Chapter 23: An Arrest, the Twelve, and an Exorcism

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book II: The Rabbi
Part Four–Teacher
                                      

Soon after Jesus threw the money changers and animal sellers out of the Temple, John the Forerunner was arrested.

The first news Jesus heard of it was in Capernaum, where he had returned. He was reclining at dinner at home, eating crushed-wheat cereal and dried figs with his family and Josi, when Peter, the brother of Andrew, burst in. Unlike Andrew, who was in the desert with Jesus, Peter was an arguer and had a flashing temper.

Jesus looked up at Peter in surprise. Peter’s long, dark beard was dripping wet from the fall rains, for it was the planting season late in the year.

“What is wrong, Peter!” Jesus asked. He rose from his couch.

Peter’s hands flew out. His eyes were flashing fire. “They’ve arrested John!” he cried.

Jesus felt his stomach turn over. He put his hand out to the nearest wall and leaned against it. “Where?” he asked.

“East of the Jordan,’ Peter answered. “Herod’s men have taken him to the fortress!”

Jesus felt his head swimming. Few escaped from Herod’s fortress. He shivered involuntarily. “But we had so much to do!” he exclaimed. “What does Herod want of him?”

Peter swore, then glanced at the women and away. “John once again criticized Herod!” he explained. “Again he told the King how wrong it was to marry his own brother’s wife. This time Herod wouldn’t stand for it anymore.”

Jesus’ tongue stumbled over itself before he could ask his next question. “Do they intend to execute him?”

Peter shook his head and stroked his beard. “I would say no. Herod avoids the Essenes as a general rule. Even though John is no longer with the Dead Sea Essenes, they would consider it a personal attack if Herod killed John. They would give him unceasing trouble.

Jesus’ shoulders relaxed. In place of his fear, he felt anger. His eyes sparked. “We must get John out if we can. Do any of us have influence with Herod’s court?”

Peter grimaced. “Not with that lawbreaker, who is neither Jew nor Roman.”

“Then go to Zebedee and his sons James and John,” Jesus said. His hand closed into a fist. “One of them can speak to the Roman officials in Bethany and ask what can be done. Perhaps Zebedee also could go to the high priest, Caiaphas, whom he knows. I dare not. I am not loved in Jerusalem, not after last Passover.”

“The people love you!” Mary interrupted, speaking for the first time.

Jesus looked at her. “The people of Jerusalem, or anywhere else, cannot get John out of prison, Momma.”

“Go to Jerusalem yourself and start a revolt,” his brother James suggested. James waved his large carpenter’s hand through the air. He was a man of eighteen by this time, and tall. “You may just be well-known enough to manage it. Especially with the help of John’s followers.”

Jesus frowned. “Do you think I want the Romans killing all of us? Besides, James, how many times have I told you that political action will get us nowhere.”

Jesus turned back to Peter, who was stamping his muddy sandals impatiently. “Go now, Peter. Quickly! And tell no one except our friends your mission, until we are sure Herod’s arm does not reach out for us.”

“Goodbye!” Peter said, nodding once. He turned and slipped quickly out the door.

“You, Jude,” Jesus said to his younger brother, now twelve.

Jude immediately stood up. He was dark and fair like his mother and looked slightly younger than his years. He soon would be going to Jerusalem for his official initiation into manhood, as had Jesus and most other Hebrew men.

Jesus pointed southwest. “Gather your pack for an overnight trip, Jude. I want you to travel overland by the hills to Cana and then to Mount Carmel. Tell those who are part of us what has happened, and warn them in case of more trouble.”

“oh, Jesus!” Josi exclaimed. Her dark eyes flashed worriedly. “Jude is so young for such a dangerous trip!”

Jesus nodded. “Yet he is almost a man, and we need him, Josi. He will be cared for along the way by our friends. He knows where to go.”

Jude nodded vigorously. He turned from the dinner table and ran through the hallway to his room to prepare.

“James?” Jesus asked.

James rose. “I, too, will go, though I think you would do better to gather a great crowd and storm the fortress. Where does my brother wish to send me?”

“To Hebron and Engaddi,” Jesus said. “Find out the plans of the Essenes there. Though I have no standing in their communities down there, especially since John rejected them for his own work of cleansing and teaching, tell them my counsel is to do nothing. We don’t want them starting a rebellion. Especially John’s followers, if any are left there.”

Jesus’ brother turned to go, stepping quickly across the tile floor.

“James,” Jesus said.

James turned back.

“Thank you.”

“You are my brother and I love you,” James told him. He smiled. “I will always assist you, whether I understand you not. Good luck, if I don’t see you for a while.”

He was gone before Jesus could answer.

Jesus turned to his mother and Josi. His jaw was tense. “I will go to Andrew and Peter’s house wait for them there,” he said.

“Stay with us,” mary answered. Her eyes showed her worry.

“There is a chance Herod has sent messengers to order my arrest,” Jesus told her. “I feel his thoughts focused in this direction. If I leave, his thoughts will become confused, for they will not be able to focus on my own home so easily. All of you will be safer with me gone.”

“Jesus,” his sister, Ruth, said.

Jesus glanced at her. She had been home from her studies in Rome for only a few weeks. The whirlwind of activity around her big brother–and the mystery of what he was–had all been almost too much for her. Even in her confusion, though, she never lost the poise she first had as a child and polished in Rome. She was beautiful, and in the fullness of young womanhood. Though only a year older than Jude, she already looked like a mature woman several years older. she had several suitors.

“Yes, Ruth,” Jesus answered her quietly.

“Jesus,” she said, “forgive me if I shouldn’t say this. If you are really the messiah, then why didn’t you know John would be arrested?”

“Ruth!” mary exclaimed.

Josi half-rose from her couch as if to go to Ruth and stop her.

Ruth glanced quickly at the two women and flushed, then looked up at Jesus again.

“It’s all right,” he told Josi and his mother. He forced himself to calm his impatient concern for John. He looked deeply into Ruth’s beautiful, dark, alive eyes.

She met his gaze.

“A messiah is not one who knows everything,” he told her. “He knows only what God wishes to tell him, and sometimes what he has asked God or has tried to sense beforehand.”

“But surely God wanted you to know this! Ruth exclaimed.

He shook his head. “I think John sensed it,” he told Ruth. “John said he would decrease while I increased. But if I had known it would happen this way, I would have worried. I would have been more concerned for John than for the people who come to see me. I was not told his would happen, nor did I think to ask if it would, or try to sense it. I felt safe, and I still do.”

Ruth frowned. Her pretty olive eyes danced up and down. “But if you feel safe, why are you leaving the house? Why don’t you just blast Herod down with a sickness or a storm?”

Jesus tried not to frown. He felt his jaws tensing again. “It is not my place to control the destiny of others,” he said. “I will work my powers only when I am asked, and then only to help. All else I will do only by the strength of my own body, as it naturally is.”

“I still do not understand,” Ruth said, shaking her head.

Jesus sighed. He bent forward, toward her. “Look, Ruth. Once there was a man who had a silver coin. He had the choice of spending it all on destroying the foxes that were killing his young lambs, or buying five times the number of sheep killed by the foxes. Rather than destroy, he chose to build up his flock. That is what I must do.”

She shivered and gripped the edge of the dining table. “If I were one of the lambs in his flock,” she said, “I would rather he destroyed the foxes.”

“I know,” Jesus answered. “It is a hard choice.”

He thought of his friend John. An image of the tall, thin man he loved so much came to his mind. In the image, John was standing in the midst of the sunlit brown waters of the Jordan River, loudly proclaiming the unhappiness of the way of lying and deceit and smiling fiercely as he spoke. Jesus imagined embracing the thinner man’s shoulders once again. Suddenly a curtain of blackness fell between them. John sank slowly out of sight.

Jesus turned to his mother. “We will not see John again.” His eyes filled suddenly with tears. “I understand that now.”

She rose. “Let me help you, my son.”

“no. There is no help for this, except the inner peace. I will seek it in the hills on the way to Peter’s house.”

He hugged his mother and Josi as quickly as he could and left. As he strode outside through the falling rain and darkness, his eyes stared, unseeing, through the misty gloom. He stumbled once, then righted himself.

By the time he reached Peter and Andrew’s house, some while later, he was soaked to the skin. But he had reached into himself deeply and made peace with his separation from John.

Jesus began to realize he needed helpers. He had them already, of course: his family, and those who followed him whenever they cold get away from their work. Most of these latter, Jesus noticed, were older women whose children were grown. Some were younger, unmarried virgins, especially Essene ones.

He wanted men who would be with him regularly. The women who followed him were necessary, for they taught and worked at physical healing as he directed them. But men were needed for the major work. Most people would not completely accept the authority of a woman. Jesus resented this, for he recognized that his mother, his teacher Josi, and others about him represented the best of Israel. But he realized he had to accept the conditions that he was given for his work, even as he tried to change them. While encouraging women to hold important jobs, especially those who weren’t raising a family, or because of vows or age, he also started seeking a group of men to be his main workers.

He chose twelve, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, and one for each of the twelve star signs in the sky, which he had studied while with the Essenes. He well understood the effects of the stars on human nature, as did most of the Magi and other wise men who had taught him. He used this understanding in his teaching.

I, John, was wading in the waters of the Sea of Galilee with my older brother, James, when Jesus called us. With us also were Peter and Andrew, our fishermen, who had returned to service with my father since Jesus had come back to Galilee.

we were mending nets, our boats floating beside us as the four of us were wading in the waters near the beach. James and I were supervising the work.

Peter happened to look up the beach. A purple-topped thunderhead was moving down toward us from the north, sending fleeing white cloud runners before it. In the darkness beneath the long shore, in the tangy sea air, Peter saw Jesus walking toward us.

He called to all four of us in greeting. He was well and happy and seemed to be out for a day’s pleasant walk.

Suddenly, from over the rise behind him, people began appearing. In groups of fives, tens, and more they came, pouring in ever-increasing numbers over the lip of the hill, until hundreds of people were confronting us on the beaches.

Jesus waded out to one of our boats. “May I borrow this?” he asked. He was smiling.

James, my brother, nodded dumbly. We were all four of us surprised.

“Thank you,” he said.

He rowed several hundred feet down the shoreline and the people followed him on the sands and grass. He stopped the boat, pushed it inshore until it grounded gently in a foot of clear water, and then in the darkening, electric air, he started teaching the crowd.

He taught them for some short while until suddenly the rain began to spatter in the water and on the beach all around us.

The crowd noisily took cover.

Jesus slowly rowed back to us, letting his hair get wet. It was obvious he felt too good to care.

“Come,” he said to Peter as he drew up to us, “let us take out your boats. Let me see you fish.”

Peter grimaced and shook his head. “There’s nothing out there, Teacher. Andrew and I were out all night.”

Jesus cast his eyes and his senses over the deeper waters further out, in a wide circle.

“It will be all right,” he said. “I will show you where to throw out your nets.”

So all four of us took the two boats and, dipping in and out of the winds, we spread our nets in the deep waters where he pointed.

Our boats soon were filled with fish. Jesus looked at us all with a twinkle in his eye.

Peter’s eyes were red from lack of sleep, and his face was drawn with tiredness, because he and his brother had been fishing all night. When he saw the multitudes of fish wriggling in the nets, he looked like he might cry. “Oh Master!” he cried out. You are a perfect man and I am imperfect!” He bowed his head before Jesus.

Jesus grabbed his shoulders. “Foolish Israelite!” He shook Peter’s shoulders kindly “We all can do this kind of thing! I will teach you. And if this is possible with fish, how much more easily can we feel the presence of needful men and women!”

He turned and looked all of us in the eye quietly, one by one. “Come with me,” he said. “You are my fishers of men. From this day onward, I have need of you at all times.”

“Yes, Master.” James spoke for all of us, being my elder brother and the true employer, after my father, of Andrew and Peter. We left our nets and followed Mary’s son who was also my and James’ cousin.

In a similar way, he called others to him so that there were twelve of us by the time he was done. We became, in short time, his constant companions and envoys. Most of us could support ourselves without working. James and I had our father’s wealth. Matthew had been a well-to-do supervisor of tax collectors. Those who were poorer were supported by the rest of us. We held a large sum of money in common. Judas, son of Ischariot and a politically eager young man, was our treasurer.

Jesus had our help for many things. He and the rest of us all were supposed to share in turn the unpleasant jobs such as cleaning and marketing. But we often kept him from knowing it was his turn, thus freeing him to do more important work.

He taught us how to meditate, and to find the inner places of peace and love, by concentrating on the center in our chest and on other centers. He taught us many other things, as well. So it was that he went about Galilee healing and teaching, and offering us and others the words that could make us clean and aware of our true inner selves.

In this way the year waned and another Passover, the second since the beginning of his ministry and cleansing by John, passed. We twelve envoys and some of the other close followers and friends gradually took over much of the teach and healing–for even then some of us were able to work small healings by simple concentration, as he taught us. Mostly, though, we used the herbs and medicines he gave to us, we learned how to rub and tap certain parts of people’s bodies in order to start healing energies circulating, and all of us, Jesus included, continued cleansing people in water. Such cleansings were for health, as well as for a sign of awakening people’s inner selves. Health and inner awakening, Jesus taught us, no matter what stage of awakening we are at, must go hand in hand.

About this time a man of Sychar in Samaria was traveling through Capernaum and happened to stop at Jesus’ villa, begging for water. The villa was almost deserted, for it was a day of rest when the envoys and followers were at their own homes with their families. The beggar was one of many who stop at the better-looking villas all around the Sea of Galilee. This is how they make their way along this trade route when they are heading north to Damascus or south to Jerusalem and beyond.

Mary came to the door first, and seeing the man, she quickly withheld a gasp. As he stood before their white stucco villa in the sunshine, quietly asking for a handful of water he could sip in his cupped hands, she examined his face. Half of it was so twisted out of shape that his eye on that side was almost completely closed and the ear was turned in on itself. The man’s lips on that side drew up and curved out in a tight, smirking sneer through the area where his cheek should have been.

“How did you come to have such an appearance, my son?” she quietly asked.

The man looked up alertly. He was used to people at nice villas like this asking about his ugliness. But rarely were they so polite. “Good lady, he answered, bowing slightly. “I was born with this affliction.”

He flicked his eyes quickly up at Mary, then down again. He felt a little pinprick of need goad him on. It was not need for any particular thing, but rather just a deep-seated desire for getting whatever he could by any means. It bothered him, for he could watch it with another part of himself and dislike it even as it made him do things. It was as if he were inhabited, he felt, by a foreign being who lived within him and used him.

That foreign part of him goaded him to speak out of turn to this fine, grey-haired lady standing before him. “Oh Madam!” He put a whine in his voice. “I can have no work in this condition, and I am so hated! Spare me a copper coin. Spare me, if you could, a small silver coin?” His eyes flashed speculatively, wondering how much he could get out of this lady. Another part of him watched in disgust, detesting such talking and thoughts.

Mary spontaneously put her hand out and laid it on the beggar’s frail arm. The man’s clothes, she noticed, were horribly ragged. His bare, deeply-tanned skin was visible through popped seams and tears in the shoulders and in the lower folds of his dirty robes. and he smelled of long-soured wine.

“I have something more substantial for you, my good man,” she told him. She tried not to turn her face away from the smell of him.

His eyes stared intently at her. One part of him within was dancing with joy at a chance to get a bigger handout than normal, while a deeper part of him despaired and worried that once again, like in that nice villa in Bethany down south by Jerusalem, he would pocket whatever treasures he could find while he was left alone in the day room.

“Come,” Mary said, drawing him by the arm through the cedar doorway. She glanced carefully at him out of the corner of her eye. She sensed there was something not right about the man. His eyes showed conflicting feelings, as if he wasn’t his own master. She glanced at him again and forced herself to examine the twisted side of his face. Her impulse was to throw him out and rid herself of the danger she felt. Still, she thought, the man needed help.

“Jesus!” she called.

She turned back to the beggar. “Here, my son,” she told him, “sit on this couch.” She placed him on the long straw couch of honor, against the back wall of the sunny day room.

Jesus appeared silently at the small doorway leading to his own private room. He was wearing a thin, beautiful linen robe that he often liked to use at home.

“Hello,” he said to the beggar. He noticed the man’s terribly deformed face, but he had seen so many such faces and bodies in marketplaces and houses of healing from Egypt to India. He turned politely to his mother, since she had called him.

The man’s heart leaped with honest happiness. This strange, tall, red-haired man acted normal! The beggar was used to seeing people gasp and cringe away from him, or at least pity him. Even as that other, darker part of the beggar began quickly calculating what he could get out of the red-haired man, the good part of the beggar rejoiced so much that tears came to his eyes.

Mary noticed the tears, but behind them she also saw the shifty, calculating stare in the man’s eyes. She wondered if she should have let him in, after all.

“Jesus!” she said.

“Yes, Momma.” He heard the anxiety in her voice. Something, he realized, was not quite right.

“I have told this man we can give him more than copper or silver coins to help him,” she said. “Can you?”

He now turned his full attention on the man. He saw the conflicting feelings on the man’s face, and wondered at them.

“I am Jesus,” he told the man. “Who are you?”

“Abazar,” the man stuttered, confused by the tall man’s gaze. “I am, yu will find me at your service, sir.”

Jesus sighed. Men deformed like this, he knew, were proud in their own way, and might resist some kinds of help if they were asked without tact.

“Abazar,” Jesus said. “I am a healer. I sometimes am able to smooth scars, and move people’s skin back into place. I can probably smooth your features. Do you want this?”

Abazar’s heart blazed with a sudden, terrible joy. Was this the Jesus he had heard a story about, just a week ago over a campfire among other beggars? At the same time though, the beggar’s darker self struck out in a rending inner cry of fear and loathing, as if healing was the last thing it could want.

Abazar began trembling from his conflicting emotions. He felt the dark thing in him immediately urging him with all its suddenly growing strength to refuse.

He fought it. “Yes!” he burst out, before the thing in him could win. He jumped up and stepped forward.

Jesus looked at him curiously. What, he wondered, was troubling the deformed man? At such times as these, Jesus always felt a desire to reach inside the other person’s mind and emotions and lay them bare to his own psychic vision and feeling. He knew he was becoming aware enough to do this. Yet he wouldn’t. He did not like to trespass on other people’s selves, not unless he was invited or unless the person was in clear danger.

“Sit down again,” Jesus said. Slowly and confidently, so as not to alarm Abazar, Jesus walked to him and gently laid his own hands on the deformed side of the man’s face. It felt taut and smooth, like an overfilled wineskin.

The beggar’s shaking increased as, wordlessly, Jesus began concentrating in the way to which he was becoming accustomed. He found the smallest parts, the little live beings, within the twisted flesh and muscle, with his awareness. Strongly, building swiftly and surely with every passing minute, he sent out healing energies from a place midway on his lower chest and made the energies flow into the parts of the man’s face that he was trying to rebuild.

Mary sat quietly nearby on a cushioned stool, watching her son work. This was the closest yet she had been when he was healing someone. she understood the process, for he had explained it to her. She was slowly learning it; but though slow, her ability already was greater than that of most others. She watched intently, her large, dark eyes flicking back and forth from her son’s face to the man’s, and to her son’s healing hands, large, bony, and tanned.

Abazar didn’t know what t think and feel. His whole body and self were in a tumult. Even s he rested his tingling flesh quietly under the strong, comforting hands of this Jesus, he felt the thing in him cowering low down in terror and whimpering.

Soon Jesus lifted his hands away. His brow was sweating.

Mary gasped. “It is always the same,” she said in a low voice. “How do you do it/”

“It is just as I have explained it, Momma,” he quietly told her. “It is a matter of practice, and constant trying.”

Abazar felt his face. The old taut lines and strange smooth twists that he had been accustomed to all his life were gone. His skin was soft, as if he had put on a new face. The kindly, grey-haired woman placed a black-glazed clay bowl of water, scented with rose essence, before him. He looked in the bowl. Hi reflection looked back at him. The face was that of a normal Abazar, he saw, a healed Abazar.

Before he could feel or think another thing, he found himself jumping up and screaming at his hosts. “You fools!” he screamed, “why did you heal my face! You have ruined everything!”

Abazar tried to close his mouth and unclench his fists, but he had no control over himself. It had been this way for years, though rarely this strong. It was frightening. In gathering despair, he watched himself continue yelling. “See what you have done to me! How can I now beg and steal? Oh, fools!”

Mary and Jesus both had jumped back in fright at Abazar’s first words. Her bowl of water had fallen on the red tile floor, breaking and splashing water in every direction. Her hand was over her mouth in amazement.

Jesus stepped forward again. The beggar, who was smaller than Jesus, cowered in fear.

“You are possessed,” he told Abazar.

The little beggar screamed. “Leave me alone, Jesus of Galilee! Get away!”

Jesus grabbed the little man and shook him. Jesus had watched Kahjian, in India, expel strange spirits from men and women who were sick with a temporary craziness and had been locked in cages by their neighbors. Judy also had taught him ancient and secret Hebrew words that acted as spells for casting out evil spirits.

Yet, Jesus remembered, when the dark lord who had assaulted him in the wilderness had wearied him too much, he had simply told the dark one to go. He tried this now.

“Begone!” he shouted in the poor beggar’s face, as he gripped the man’s narrow shoulders. “I command you to leave!”

The little beggar fell limp in his hands. Jesus heard a howling wail, deep in the back of his mind. Trembling a little, he lifted Abazar and laid him down on the long couch. Then he turned to his mother.

She was still standing and staring at the beggar with her hand over her mouth.

Gently he went to her. “It is done, now, Momma.” He took her hand and held it between his own. “The man will be all right when he wakes up.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, leaning her head wearily against his shoulder.

He nodded. “I have seen it happen before in India. and Judy has her stories to tell, as do other healers who sometimes encounter these same problems.”

Mary’s face paled. “But it is dangerous!” she exclaimed. “There are stories about those healers becoming possessed themselves!”

“You should never try it,” he told her. He glanced over at the little beggar asleep on the woven straw couch. The man’s healed face was peaceful. It looked more changed by the new-found peace in it than by the mere physical healing Jesus had made.

“Ridding a person of spirits,” he told his mother, “n matter what kind they are, is only for those who have been given the authority to do it.”

“Do you have that authority?” she asked, cautiously looking up.

“So far, I have.” He looked down at the broken shards of the black-glazed bowl. He gently released his mother and bent. He started picking up the sharp pieces and putting them in a fold in his robe.

Mary signed. She went to the cooking room and returned with a handful of old, torn rags. She began wiping up the rose-scented water, which had splashed everywhere. “Do you think this is a result of what happened in the wilderness?” she asked, looking over to where he was fingering an especially sharp piece of the bowl.

“Perhaps, Momma. Perhaps the way the dark lord fights is by sending such spirits against me.”

She gazed at him intently. “Then we must all be on guard against such things.”

He glanced at her, then nodded. He looked grimly at the beggar. “It must be terrible for those who suffer from it. I would guess he has been that way for several years at least.”

She sighed. “At least you can heal this kind of disease, too.”

He rose and carefully carried the broken shards in his robe to the door, for dumping outside in a hole they used for rocks and broken pottery. “Yes,” he said, glumly turning around. “There will probably be many more of them in the coming months. When such things come, they come suddenly all together. Let us hope we can recognize them for what they are, before they can hurt any of us.”

Jesus’ reputation as an exorcist quickly spread. Son he and his envoys and closes friends had many people coming to them to have spirits, imagined and real, cast out. Jesus dealt with the real ones, one by one, as swiftly as he could. Those people who were really just lonely, or physically sick or crazy because they, themselves, chose to act this way, he healed by other means. Often he left it up to his closes followers to help teach these people how to heal themselves.

Nevertheless, his reputation increased by leaps and bounds. Soon the crowds of people to whom he spoke began to number a thousand or more at a time, rather than several hundred. His reputation spread far beyond Galilee, to the north and to Judea and Jerusalem in the south.

With the spreading of his reputation came more resistance from the conservative priests, and more people who were willing to follow him. People streamed into Capernaum and to the seashore from many miles around just to hear and see the tall Doctor of the laws who spoke so confidently yet simply. Many also hoped the red-haired man would touch them, for his healing powers already were becoming legendary.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Oct. 2020.