Seth thought he had come to learn, and he had, but when last they saw him he was in the temple of Eshmun, in one of the pillared rooms of the temple prostitutes, the morning sun coming through, and he stood naked and innocent and John lay half dreaming and half drugged in the bed wrapped in Judas’s arms. Jesus was naked to the waist and he was smoking the cannabis stick which he passed to Seth. They looked out over the city spread beneath them, where day was beginning and the sun shone on the water.
Jesus said, “There are two paths, and both lead back here, but on one I remain, I spread, I grow throughout the world, and on the other I suffer. I am torn limb from limb.”
“Which is the truest path?”
“The latter. The one I spoke to you that night when we lay together and I held your face in my hands and yours was in mine.”
“Then you will die?”
“I believe so. I know so.”
“How can you endure it?”
“I barely can. But the truth is I cannot not endure… If that makes sense. Once a demon drove me into the desert to fast for a time and meet Satan. And now I cannot tell if the demon was the Holy Spirit, or if Satan was God my Father. It is like that now. I have done everything I came to do here, and now we must turn away.”
“I will go with you.”
“You do not want to go with me,” Jesus said.
“Look in your heart and see that you don’t,” Jesus said when Seth said nothing.
“Your place is here, in the ecstasies and fearful lessons of this temple. I promise I will return to you, and when I return, I will be greatly changed. But you, son of the widow of Nain, remain right here. For this last road I take is not yours.”
Jesus kissed him and the longer he kissed him, the more Seth’s body warmed. They made love in the morning, even as Judas was waking, even as John was. As the sun rose and shone into that room, they gave themselves to each other unhurriedly, surprised when one of them cried out, spilling his seed. John and Judas gathered them in, and they all slept in one another’s arms. It was the last comfort before returning south.
Leaving this place of earthly delights, they set south for Galilee, and John felt a heaviness on all of them, a sort of restriction he had not known in the greater world. But with the restriction was the return of some awful purpose, and even as they saw Mount Hermon from this side, he remembered what had happened when Jesus had called him and Peter and James to travel up into the swirling darkness of the clouds, and to camp in the hallucinatory heights. Jesus, in increasingly graying robes, was transformed before them, glowing like light, glowing, Mark would say, whiter than any fuller on earth could make one glow, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. And then there were two speaking with him, and all of his life, when John would try to describe them he would not be able to, but he was sure he knew them as he knew himself, and it was Peter who, looking at the three glowing figures, said,
“Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three mishkanot—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”
Tabernacles, like the holy places of old, like the one carried through the desert forty years, and the one at Shiloh where Samuel served. Even while Peter spoke, brightness upon brightness, a burning cloud covered them all.
“This is my beloved Son in whom is all my pleasure. Listen to him!” She said, He said. And in saying it, the voice said so much more, as if waves were washing on waves and wind rushing through trees.
When they heard these words thundering down, rumbling through earth, laying them bare, the disciples fell facedown to the ground, terrified.
Even as they were trembling, as John felt fit to fly from his body, Jesus touched him on the head. He touched them all.
“Rise,” he said. “Do not fear.”
It was as if he had, like God, taken his hand back and pulled way the curtain between the common world and the terrifying house of heaven, and now they were on the mountaintop, still wondrous, still strange, but now in the darkness they had known before with no Moses and no Elijah. Even trying to remember them, John felt the memory, or the belief in the memory, slipping away, as if someone else had told him this story rather than he had been there to see it.
As they had been coming down the mountain, Jesus said, “Do not tell anyone what you have seen until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”
And though John did not care for this new vocabulary of being raised from the dead, he was glad to not tell anyone about something that, at the time he wished he had never seen.
Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He wanted to leave Tyre in secret, and he nearly did. A day outside of town, they took a house by the sea that belonged to Simon, the old factor of Lazaros and Marta, and here in the presence of the water, the disciples began to come together and get some much needed peace. He did not get the total privacy he desired, and he never thought he would, but the people were kind and well mannered, and on the day they were elaving, as Jesus was gathering the old sand and dust stained mantle about him, came a woman whom some have never known how to describe. Some called her Canaanite, and some Syro Phoenician and still others Greek, but this was in another time, when people had forgotten that to be one thing in that part of the world was to be another. Even the Jews were these three things, but this woman of Tyre was no Jew. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
“First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
This was so unlike the man who had fed five thousand, and who had little patience for the powers in Judea, and who had such a longing to be away from Israel, that John was sure he had said this to test them more than her.
She was not daunted.
“Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
Jesus, who had been rather sober since leaving Tyre and the temple of Eshmun and the comforts of Seth, smiled now and touched her cheek, and she knew she had been tested.
“For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.”
She asked for no proof, but touched his hand and kissed it.
“You are the very Lord Eshmun,” she told him, and departed.
“What a blasphemy!” James decried.
“Not to her,” Jesus shrugged.
Sometime later, when much had passed and Seth no longer lived in the temple of Eshmun, he would tell others of meeting this woman, whose name was Ashua, and of how her daughter had been healed in that instant, and she spent her life telling people of her meeting with Jesus of Nazareth, the living Eshmun.
Then Jesus left the lands Tyre and Sidon and returned to the Sea of Galilee. But he did not stop in Bethsaida for long, and he did not visit Nazareth at all. In Sepphoris he learned that Marta and Lararus and John’s young son had departed for Bethany, and Magdalene had remained with Rachel and the women to wait for Jesusth. Together now, they depareted east, into the region of the Decapolis. There, some people brought to him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged Jesus to place his hand on him.
Jesus took him aside, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spit and touched the man’s tongue.
In the presence of the disciples he gazed into the sunlit sky through the trees and groanwed the word, “Ephphatha!”
Judas murmured: “Be opened!”
At that moment the man’s ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly.
And Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone. But, as usual, the more he did so, the more they kept talking about it.
It is said that people were overwhelmed with amazement.
“He has done everything well,” they said. “He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”
“He does it for us,” Magdalene said.
“What?” Joanna asked.
“It is not that the man’s ears were to be opened, but our own,” Magdalene answered.
“The more he says what we don’t want to hear, the more we pretend to not understand.”
It was the beginning of a new year, and the first flowers of spring were someway off. The Pesach was upon them, that word that was so ancient none knew the meaning of it. It had come to mean the Passover, but the word was older than that. It had come to be the story of the destroying angel passing over Egypt, slaughtering the firstborn, but ignoring the houses with blood on their doors, the homes of the children of Israel. The morning after the Passover the mothers and fathers of the mothers and fathers of all Jews had awaken, blinking into the yellow white morning of a ruined, weeping Egypt, tasting their first freedom.
And the offering was the Pesach, and the feast was the Pesach, and the memory of the Pesach was before the event. Those worldly scholars in Egypt and Greece who were not likely to believe the simple words of rabbis and doctors of the Law, remembered that long ago, in the hill country, the Pesach was the necessary offering for the grain to come again, that the hills would be fruitful, that the people would pass from the old year into full life in the next, and Nikodemos, sitting in the great house in Sepphoris, thought this was as good a meaning as any.
He and Joseph and their friends had come from the south, hearing Jesus was returning after his long pilgrimage outside of Israel. So they too had returned to sit at the feet of their friend and teacher, to be with people who were like them when they sensed more and more that they were not like the people who were supposed to be their peers. They longed for the heat of Jesus’s words and the fire of his presence when the rest of the world seem so dull and cold.
Here in this house, everyone was dangerous, everyone was someone Nikodemos sensed he should not know, but to whom he felt great attraction. The philosophical Nathanael, the thoughtful Samaritan woman, Photine. Joanna, the beautiful camel haired functionary of King Herod, who felt especially protective of Susanna, a woman of business who had sufferd from some ailment for years. There were the former tax collectors, the sons of Alphaeus, along with their mother Mary, the very plain family of Jesus, the very plain and plain spoken Peter with his wife and mother in law and little girl, and the strange otherworldly Magdalene.
And there was, tonight, the company of Pharisees who longed to understand Jesus, who loved him, but were perhaps not entirely ready for everything he said. Tonight, prominent among them, was the man Simon, who was of Bethany, like Magdalene, and whom tonight was using Magdalene’s great house for a feast.
In the midst of the party, they heard screaming, and then pounding of feet, and Jesus looked up from the couch. Into the room, chased by two servants, careened a woman in deepest red, her great cloak and long hair both black and trailing behind her, and she flung herself at Jesus’s feet. Malthace, Jairus’s daughter, who was at his side, reached for her and touched her hair.
Weeping, she opened up her robes and took out a jar which she laid at the feet of Jesus, and then, taking out a ewer, she poured scented water onto his feet, and the rosewater filled the air even as it poured over the flagstones and around her knees. Heedlessly she cleaned his feet, and then she opened the jar and poured the richest, most fragrant oil on them, and now, as the rich smell of the oil filled the room, she wiped the oil into his feet with her very long hair, and while she did it, Joanna whispered to Magdalene, “What is this?” and Magdalene, all in white whispered, “Whatever this woman was, she is become a priestess.”
The woman continued her ecstasy of weeping and wiping, and the men were most uncomfortable. Mary said nothing, but thought, “There is a thing happening here. Is it as he said, those who believe in me are my mother… Is she too my son’s mother?”
She looked to Magdalene. She looked to the men. Judas was frowning, Peter scowled. Simon the Pharisee said what was on everyone’s mind:
“If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”
And Jesus, who sat like a king before the woman, face lifted, eyes closed, receiving her worship, answered, mood unchanged, almost droning, “Simon, I have something to tell you.”
“Tell me, teacher,” he said.
“Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?”
Simon replied, “I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven.”
“You have judged correctly,” Jesus said.
Then he looked down, lifting the woman’s face, and looking into it while he still spoke to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.”
He reached out and took her hand, covered in myrrh oil, in his his and tears sprang to his eyes the same time they sprang to hers. He was suddenly so overcome with emotion, he could barely speak.
“You did not give me a kiss… but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You… did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has little knowledge of the love of God loves little.”
Jesus said to the woman, “Daughter, how are you called?”
And she said, “My name is Binah.”
Then said Jesus, “Your love has saved you; go in peace. And return to us in greater peace.”
As she rose, Jesus bent down and took up the earthen jar. He capped it and held it out to her.
“My sister, keep this,” he said, “for the day of my burial.”
As if he had issued a royal command and she had but to obey it, Binah wrapped the jar in the length of her black cloak, and then turning with dignity, she left the silent room, still weeping, her long black mantle trailing behind her.
And as she was departing, Jesus rose in his long, worn out robe, beige with age, his uncut hair now almost to his shoulders, and he declared:
“The Son of Man is going down to be delivered into the hands of men. They will mock him, scorn him, put him to death—”
“No, Lord!” Nikodemos cried out.
“And on the third day,” Jesus continued, “he will be raised to life.”
And as he stood before them, the entire house, already troubled, was suddenly filled with grief.
END OF CHAPTER
