white caught in the branches of the olive trees.
“Jerusalem is right over that hill,” he said, “and I feel no desire for it. It is the center of the Jewish world, but… Is it? It is too full of itself for us, Jonni. Whatever I have to say, it will not receive it. It cannot be a home. I felt more at home in Sidon and in Palmyra then at the idea of Jerusalem. It is so close, but… Where do we go, John?”
“We go north,” John murmured, placing his chin on Jesus’s chest and placing his fingers in his thick hair. Did he dare to kiss him? He did. He kissed him again and thrust his hand into the neck of his robe to feel the heat of his chest, his pumping heart.
John said, “I’ve enough of Judea. Let us go home.”
But they did not go home the next day. Lazaros did not like to stay home and Marta was tired of Bethany.
“I have a mind to see Sepphoris,” she said, “for we have a factor who lives there.”
“Teacher, are you opposed to journeying by caravan and in a litter?” Marta asked Jesus, and Jesus said he was not.
“I certainly shall not complain,” Andrew noted and John nodded.
The journey would be more comfortable, and perhaps even shorter than if they set out on their own, Jesus reasoned, but they would certainly not be traveling today.
The next day there was time to bathe and to relax, though Jesus was filled with a strange intensity, and it was as the evening came that they set out in two covered carriages lead by donkeys, to ride west toward Emmaus. In that land, back roads were only passable in the summer when streams were low or dry. Some roads were difficult to traverse on foot, and most could not accommodate heavy wagons. However, roads between major cities and holy sites were built to withstand all weather. Had they been traveling alone or without a guard, they might have stopped right there, for night was getting on, but they rode still northwest till they arrived at the large and torchlit home of an old friend and fellow merchant, Joseph.
John had fallen asleep in the wagon and stretched his arms and yawned when Andrew shook him.
“Where in the world are we?” he demanded as he blinked and found himself in a white stone courtyard with palms leaning over the walls.
“Arimathea. Near Samaria,” Andrew said.
Near the entrance of the house, Jesus stood, poor and ragged, wide eyed, but strangely dignified, talking to a youngish man in red and black and Mary, coming beside them said, “This is an old friend. His family did business with ours for years. Joseph. He has ships that travel past the Pillars of Hercules, to the tin mines in Brittania, at the very edge of the world.
As they approached the doorway of the house, Joseph said, “Greetings. Welcome into my home, and may you find rest this night and maybe the next. I know your teacher, though he might not remember me. He was just a wild boy last time I saw him, strange and precocious.”
Jesus looked more embarrassed than anything.
“It was the year we went to Jerusalem and I was listening to the scribes and teachers. I had just become a man. Or so I thought, and then the family headed back without me. Mother and Father eventually found me in the keeping of this good man, and I was, perhaps, not kindly disposed to them. Especially when Mother asked me why I had left them? Left them?”
Jesus yawned and Joseph threw an arm over his shoulder and said, “Talking will be for later. Your throats are dusty with travel, and your bellies empty as well. Here, I will tend to both of those.”
“Are they your disciples?” Joseph asked when they sat on the roof top, Joseph smoking a hookah and puffing lightly on it as he passed the pipe to Jesus. Below, the city of Armimathea moved in the quiet half sleep of villagers rising for their second wind in the middle of the night, and past the old and only perfunctory city walls, a train of camels was marching slowly toward the hills.
“Disciples!” Jesus tried to laugh this off and played with one of his toes.
“Yes. They said Yochanon told them to follow you.”
“The whole thing fills me with confusion. Magdalene and John are my friends, and I do not worry for them, except they should have a more stable friend than me. Lazaros, also a friend. Marta… something entirely different. Andrew... If they are my disciples, what do they expect me to say? What great lessons are about to emerge from my mouth?”
“As I recall, even as a child you had much to say,” Joseph told him, shifting, drawing one knee under the other. The night air was filled with the sweet smell of smoke and Jesus exhaled smoke from his nose and passed the pipe back to his friend.
“Here is the thing,” Joseph continued, “do you believe what John said? Do you believe what you heard? Because if you believe it, if you know, everything else you are doing is merely equivocation. If you are who they say you are, then you should not even worry about what you will say next or what you will do. You do not have to say or do anything. You only have to be.”
“Bless you, Joseph.”
“You are already being it.”
“There is one other thing that bothers me.”
“Only one thing?”
Jesus laughed and gave a small shrug.
“Whaddid he mean? What did Yochanon mean? All the things he said of me, all the things I expect of myself, a fiery judge, a leader of wars, winnowing fan in hand, leveling mountains and raising plains. And yes, when Yochanon spoke of me last he said, ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’ Not the Lion of God, not the Shepherd of Israel. But the Lamb, and I have been thinking of this ever since.”
Two men came to the roof, balancing a silver coffee service, Lazaros and a young, handsome fellow with a trim beard and in a burgundy caftan. They settled the cups on the ground before Jesus and Joseph, and Lazaros commented, “We are poor at this, for this is woman’s work.”
“I am of the opinion that work is for those who can do it,” Jesus said.
“Well said, rabbi,” the new young man, hair clipped almost like a Roman’s said with a smile. “Besides, the only woman awake now is your friend Magdalene, and she does not strike me as the coffee making type.”
As he poured the cup for Jesus and put honey before him, he touched his hand and said, “I am Nicodemus. From Jerusalem.”
“One of the youngest members—the youngest, I believe,” Joseph said, “of the Sanhedrin.”
“Master, I saw downstairs a boy, a man actually, not much younger than me, Tall, dark haired, studious, and he seemed to believe that he was not important enough to be on this rooftop.”
“My Jonni!” Jesus said.
“Yes,” Nicodemus said as, having poured coffee for Lazaros and Joseph, he now poured his own cup.
“He should be up about now. I told him a roof is a roof and if you are a disciple and friend of the Master then by your master is where you should be.”
“You must not call me Master,” Jesus said, even as John was coming up, and Jesus looked up, pleased by the sight of him.
“How can we not?”
“How can you? I haven’t done anything.”
“But you will.”
Jesus held out his arm and John came to sit by him and was sheltered under it.
“Every Alexander must have his Hephaestion and every Akhilles his Patroclos.”
“You must forgive our Nicodemus,” Joseph said, “he’s a bit of a Greek.”
“We’re all bits of Greeks, even in Jerusalem where half of us pretend the Greeks never came and we aren’t half Aegian. Nikodemos, Victory of the People, that was what my father named me, for the old Greek Goddess whose image is in the temple in Athens. Greekified, Hellenized, for several generations, and not two generations pass in any branch of my ancestors before there’s some Greek or Macedonian soldier clanking around. Why do these Zealots pretend we are a pure Israel and these occupying soldiers are just now putting their boots on our necks when the truth is we’ve always been occupied by someone else, except for with the Hasmoneans, when we were busy occupying other people, and there have always been soldiers clanging around, and they married our daughters and we married their sons. The curse of Israel is the lie that we are something else, that we are pure, that we became pure when we killed the Canaanites, that we became holy when we subdued the Philistines, that we are purer than the Samaritans to the west when almost everyone sitting here is the grandchild of a Greek, the great-grandchild of a Babylonian or an Assyrian, and the descendant of Canaanites as much as anyone in Sidon.”
“Well,” Joseph said, rocking back on his heels, “it appears our friend Nicodemos has much to say tonight.”
“I have much to say every night,” Nicodemus waved this off.
“But, Teacher, give us a good word.”
“I have no good word, but that you are blessed and near the Kingdom of God.”
“Well, that’s a very good word,” Nikodemos said. “Only, what is this Kingdom? I came down with Joseph to see John on the Jordan, and it seemed he was building it there. Certainly, in Jerusalem, Caiaphas wondered if he might be raising an army and preparing to march into the holy city. He said it jokingly, but not entirely, and certainly even now Herod’s men have been to see John, have wondered what he was about.”
“There was, among John’s followers, a beautifully dressed woman, most strange,” John said. “And now and again one of Herod’s soldiers came down to see her and speak with Yochanon.”
“That is Joanna,” Lazaros and Nikodemos said, looking at each other in surprise.
“How do you know?” John frowned.
“You would have known if you had asked,” Lazaros said. “Magdalene knew.”
“Among other things, Joanna is the wife of Chuza, a steward of Herod’s. Very wealthy and very devout from an old noble family. She went to learn from John.”
“And the man is Chuza,” John said.
“Chuza is dead,” Nikodemos said. “But the man may be her brother-n-law Manaen, who is in Herod’s court as well.”
“What a strange world,” Lazarous murmured.
Jesus sat up.
“But you had asked of the Kingdom of God.”
Nikodemos returned his attention to the thin, wide eyed man who held out his hands, palm open.
“That, what you saw, was not the Kingdom, but it was the door to the Kingdom… And there are many doors, for the Kingdom is in many places.”
“Many places?” Joseph murmured.
“Will it be in Jerusalem?” Nikodemos asked.
“Listen,” Jesus said, and John leaned nearer, for he felt all his twenty-one years he had been listening, waiting for these words from the mouth of his kinsman.
“If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.”
They went on sipping coffee, and finally Nikodemos said what Lazaros was not willing to, though John was turning the dazzling words over and over again in his head.
“Teacher, I do not understand you.”
Jesus looked vague, impatient. There was a knot in his head while he took the pipe of the hookah and inhaled, blew smoke from his nostrils again.
“You will understand what I am saying when you understand who you are,” he said.
“As I am beginning to know who I am. There was always a Word in me, but I was terrified to look. When you come to know yourself,” he looked around the circle of men reclining on the roof, “when you all come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the Living Father. But if you will not know yourselves there is no kingdom, there is… No inheritance, no hope. No anything. You dwell in poverty. You are poverty.”
Though he had thought he had no words, he had them now, and he said, “Jonni, please, call Magdalene and Andrew. Call them all. The word is upon me.”
As John rose, running down the steps, Jesus stood up so that his back was to the parapet of the house and he looked on Nikodemos, Joseph and Lazaros.
“The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the Place of Life,” Jesus declared, his face full of light, a crooked smile on his lips.
“And he will live! For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same.”
He had more to say. He felt like a burning star. Above them, above the canopies that covered the roof of the house, the heavens themselves were gently opening so that the stars of the second and third heaven intruded with the stars of another night, so that the moon they saw at all times was eclipsed by another moon altogether, and all about him, for a moment Jesus saw the dense wings, like storms of butterflies of the angels of God and it seemed he was immense and they were going up and down him. He was a tree, like the myrrh tree, like the Adonis tree, growing from the underworld, his toes curling into the depths of the depths, his trunk stretching, his head crowned in God, and as Magdalene, and then Sara and Marta and lastly Magdalene and Andrew arrived, Jesus declared:
“Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you.
“For all that is hidden will be brought into blazing light!”
