Chapter 24: Miriam, Judas, and More Demons

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book II: The Rabbi
Part Four–Teacher
                                      

The conservative priests who resisted Jesus the most were the Pharisees. “A dangerous blasphemer!” some of them muttered among themselves.

Jesus healed people on the Sabbath. They considered this immoral, for it was work on the holy days. It also violated several other small, intricate points of the Laws. They frowned.

He was a Galilean. Everyone knew such men were stubborn, hot-tempered farmers with little education and too much disrespect for authority. He was certainly like them, and, unfortunately, he had an education, too. The Pharisees shook their heads.

He often walked on the Sabbath–many leagues further than the Laws for Sabbath journeying allowed. He broke other small points of the Laws, too, that a scholar should follow even if the common people didn’t. The Pharisees threw up their hands in disgust.

But, and this was what really incensed many of them, the young man’s whole attitude toward the Hebrew faith was revolutionary. He taught that finding oneself and God were more important than keep the Laws! This was simply horrifying. The Laws, most Pharisees believed, were all.

But it was true, as other Pharisees knew, that in most ways Jesus still was a son and follower of the important Laws. He also was very intelligent. For such reasons, these other Pharisees were more tolerant of him. A good teacher of the Laws, such as some of the Pharisees were, will come to respect other intelligent people. He may not love them, but at least he will accord them an audience.

So it was that from time to time, Jesus found himself eating at the house of a Pharisee who wished to talk with him further. One such invitation came shortly after one of Jesus’ most talked-about feats.

Jesus had just successfully healed a young man of a sickness that made the man appear dead. He was not dead, but only sleeping and near death, Jesus told us later. but everyone at the time of the healing was amazed. The reports of Jesus’ amazing powers and mystery were spreading throughout all of Israel like a fire.

One of the first to respond to these reports was John the Forerunner from his prison in Perea. John secretly sent two of his closest followers, his nurse of childhood and a relative, to ask Jesus if he really was the Messiah.

“What?” Jesus laughed when he heard them. “Does John still doubt?”

“you have both had your doubts,” John’s childhood nurse reminded him. She gazed at Jesus fearlessly. “John only wishes to have your final word.”

Jesus smiled. “Tell John what you see. The prophecies are all coming true. As the prophet Isaiah told us, in these words,

The deaf will hear and blind eyes will see. The lame will leap like crowned deer and the voiceless sing with joy. I bring useful teaching to the poor and open the prisons of death in life so that the spirit within may come out and discover its own light.

“John will be able to judge these things as well as I.”

Giving them his love to offer to John, he sent them off down the rocky path. Later, in a nearby small town, he began to teach a crowd gathered around him about John the Forerunner’s work. Among these people were many Pharisees. One of them was an older man named Simon, who had a glint of amusement in his eyes and a handsome, brushed white beard. He invited Jesus and several prominent townsmen to dinner.

Simon’s house was elegant, if small. His wife and her aging servant laid down a meal of fine wheat bread and young lamb. Hanging mats inlaid with woven designs of blues and golds were on the clean white walls, and cooking smells perfumed the airs.

Each of the guests dipped his bread into one of several bowls filled with portions of the young lamb. Before they reclined on their couches, each man was offered a bowl of clean water in which he washed his hands, though no bowl for washing feet was offered, as would have normally been expected in a well-to-do home such as Simon’s. Jesus wondered if the old Pharisee felt bothered by the idea of washing his own Essene feet, as a host normally would do for a guest.

As they were eating, Simon and the other guests made polite conversation with Jesus, not wanting to press him on points of the Laws at meal time.  To do so would have been ungracious.

Jesus was bored. He felt alert and ready to keep teaching for hours more. The evening was early; it was still light outside. He calmed his restlessness, knowing he would get his chance as soon as the last course of the meal was taken away. Yet he felt on edge. Tension was around him. Quietly he sent his feelings out toward each of the other people in turn, yet he could find no other source of tension. It was around him alone. He couldn’t get rid of it.

As the meal progressed, his tension increased while he and the others made polite remarks concerning the weather and his travels. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and meditated briefly. He realized, in this meditation, that something important was about to happen. He looked about the spacious, crowded room but saw nothing unusual.

Suddenly the tension soared to a peak, and he felt he would burst. A small figure, that of a woman, entered the room where the men were dining.

Jesus rose suddenly. His eyes grew wide and his lips opened in pleasure and surprise. “Miriam!” he exclaimed. The Pharisees at table with him looked at him in confusion.

The small figure threw back her richly woven head covering. Her red hair tumbled over her shoulders. She looked at Jesus sadly, not answering him with words, but her clear blue eyes hungrily examined every part of his body and face. The other diners examined her carefully.

“Where have you been?” Jesus asked her. “I have asked about you, but no one would tell me a thing!”

A silence had fallen over the room. As Jesus spoke so freely, several people gasped.

Miriam’s beautiful, pale face drew together like a child’s, and suddenly she began crying. She ran over to him and knelt before him, the tears running down her cheeks.

He looked down at her in surprise. Where, he wondered, was the joyful singer and companion he had grown to love in Egypt?

“My lord,” she whispered, choking, “remain silent that I may wash your feet.”

He suddenly felt the water of her tears dripping onto his bare feet, while she kissed them and held them gently between her hands. Then, taking the long, soft falls of her clean red hair she gently wiped away the grit and dust on his feet, which had been moistened by her tears. She drew out a small white alabaster jar of ointment and, drop by drop, spread it over his feet and between his toes. The wonderful scent of costly perfume of nard rose into the air, mingling with and overcoming the less luxurious smells of the wheat bread and lamb.

Jesus, his heart beating quickly, looked around him. Some of the guests were staring stonily at Miriam as she bent over her work. One elegantly dressed guest, seeing Jesus watching him, blushed a deep red and quickly glanced away. Simon, Jesus’ host, was staring at Jesus with cold surprise and distaste.

Jesus met Simon’s stare and felt the older man’s angry thoughts intruding upon his own. hearing these thoughts half-form themselves in his own mind, Jesus suddenly reeled back in surprise. From Simon’s mind, Jesus sensed the thought that Miriam was a courtesan. She gave her body to to Roman soldiers and rich, powerful Israelites.

He looked down at the head of red hair bent before him.

Why? he wanted to shout. He saw she was trembling. Suddenly he realized why he had heard nothing of her since his return to Israel, not even when he had sent messengers to her hometown near Jerusalem. She had been living here in Galilee all the time, having left her family out of shame, and in shame she had avoided him.

“Simon,” he said. His voice was gravelly. He cleared it. He felt as if he were starting to break apart inside. He took a deep breath and continued. “Simon, once there was a moneylender who had two debtors. One man owed him silver equal to fifty days’ labor, and the other owed him the equal of five hundred days’ labor. The men could not pay the moneylender, so he freely cancelled the debt of each. Now which of the two do you think will love him more?”

Simon, his fine white Pharisee’s robe flowing about him, and with everyone in the room turning toward him, arched his long eyebrows. “The one, I supposed, whose debt was greater.”

Jesus nodded toward Miriam, who was still kneeling on the tiles before him. “Do you see this woman? When I came into your home, you offered me no water with which to clean m feet. Yet she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss of greeting, but from the first moment she came in, she has not ceased kissing my feet and tenderly caressing them.”

Jesus stared hard at the white-haired man. “You did not anoint my head with even the cheapest olive oil, Simon. But she has anointed my feet with costly nard. Her imperfections are already forgiven because she has loved so much.”

Simon frowned in dismay. This was not, he knew, how the laws death with such women.

“Rise, Miriam,” Jesus said. He gently took her slim shoulders and lifted her up from the tile floor. Still holding her by her shoulders, he looked into her tear-filled eyes. She was watching him with wonder.

“Your imperfections are forgiven!” he told her.

The elegantly dressed guest, the one who had blushed when Jesus looked at him, spoke out to the others. “Who does he think he is, forgiving sins punishable by death?”

Jesus spoke carefully so that everyone could hear him. “Your love of me and others has saved you, Miriam. Enter into the freedom that is already yours, away from pain and darkness.”

To the surprise and shock of everyone in the room, he took her hand and held it as if he was betrothed to her.

A look of peace, smoothing her face and relaxing her tense shoulders, already was starting to come into her eyes. “I expected you to throw me away from you like a soiled and broken sandal,” she said huskily.

“Let us go out in the street where the air is not full of such condemnation,” he said.

Jesus nodded quickly to Simon, who was still frowning and looked as though he was about to say something. Before he could, Jesus steered Miriam gently out the doorway.

As they walked down the narrow street, hand in hand through the cool, dusky evening, he squeezed her fingers gently. “You know what I have been doing, don’t you?” he asked.

She looked up into his face, searching it. “Yes.”

“Will you come along and share my work with me?” He watched her eyes, fighting his desire to force her to say yes.

She stopped suddenly. “After what I have done? I can never be any man’s wife, and you do not want a wife. What good could I be?” Her finely drawn face and graceful neck flushed.

He reached out and cupped one of her cheeks. “I will need you. What you were is past now. You should have come to me before.”

“I will ot be your wife,” she said.

“we will be closer than man and wife,” he answered. “I will teach you the ways of the spirit. And you will teach me. Love will draw us closer than even the meeting of flesh in flesh can.”

Tears came to her eyes once more. She laughed once, quietly and happily. “When I first saw you in Egypt, I was worried you might not be good enough for me. I was afraid my father’s wealth might make you feel awkward. Now you are making me feel like the foolish one. I love you.” She blushed deeply.

He smiled. “I love you. Let us not be apart again. Our love is greater than you realize. There is enough of it for both of us, and many others besides.”

That night he introduced her to each of his closest followers–the twelve envoys and others. The next day, because the town in which she had been living, Magdala, was close to Capernaum, he took her to his home to meet his family.

Soon she knew as much, and more about him as any of those closest to him. What he taught his chosen twelve and some others, he taught her. And though as the Messiah he loved all men and women equally, as the man Jesus he loved her more than most. With her harp and her beautiful voice and patient strength, she quickly became one of the most loved and sought after among the friends.

Though some of his followers like Miriam were a joy, others, Jesus discovered, were often problems. One of his constant problems from almost the beginning of his work was handling Judas, son of Ischariot. Judas was tall and handsome with dark, flashing eyes and locks of tightly curled hair that made him seem like a rich prince of the desert. He constantly worried about money and Jesus’ political position.

“I have no political position, Judas,” Jesus told him over and over. “My work is otherwise.”

Judas would smile with that winning, pleasant glance of his. “On the contrary,” he would reply. “Whether you wish it or not, it is you to whom Israelites of all kinds are looking in increasing numbers. You declare yourself the Messiah. According to some ancient prophecies, our Messiah shall lead us to victory in war.”

Judas then leaned forward solemnly. “Surely,” he continued, “you can give the people just a small word of encouragement, an idea here and there, carefully placed so the authorities cannot object. The people are waiting for you, Jesus Messiah.”

Jesus shook his head, looking at Judas sadly. “Don’t you yet understand?” he asked Judas. “The kingdom we are setting up is within people, not outside them.”

Judas nodded and changed the subject, as he always did. Yet several months later he would be at it again.

He also was close with the funds. This became obvious one time when Jesus was standing before the villa in Capernaum, with the sunlit Sea of Galilee off to his right and behind the villa, and Judy, his teacher from Mount Carmel, beside him. Though she was completely white-haired and her face filled with fine wrinkles, she still visited Capernaum for months at a time to help him in his work.

He and she were talking about building new housing for the followers, something to which Judas already had objected.

The weather was warm and the grass green, as is usual around the coasts of the Sea. The scent of fresh, clean lake water was blowing toward them. A little black-and-brown dog was yapping playfully around Jesus’ knees. He had found it half-dead, several months before, and brought it home to heal its wounds. The dog loved to walk with him whenever he was teaching and healing.

He and Judy both were pointing at the west side of the little white villa.

“I think,” she said, her face flushed from the sun and wind, “that four more rooms might be enough.”

“Four large ones,” he said, “and two more smaller ones on the east. My brother, James, can supervise the building. It is not just sleeping rooms we need for the followers, but a larger kitchen and an eating room, as well.”

He crouched down and petted the dog slowly. She examined the villa more carefully with a keen eye. When he stood up gain, he saw Judas coming from town on the dirt road.

“Judas!” he shouted and waved.

Judas strode gracefully over to where Jesus and Judy were standing. His robes were an artful and expensive combination of blues and oranges in narrow lines and great bands. He did not spare money on his own appearance.

“Hello!” he said. “The stories you told the crowd last night on the hill were excellent. Will you explain them to us again, and make them clearer?”

Jesus nodded and smiled. “Of course. Right now, though, we have need of your purse. Would you go to James and give him whatever he needs for building the extra rooms onto the house?”

Judas shook his curly-haired head. “I was hoping you wouldn’t go through with that. Our funds may not be able to withstand it.”

“What?” Jesus exclaimed. “But what of the new money Miriam’s brother in Bethany has sent us, and the gifts of Johanna and of Rachael of Tyre?”

“It is well that you also keep track of our money,” Judas said. He looked mournful. “Yet are not the funds given into my charge and care?”

“Only to hold them and to buy our necessities,” Jesus said.

He and Judy exchanged quick glances.

“Judas,” he said. “Once there was a man who had two daughters. One of them was quiet and respectful, yet she went out at night and found young men to go to. The other daughter was loud and complaining all day, yet she did not touch a man until she was married. Which do you think their father praised the most?”

Judas frowned. “I do not know. The one who complained, but was good?”

Jesus shook his head. “The father found fault with both of them. The one who crept out at night, frivolous and gay, he chastened for deceit. From the complaining one he asked more quietness and trust.”

Jesus looked deeply into Judas’ eyes. “But you,” he told Judas, “both complain during the day and are frivolous at night! You spend money for your own pleasure when no one is looking.” He waved at the expensive robe Judas was wearing. “And when we are together, the only words you can speak are, ‘This costs too much,’ and ‘We can’t afford that!’”

Judas’ face became pale.

“If you were like just one daughter or the other,” Jesus said, “it would be easier for all of us to forgive you. As it is, because you are selfish with money for everyone except yourself, many of the followers find fault with you. Change this.”

Judas’ face grew suddenly red. “Yes, Teacher,” he said. He turned and quickly strode away.

“Weren’t you too hard on him?” Judy asked.

Jesus looked off sadly at Judas, who was back on the dirt road to town. “He is one of my best assistants for almost anything we could name,” he told her. “He even is among the best healers. Only my mother, and one or two of the other envoys, have progressed as far as he in their knowledge of medicines and their ability to heal by touching. But he is stubborn and selfish when it comes to money. I have talked about this with him before.”

Judy raised her clear, dark eyes to Jesus’. “Give someone else the purse,” she stated.

Jesus shook his head. “Judas manages our money better than could anyone else. Everyone recognizes this. And he is loved and respected when he is not talking about money.” Jesus frowned. “There is something else about him that troubles me more. I dream that he and I lie side by side in a tomb.”

Judy’s eyes grew intent as she watched Jesus’ troubled face. “Why?” she asked.

“I do not know,” he answered. “This is hidden from me. As the future draws nearer, my awareness of it becomes more clouded.”

“I will search it for you,” she said. “Perhaps I will be able to see what you cannot.”

“I must conquer death,” Jesus said, almost to himself. “Surely this dream is a good sign? It may mean that I am on the verge of healing death itself. Perhaps Judas is to help me.”

Judy, whose age made her nearer to death than any of Jesus’ other followers and friends, shook her head grimly. “Do not ask too much of yourself,” she said. Her voice softened. “Come, let us go into your home. I smell the barley bread that your sister, Ruth, has been making all morning. It will do you good to eat before you teach the people later this afternoon.”

Her hand on Jesus’ arm to keep from falling, she led him into the small villa. As they walked, Jesus saw in the distance a fisher hauling in his net. The fisher was closing it tightly over the fish trapped within. The sight made Jesus feel trapped. He breathed deeply several times and reached within to make better contact with his inner self. It helped little. The gloom he felt would not go away.

As they ate, he thought of the time later in the afternoon when he would be teaching.

Then, he knew, the gloom would lift and he would feel fine again.

Men and women continued to come to him, asking to have him get rid of spirits possessing them, more and more frequently.

“But why is this happening?” Peter asked him one day as they were walking on the Sea road south of Capernaum.

“We are making people whole in a way few have ever dared before,” he told Peter. “Look. If you wre a spirit wishing to control someone’s body, would you choose people who are aware within themselves of most of their feelings and ways of thought, or would you choose those who avoid knowing anything about themselves, living in the outer world only?”

“The latter.” Peter shrugged.

“This is why the spirits attack us,” Jesus answered. “We are destroying their playground. But they must attack through strangers around us, for we ourselves are better protected than those who haven’t learned, yet, to look within.”

Some of the spirits Jesus cast out were, of course, really just physical conditions of sickness and infestation. Of the latter, once he drew an unclean worm, the length of an arm, out of a man’s body by making the man fast for a week and then putting a bowl of warm milk before the man’s mouth. The white worm stuck its head out, following the scent of the milk, and Jesus pulled it the rest of the way to the ground and killed it with a rock.

But real spirits also came out of men and women, too. These were unclean spirits with no bodies of their own. They haunt men and women, and travel from person to person especially by human touch, though their cold and silent presence can creep upon someone alone and enter him before the person quite realizes what has happened.

These unclean spirits, the evil ones who howl in darkness and bring men and women to despair and imperfection, are demons. Jesus fought them. But often, when they came face to face with him, they tried to get away.

This happened in Capernaum in the home of a wealthy man who had just joined Jesus’ followers. Jesus was healing and teaching when several of his envoys brought in a stumbling man who was able neither to see nor to speak.

Jesus stood as the man, groping and not even knowing there were dozens of silent people crowded into the same large room, was led forward.

“Who is this?” Jesus asked.

“Maloch of Judea” said Peter, who was holding the man’s upper arms tightly. Peter’s mouth was set. “His family is just outside the door. They have brought him to be healed by you. Yet the man, of his own accord, tried to break free and run when we approached this house. We didn’t tell him you were here. He seemed to know on his own.”

Jesus held out his hand, and Peter gave the man to him. Jesus held the man ahd shook him. He sent his own awareness deep into the body of the possessed man, seeking up and down for the awareness of the unclean demon. When he found it, he surrounded it with his own awareness and quickly closed in like a fist tightening on an empty husk of barley.

“Go, you unclean spirit!” he exclaimed.

The man screamed and fell down.

Jesus bent and lifted him up. The man looked at him and spoke. “Thank you,” he said in a rattling, unused whisper.

Immediately in the crowded room, another man fell down on his knees before Jesus, a young man who had let himself become dirty and unkempt. The young man’s mouth twisted. His words came out half-howling and half-grunting. “Do not send me away, Jesus Messiah! Let me stay here a while longer!”

Jesus turned and his eyes pierced the confused and frightened young man’s eyes. “Do not be afraid,” he told the young man gently. “It is not you who speaks, but an unclean spirit within you. Go!” he commanded the spirit. “Return to the house of this man’s self no more!”

The spirit left the young man, who rose quickly and walked out, trembling at what had happened.

Two Pharisees who were standing against the back wall, taking all this in, suddenly shoved forward.

As he watched them approach, Jesus felt a great tiredness coming over him. He shook it off.

“You are an unclean spirit yourself!” shouted the Pharisee with a black, pointed beard. He was trembling.

The other angrily waved his walking staff. “We have watched you, Jesus of Capernaum, name yourself as Messiah and heal sicknesses of all kinds. But now we know you! Only a prince of demons could chase other demons away. You are a partner of Satan himself!”

Jesus looked at him severely. The man was gaping, half-scared and half-angry. Jesus put both of his own palms out, facing the Pharisee, hoping this might help quiet him. “I say to you that Satan is more intelligent than that! Would an envoy of Satan, which you call me, chase out the very demons that Satan has sent to harass people? A kingdom divided against itself will fail. Satan has his kingdom to look after, and I, having mine, am freeing it from Stan’s grip. Watch yourselves! You invite Satan into yourselves by every word of uncleanness that your mouths utter!”

“Give us a sign that you are who you say you are!” the trembling Pharisee demanded.

“It is before your own eyes!” Jesus angrily told him. “Open your eyes! Fill yourselves with the light that is within you rather than the dark words that circle and buzz through your heads! Let the light out through your eyes! You will see everything you have always wanted to see, and more!”

The Pharisees, angry at this rebuke but aware that most of the people in the room were Jesus’ followers, drew back again to their places by the walls.

A small girl slipped up to Jesus quietly and tapped his waist.

He took a deep breath and looked down at her. He tried to relax.

“Your mother and brothers want you to come home,” the little brown-haired girl said. “They are waiting outside.”

“Did they say why?” Jesus asked her.

She nodded. “They want o know if you are be-, beside yourself,” she struggled to say. “And if you need a rest.”

Jesus felt a pang of disappointment flee through his chest. Were even his brothers and his mother, who had seen him cast out spirits, now thinking he was seeing demons where demons did not exist?

He quietly rested his hand on the little girl’s cheek. “Listen, and tell them this,” he said. He waved his other arm over the crowded room, pointing at the people watching him in silent fear and awe. “These here,” he told the little girl, “are my mothers, my brothers, and sisters. Here I belong.”

The little girl nodded solemnly, turned, and left to deliver his message. Her lips repeated it silently as she went.

He turned to the crowd and looked a them all. “Just because one day you awake and you see evil all around you,” he spoke to them, “do not think your eyes delude you and your mind has turned off-center. Evil waxes and wanes.”

He looked into everyone’s eyes as he glanced at each of them standing and watching him. “I tell you now, do not make the mistake of disbelieving in demons. What is there is there. They are as real as the flame that burns in bright sunlight and therefore cannot be seen. It still scorches and burns.”

Yet many of his followers still had their doubts that Jesus was really ridding so many people of demons. They thought that often, if not always, demons were just imaginary beings reamed up in the heads of foolish ones.

It took Gerasa to disprove this to them.

Gerasa is a small, hilly region on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, across the lake from Magdala’s port. It is a barren place where wolves and lions prowl, and many tombs of Hebrews and others have been cut into the rocky hills for miles around. Men avoid that place, except to bury their dead, for spirits who are neither in the body nor of heaven roam there, restless and unwilling to leave the dead flesh that once was theirs. The hills themselves have absorbed the grief and despair of this darkest of resting places. And so demons, who eat and drink human despair, also live there, waiting to trap human persons who wander those hills.

Shortly after Jesus refused to go home with his mother and brothers, they came to him instead. he led them and a number of his other followers to boats and across the Sea to Gerasa. He was drawn to the place as if some final combat awaited him there, and death, waiting in the tombs and gravestones, would show him more of its darkest nature.

His eyes were lit brightly and intensely as he stepped ashore and cast his glance on one hillside tomb after another.

The moon was full, the tombstones gray and white. Nighttime creatures such as jackets and slinking wolves hid quickly in the deep shadows, their eyes shining forth fearfully, as he strode among the tombs. Rough patches of grass grew amidst the rocky sand and rubble, and from it a light but distinct odor of death and decay hung in the heavy air.

While his followers struggled behind him to keep up, Jesus went on a straight course as if he had already picked out his tomb and must go to inspect it. He walked for a long time.

Then, suddenly, out of the shadows, a naked white figure leaped before him.

It was a man, unclothed and dirty with the terrible stench of his own excrement spread on himself. He crouched, ready to spring.

Jesus pierced the man’s flesh with a hard stare. “I have come for you,” he said to the man.

The man opened his mouth wide and let out a loud and gravelly scream that echoed throughout the hills. He fell down before Jesus. “What business do you have bothering me, son of God!” he yelled. “Leave me alone!”

Jesus’ hand trembled, then grew rigid, as he raised it and pointed. “Name yourself,” he told the man.

“We are The Many!” the man screamed. “Do not send us out of this man!”

“Go!” Jesus commanded.

“No!” the man shouted.

Jesus drew back as if he had been slapped. His face clouded over with anger.

“I command you–” he began.

“Wait!” the man yelled. “Send us into those pigs, that we may stay in this valley.”

Jesus looked up. At the moonlit crest of the near hill, overlooking the coat of the lake, was a large herd of pigs. It was the custom of the people in that region to send all pigs and cattle that were sick with the black plague to the hills of the tombs. There, where other animals and men could not be infected, the animals were eventually slaughtered and burned.

Jesus examined the pigs from the distance as well as he could in the moonlight. They were dancing about and twitching their ears nervously. Bloody patches of skin where they had been rubbing themselves against rocks, and trails of diarrhea on the ground behind them, marked their disease.

Jesus turned back to the man crouched before him, catching a calculating and powerful look in his eyes. “Go, then,” Jesus said to him. “But leave quickly before I send you back to the empty places from which you have come.”

The man suddenly collapsed in a heap on the hard ground. Jesus went to him, lifting him up. “It is done now,” he told the man gently. “You are free.”

The man shuddered and looked down at his own filthy body.

Jesus lifted his finger and, looking at his followers behind him and the man before him, he pointed to the hill.

“Watch,” he said.

The large herd of pigs, already restless and grunting in the dark, suddenly began to mill about as if a fox or mountain cat was in their midst. They tossed their heads and squealed angrily, circling even faster. Many of them as they circled stared evenly and with a strange, frightening intelligence at the small collection of people in the valley below.

Then an edge of the great, dancing circle of pigs suddenly broke forward and began running. They headed straight for the group of humans. The whole herd followed, twitching and squealing and trampling over dozens of their brothers and sisters who were tripping and falling under the sharp hooves.

Jesus’ first impulse was to jump and run out of the way. He stood still, silently, and sent his awareness deep within himself. He heard the others behind him gasping in far.

The pigs’ passage made the ground thunder from their thousands of cloven feet. They raced down the side of the rocky hill and, at the last moment, slowly swerved away from Jesus and the others. They ran out onto a high cliff overlooking the Sea. The leading pigs tried to stop, but it was too late. They were pushed off the cliff by the squealing pigs behind them, and in the shadowy darkness, others followed. The whole herd followed the lead of those in front of them, not seeing their danger until they were well past the point for stopping. In several minutes, the last of the herd went over the edge of the cliff, sending large columns of water up the side.

The great splashing of water at the foot of the cliff continued a few seconds more; then abruptly it ceased. Except for a few smaller splashes, as if silvery fish were twinkling u into the moonlight and back down, a great silence filled the dark hills and tombs.

“You see,” Jesus said, surprise drawing even his eyebrows upward, “this is what our God can accomplish!” He shuddered and then, breathing deeply, took control of himself.

The followers facing him who were capable of answering nodded.

“Our Poppa sent the unclean spirits out,” he said, looking around at everyone. He rested his hand lightly on the cured man’s head.

“And our Mother,” he continued, “has swallowed the unclean spirits in her bosom of earth, there to destroy their bodily shells.”

Judas was with the followers. He was one of those who doubted that people could so often be cured of demons. He went, trembling, up to Jesus and kneeled before him in the dark. “We believe you, Master,” he said, looking humbly up into Jesus’ face.

Jesus smiled. “Good! I think now, Judas, we will see less of these evil spirits. We have gone into the dark lord’s own territory and have dealt him a great blow. He may use other means, now, such as turning the Romans and the Pharisees against us, to destroy our work.”

He turned to everyone and smiled. “Now, dawn is coming soon. Let us return to our boats and go home. I have much to say to all of you when we return to Capernaum. I wish to talk to you about death. It, too, can be conquered. Tonight I have begun to see how.”

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Oct. 2020.