Twenty-Six

He certainly had enough to occupy himself with now. Was Judas correct, and were Joseph and Mary misinterpreting what had happened to them? Was God a kind of "force" that could do supernatural things, but not a person who had personal contact with this world? Was all of Scripture merely stories, or did God know what was happening in this world he made, and was he actively directing it toward a conscious goal he had chosen--as the history of the Chosen People seemed to indicate on its face?

The question was this: Could Mary have had a revelation by an angel and become pregnant if God were as Judas claimed? If not, Judas would have to be wrong; Judas's theory supposed that Jesus was a normal child that had got somehow in the way of this impersonal force and channeled it so as to be able to perform miraculous feats. In that case, the Reign of God was a delusion. Jesus would eventually die, because "everlasting life" was nothing but a state of mind, and pain and suffering would not eventually be abolished, but simply never matter to anyone. Tell that to someone who has broken his legs and cannot walk. He might be able to live in that condition and not let it overwhelm him; but his "joy" meant no more than gritting his teeth and ignoring half of his life. What then did Jesus promise with this "change of thinking" but closing one's eyes to unpleasant facts?

And his actions belied this. He cured people and made them able to walk, obviously as a sign that he could do this, and that this was the way things were going to be. After all, Matthew himself had cured cripples, and he felt no "power" taking over his body. He simply invoked the name of Jesus and the person got up and walked. And he was to announce that this was a sign of the way it would be when God began his reign shortly.

Granted, God was not some kind of inflated man; he was not a person in that sense, he was a spirit--whatever that meant. Why else did he forbid making images of him? There was no way to picture him, because to picture him was to depict him in material terms, and he was not material. And so Matthew could believe that he could be "in" someone in a sense, much as the demons were in Mary. They certainly seemed to be persons, though invisible, and not material things in any way; they made her speak in a completely different voice, and had their own fears and plans. They were not "powers" of evil, merely; they were individuals, obviously terrified of Jesus. And God must be like them, must he not?

He had convinced himself of this, when something inside him said, "You do not believe this--any of it! Judas may not be completely correct, but he is closer to the truth than you! You are wasting your time here; you should leave before it is too late, and either force Gideon to give up what you have let him have, or at the very least go back and retrieve those jewels, and start life over again. They will take you back as a tax collector--or perhaps you can find a post in the administration of Pontius Pilate. He could use a consultant who knew as much as you about a person that might very well cause severe trouble to his regime." And what would follow from that? That Matthew would be there advising Pontius when Jesus was taken to him to be crucified!

He shook himself, waving his arms as if to ward off a swarm of bees. "What? Am I to allow myself to become possessed? What am I thinking?" The answer seductively came, "The truth," but he fought it with all his might. The lure of the jewels was poisoning his mind and not allowing him to be rational. He knew not what was poisoning Judas's mind, but Judas's seemingly rational argument simply did not square with the facts as Matthew knew them. The fact was that God was not an impersonal power, and God would not cooperate with Jesus by doing things that only God could do if what Jesus was saying was false; God did not corroborate falsehood, still less pernicious falsehood.

The question, then, was not whether or not God was ratifying what Jesus claimed; that had to be so. The real question was what Jesus meant when he made his claims. That was what needed rational thought. We were not to follow Jesus blindly, but we were to follow him and use our minds to see how what he said made sense; and if it did not make sense now, then we were to wait until events showed how it made sense.

This line of thought is easy to summarize, perhaps, but it took Matthew several days, in which he simply went through the motions of what was expected of him, while his mind tossed one way and then the other as a sleepless person tosses in his bed. Finally, however, he managed to square his shoulders and "take up his cross," as Jesus had been saying, and tried manfully to follow him.

Mary had not left his consciousness for even a moment during this time. It was as if he had two sets of thoughts going on simultaneously. He did not have much of any direct contact with her, and was troubled by the fact that she herself was greatly disturbed by what had happened on that fateful night. He wondered whether Judas had shaken her faith in Jesus as he had shaken his--though she had the experience of the demons, perhaps, to make her aware that he could not be right. Or perhaps she was troubled by the fact that Judas had acted as if he were sexually interested in her after all, and was worried that she might relapse into her old ways--just, as Matthew suddenly realized, as Judas's words and actions and made the jewels burn once again in his own mind, and brought turmoil upon him. Each of them had his own demons, though not exactly of the kind that actually possessed Mary, and Judas seemed to awaken them somehow.

Well, they would have to trust the Master. What else could they do? She was probably just as helpless as he was; but the Master was there, and he knew. He had to know. There was nothing to worry about.

And so he worried.

One afternoon, as he was wandering and fruitlessly ruminating over the troubles in his life and hers, he had gone with Jesus and the other eleven emissaries into a lonely spot, after crossing the "sea" of Galilee in a boat, because Jesus had been so pressed by the crowds that he decided that they should have a little time by themselves; they would return on the morrow. But it turned out that a positively enormous throng of people had divined where they were going, and had walked around the lake from Capernaum and all the surrounding area and caught sight of them; and Jesus, unwilling to simply send them away, had gone up a hill (it was not very far from the mountain where he had delivered his initial sermon), and he spoke to them at great length, sitting there, with the people ranged below him down toward the lake.

Finally, he said to the Twelve, who were gathered round him, "It is late, and the place is deserted." He turned to Philip, who happened to be beside him. "Where will we buy enough bread to feed all these people?" He had a twinkle in his eye as he said this.

"Half a year's salary," Philip answered, "wouldn't buy enough bread so that everyone could have even a little!" He gazed out at the crowd in dismay. Jesus wore a little smile. He looked around as if for suggestions.

Andrew said, "There is a boy here with five barley loaves and a couple of fish. But" he added as he cast a glance out at the crowd, "what good would that do with all of them?" He waved his arm indicating the multitude.

"Have the people lie down to eat," said Jesus. The place was quite grassy, and so they milled about and reclined on it, spreading themselves on the field halfway down the hill.

Jesus then took the loaves of bread from the boy, raised his eyes to the sky and thanked his Father for supplying them with food. And then he tore the loaves apart and handed the pieces to the "emissaries" to distribute; and did the same with the two cooked fishes. And each of the emissaries, Matthew included, managed to get a piece either of bread or fish or both. Matthew noticed that his piece of bread was quite large, considering it was a mere fragment of one of the small loaves.

And then when Matthew tore apart this piece of bread and gave one piece of it to one person, he found he had enough to give a piece to someone else; and when he did this, he still had enough to continue doing so. It was incredible. He could not see the little part of a loaf in his hand grow; it was just that there was always enough, somehow. It fascinated him, and he tried to follow it as he was distributing the bread, but somehow he never could see what happened.

It was like that game that some people played at festivals, with shells and a pea; they would say that the hand was quicker than the eye, and one was supposed to follow what they were doing and say which shell the pea was under; but it never was under the one one named, however closely one scrutinized what the man was doing.

The difference was that he was not a clever manipulator; he himself was handing out the bread, and his left hand apparently did not know what his right hand was doing, because his left hand always had bread in it, no matter how much he gave out. He thought of giving the whole thing to someone, just to see what would happen, but considered that after all, he was feeding the people, not playing games, and he had better be serious about it.

At one point, Matthew spotted Mary emerging from the path into the field, looking at all the people eating, when Simon the Revolutionary passed her, and said, "Have you received any as yet?" and when she answered No, he took a piece of barley bread he had, broke some off, and handed it to her.

"Is that enough?" he asked. "Take another." And he tore off another rather larger chunk of bread from the piece he had and gave it to her. "Have some fish also," he said, and took a piece of cooked fish he was carrying with the bread, broke it in two, and gave her half. "Is it not amazing?" he said, half to her and half to some people seated nearby.

"Is what amazing?" asked Mary.

"Look!" he said. "I gave you two large pieces of bread, and half of my fish, and see what I have left! What I started with! I have been trying to see when it grew back, and I cannot! It is just there when I want more! Is it not astonishing?"

Mary was about to make some remark, but Simon passed along to the group, asking everyone he met whether they wanted more, and saying, "You see? Your King is feeding you! With five loaves of bread and two little fish! And there are thousands of you! I have been counting. You must be five thousand men or more, not even counting the women and children! And all of you are being fed on these five loaves by your King! Or is Caesar your King? Or who is?"

And as he passed from group to group in the throng, the word "King" began to swell from the crowd like a chorus, and when finally the students came around with baskets to collect the leftovers and eventually filled twelve with what people no longer wanted, the cry of "King!" became a roar, as the people stood up, evidently to go up to Jesus and lift him on their shoulders and take him--to Jerusalem, to anywhere, they knew not; they were simply inflamed with enthusiasm.

But quickly the swell of hosannas turned into a confused, "Where is he?" and Simon began running among them, from one student to the next, asking who had seen Jesus last. The most that could be gleaned was that he had been there, but had slipped away while everyone was distracted with collecting the marvelous harvest from the five loaves. "But he cannot have gone!" screamed Simon in anguish. "It is the perfect moment! Where is he?"

Nathanael put a long hand on his shoulder and turned him around. "Obviously," he said, "he does not want to be King."

"What do you mean, 'does not want to be'? He is our King."

"Then where is he?"

"That is what I want to know!" he shouted, and broke free. He ran off into the woods at the top of the hill, where Jesus must have gone; and after a short while came back, protesting and sputtering for people to help him look for the Master. But the others said that the Master knew what he was doing, and that if he wanted to be made King, he would appear and allow himself to be proclaimed King; but if he did not, everyone here could search the whole hill, and he would be nowhere to be found.

Simon would not calm down for a considerable time, well after the crowd had thinned out a great deal, and night had begun to fall; and even then, all he did was hang sulking about the periphery of the little band of students.

They, on the other hand, were ebullient. "Did you see Philip's face," laughed John's brother James, "when the Master asked him how we were to buy bread to feed all these people?"

"Well how was I to know what he planned to do?" said Philip, evoking a roar of laughter in everyone, who continued teasing him unmercifully in their joy, while some related anecdotes about the people in the crowd, how everyone tried to find out how the bread multiplied itself--and no one, not even the students, could fathom it; there simply always was more. Like everything Jesus did, it was perfectly simple, and perfectly impossible to understand.

But night was falling apace, and Jesus was still somewhere on the hill--or nowhere, or perhaps already in Capernaum. "What shall we do?" they asked each other. "He told us we were to be in Capernaum tomorrow. Shall we wait, or get into the boat now?"

"There is only the one boat," said Simon Rock, "and"--looking at Mary--"there are more of us now than when we came over. Will we all fit in?"

"Do not concern yourself," said Thomas. "It is a fine night, though it looks as if there might be a wind later. You go ahead in the boat if you think you want to risk it, in case he has somehow gone ahead of us. I will walk, and see you there probably around noon." He asked if anyone wanted to accompany him, and Simon the Revolutionary, who was not very interested in chitchat, volunteered, as did Mary and a few others, including women who were driving donkeys with bundles of the group's nomadic provisions.

Matthew, overwhelmed by what had happened, sat in the stern of the boat, musing to himself, as John, James, the Rock, and Andrew took to the oars to row them over to Capernaum, which was a goodly distance away. They had to go fairly far from land if they wanted to make straight for the town, and so they set out for what seemed the middle of the lake.

They talked happily among themselves at first, though not, of course, the four oarsmen, who were working rather hard at propelling the large boat--it was one of the Rock's fishing boats--but as the night wore on, conversation died down, to Matthew's relief, because he wanted to ponder the significance of this particular miracle. Could Jesus have been telling everyone that in the Kingdom there would be no more need to sweat for food? That the world would turn once again into a Garden of Eden, where tending the soil was not arduous but a pleasure, and rains would fall in such a way that one had no worries, and locusts would not eat it? Could such a world exist? Why not, if five barley loaves and two fish could feed seven or eight thousand people? Or was he trying to say something else? John had told him once that at Sychar in Samaria, he had told a woman that when God's reign came, no one would ever be thirsty, and would not have to drink. Perhaps they would not have to eat either. Incredible! But he had just seen it with his own eyes!

One of those sudden squalls all the fishermen feared began to blow up. The four oarsmen dug in with all their might as the waves rose, and everyone silently pulled with them, mentally, as they struggled harder and harder. In a short while, Philip took over John's oar, and "little James" the one of "big James," while Nathanael (with some reluctance, Matthew thought) spelled Andrew, and Thaddeus, of all people, took over from the Rock, who came to the stern beside Matthew, where Thaddeus had been sitting, and looked out, panting.

Suddenly, he straightened. "Behold!"

"What is it?" came from several voices. The oarsmen were too busy trying to hold the boat on course.

"It looks like the Master!"

"The Master? What boat could he be in? Ours was the only one."

"He is not in a boat! He is walking over the water!"

"What?" "Where?" "You are out of your mind!"

"Look there astern! See for yourselves!"

"It is the Master!" "It is a ghost! They have killed him!" "Who is out of his mind now?" "How can anyone walk on top of the water? You are all seeing things!"

"No, it is truly the Master!" shouted the Rock over the roar of the storm. "Master, if it is you, tell me to come to you over the water!"

"Come!" came the voice--clearly, Jesus's voice.

The Rock stepped out of the boat and took a few steps toward Jesus--and then made the mistake of looking down. Immediately, he sank. "Master! Help!"

Jesus was suddenly up to him, reached out his hand, and lifted him up. "You skeptic!" he said, in an amused, not unkindly tone. "Why did you doubt?" He brought the Rock up to the boat, and both climbed in.

--And suddenly, the wind and rain stopped, and they found that they were on the shore they had been trying to reach. No one said a word, all cowed by what they had witnessed. Not only food, but even the winds and the sea were his slaves, and did his bidding at not even a word, but a mere nod of his head.

Matthew glanced over at Judas, as overwhelmed as all the rest. He seemed, nevertheless, to be trying to see if this fit in with his view of what Jesus was, and making adjustments to his theory.