Chapter 22: Baptism, Wedding, the Desert, and Money

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book II: The Rabbi
Part Four–Teacher
                                      

Jesus went down through Jerusalem quietly and south to the place on the Jordan River where John was cleansing and teaching. John was not expecting him that week, knowing only that Jesus was back in Israel again and would come sometime soon.

Jesus found John at the spot by the River where the banks dip their clay sides low, and reeds and rushes spread throughout a large pool. It is the same place where Joshua, Moses’ captain and heir to power, first guided the children of Israel back into the land of Judea to Jericho. Joshua and Jesus were the same person in different lives, according to Jesus’ own dreams, so it was a fitting place for Jesus to start his work in our country.

when he first appeared among the reeds and rushes in the muddy waters, there were only a few dozen others present, a quiet day for John the Forerunner. On busy days, John sometimes talked with hundreds, and once he had spoken to two thousand buzzing, intent men and women at once, cleansing many of them afterward.

As Jesus stepped down into the warm pool, the dank salt smell of the River spread upward to meet him. Here the River was so close to the Dead Sea that it had many of the latter’s mineral deposits. Jesus felt a rush of pleasure as he looked at the people gathered around John. The whole milling scene reminded him of the time he had dumped his bag of medicines into the healing waters of the pool in Persia.

He examined John carefully. This was the first time he had seen his cousin and best friend in over two years. john looked thinner than ever. Jesus shook his head. People said John ate little else but honey and campfire-fried locusts. But, Jesus noticed, he also looked healthier. John had a deep, almost Egyptian tan on his face and thin, muscular arms from spending so many hours under the hot sun of the lower Jordan Valley.

John was speaking firmly and comfortingly to those around him and didn’t notice Jesus at first. “Come,” he was saying to a carefully veiled and hooded old woman. “Come and be cleansed. This is the cleansing for the taking away of the imperfections of life. You have listened to me speak, mother. If you believe, come and be bathed. The Messiah is already alive and wants you to be clean of your imperfect ways. Ask, and it shall be given to you.”

Gently John helped the old woman walk slowly into the brown waters.

But as John finished purifying her with the waters, his disciple Andrew let out a call. “Look!” exclaimed Andrew, pointing to the other side of the pool. “Is that not Jesus, Master?”

John shouted. “Jesus!” he splashed his way steadily through the water as Jesus came toward him. The two friends met in the middle of the pool and hugged each other.

“Hello, John.” Jesus smiled. His whole body was gripped by intense satisfaction.

“I have been waiting for you!” John exclaimed. “It is good to see you, Cousin!”

“And you,” Jesus said. He grabbed John around the shoulders with one arm, and with the other Jesus spread his hand out in a wide circle, indicating all of the people who were watching them with fascination. “You have been doing well, John.” Jesus smiled.

John laughed. “For you! For you, Jesus! Are you ready for all the men and women I have prepared for following you?”

Jesus nodded. “The time has come, John. In fact, I want to be cleansed.”

John opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. “you?” he said. “But you are the messiah.”

John turned to the other people, who still were watching him and Jesus with great curiosity.

“Look!” John called. “It is he of whom I have told you! This is the Messiah, the one for whom we have waited!”

“Will you cleanse me, John?”

John leaned forward and spoke low so that others around them would not hear. People were edging suddenly closer.

“you are the one who should cleanse me, Jesus. I have waited for this. You know the way it is done, for the Mount Carmel Essenes also sometimes do it.”

Jesus shook his head and laughed. He ran his hands through the waters around them. “No, Cousin, I must have it done to myself, even if I must ask one of your followers to do it. I am one with many imperfections, as are others. It is a fitting start to my work.”

John’s eyes became sorrowful. “When I first saw you just a moment ago,” he said, “a dove was hovering over your head. Not a real one, no. A sign. How can I refuse you what you ask? Come with me.”

John took Jesus by the arm and led him forward into the deepest part of the pool. They stood together, chest-high in the warm, eddying water.

“Look!” John spoke loudly, looking around him at the watching people. “The son of God who will take away the world’s imperfections!”

John cupped his hands together, dipped them in the brown River and poured water over Jesus.

Jesus bowed his head as the warm water cascaded against his hair and down his shoulders and body. He went deeply within himself, finding his center of concentration within his chest. He felt a lightness, a gust of inner washing or breath, fill his entire body. He felt whole and clean within him as only his deepest meditations normally could do for him.

John turned happily and commandingly to the others who now were watching in open-mouthed awe. Though a few knew Jesus, most of them only had of the Messiah from John. Suddenly here he was, before them.

“This man,” John spoke aloud to everyone, “is he whose feet I am not even worthy to wash, as a host will wash the feet of his guest before dinner. Yet he comes before me for the cleansing of all of himself like everyone else. Hear me! This is a man worth following. This is your Messiah!”

He helped Jesus out of the water, his hands trembling as he pulled Jesus up. “Will you come again when I’m not busy?” he quietly asked Jesus.

Jesus looked directly into his eyes. “Thank you, John.” He smiled. “I will come tonight, and again tomorrow, if you will be free.”

John wiped his sweaty brow in the afternoon sun. “We will make our plans for your work and mine. Now that you are becoming active, I will be able to send people directly to you after I have cleansed them.”

Jesus grabbed his thinner, wiry cousin by his shoulders. They looked strongly into each other’s eyes. “Our time has come, John. Now we can do what we were born for. The hour we share is here with us. I will come by this way as often as I can.”

The two men parted, but later that evening, and during the next day, Jesus returned. They talked for hours, beside the rippling moonlit pool in the Jordan, of what they had seen and done since John had left Jesus in Egypt.

A few days later, Jesus went into the wilderness to fast, in preparation for his work. With him went Andrew, the disciple of John the Forerunner. Andrew took with him a loaf of bread and a jug of sour wine, but Jesus had nothing but water enough to last him forty days.

According to Andrew, he and Jesus walked up and down the rolling, sand-laden hills of the grey desert for ten days–resting only a few hours each night–before Jesus nearly collapsed from lack of food. He didn’t quite fall down, but for several hours he had been stumbling, and it was clear to both him and Andrew that he could not go further. There the two of them sat, with little but hard winds and gritty sand around them, for almost two weeks. Andrew’s normal reasonable fear of the desert had given way to a greater curiosity to see if this Jesus could survive his ordeal. Andrew took refuge under a spiny thorn tree, ate, slept, and watched. He made himself a little side-angled shelter from dead wood. Jesus had no shelter. He sat, day and night in spite of the sharp, early-morning cold, in a deep meditation.

What Jesus went through in his meditations is recorded elsewhere, by others among the closest friends. Jesus had hoped that he would gain a special vision or understanding of the exact nature of his coming work. Instead, he experienced temptation and discovered a new source of enemies other than just human temple priests and Romans. In the depths of his hunger and concentration, his inner eye was opened wider. His spirit, as could his teacher Judy’s, left its body and met other spirits.

Though many do not believe it, there are spirits who do not have bodies and never have. These spirits are of many kinds. The kind Jesus saw during this stay in the wilderness was an evil one. Some say there is a king of the evil spirits, the dark prince of the world. A spirit like this came to Jesus and pointed out everything Jesus could have, merely by exercising the powers he had learned in India and other lands.

Jesus refused, as it is written. He chose only to think of–and concentrate on–the great Force or Power we call God. Out of that, Jesus knew, would come whatever plans or decisions he should make. In fact, that was what he gained from his stay in the wilderness. He went there looking for answers; when the dark lord came, Jesus himself provided the answers. The dark lord left, screaming his anguish at Jesus and promising to put obstacles in the red-haired man’s way.

Andrew saw little of this. He was not particularly psychic at that time, but so much power and force were emanating from Jesus that Andrew did see some things.

The fourth day he and Jesus were sitting there, each in his own sandy place, Andrew saw a layer of air, darker blue than the sky, surrounding Jesus. He watched this for two hours until he fell into a deep sleep.

The seventh day, he saw a white ball of flame crowning Jesus’ head. It might not have been noticeable if the sun had been behind Jesus. As it was, the sun was off to the side. The ball of white flame looked like a pale cloud shimmering and sending out light wisps of white smoke.

“Are you all right, Teacher?” Andrew called.

Jesus did not answer. Andrew was afraid to interrupt him any further.

On the fourteenth day, Andrew saw Jesus’ whole body shaking and trembling. He ran over to him.

Jesus’ eyes were open. “Let us go home, now, Andrew of Capernaum,” he tiredly said.

Andrew wrapped his extra robe around Jesus and helped him to his feet in the shifting sands.

Slowly, taking many days, the two made their way out of the wilderness. By this time Andrew’s food and wine were gone and both men lived on what was left of Jesus’ water. During that long journey, Jesus encouraged the younger man to speak of his life. Andrew told Jesus everything, and later was surprised that he had talked so much about himself as he helped Jesus slowly limp back to the Jordan in a greatly weakened state.

Jesus was not weakened in spirit, though. He was full of good humor, smiling at Andrew’s cautious but relieved jokes and seeming, in his loss of more than a fourth of his body weight, to almost be floating on thin air.

When Jesus returned to the Jordan, he again met with John. The two men talked and ate together, John breaking his fast of honey and locust for this occasion, and Andrew’s brother Simon came to Jesus. Jesus renamed Simon “Peter,” the Rock, and soon Peter, Andrew, and Jesus returned by the hilly roads of Samaria and Galilee to the wedding at Cana that Jesus’ mother was preparing.

The weather in Cana was cool, though the sun was shining brightly, for it was spring in the northern hill country where Cana is, west of the Sea of Galilee. The whole town was out for the wedding feast because the wedding was important. The bride, who lived with her parents in Cana, was marrying into a well-to-do family by small Cana’s terms.

The bride was beautiful. She was much older than normal for marriage, for being an Essene, she had held herself back from it for many years. Because of this, she was in the full flower of beautiful womanhood. Her dark eyes flashed with happiness and embarrassment through her gauze veil. Her white robes shone so brightly in the sun that she looked like a sky-clad cloud. Her jewels, topazes and bloodstones, reflected beautiful yellows and reds, and the bridal girdle of fine silk drew in her waist, showing her youthful figure. A scented bottle of Bengal aloes and jasmine hung from her girdle, as a perfume. The mature, rich scent drifted sweetly through the air.

Roael, the bridegroom, was standing beside his bride when Jesus arrived. Roael, Jesus noticed, was wearing handsome new robes, as was proper for the eldest son of Zebedee. He also wore a colorful wedding headdress wrapped several times around his head. The cloth of the headdress was dyed beautiful greens and reds.

Jesus saw that a large feast was laid on tables in the yard, beside the bride’s parents’ home of fitted Galilee stone. On the wooden tables, duck, roast lamb, hill pheasant, and dozens of fruits and vegetables–in dried and fresh, honeyed, and bittersweet forms–lay waiting, making Jesus’ mouth water. Guests were helping themselves. Wine stood nearby in huge jars with small mouths. The wine steward poured wine from these tall jars into smaller ones carried by young girls serving the drinks.

As soon as Jesus appeared, many people found an excuse to greet him. Word travels fast in the hill of Galilee, especially when it concerns a Galilean who is doing well. Many already had heard of Jesus’ rescue of the little weaver in Capernaum, and also of Jesus’ cleansing by John and the words John had spoken at that time. Everyone knew the handsome red-haired man was one of Israel’s most-educated and traveled men. It was no wonder, according to many who whispered among themselves, that the young holy man John down by the Jordan had called Jesus a messiah.

“Doctor,” said one young woman to him, before he could even enter the throng of people in the yard, “what of the future of Israel? Will we ever be free of foreign control?”

Jesus raised his eyebrows. Then he answered, “The ancient prophets say, my lady, that we must go through many such occupations by foreign powers. Our peace must lie within us, for there is the beginning of the true founding of our nation.”

Some people just wanted to chat with him. They came up to him cheerfully, pleased to spend a few minutes saying hello. He discussed the weather with them, the chance for improved crops in the valleys and on mountainsides around the town, and other gossip common to the Galilee farming regions.

“Are you really a messiah?” one young man asked. He was carrying a huge handful of dried fruits and slices of pheasant from the serving tables. He was about fourteen, an age of beginning manhood in our country.

“What do you say the messiah is?” Jesus asked him.

The boy’s mouth dropped open. He was not used to great Doctors of the Laws, especially those who traveled to foreign countries, asking his opinion.

“The Messiah is he who leads our people with an iron rod!” said the boy, quoting the holy books. His eyes darted quickly to Jesus’ face to see if the answer pleased this great scholar. What the boy saw reassured him. The Doctor was smiling.

“Your backbone must be like iron,” Jesus told him. “You must have courage and strength to reach out to the higher powers. That is the job of a messiah and yours, too.”

The boy nodded eagerly. He hung by Jesus’ side as other people came up on the grassy lawn to question the great man.

“Are you married?” a girl half-whispered to him. She was tall and slender, unmarried though she was sixteen and her eyes were like almonds.

“As do some Essenes,” Jesus told her, “I have taken a vow to spend my energy for the spirit.”

She withdrew, disappointed.

His mother, Mary, who had been busy in the bride’s house overseeing the cooking and laying of the foods, came up to him. She gave him a quick hug as others around them drifted away, smiling approvingly, to let the mother and son talk.

I am glad to see you were able to come,” she told Jesus. “See, over there by the well? Zebedee is pointing you out to everyone. You are making this feast the most important Cana has seen in many years.

Jesus smiled down upon her. Her enthusiasm was infectious.

“John is doing well,” he said. “I spent most of my time with him when I wasn’t fasting. Did you hear of these things already?”

Mary’s eyes glowed. “I have heard what John said. We all have waited thirty years, and now it is happening so fast. I am glad John announced you in public like that.”

“I got no such announcement in the wilderness,” Jesus softly answered. He felt a shiver run up his back as he thought of what he went through in the grey sands.

“I know,” Mary replied. She looked at his thin body. Her eyes were worried. “Andrew told us everything that happened, just as you told him. I hope you will at least eat well white you are here. You are thinner than John.”

Jesus smiled. “I have much to do. Do you want to talk to me about just food?”

She shook her head and looked out over the heads of the crowd. Then her eyes fell on him again. “My son. You must accept help. You’re too worn down already. You can’t do it all alone, or even with just John helping you.”

“I have called to me whomever will come.” He shifted restlessly. “Many of John’s followers are already with me. I am hoping they will be a big help. Haven’t you seen them here at the feast? And I will ask all of Zebedee’s sons, Roael, James, and John, to also help. I especially want John. I’ve talked with him already.”

Mary nodded. “Good.”

A young serving girl with pretty light-brown hair ran up to Mary breathlessly, giving Jesus a shy, sidelong glance. “My lady,” the girl said, “we are out of wine!”

Mary’s brow creased. “I thought this might happen,” she told the serving girl. Then Mary turned and gazed into Jesus’ eyes. “Would you take care of this?” she asked.

Jesus looked at her carefully. When he realized what she was saying, he felt a slight flush of annoyance reddening his cheeks. “Momma,” he said, “you are looking for a miracle.”

She nodded. “Why not? You have done nothing of the kind since your return. Surely that is part of your work, too.”

“Flesh of my flesh,” Jesus said, looking down upon her kindly, “why have you asked me this now? My time for great feats has not yet come.”

Mary bowed her head graciously. She nodded and smiled at a nearby guest. She nodded and smiled at a nearby guest. “I must return to the kitchen,” she told Jesus. She frowned. “Do as you will. But I think you are wrong. If you want to heal people, you must learn to help them celebrate, too.”

She left with the serving girl following close behind.

Jesus was just beginning to get into a long, involved discussion about some point of the Laws with a bright-eyed elder of the Cana synagogue when several servants approached Jesus. One of them, a red-faced older man who had helped with such feasts as these for over forty years, spoke. “Your mother has told us to come here to you, young master. We are to do as you tell us, concerning the wine.”

Jesus frowned. “Your mistress expects more of me than I can give.” He sighed. “Yet I will try. The wedding should not be interrupted for lack of something to drink. Fill the wine jugs with water and bring them to me behind the house.”

Jesus strode behind the house and relaxed his fast-beating heart by breathing exercises until the servants brought the water.

He looked into the deep earthenware jugs. His face was mirrored, along with the blue sky behind his head, on the surface of the water. How, he wondered, could he do such a feat as his mother had requested?

He went over in detail, in his mind, the time in Egypt he changed the poison in his body into a harmless substance.

Then he concentrated on the water. As Kahjian and others had taught him, he tried to focus on the center, the spirit, of one little particle of water. Soon he felt he could sense what he was seeking: a pattern, a small circle of activity, a certain energy that felt like the medicines that make water what it is.

Then, holding this awareness in the front of his mind, he concentrated in the same manner on a drop of wine in a goblet one of the curious servants was holding. This was harder, for the identity, the spirit, of the wine was more complex and active. When he finally had it, he compared the two substances, the wine and the water, in his mind.

Then, with a short prayer and an even deeper concentration, he tried to make the water particles reshape themselves and take new energies into themselves–to become like the wine particles.

To his surprise, it worked. At least it felt like it. One water particle seemed to become wine, then quickly another, and the reaction spread to the entire jug.

He aimed his concentration on each jug in turn, until he had changed the waters of five large jugs. But it still looked like water.

Perplexed, he stepped back and wiped the sweat off his brow. Then he got an idea. Perhaps the water needed movement. “Dip your serving ladle into the water, stir it, and pour it into your goblet,” he directed the old servant.

The old man did so. The fluid was dark in his goblet. He tasted it and looked up at Jesus in surprise. “It is–” the servant said. “But how–”

Jesus felt a glow of elation run through his body. The water had made its final change into wine when the servant had dipped in his ladle. It had taken the energy of the stirring to complete the change.

The servant turned and, in spite of his years, ran off. The other two servants, wide-eyed, watched Jesus’ every move.

Jesus removed his outer mantle, damp with sweat, and directed one of the servants to find him another. The spring breeze from the hills was chilling his wet skin.

The older servant returned around the back corner of the house, speechlessly dragging the long-nosed wine steward with him.

“What?” the steward said, seeing the jugs. “More wine? Why has it been kept behind the house! Give me that ladle. I must taste it before it is served. I will not allow sour wine at this feast, even if we must drink water instead!”

The old man ladled out a goblet of wine with trembling fingers.

The wine steward sniffed it with his long nose and sipped some of it. “What is this?” he exclaimed. He frowned disapprovingly at the old servant. “Usually the bridegroom serves the best wine first, leaving the inferior for later when men’s tongues are too dulled to taste it. But the wine you have here is the best! Why did you leave it until last?”

The old servant pointed his trembling hand at Jesus, who was standing silently in the shadow of the wall. “He made it, steward,” the old man said. “It was just water, and he turned it into wine.”

Jesus nodded once, politely, at the steward and carefully tried to keep a smile of triumph off his face.

The wine steward looked him up and down. Jesus was skinny like a beggar, tanned like a poor farmer, and flushed, and his outer mantle was missing.

“This man!” the steward exclaimed. “Don’t joke.” He pointed at the wine jugs and looked at the servants standing there, shifting their feet in the grass in confusion. “Take this wine out immediately,” he told them. “People already are asking where it is.”

He turned to Jesus. “You, sir,” he said, inclining his head back and tilting his graceful nose. “May I suggest you find your mantle and join the feast over there again? It is not desirable that guests hide themselves behind houses.”

Jesus nodded again, quietly, and moved away. He was tired but pleased, and ready to go back to the crowds in front. The steward turned and quickly strode off.

Later, after Jesus had left the feast and returned to Capernaum to rest, the servants spread word of what Jesus had done. His following, which had numbered dozens of people, became hundreds during the next few weeks. Everywhere he went, people wanted to see and hear the man who it was said, had turned water into wine.

For several weeks, he taught hundreds of people at a time in the green growing fields and by the rocky shores of the Galilee when the pleasant daytime weather permitted. He taught in large houses and villas during the cool or rainy days, making a name for himself everywhere as a man who knew his prophets and his Laws as well as even the high priest Caiaphas in Jerusalem did. In addition, many said that Jesus gave kindness and laughter as the sour-faced and serious Caiaphas never could.

When Passover time came in the middle of April, Jesus went to the great Temple in Jerusalem as all good Hebrew men are supposed to. He could have gone to the smaller Essene temple on Mount Carmel, or stayed at home as did many Galilean farmers and others who were less strict in their worship. Yet Jesus was a son of the Hebrew Laws. He had been brought up to understand every detail of them. And he realized that, as the Messiah, he was the outcome, an end result, of the best parts of the best parts of the Laws, which had held his people together for thousands of years. The major parts of the Laws were very practical. He obeyed them when he could.

Besides, he had plans. He hoped, somehow, to convince the moneychangers and the animal-sacrifice sellers who plied their trades on the Temple grounds inside its walls that the Temple was not a place for business. He had wanted to help make the Temple a place of meditation and quiet during Passover, ever since his first Passover feast in Jerusalem when he was a boy. That was the time he had stayed with the Temple Doctors of the Laws, without permission, while his parents started journeying home. Ever since that time, he had increasingly become convinced that the Temple should be a place where people could discover their deeper selves and not the clink of money and the braying of half-starved animals.

But how was he to accomplish this? He had no clear idea. He only knew that from deep within himself he felt, more strongly than ever, that the time was at hand for him to openly oppose such uses of the Temple grounds.

The second day of Passover week was the day he chose. The sun was already riding high in the sky, and the high priest Caiaphas had ceremonially shown the first sheaves of barley, reaped for the spring, to the crowd. Jesus, with a great deal of uneasiness and concentrating deeply in the center of his chest, walked beneath the roofed-over porch surrounding the Temple and entered the first wide stone courtyard of the Temple itself.

This wide-open space was called the Court of Gentiles, where foreigners as well as Israelites could go. Walking into it was like diving into a great stone sea of noise and clinking coins and cattle-yard odor.

“Get you oxen here!” bellowed one fat merchant near the entrance. “Each one ready and tied for official sacrifice!”

Jesus looked at the beasts. Their heads hung down, their bellies sagged from age, and their eyeballs were bloodshot. He shook his head sadly.

“Sheep! Lambs! Turtledoves!” another thin seller was yelling. He held his nose by his fingers even as he yelled, for the sheep were almost under his feet, and the smell of their droppings reeked.

The moneychangers, who changed foreign coins into the Jewish half-shekels required for sacrifice, offered busy little pieces of gossip with their customers as coins clinked, and weighing scaled clattered. The scales guaranteed that no silver or gold coins had been shaved around the edges or counterfeited. Many of the moneychangers had cold, glassy eyes and quick little half-smiles as they took in their fees for each exchange, and an extra fee for their own pockets from unsuspecting country folks or Jews from Alexandria, Damascus, or other far-off cities.

Jesus stood quietly, unsurely, in the middle of this vast marketplace of human and animal noises and looked about him with exasperation. He felt edgy and frustrated, for he didn’t know how to start. He had hoped to simply begin teaching, as did other Teachers and Doctors of the Law from time to time on the Temple grounds; but his intuition told him it would do no good. He was unknown here, and he senses that if he began to speak out against the moneychangers and animal sellers, they would laugh at him and possibly even take after him with whips, chasing him out of the Temple.

He stood there, wordless, sinking deeper into his frustration, and he concentrated even more within himself, curling his awareness around the core of his being. Something psychic suddenly pierced him, a clear, bright bolt of fiery emotion that welled up in him before he could even determine what it was. All he knew was that it came from the same source as did his mysterious experience during his seventh initiation in the tombs of the Egyptian temple. He trusted the blazing force, even as it overpowered him, and suddenly, to his own amazement, he felt himself ablaze with anger.

Like a lion in a cave of jackals, he found himself roaring out loud.

Everyone’s head jerked toward this towering and bearded, red-haired man who was bellowing like an ancient prophet.

“This temple is for drawing close to God!” Jesus heard himself shouting, over the heads of the crowd. With a last inner shrug, he let himself go entirely. “Yet these looters who take your money,” he shouted, “have turned it into a marketplace!”

Whirling quickly, he grabbed a handful of leather cords hooked on a sheep seller’s stall beside him and waved the leather cords by their handle high in the air.

“Out! All of you making my Poppa’s house a place of business, out!” His anger was complete, now.

Many customers and visitors, foreigners among them, began streaming toward the exits. The tall man with the red hair had a wild and certainly dangerous look in his eye.

Jesus brought the whip down quickly on the rump of an old, stringy ox. She jumped forward, then ran. Jesus’ rage was so complete that he did not even feel happy when he saw the ox head out one of the Temple gates.

“He ya!” yelled the owner, chasing after her as fast as he could. “Come back, you skinny piece of meat!”

Jesus brought his whip down on several sheep that were clearly starving. He yelled at them. They awoke with a start and broke loose from their cheap rope fetters.

People were scrambling left and right to get out of his way. Whether he was a madman or a prophet of old, no one knew. They didn’t want to wait and see.

As Jesus strode around the Court of the Gentiles, wielding his whip and yelling fiercely, animal sellers were waving their fists angrily at him and running to get out of his way. Animals and men alike were slipping on the liquid and solid manure that the surprised animals were dropping as they ran. The stench was terrible.

The moneychangers, who were off to the side as fitted their more dignified business, watched all this with smugness and a certain amount of awe at Jesus’ energy.

Suddenly they were a group in confusion as Jesus went down their rows, neatly tipping over each of their little wooden tables. He flicked the leather cords at them, catching one fat, thick-lipped man with Syrian blood in him on the rear. The moneychangers, babbling and screeching and shocked, quickly left the Court without even a chance to pick up their cash receipts and their spilled coins spinning across the mucky stones.

As soon as the Court was empty of businessmen, Jesus paused. Flushed and still angry, eyebrows drawn down sternly, he looked around him.

Men and women who had been looking on from the surrounding porch, and from the gate of the inner Temple building towering over everyone, now began to edge forward slowly. children peeked out from behind their mothers’ robes and asked to be let down from their fathers’ protective arms.

“By what authority do you do this?” asked a wheezing old man with a bent back and a long walking cane.

Jesus breathed deeply and gazed at him. “Each of us is a house like this temple,” he told the old man.

People drew nearer. A farmer began spreading sheaves of straw, kept in the corner of the courtyard for just this purpose, on the much and stone underfoot.

“The house,” Jesus continued, “has its outer and inner courts, just as here, and at the center is the Silent Place, the holy of holies as we call it in our Temple. Would you have greed and dishonesty just under the surface of your own skin, creeping both inward and out?”

“You ought to be stoned!” an angry young man yelled. He was wearing the dark robes of a novice Pharisee priest.

Jesus suddenly saw the threatening faces among the crowd around him. A tremor passed through a muscle in his leg. He concentrated deeply within himself again.

“Destroy this temple,” he found himself saying, “and I will build it again in three days.” He realized that he was, for reasons he himself did not understand, talking about the temple of his own body.

“It took forty-six years to build this temple!” exclaimed the young Pharisee novice. “How can you rebuild it in so short a time?”

“All things are possible,” Jesus called to him, “if you use our Laws to learn that which is beyond the Laws. For the Laws are but quiet echoes of the great force and power of the higher world and its workings. The Temple we should rebuild is within ourselves, not this one you see with your eyes!”

The Pharisee novice scowled and turned away. “Dangerous foreign teachings!” he yelled back, and hurried out of the court.

“Teach us more!” shouted a short, young farmer. The man’s rough-woven tunic of wool showed he was from the lower hills of Galilee.

“Come!” Jesus told him. “Let us go out in the streets where we may be as noisy as we wish!”

With a crowd of about a hundred following him, he led the way to a meadow covered with ankle-deep spring grass on a slope just outside the city’s walls. There he talked to all of them about the Temple of the priests in Jerusalem, and the temple of each person’s body, and he offered lessons in healing and meditation to whomever would come with him. He touched as many of them as he could.

When he thought about what he had said and done inside the Temple, in the courtyard, he began slowly feeling relieved. He had lately found, more and more, that he was saying and doing things that he didn’t always understand. When this happened, he usually was concentrating hard on the place within him that was connected to the presence of God as he understood it and had sometimes experienced it. If, he now thought, the results were always as dramatic as what had happened today, maybe the experience wasn’t so bad after all. He realized, with mixed excitement and worried anticipation, that he was learning to become, at times, little more than some kind of aware human channel for a greater power. it gave him an odd feeling. It made him more confident in his own abilities, strangely enough, for now they were added to by an immense unknown factor helping them along.

But being a human channel, he realized, also put him in greater danger with the authorities. For somehow, often, the power running through him had no respect for the authorities. It recognized no authority except truth. And that, Jesus knew, was the most dangerous authority of all.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Oct. 2020.