Sixteen

Jesus came back among them, but without Matthew, who he said had an errand to perform. As usual, people were discussing events, but Nathanael had no particular desire to join in, since he was still mulling over in his own mind why ordinary virtuous people would want the sinner punished. What difference would it make to them? He seemed on the verge of an answer, but it kept eluding him.

He happened to be near a conversation that was going on with Judas, and he decided to listen in for a while to see what Judas had made of the latest cure.

He was mentioning to Simon and Andrew as Thomas joined them that it was obvious that Jesus was filled with the Divine Spirit in a way even beyond what the prophets "including such as Elijah and Elisha were. They had to invoke God, while the Master simply does miraculous things as if by his own power." So Judas had noticed what Nathanael had noticed.

"As if?" said Andrew. "You think it is not by his own power?"

"Well, clearly, it is by the power of God. They are perfectly right; only God can forgive sins. But 'The Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins.' Either he is saying that he is God, or he is claiming that God has given him this power. But God is a spirit, not someone with flesh and blood. So the only reasonable thing to do is say that he is a man somehow filled with God. Either that, or he is a liar."

"Or," said Simon, "he is God."

"And you can see how absurd that is, I hope."

Nathanael wandered away. Judas was a little too ready to dismiss this possibility. Who were we to put limits on the Almighty? Unless the Almighty were some kind of impersonal Activity or Force that had no interest in the things that It created, as if they were automatic emanations of It--some kind of spiritual droppings, as it were, that were beneath Its notice.

Granted, God had to be a super-person and was not a person in our sense of the term--but there doubtless was some kind of continuity there; and after all, Jesus did call Him "the Father," and "my Father." And did not Scripture confirm this? "Does a mother forget her baby? But even if she does forget, I will not forget you." How could an impersonal Being inspire statements of that sort?

--But the fact that Jesus called God his Father implied, did it not, that there was some kind of distinction between Jesus and the Father. So Jesus was not the Father who took on himself flesh. Supposing, then, that he is God, is there a God the Father and a God the Son? Two Gods? That sounds dangerously like the polytheism of the Gentiles. The whole thing grew more mysterious the more one thought about it.

This pushed out of his mind his speculation of why the virtuous want the sin punished, and brought him a little closer to Judas's position. When Matthew returned the next day, and Thomas introduced him to Judas, he thought he would see if Judas would explain himself more fully to Matthew, who clearly was well-educated, and so he remained nearby, as if lazily contemplating the sky, and listened.

And, indeed, Matthew was saying, "Then what, as a man of learning, do you make of the Master?" Nathanael leaned back against the tree trunk he was near.

Judas replied, "He is an extraordinary phenomenon, without question. He has obviously read rather extensively in the Scriptures, and seems to know some of them by heart. He can quote from the prophets, for instance, at a moment's notice. But at the same time, he does not have the same kind of command of them that the scholars have, who have studied all the commentaries and all of the--shall I say, often twisted?--interpretations they give of every jot and tittle. He gets at the spirit; he knows them from the inside, so to speak. It is extremely refreshing. He will go right to the heart of some passage that commentators have worried to death like dogs fighting over a sandal, and one will say, 'Of course! Why was that not brought up earlier.' It is like reading Scripture with a bright light shining on the page.

"And that, of course, allows him to go beyond what is merely written down, because he seems to understand, more than anyone I have ever seen, why it was written down. That is why, even if he is not a scholar in the strict sense, I have joined him; I learn more here in one day than I did in years of study beforehand."

"That is great praise indeed," said Matthew.

"It is far less than he deserves."

"He is not one," put in Thomas, "that even a person like myself can find fault with--except perhaps his tendency to be a bit outspoken and confrontational from time to time." The image of Jesus with the whip came before Nathanael.

"Confrontational?" said Matthew.

"You remember last Passover, Judas, when he went into the Temple and saw all the people selling animals for the sacrifices? Fire came out of his eyes, and he took off the rope he used as a belt and made a whip of it, and drove them all out, shouting, 'Take these out of here! You are not to make my Father's house a Market!'"

Nathanael missed a good deal of what they said, trying to put what Judas said into what he was beginning to think of Jesus. Certainly, if he were God--God "the Son," whatever that meant--he knew the Scripture "from the inside," since he was in some sense responsible for its being written--so that would reinforce the Son of God sense. But, of course, if he were simply "filled with" God, with his "spirit upon him," then the same would be true, even if he were just a man--or more than "just" a man, but--it was still a complete muddle.

"--himself on the chest, Judas was saying, "as he said, 'Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will rebuild it!'" as he waved the three fingers before him.

"What could he have meant?"

"No one knew. But it silenced them, if only for a moment, because of the force of his voice, more than anything else--and perhaps because it was so incomprehensible. The obvious implication was that if they tore down the Temple, he--and perhaps a legion of angels--would restore it."

"To save face, in fact," interjected Thomas with his characteristic little chop of the head, "some of them scoffed, 'This Temple has taken forty-six years to build, and you will rebuild it in three days?' But the problem was that they were afraid he just might be able to do it, and so they drifted away."

"The people did not, however," said Judas. "They were not enamored of the Pharisees to begin with, with all their rules and regulations and interpretations and exegeses, and it delighted them to see someone stand up to them and best them. They hung on his every word."

"Actually," said Thomas, "I think that he was saying that if they tried to kill him, he would escape and return in three days. Because they would dearly love to get rid of him, and he was pointing to himself, not the Temple. 'Destroy this Temple, you see." Ha! So Thomas had caught the implication! Thomas was no fool.

"You may have a point, Thomas," said Judas. "But it does not make a great deal of sense no matter what. I think perhaps he was carried away by the heat of the moment. There is no question that he was angry."

"I refuse to believe that he was not in complete control; I saw him. And after all, did you notice that he kicked over the changers' tables and drove out the animals, but did not set the doves and pigeons free, because the vendors would not have been able to recover them." Thomas had also spotted that. Nathanael was proud of him.

"There is that, of course."

"What is that commotion up ahead?" said Matthew. "Why are we stopping?"

They were near the village of Nain at the moment. It seemed that a tiny funeral procession had crossed their path. There were quite a few--almost a hundred--people around Jesus, when he stopped and signaled to the bearers of the stretcher on which the body had been laid, wrapped in in a linen cloth, with the napkin tied over the head. The mother, evidently a widow, was frantically wailing in despair beside it.

Jesus went up to her. "Do not cry," he said.

"Oh, sir!" she wailed. "First my husband, and now him! It is too much! Too much! I cannot bear it! What will I do, alone in the world? How will I live?"

Jesus made no attempt to utter consoling words. He went past the woman to the bier, touched the wrapped body, and said in a matter-of-fact, quiet voice, "Young man, I tell you, sit up."

And he sat up.

Jesus freed him from the napkin and began loosening the shroud from over his head. Someone cried, "Here! Find him sometime to wear! He is naked under that shroud!" and one of the men took off his cloak and handed it to Jesus, who put it over the boy's head as the linen fell off.

Everyone was struck dumb as they saw him blink in the failing sunlight. Then they suddenly began shouting, "A great prophet has risen among us!" "Another Elisha!" "God has smiled on his people!" "Who would have believed it?" "Did you see? Did you see?" "How bewildered he looks!" "He cannot have actually been dead; I have heard of such things in the past." "Then how did he know of it? Everyone else thought him dead!" "Behold the mother!" She screamed and ran up to him, smothering him in her arms and weeping hysterically.

The boy looked a trifle embarrassed at all the attention, and his eyes for a moment looked over her shoulder as if to say, "What is all the fuss?" and then looked at something or someone, and his expression changed in an instant to a gaze of horror and disbelief.

Matthew, who was in his line of sight, turned to see if he had noticed anything behind him, and there might have been six or seven people that he could have seen. Obviously he knew nothing of the boy, who quickly recovered from his astonishment, and was asking his mother and everyone around him where he was, and what he was doing on this stretcher. Nathanael noticed that Thomas and Ezra had observed the same glance. Was it Matthew? But then, why did he not react?

The boy then seemed to recall something, and looked for a moment as if he was going to faint. He whispered something in his mother's ear, and she nodded tearfully, and then said "But you have come back! You are with me once again! Thank God! Oh, thank God! --And (to Jesus) thank you, Sir, so very, very much!"

"Your faith has brought him back to you."

"You are right! I could not believe I had lost him forever! I knew somehow he would come back to me! And you have done it!"

The boy whispered something else in her ear, and she said to Jesus, "You are Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet we have heard so much of?"

"I am."

"I was looking for you! I was praying I would meet you! I told myself that if I met you and you saved my son, I would join you. What else have I to live for?"

"Well, if you think you would like to come after me, feel free to join us. And you, child? What is your name, by the way?"

"David, son of Asa. Yes, I would join you also." He said this perhaps a bit reluctantly, but then cast another glance in Matthew's direction, and seemed to come to a resolution as he turned back to Jesus. So it did seem to be Matthew, thought Nathanael.

"You may leave, of course, whenever you please; I realize that you are not in a state for making permanent decisions at the moment. --Nor were you, yesterday, is it not?"

The boy blushed. "It would seem not, indeed."

"I trust, then, that there will be no more of that in the future."

"No, Master."

"You need have no fear. Your sins are forgiven."

The boy hung his head. "Thank you, Master."

The boy then said something to his mother and ran off, probably to get cleaned of the spices and dressed. Here was a new development. He could not only cure diseases, he could even raise the dead! The "Son of God" seemed to be winning the debate over who Jesus was. But then Nathanael remembered that Elijah had restored a child to life--but only with an elaborate rigmarole of lying on the body. Well, there was no question of Jesus's being greater than any of the prophets, including Moses; but the fact that he raised a boy to life did not necessarily make him more than a man filled with God; it might be that he was just a bigger container, so to speak.

On the other hand, none of the prophets claimed to be able to forgive sins, and Jesus did not say that God forgave them, but that he had the power on earth to forgive sins. Still, why would God want to confine himself within the multitudinous limitations of the human condition? Still, if God were infinite, who knew what he could do? It was at least not inconceivable that he could in some sense limit "exercising" so to speak, most of his Activity, and thus in some sense be a human being while being still essentially infinitely beyond what he was.

Or something.

But that was not impossible, was it? If we ourselves could close our eyes, for instance, and act in the limited (human) way a blind man acts, why could not God "refuse," so to speak, to act in more than a human way--except, of course, when he performed acts that only God could perform, as when we opened our eyes when we needed to do so.

Or something.

But even if this were not nonsense, the question still would remain why God would want to do such a thing. Of course, that was probably beyond human fathoming. Why did God create the universe at all, if he is completely self-sufficient?

But perhaps Judas was right after all. But still the same question remained. Why would God "fill" a man with Himself so that he did miraculous things--especially if He were an "It" that was totally aloof from the world that "emanated" from Him--It--somehow.

In this case, was it not true that there really was no "why"; it was just one of those things that "just happened," and Jesus happened to be the man who was in the way of some kind of ray of power, as Moses was.

But then nothing ultimately made sense; there was no purpose or rationality for anything. It "just happened." Fascinating. Judas's rational attempt to "explain" Jesus led, not to making sense out of what Jesus did, but to reducing it to random nonsense.

Or something.

The boy had run back, clean and in new clothes, carrying the cloak that had been loaned to him, while Matthew was speaking to Jesus, saying something about giving a feast. The boy heard him, and said to Jesus, "A feast? Then surely he will need help, Master! Let me go with him; I can do much, and will do it gladly!" Oh? So eager? After such a look when he first saw him?--if it was Matthew he saw.

Matthew answered that he would not trouble him, and he replied, "There is no trouble; and besides, I would prefer not to have people gawking at me and me and asking me what it felt like to be dead!"

Matthew accepted his offer, and Jesus stroked his beard, looking at the two of them, and nodded permission. So Jesus had seen something suspicious also, it seemed. But he did not foresee any real danger to Matthew, or he would not have let the boy go with him.

Neither Matthew nor the boy appeared the next day, evidently busy with preparations for the feast on the morrow. The boy had apparently decided to sleep at Matthew's house. His mother had fretted a bit, but Jesus assured her that he would be perfectly safe with Matthew and his slave. It seemed that Matthew was also safe.

And sure enough, when they arrived at the--one could only call it mansion--the next day, there was Matthew, with the boy behind him, both dressed in fine linen, Matthew welcoming them in a kind of embarrassed way, as well as a number of what turned out to be tax-collectors, who clearly were as unfamiliar with Matthew as the members of Jesus's entourage were.

It was a fairly tense dinner, in fact, particularly at first, but Nathanael, who knew wines, whispered in Thomas's ear (he was drinking water, of course, and looking on nostalgically) that the vintage was almost up to what Jesus had supplied at the wedding, and that Matthew had diluted it very little, probably to loosen tongues.

And, In fact, they began to speak rather more freely after a short time, and the dinner could be said to be a success. Afterwards, people kept their cups and rose from the table, looking over the house and talking. Suddenly, Jesus let out a piercing whistle and ran out the back, where the dogs (about which the guests had been warned) had been chained. Matthew sprang up and followed.

No one else did so, but stood or sat, frozen for a moment in shock; there was definitely a commotion of some sort back there. Nathanael recovered in an instant, and moved to one of the windows looking out on the back, where he saw Jesus running up to one of the dogs, which had broken its chain and was about to bite out the throat of one of the visiting tax-collectors (and, thought Nathanael, do a favor to mankind), but which had looked up, puzzled, at Jesus's whistle and at his command for it to stop.

He called it by name!

The man was lying on his back, with his clothes and skin torn, and he looked half-dead already. "Back!" said Jesus, and the dog, with its tail between its legs, dragging half its chain, retreated to the doghouse to join its companion, which looked more ashamed and sheepish than the culprit, if possible.

Jesus went up to the man, who was gasping on the ground, and ran his hand over him, at which his wounds closed and his clothes restored themselves. "You will say nothing of this, if you please," he said to the man. Nothing. It will be as if nothing happened."

The man was too stupefied to speak. "You had better compose yourself and go back inside," said Jesus, and the man left, opening and closing his mouth like a fish.

Others, who had heard the commotion, came out to greet him as he entered, and asked him what had happened, and all he could say was, "Nothing. It was nothing. I came out and then decided that I had best go back inside. No, it was nothing." No one believed him, of course.

Jesus then went back to the dogs, and Matthew cried "Master! No!" since he knew how vicious they were. But Jesus answered, "Fear not; she knows me." He felt the dog's neck, which had been bloodied by the tremendous pull she had made on her collar when she broke the chain, and there too the wounds were instantly healed. He fondled the dog's head a bit and she actually licked his face and wagged her tail! He then grasped the chain and ran his hand along it, and joined it to the part that was fastened to the house, and the chain was intact.

"He provoked them," said Jesus. "But he will not do it again--ever." He ran his hand along the other's chain also, and healed the bruises on its neck. "Do not be hard on them," he added, to Matthew, "They only did what they were trained to do. And did it very well." he said to the dogs, as he fondled the two of them. "You could not know that this was the wrong person."

Matthew was speechless, not only at how he had healed the man and the dogs (and the chains), but at how he had absolute control over these vicious beasts. They loved him, and he acted as if he loved them also.

Well! And he knows the animals, and not only that, they know him and do his bidding! Incredible!

"But let us go back inside. I would not have this known, if at all possible; it would do no one any good, and it is too early in my time." And what was that all about? Too early for what? To reveal who he really was? Certainly the world was not yet prepared to hear that the Creator and Owner of absolutely everything was going to rule over them as King. Nathanael himself was not prepared--as yet--in spite of all he had seen.

But he was on the road.

A little later, he came up to Matthew and in a low voice asked, "Did I see correctly out of the window? That the dog broke loose and attacked that man? And the Master healed him?"

"He asked me not to speak of it, and so it would be as well if you did not repeat the story either. He said that it was too early in his time, whatever that meant."

"I see," was the thoughtful answer. "Something like this happened at the very beginning, you know--also at a feast, come to think of it. We had been invited to a wedding party, and it seemed the host did not expect so many with us and the Master, and the wine ran out. His mother mentioned it to the Master, and after a moment, he very quietly told the servers to fill up the water jars--you know, the ones they use for washing--with water, and they took it out, and began serving it, because it was wine. But the reason I mention it is that when his mother told him about the lack of wine, he said, 'But what is that to me, Madam, or to you? My time has not come yet.' He seems to have his wonders planned out in some sort of sequence, for some purpose of his; but he is willing to respond to emergencies, apparently."

"Thank God for that!" said Matthew.

When asked by the guests what happened, the tax-collector protested (with a face still wide-eyed from terror) that nothing happened, but that he thought it would be well, all things considered, if he excused himself, and practically ran off.

As soon as he was gone, everyone was buzzing with the story, but they could not verify it, since only Matthew and Nathanael had actually seen it. Others had been outside, but they were in the front of the house, confronting a number of Pharisees and law-experts at the fence who were trying to discover if it were really the case that Jesus was "feasting with tax-collectors and sinners."

Thomas went up to Nathanael, and asked, "What went on?"

"Matthew asked me not to speak of it, and so I cannot say, but it is probably what you thought it was."

Ezra, who was, as always, present, said, "So he is Master of vicious dogs also."

"He is Master of everything, it seems. Everything," and he added, "Thank God!"