Part Two
Chapter Nine
Fishermen
“Ahavat olam beit Yisra-eil am’cha ahavta,”
They sang
“Torah umitz’vot, chukim umish’patim,
otanu limad’ta al kein Adonai Eloheinu,
b’shoch’veinu uv’kumeinu nasi-ach b’chukecha,
v’nis’mach b’div’rei Toratecha uv’mitz’votecha
l’olam va-ed.
Ki heim chayeinu v’oreich yameinu,
uvahem negeh yomam valay’lah,
v’ahavat’cha al tasir mimenup l’olamim.
Baruch Atah Adonai, oheiv amo Yisra-eil.”
They sang, dancing until that dangerous time when they all began to think, but it will be day soon, and what will be done in the day if they are like this all night? They danced in a bright lit room, and every one of them seemed on fire. Each face glowed with the noon day sun. Here, there was only love. That was the message, this burning scorching love. To be loved ravenously, consumed by God, and to consume him in return. Not only was the wedding feast for the lamb, the lamb was the feast, to love and be loved was to consume and be consumed. He could not explain it all, nor understand the shape it could take. He could only lead them in the dance until, drunk and joyous, like little boys and girls they fell on the floor, laughing, and slept in one another’s arms.
In the early morning, scrunched like a child, Jesus clasped John by the waist, and Nathanael was holding him, and they were still in their wedding clothes and John was murmuring:
“Ahavat olam beit Yisra-eil am’cha ahavta…”
With great love have You loved us, Lord, our God; with a great and superabundant compassion have You had compassion upon us.
“You were with us the whole night,” John said when they were eating breakfast in an upper room. Mary was there, and Magdalene was there. Lazaros and Marta were there, and the others, but here was a little man eating with them, and Jesus smiled and passed him a cup of wine.
“I work in the household,” he said. “My name is Simon. My family lives outside of the town, and I saw it—I poured the water—I was one of those servants. I poured the water and looked into those empty jars, and I was the one who drew that first cup out and saw the finest wine I’ve ever seen. I drank that wine!”
Jesus, leaning against the wall, folded his bread and dipped it in fish sauce. As he chewed he said, “And what did you think when you drank it?”
He wiped his fingers on the old robe he had changed into.
“What do you think now?”
“Rabbi, I do not know what to think, but that in times of old God restored oil and grain to the woman of Zarephath to save her from death, but never did I hear of God working a miracle simply to delight people. Everytime I sipped from the cup I thought how God was delighted in me, and all night we danced, I was delighted in him. I would live like that always.”
“You are called Simon.”
“I am.”
“It appears,” John said, “that Simon Kanaios is Kananaios for the Kingdom of God.”
Simon gave John a look between a smile and a frown and Jesus, rubbing the back of John’s neck said, “Our Jonni likes word play,” for Kanaios was one from the village of Cana, but Kananaios was one who was zealous.
“Well, I am both, and if you call me Zealotes, I’ll answer,” Simon said, and Jesus said, “If I call you to follow me, will you join us?”
“With a good will,” Simon said, his eyes bright as lamps, “with a good will.”
“Master, where do we go after this?” Andrew asked.
Jesus said, “It would be make perfect sense if we went to Capernaum.”
Heading east from Cana, they arrived at the town of Magadan and then Gennesaret, named for the body of water that was also called The Sea of Galilee. Already, while they were simply just thinking of heading north, they could see Capernaum, spread out along the shore of Lake Gennesaret like a necklace of fine white stones along the border of a sea deeper and bluer than the sky which stretched far above and overlooked the distant hills. Kfar Nahum, the village of Nahum, few could remember who Nahum actually was, but that town had been, if not established, then established in importance in the last few generations under the Hasmonean kings of blessed if not spotted memory. Though they were three distinct towns, Chorazin and Capernaum bled into the larger municipality of Bethsaida, queen of the fishing villages at the top of the lake.
Riding toward the city, Marta pointed to a large and stately home of white stones, huilt off the land and overlooking a series of terraced hills.
“It looks a bit like home,” Lazaros remarked, and John said, “I doubt very much you would have such a home.”
Lazaros looked at him.
“That is the home of Levi,” John explained, as if that said everything.
While they rode on, Nathanael mused, “Levi ben Alphaeus and his brother. Little Shit, I prefer to call them. The neighborhood tax gatherers, and I owed them much when I had things to owe them. Rome isn’t bad for those who know how to get into bed with her.”
“Yes, well,” Andrew, who liked to keep the peace, said, “the less we speak of them, the better.”
And as the house rolled away from view, that seemed to be the end of the discussion, though John observed Jesus, the sun striking his white gown, turning in the cart to observe the disappearing house on its hills from all of its angles, and knowing that Jesus was never someone who cared much for wealth or its displays, wondered what was on his mind.
“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.
“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.”
John let his hands rest on his lap and concluded, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
And his father shouted, “What in the five fucks are you talking about!”
Zebedee was a loud, wild eyed, but mostly well intentioned man, half Greek in origin, with a thriving fishing business, and after all these years the rest of the family had learned to put up with him
“The worst thing you ever did,” he told his wife Salome, who seemed not only to barely be listening to him as she ladled out sauce and soup while one of her servants placed hot bread down in their midst, “is send this boy off to be educated. All of that Greek shit—”
“You’re Greek.”
“I’m a Jew, just like you, plain and simple. And he comes back talking about the light, and—” he gestured to his nephew, Mary’s son, who was sitting there, looking at him amused.
“You!” he said to his nephew, “well, what the fuck do you have to say for yourself?”
Jesus said nothing, but wrapped the lamb in bread and millet and chewed while Simon Zelotes said, “Sir, he may have been your nephew, but now he is our Teacher.”
“One could easily see that coming,” Zebedee said. “You were always the odd one.”
“Enough,” Mary said in a tone which was not quite snapping, but which silenced her brother-in-law.
It had only made sense to come up here. Mary longed to see her sister, and so many of Jesus’s new friends lived here as well. Andrew had wanted to introduce Jesus to his brother, also called Simon, and John had missed his father—believe it or not—as well as his brother, James.
“You go away all this time,” James said to his cousin, “and you come back, from… wherever, and now you tell us you are a great teacher.”
“I’m not telling you anything,” Jesus said. “I’m sitting here, eating. If you want to know anything about me,” he gestured around the room, “ask them.”
“He turned the water into wine at Cana,” Zelotes said.
“He… Knew me, saw the places I had been,” Nathanael said.
“How can I believe these? They are already in your spell,” James said.
Jesus shrugged.
“Your belief is your own affair.”
Zebedee turned a beard sharp as the lighting bolts of Zeus to Joses and Judah, the younger brothers of Jesus.
“You always had good sense. Tell me what you saw at this wedding.”
The brothers looked at each other, at a lost, and then Jacob said, “He turned water into wine. I don’t know anything else, but I do know that. I don’t know what the rest of it means, but this I saw with my own eyes.”
“With my own eyes,” Zebedee shook his head, muttering, “with my own eyes.”
“At any rate,” it was John who interrupted his father, “we did not follow him because of wine and wonders. But because of his words.”
“So far all his words have been, ‘give me more lamb.’”
Jesus snorted at this. Mary thought, “He does not care. Not that he ever cared about Zebedee, but something has happened. Nothing this old fool will say can shake him.”
Fishermen were neither poor nor ignorant. The house of Zebedee had a great living room and a large atrium, and now they sat in the courtyard, and Andrew whispered to Peter, “What do you think of him?”
“I don’t think anything of him,” Simon said. “For he has done nothing for me to think about.”
Simon bar Jonah had other things to think about. A wife who had been lush and joyful, who had become hard over what life had made of her, withholding children from her womb—or maybe it was him? He wondered if it was him, a flaw in his flesh that had withheld children from them. A flaw in himself?
And right now it did not do to have children anyway, for the whole of the Lake of Gennesaret seemed to be hiding its fish, and these days the most lucrative and constant job in the world, the occupation that supplied the palaces with lobster, shrimp, crab and the delicacies good Jews never touched as well as the fish essential for every meal, had become a bust. The garum factories where men and women gathered day after to day to make a fish sauce many who were not called Simon bar Jonah savored, was supplied by the fish who seemed to have hidden their little silver faces and tiny mouths from the nets of the fishers of Bethsaida, Chorazin and Capernaum. What was more, Levi, the appointed tax gatherer was growing testier, waiting for backtaxes he had been promised by prominent men, Zebedee and Peter among them. And at the end of fruitless patience was the court and the sentence of the debtors prison. And who would be the one at his door with a grasping hand and a snarl on his face but Lille Shit, Levi’s brother, possibly even more despised than Levi. Jacob, Jacob, that little shit!
Jacob, the grasper, the usurper, the original names of Father Israel. Unlike Levi, who was unloved, but also unhappy, and simply doing his job, Jacob took joy in making a man poorer, and he was always called Jacob, to remind him of the meaning of that name, though he prefered the Greek version of it, James.
Simon shook his head, breathed out of his mouth heavily, and put those thoughts away.
There had been a tapping on the door, and someone had gone to answer it, and presently in came a man who knelt before Jesus and said, “Master, we heard you—”
“In Cana?” Zelotes said.
“Aye.”
“What happened in Cana?”
But even then, a few others entered the house and a woman said, “He made water into wine. I drank it and it tasted like the sun.”
“He spoke good words outside of Nain and we long for them again,” the first man said.
“Teacher, give us a good word.”
His disciples said to him, “Show us the place where you are, since it is necessary for us to seek it.” And then, wiping his fingers on the dirty robe he used as a napkin, Jesus spoke.
He said to them, “Whoever has ears, let him hear. There is light within a man of light, and he lights up the whole world. If he does not shine, he is darkness. Love your brother like your soul, guard him like the pupil of your eye. You see the mote in your brother's eye, but you do not see the beam in your own eye. When you cast the beam out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to cast the mote from your brother's eye.”
He looked directly at Zebedee.
“If you do not fast as regards the world, you will not find the kingdom. If you do not observe the Sabbath as a Sabbath, you will never see God."
But by then, others were coming, and Zebedee, though he started with, “What in the hells is going on….?” fell into silence while Jesus continued speaking to them. Jesus answered every question, and his face burned liked the sun.
As night drew on and people were yawning, he said, “If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders.”
He stretched his hands before them and added, “Indeed, I am amazed at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty.”
Simon touched his brother Andrew’s knee and said, “You ask me what I think of him, and I tell you, I have nothing to say, for I have never seen a thing like this.”
