Four

Toward evening, Jesus had finished his prayers, and we left the Temple to go to a place he knew on the Mount of Olives, opposite Jerusalem on the east, when a slave approached Jesus and said that Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrin whom I knew well enough to speak to, wished to have an interview with him.

"Indeed?" said Jesus. "This is not an arrest for my audacity, I trust." I had suspected something of the sort, since he had called the Temple "my Father's house."

But the messenger put on a conciliatory tone and said that Nicodemus merely wanted to see what Jesus had to say. Conceivably, he saw something of the Power that was in Jesus; and after all, the Messiah had to come at some time.

"Simon," Jesus said to Andrew's brother, "Do you remember the garden where we stayed once when we were in

Jerusalem? That is where we will be going. I will come to you

later, after I have had a talk with this Nicodemus. --And it might be as well," he added, "if we kept this destination to ourselves. We might need a place later on to go where no one

could find us. Do you understand?"

"I do, Master," said Simon, who was as much in the dark about what he meant as everyone else.

Jesus then followed the messenger, and Simon led us to the east, up the hill from the Kidron Valley, as the sun began

to sink behind us over the Great Sea, finally becoming a huge red half-sun on the horizon, turning the sky orange and green, with a few clouds red and purple around it.

We entered a garden full of olive trees, with their gnarled trunks, and tried to make ourselves comfortable on the ground. This was something of a hardship for me, since I had not been used to the nomadic life that we were now living, but I endured it, because eventually, when Jesus became King of Judea and then the world--as I was convinced he would--we, his close followers, would be living in the lap of luxury.

As I mentioned, I had a house in Jerusalem to which I could have repaired, but I did not want at this time to put myself above those around me; our respective places in Jesus's entourage would be sorted out as time went on.

It seemed that Jesus and Nicodemus entered into a long conference; Jesus appeared well after midnight, and settled down beside Simon and Andrew, remarking in a whisper to Simon, "The seed, it appears, has been planted. It is not what I would have planned, but it will do; it will do."

So the inspiration of the Force was not a total disaster, it seemed; at least one influential Judean reacted favorably to Jesus--and who knew how many more, seeing his miraculous cures, would also forgive him the presumption of actually doing what needed to be done. The problem was, of course, that many other influential Judeans had been making a great deal of money from the abuse, and they would be hard to persuade, to put it mildly.

And, as I lay in bed, when I considered everything that night, I found I could put aside my disappointment that Jesus had not followed my path of diplomatic persuasion, since it was now clear that no amount of persuasion would induce most of the important people here to give up their power to an upstart, however persuasive he might be, still less a Galilean upstart. Perhaps his inspiration was correct: he should do spectacular things to bring the ordinary people on his side, who, if ignorant, were hundreds of times more numerous than the leaders of the people; and they could, conceivably, exert sufficient pressure--at least over time--to force even the authorities to recognize Jesus.

I had learned, incidentally, in talking to some of the others, that Jesus was actually born here in Judea, and in Bethlehem, David's city, no less. I kept that knowledge for use when people began to scoff at him as a Galilean Gentile. The fact that his parents, out of fear of King Herod, chose to live in Galilee, ought not to count against him. Well, we would see what would develop. So all in all, the day was not a total disaster, by any means.

After celebrating the Passover the next evening at the house of a friend of Jesus, we went to the banks of the Jordan, not far from where John had originally been bathing people. He was still doing so at Aenon, near Salim, but his followers had diminished somewhat, after rumors about Jesus and John's pointing him out had begun to spread.

Jesus himself did not bathe anyone, which I considered wise, since it would have confused him with John, but he enlisted several of us to do so. I demurred, myself, since standing in cold water for any length of time did not do my health any good. But others, especially the younger ones, took to the task with a will, and the result was that Jesus, who of course, was on shore in the group of those who were bathing and being bathed, increased his following greatly, especially since he continued his practice of healing with a touch the sick and the crippled.

But word of what was going on, I discovered, began to reach the ears of those in authority who were ill-disposed toward him, and so I took the liberty of suggesting to him that it might be politic to leave here and return to Galilee. If he acquired a following of thousands there, the authorities here would merely note it as a remarkable phenomenon, whereas if it happened here, especially at this early stage, they could not but look upon it as a threat.

Jesus indicated that he agreed with me, which gave me a good deal of satisfaction, and so we left; but instead of returning by the Arabah, we went straight through Samaria. Jesus evidently wished to capitalize on his success as quickly as possible, a course with which I was in complete agreement.

It was not possible to travel through the country as quickly as I was accustomed, since I am considerably more fit than most--even than some of the fishermen--and of course we had to accommodate ourselves to the slow members of the group and the women, who carried the impedimenta of the group on donkeys.

In any case, we arrived by Jacob's well around noon, and Jesus told us to go into the town of Sychar nearby to buy food, while he sat down for a while to rest. I decided to stay behind and watch over our Master from a discreet distance; I did not expect anything serious to happen to him, but one never knew; so I gave Andrew's brother Simon and John's brother James a sum of money each for them to buy food.

"There should be plenty there," I said, and you can return what you did not spend; only do not let them talk you into giving them more than what the provisions are worth." I had heard that Simon was good at haggling, and James could take his cue from him. And so I went a bit into the woods, as if I were going to relieve myself, and watched.

And sure enough, a woman came to the well to draw water, and Jesus, to my astonishment, asked her for a drink.

She was as astonished as I was, and answered, "What is this? You, a Judean, are asking a Samaritan like me for a drink?" The Judeans and Samaritans have been all but at war with each other for generations--not to mention that men do not speak to women.

But even more astonishing was Jesus's reply. "If you knew the gift God is giving, and who it is who is asking you for a drink, you would be asking favors from him, and he would give you living water."

The woman laughed. "You have no bucket, sir," she said, "and this is a deep well. Where would you get running water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob? This is what he drank from, and so did his sons and his cattle." I noted that she had astutely brought up that the Samaritans were descendants of Jacob as well as the Judeans.

Jesus answered, "Anyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but a person who drinks the water I give him will never afterwards feel thirst, because the water I give him will turn into a spring inside him, gushing up to eternal life."

The woman laughed again and said, "Then give me this water, sir, so that I will not be thirsty and have to come here and draw this."

Jesus looked at her, insolently mocking him, and said, "Go call your husband, and come back."

She tossed her head. "I do not have a husband."

It was now Jesus's turn to laugh. "You are right," he declared, "when you said you have no husband." He held out his hand, fingers splayed. "You have had five men, and not even the one you have now is your husband. What you said was true."

She looked at him, startled, and then to recover herself replied, "I--er--I can see that you are a prophet," and suddenly changed the subject. "Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, and you people say that Jerusalem is the place where one must worship God."

Something like this was what Jesus was looking for, and he answered, "Believe me, Madam, the time is coming when you will not worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem either. You are worshiping what you do not know, and we worship what we know. But the time is coming--it is here already--when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. God is a spirit, and those who worship him should do it in spirit and in truth." Was he also planning to free us from having to go to the Temple? If he was to be King of the whole world, perhaps so. And the One was not confined to a place, certainly. It looked as if "worship" was going to take on a new meaning.

Taken aback by what he said, she pondered, and answered, looking hopefully at him, "Well, I know that the Prince is coming, and that when he comes he will explain everything to us."

"I am, speaking to you," he answered. I put that literally. The obvious meaning is "That is who I am, speaking to you, and it is the ordinary way of saying it. But there was a nuance there that disturbed me somewhat. I had been looking for signs that Jesus was not simply aware that God--the one who called himself YHWH, or "I AM"--was not merely flowing through his soul, but that he might be beginning to think of himself as God, since he could do so many amazing things.

I might have been making too much of an ordinary expression, since clearly it meant, "I am he (the Prince), speaking to you." But when young, and without studying, as I had done, he might think of God (the Creator of the cosmos) as a kind of super-person, one that one could speak to and who would reply as one man to another. Many of the early Scriptures gave that impression, as when Moses spoke with God "as one man to another," for instance.

But those of us who have studied the matter deeply, especially, as I have, in the light of Greek science, realize that God, YHWH, the One, or whatever one chooses to call Him or It, is as much beyond personhood as we experience it as we are above, say, a lily plant out in the field. It would be like the lily plant picturing us (supposing it could do so) as a kind of glorified plant--and the distance between us and YHWH is infinitely greater. So we cannot conceive of It as a kind of glorified man. Moses did not, though he talked to YHWH; but he was not so intimately connected with the Force that made the universe as Jesus was; YHWH, for Moses, was something outside him, and not something within him as It was for Jesus; the power seemed to be his, not that of something infinitely beyond him. That is, when he referred to himself as the Son of Man, it was as if he thought of himself as a diminished being, one who "emptied himself," as it were, into human limitation, while somehow being infinitely beyond it.

But that, of course, is absurd. Still, one could see how a man as full of the Infinite Power as he was could think thus, especially if he had no special training. And if this continued, as it seemed to be going to do, I feared that it would drive him mad. He would imagine that he indeed was the Creator of the Universe, the "I AM" who made and controlled everything, and it would lead him to do wild and attempt impossible things.

But not even the Infinite Being cannot actually do impossible things. He cannot make contradictions, such as white which is black, or hard which is soft, and so on. These are simply ways of speaking, and do not express anything. That is elementary.

But there are things which are in fact impossible--contradictory--which do not seem so. For instance, that the Infinite Being could be finite (i.e. a man) while remaining infinite. One must be careful to exclude such things from one's thinking. And the fear I had was that Jesus would consider himself as a limited Infinite, which is a contradiction in terms. If, because united with the Infinite, he could do amazing things, it did not follow that he himself was Infinite. Clearly, he was not; he was a man, and all men are limited to being only men.

But once he was convinced that he himself was the Infinite who limited himself to being (only) human while being simultaneously beyond all limit, it would drive him mad. It was my noble goal to prevent this; and this was why I was disturbed by the innocuous phrase he used to the woman.

But perhaps I am making too much of what is, in fact, a perfectly ordinary expression; and in any case, the other students of Jesus arrived at this point and the woman ran off, leaving her water jar, presumably to tell her neighbors what had happened.

Jesus was walking excitedly back and forth, and when James said, "Rabbi, eat something," he answered, "I have food to eat you know nothing of." They asked each other whether anyone had given him something to eat (which I could have refuted), and he answered, "My food is to do the will of the one who sent me, and finish the task he gave me." It seemed that the conversation with the woman had a much greater significance for him than it appeared to have--which reawakened my fears.

He looked out at the fields, which were just beginning to sprout. "You would say, would you not, that it is four months before the harvest comes? But I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields; they are ready for the harvest."

Everyone looked out, bewildered. "The reaper," he went on, has already had his pay and is gathering a harvest for eternal life, so that the one who planted and the one who reaps can enjoy themselves together. This is where we verify the saying, 'One person plants; another reaps.' I sent you to reap what you had not worked on; others have done the work, and you have received the result."

No one but I had the faintest inkling of what he was saying; but I had seen the woman, who was the "firstfruits," as it were, of the "harvest" he was referring to. And indeed, the Samaritans came up with her shortly afterward and wanted Jesus to stay with them--which we did, for two days; and I am told that they said to the woman that they now did not have to take her word for it; they knew from their own experience that he was the Prince, and the Savior of the world.

And that was why I considered my task to be supremely important. If he was to save the world, he would have to be sane to do so; and I, I hoped, would be able to mitigate his megalomania, and keep him sane long enough for it to occur. Nothing like him had ever appeared in the world, and I had to see to it that his mission could be accomplished. This is why I am writing this diary; so that people will be able to see how I managed it--because just as the Force that created the cosmos made him, that same Force put me here to see to it that he did not go beyond his limits and destroy himself and all the rest of us.

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