Chapter 21: A Return to Capernaum

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book II: The Rabbi
Part Four–Teacher
                                      

My beloved David: I, John, am very old, and by the grace of what little wisdom God has given me, I must admit that I have not included all of Jesus’ activities in this letter. I have tried to mention things that have not been recorded before this. But if all the tings Jesus has done were to be put down on paper, the world itself could not contain the books that people would write. I must leave some of that job to the few still living who also knew him personally, and to future men and women who can send their minds back to these times and see the events themselves.

I have tried to show you the real Jesus: the man who, though he became a God, was yet as human as you and I. If Jesus had not been a human person, what good would it have been for the rest of us to strive, as he did, to become more than human? I know that he was born of a virgin and this, some say, gave him a head start. But what of it? He was a person in the flesh like everyone else, doomed to the forgetfulness of birth just as each of us must experience it at the beginning of a new life. He struggled; he suffered. He did. These events were not just outward symbols, like a Greek play, which he put on for us. He felt these things, perhaps even more so than most humans because of his great sensitivity; and in spite of his amazing powers, he felt pain, loneliness, sorrow, joy, and human strength. He was human first. Only later did he resume his immortal Godhood, as we all can hope to do someday.

What of his claim that he was the son of God? He felt like he was a son–and he had a son’s relationship to his father–with God. But the claim means more. He also was born of a virgin by God’s hand; but this can happen to others, too. Jesus’ claim means even more than this.

Jesus said he was the firstborn of his father. He meant this in more than an earthly sense. All human souls had a beginning, when spirits first were created. Out of God came the earth and all things on it, the universe and its stars, and the spirit beings who were of different types of awarenesses–plants, animals, mature spirits, and all the angels. When God first made mature aware spirits, Jesus was the very first to be made. He led the way for the rest of us, and still leads. Jesus was many men throughout different ages, leading and guiding, but the firstborn son in all ages: Joshua in one life and Jesus in another, yet Christ in all. Born perfect (as we all are) at the beginning of creation, he took on various imperfect physical forms, from Adam down to the present, to lead us to greater and more complex forms of perfection.

Jesus is not just an incarnation of God; he is a separate soul who is growing like all of us. Because he has attained perfection with the aid of the flesh, and in it, he has lit a beacon that all of us may follow. He established an immortal body. We, who are mortal in repeated lifetimes, may hope for that same immortality. Though we will never be a firstborn son or daughter, yet we were born soon after. We, too, will someday become immortal. We, too, will someday be like Christ.

It is for this reason that the example Jesus laid for us is of the greatest importance. By his life he showed us, first, that becoming like him is possible. Second, because he now is the perfected physical human, he has given us a glimpse of what we, too, shall someday be. Third, most important, he has cut a path that each of us may follow more easily through the wilderness of death. Beyond this wilderness lies the great ocean, and eternal life, not forgetting, uninterrupted, and as the sun of perfect brilliance is to the moon of our present lives. Each of us is a sun in our rightful inheritance and not merely the poor clay form which our Selves are said to have been born.

What did Jesus do after he left Egypt the final time? He returned to Judea and Galilee to teach and heal.

It is curious that one of his first acts in his homeland that brought him fame had nothing to do at all with his powers. He acted simply, as a wise man would, and so his first reputation was as a scholar and teacher of wisdom.

It happened one day shortly after his return to Capernaum and his family at the villa. A man was drowning. From inside the villa, which is close by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus heard his cries for help. Jesus was alone for the afternoon. Without thinking he jumped up from the book rolls he was studying on a new straw mat in the day room, and he ran to the window. He saw the man, a little, lonely weaver who had recently come to Capernaum alone and sold his woven goods on the streets. The weaver was flailing his arms in the Sea and choking on water as small waves kept breaking over his bearded head. Believing the man had somehow accidentally gone too far out in the water, Jesus stripped off all but his loincloth.

Jesus had learned to swim as a boy in Capernaum before his family had moved to Nazareth. He kept his eye on the drowning man now as he hurried out the rear doorway of the villa, across the thick green grass and down the rock beach. In a flash he was in the water and swimming for the man. But the weaver had gone under.

Jesus worriedly swam to the spot where he had last seen the small man. An iron claw clamped painfully around Jesus and began dragging him under. It was the man.

Almost sighing with relief, Jesus reached down through the cool, churning waters and found the man’s hair. He pulled on the hair and brought the weaver’s face above water again, a small, quiet face with closed eyes. The man looked asleep. But he was still struggling. Dreamily he began wrapping his thin, bare arms around his rescuer so tightly that Jesus couldn’t move.

Scared, Jesus tore loose his right arm and pushed the man’s chin back and away until he was free of the entangling arms. Then he turned the weaver around and swam, pulling him, to shallower water. As soon as Jesus could touch bottom comfortably, he stood and wrapped both his arms across the man’s bare chest from behind. Using the buoyancy of the water, he hugged the man as hard as he could across the chest, then released him; hugged him, then released him. After Jesus had done this several times, a spout of filmy water shot out of the man’s mouth.

The little weaver coughed several great, racking coughs, and more water gushed down over his black beard. Then, shivering and gasping, he painfully began to breath.

Jesus quickly took him onto the beach and straight into his own family’s villa, where he laid the man down on a dining couch. The man opened his eyes as Jesus was covering his nakedness with a linen spread and woolen blankets.

“Who are you?” he asked Jesus and coughed again. He looked around the room wildly.

“My name is Jesus. You were drowning. I pulled you out of the water.”

The small weaver grabbed at the covers and tore them away. Before Jesus could stop him, he leaped up and raced out the door again.

Startled, Jesus hurriedly followed him. The man was leaping down the slope behind the villa to the shore below. As soon as he reached the water’s edge, he threw himself in and began crawling and walking back out into the rising and hovering waves.

Jesus ran down to the waterline and stopped. As the cool water washed over his bare feet and lapped at his ankles, he realized it would do no good to struggle with the man in the water. This time, if the man could breathe in enough water while fighting with Jesus, it might be impossible to keep him alive. In tense fear, Jesus tried the first thing that came to his mind. He called to the small man.

“Wait! You owe me a debt!”

The small man paused; then he angrily turned around. “What debt!” he shouted back.

“If I have saved your life,” Jesus called, carefully making his voice sound gentle, “certainly you must pay me back before you do anything else. It is the Law of the holy books.”

The man gasped with anger. “Do you think I’m concerned with Laws at a time like this!”

“I hope you are,” Jesus suggested. He stared hard at the man. “You are about to meet the Lawmaker himself!”

The man grimaced and looked unhappily at the water around his bare shoulders. “What is it you want me to do for you?” he asked, across the stretch of water separating the two men.

“Remember!” Jesu sternly warned. “If you do not do this thing for me, your spirit may go to the deepest pit of darkness after you die!”

“I’ll do it; I’ll do it!” the man screamed angrily. He began wading back toward his tormentor.

Jesus hid a smile of relief. The man was too angry, now, to seek the cool waters again. He began to feel himself trembling inside from coolness and the aftermath of reacting swiftly to danger. A puff of wind chilled his shoulders. He took several deep breaths.

As the weaver came stumbling, blue of skin from could, out of the water, he rose up before Jesus and stared impatiently at him. “I am here,” he snapped. “What do you want?”

“Do you remember the sudden storm last month on the Sea, which destroyed many fishing boats?”

Several older children down the shore toward the south called out from the distance and pointed in their direction. Jesus awkwardly shifted from one of his bare feet to the other. He himself was only in a loincloth and the man was naked.

The weaver nodded curtly. “Go on; go on!” he snapped.

“The wives of some of those fishermen also were in the boats with their husbands. Now their children are homeless. No one has been able to take them in. They live with an old woman in that small reed hut by the boat pier in the center of town, by the Sea. I wish for you to take care of them for a time.”

The man frowned impatiently. He tapped his foot and cold water splashed on both men. “What concern of yours are these brats?”

“Some of them,” Jesus said softly, “are children of men who were my friends.”

“Take them in yourself!” The man grabbed his beard and tugged at it impatiently, wringing water out of it.

“My family has the money for this, but not the time. We could not give them the attention and love they need. Come.” Jesus finally smiled. “You owe me this. It is your duty.”

The man swore angrily. “Where is this house?” he asked.

Jesus pointed it out to him. It was just barely visible along the shoreline from where they stood in the rocks and sand.

Without another word the little weaver walked around Jesus and stamped off, along the shore, toward the house. Jesus, beginning to shake all over by this time, took several more deep breaths and hurried back into the villa. As he drew his warm woolen robe about him, he wondered if the man would do what he had asked. At least Jesus knew, the little bearded fellow wouldn’t try killing himself for a while.

The next day, Jesus trolled by the small reed hut with mud plastered unevenly against its walls. Through the open doorway, he saw the little bearded man. Several small children, eyes bright with wonder, were gathered around him. He was sitting on a wooden stool telling them a story. Jesus quickly turned away.

A week later, Josi brought up the subject of the man after dinner. She, Mary, Jude, and Jesus were still reclining on their dinner couches. James, almost a full-grown man of seventeen, was visiting friends near Jerusalem. Ruth was in Rome. She had been there two years, studying under the tutorship of scholars of literature, history, and music. The four of them still at home lay listening to the seabirds calling loudly to each other over the Galilee, and eating a dessert of honey dates and mixed nuts.

Josi looked at Jesus quizzically. “Do you know that little man who used to be a weaver, the one who now is taking care of the storm children at the pier?”

Jesus nodded. He felt his body tense. He quietly had been checking on the man every day. Had the weaver suddenly given up and run into the Galilee again?

Josi’s eyes examined Jesus carefully. “He says he loves taking care of those children He claims you saved his life by making him work with them.”

“We had a talk,” Jesus said. He spoke casually. He saw no point in telling them about his own part in it. “He wanted to drown himself.”

“A talk!” mary frowned at him across the table. “He claims you pulled him out of the Galilee when he was drowning. Twice!”

Jesus blushed. “Is that what he is saying? It was just once, momma. The second time, I talked him out.”

Jude, who was now a serious eleven-year-old, studying the Laws as did all boys his age, grinned once and spoke up.

“Yes,” he told Jesus. “You made him obey one Law even while he was about to break another and kill himself!” He popped another date in his mouth, licked his fingers and looked nonchalantly at his brother.

Jesus shrugged. “The man needed help,” he said. He got up and lit the large table lamp from the small oil lamp always kept going on a pedestal in the corner of the room.

The family talked him into telling them the whole story. By the time he was through, to his embarrassment, their eyes were all glowing with pleasure and pride. They were still looking at him that way when he rose from his couch and went for his nightly walk through the low hills along the shore.

Even worse, as Jesus discovered during the next few weeks, the little weaver had told everyone the story. It spread like fire. Soon the whole northern coastline of the Sea, and even man of the farm villages of Galilee, were talking about it. As the story traveled and improved with the telling, Jesus quickly became known as the Doctor of the Laws who charmed a despairing man out of a raging sea simply by the power of stern speaking and a quick, artful tongue.

Beloved David, as you well know, I came into closer contact with Jesus also about this time. After he returned to Capernaum and visited with his family, and with Judy on Mount Carmel, he began seeing other people in the Capernaum area. One of the groups he saw was my family. We were his cousins, after all, and we had a home in Capernaum. In addition to our family ties with Jesus’ family, we also had become closely connected with John the Forerunner. My father, Zebedee, my older brothers, Roael and James, and I were all followers of the Forerunner, and had been cleansed in the Jordan River by his hands.

I was confused in those days. I was still a young man just barely of marrying age. Though I liked the Essenes more than the Sadducees and Pharisees, and accepted John’ cleansing happily, I was a quick-tempered man when it came to the Romans, who occupied our country. I hated the rich Sadducees who often helped the Romans, and I resented the Pharisees who paid so little attention to freeing Israel but instead insisted on counting the number of hairs on a sacrificial sheep.

I had my doubts about the Essenes, too. I often felt they were too busy locked in their desert and mountain retreats, meditating and studying, to have any kind of effect on the future of Israel. They believed, more than most, in the coming of a Messiah. A Messiah, I knew from scripture, was one who would probably free our country.

When John the Forerunner broke the bonds with his own Essene community by the Dead Sea, because they were too “rule-bound and retiring,” as he told my father Zebedee, I gladly let him cleanse me. He was, after all, teaching that the great messiah, the long-awaited man, had already arrived. Our family knew, of course, because of our own long and close association with mary and the Mount Carmel Essenes, that this Messiah was Jesus. He had not yet proclaimed himself openly. John the Forerunner was doing it for him without naming him. Jesus had returned from Egypt only in the past few months and had not yet started his work.

But he certainly looked like the Messiah.

The first time I saw him after his return from Egypt, he was tall and fair to look upon. He was building an addition to his mother’s villa in Capernaum, working under the hot Sea of Galilee sun. His dark red hair rolled down almost to his shoulders, and his deep, wide chest and thick arms heaved with bared strength as he handled his father Joseph’s tools with easy force, making the hammer and other tools ring, and cutting out chunks of wood from the beams and poles. Beads of sweat were running down his temples and chest.

It was his eyes, though, that did it for me. I had been sent by my father, Zebedee, to invite Jesus to come to our Capernaum home for dinner. As I walked into the yard, Jesus turned and looked at me. His eyes pierced deeply into me, as could the Forerunner’s, but Jesus’ eyes had a gentleness and strength that no man I had ever known possessed. They held me in their grip and challenged me, watched me, and tore into my deepest inner self. I had no secrets to hide from this man. I was thankful I didn’t, for he would have seen them.

“Hello, Jesus,” I said. “Welcome back to Capernaum.”

“It is good to see you, John,” he answered me. “you have become a man while I have been gone. I understand you and my brother James go about the countryside together.” Jesus’ eyes held a sparkle as he told me this. His brother and I were about the same age.

“Has he told you what we do?” I asked, a bit nervously.

“Yes.” He smiled. “You are forming a Galilean group of young men to fight the Roman soldiers if Israel rebels.”

My eyes widened. He talked of it so cheerfully. “Do you accept what we are doing?” I asked, watching him carefully.

He nodded and gave me a serious look. “Yes, john, bt with this difference. There are better ways of fighting the Romans.”

“How?” I asked.

“It requires more strength of mind,” he said, “than most of our people now have. It requires that everyone refuses to help the Romans, even to paying taxes.”

He put down his saw

“Possibly,” I said. I liked his quick understanding of how little the majority of our people could resist the Romans. Money and peace were easier to come by under Roman rule. Only a minority of handpicked fighting men had any hope, I believed, of throwing out the Roman foreigners.

“I have come with two invitations,” I continued. “One is for tonight. my father wishes to know if you will take dinner with us. My mother will prepare some of the silver deep-water fish our fishermen caught yesterday, if you would like that.”

“Thank you,” he answered. The sparkle was back in his eye. “I will come.”

“The other invitation,” I said, “is for Roael’s wedding in Cana.”

“In Cana?” Jesus asked. My mother has already been asked to fix the feast. I didn’t know it was Roael’s wedding, for I thought he was in Judea with John who is cleansing people in the Jordan River.”

I picked up some sawdust from the wood he had been cutting and chipping. It was cedar wood from Lebanon, specially brought to Galilee for better housing. I slowly poured the fine pieces of wood back on the ground. “Roael is with John,” I said. “He’ll make the trip north in several weeks. Jesus, when will you make your first move? We all know who you are. John the Forerunner is already working.”

“The time is soon, now,” John.” He looked straight at me. “Would you like to come with me?”

“Me? I am neither a priest nor a public speaker! Surely you must mean you want my father, or my older brothers.”

He smiled. It is you I want, John, and others like you. You and I were born into close circumstances for a reason. many of us have come here in this life to work together. We have been together in other lives. Let us join again now. You are important to all of us.”

I shook my head and started to smile, to make a joke of it, for I couldn’t believe he was being anything but polite. But those eyes of his were dark with purpose.

I became serious, too. “What will your work do for our country?” I asked. “Israel must be free.”

His eyes flashed. “Israel is people. We will set people free.”

“Then I will come with you for a time.” I nodded my head. “From what I have heard, many of our friends expect you to become King of Israel anyway, and lead an army against Rome.”

“Do you believe them, John?” He watched me with concern.

I slowly shook my head. I could not imagine him in helmet and breastplate.

“It is well that you don’t,” he told me. “Let me make this clear from the beginning. I do not fight as a soldier, nor will I do anything aimed against Rome. We will just help people to become what they need to be, and want to be, more easily.”

“I will come,” I said. We smiled together and embraced; then I left him to his carpenter’s work.

That night he came to dinner, where he pleased my family, especially Zebedee, my father, who was always looking for an intelligent person with whom to argue. My brother James, who was much closer in age to Jesus, counseled him not to become too visible to the Jewish authorities, especially the Sanhedrin high council, until his power as a teacher was well established.

Salome, my mother, was overwhelmed by him. She always had enjoyed entertaining distinguished visitors and friends. Jesus’ appearance was perfect, down to his clean feet and sandals. And his manner was as civilized ad sparkling as that of the Roman senator we once briefly entertained. Clearly the carpenter’s son was a man who had traveled widely and well, and knew how to put his hosts at ease.

After that evening, we didn’t see him again for several months. Later we found out he had gone down to Judea, to the Jordan where John the Forerunner was cleansing people and teaching. Roael, who was there, told us about it. Andrew, a thoughtful and reasoning younger man who was one of my father’s fishermen in the fishing business, also told us what happened. He, too, had left Galilee to follow the Forerunner. My father graciously gave him an indefinite period to be gone, and the right to return to us for his job any time.

It was Andrew, in fact, who gave us the most detail of what Jesus did as the Jordan and immediately afterward.

And, of course, there is always the word of Jesus himself. Later, much later, he told me many of these things that, my beloved David, I tell you now. Let me continue his story.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Oct. 2020.