Chapter 26: An Earlier Passover, Danger, and Lazarus

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

---

Book II: The Rabbi
Part Four–Teacher
                                      

After John the Forerunner’s death, Jesus drew closer to some of his envoys and family and to other friends such as Miriam and Lazarus. So it was that those in Capernaum with him objected even more strongly when he told them of his plans for Passover.

“You simply can’t go!” Peter exclaimed, throwing up his arms in amazement. “Do you think the Pharisees haven’t heard the ideas we teach? Don’t you realize they are disgusted with you, and scared of you, Jesus? And it’s all because you have so many people following you.” He began to pace the tile floor of the day room, for they were in Jesus’ villa.

“Yet I will go,” Jesus calmly told him.

Mary and several others were sitting to the sides, watching Peter argue with Jesus. She suddenly rose. “You must at least take some of us with you!” she exclaimed. “In numbers we will be safer!”

Jesus shook his head stubbornly. “That would just put all the rest of you in danger.” He sat down on his straw reading mat, hoping that would end the conversation.

“We will still go with you,” said Peter, “even if you refuse us. We must protect you.”

Then he, too, sat. Soon they were all involved in a discussion of their plans for the coming week of teaching.

Several days before Passover, Jesus snuck away on his own. He left in the middle of the night, after waking his mother and asking her to command his other friends and followers not to come after him. Displeased, but finally deciding he would be less noticeable alone, she agreed.

A few days later, he was in the bustling, sunlit city of all their forefathers, their ancestral home. He was excited by this chance to be on his own without a group of followers bunched around him constantly, asking questions and giving advice. He wanted to talk with people, and observe them, without anyone knowing who he was.

For much of the week, he walked about the Temple, careful not to go too close to priests who might recognize him. He watched the Temple priests kill the sacrificial bulls, which bellowed as they were laid out and cut. The sacrificial ra, lambs, and the old he-goat bleated and struggled as their turn came for the stone cutting blocks.

A solemn and dignified air of priestly splendor clung to the innermost parts of the Temple–the Court of Israel, where only Hebrew men could go, and the Court of Priests and the innermost Holy Place, where only priests were allowed. The priests hummed with self-important and sometimes truly humble energy as they went about their lengthy rituals. They proudly wore their blue and their orange-and-purple cloaks. Their faces were dabbed with symbolic black paints. Their beards and side curls were carefully oiled to sharp points.

Because of his official status as a Doctor of the Laws and his hereditary line of priestly blood, Jesus had every right to enter the inner Court of Priests. But in order to avoid recognition, for the most part he stayed out of it. He walked instead in the Court of Women and the Court of Gentiles, where moneychangers counted their coins, the animal sellers called out, and foreigners walked freely.

He also spent many pleasant hours in Jerusalem’s spring-warmed streets. The stone-paved streets and dirt lanes were bursting with a festival atmosphere from the first evening of Passover through the seventh. This was the yearly Feast of Deliverance celebrating the time, ages ago, when Moses and the Israelites finally escaped Egypt’s pharaoh. The festive air of Jerusalem was especially strong in the lower city and the deep valley beside it, where people were poorer. In these parts of the city, the Laws and the festivals were enjoyed in a much more relaxed manner. Poor people in age-torn robes and flopping sandals passed each other busily n the narrow, dusty streets.

Jesus helped eat several paschal lambs, the main course of the great Passover dinners. Because of the custom requiring the entire paschal feast to be eaten in one evening, Israelites were out in the streets calling to their neighbors, and even pleasant strangers like Jesus, to come into their homes and help them finish the food. The lambs were roasted in the early evening and, because people in this neighborhood were poor, the lambs were small. Jesus was graciously given several bites of young, tender mutton in each house he was pulled into. But the flat breads and inexpensive watered wines flowed like manna honey from heaven.

Jesus tasted the bitter herbs and ate of the vinegar-mashed fruits happily. More hard bread was pushed into his hands by skinny but determined and happy young fathers. He sang with them the joyful psalms from the holy books, songs of deliverance and of gratitude for the beauties of living.

He had a good time. Few recognized him. He cautioned those who did to remain silent.

By the last day of the festival, a Sabbath, the crowds had diminished. Many people had gone back to their homes elsewhere in Judea and beyond. Attendance for all seven days of the festival was not required.

Jesus, looking for something to do, strolled abut the city and beyond its immediate boundaries. He eventually came to the pool of Bethesda just north on the road leading out of the Temple.

Here at this pool, he thought to sit and rest beside its carefully laid-and-cornered rock walls. Green bushes and grass waved in the light breeze all around the pool. Within its warm waters, several dozen people walked and sat, for the pool was very large. The people were waiting to be healed. The spirit of the water at this pool was a bubbling spirit. Sometimes it sent up smelly bubbling airs from the spring that fed it, and these airs deposited medicinal substances in the water.

Jesus watched the half-naked waders drifting back and forth in the water. He felt a tinge of guilt that he was not busy trying to heal them. But he could not heal people each hour every day. His inner spirit, when he looked into himself to consult it, counseled him to keep resting.

There was one man in particular, lying on the grass beside the pool, whom Jesus noticed. He felt bad for the man’s sake, for the old and nearly hairless fellow obviously had been sick for years. His legs were shriveled and useless. Jesus rose and hesitantly went over to the old, crippled man. “How long have you been here, grandfather?” he asked.

The old man looked up at the tall, handsome Galilean with the chestnut-red hair. “Many weeks,” he said, his voice trembling. “As soon as the angel of the water causes the bubbling to come forth, I drawl t the pool. But I am always too late. Others get in front of me. I have no one to lift me and put me in the waters.”

Jesus bent down and stroked the old man’s legs. The old man looked at him in surprise.

“I am a healer,” Jesus said. He stroked the legs and pushed his concentration and healing energies through his arms and hands into the withered muscles and bent bones before him. All thoughts of resting were gone from his head, for here was someone he could help quickly and easily, who could not help himself.

The old man relaxed.

Jesus was sweating lightly, but after years of doing this, he was now accustomed to building up and using so much healing force. In fifteen minutes, the old man’s legs began filling out a little.

Jesus stood. “Get up. Pick up you’re your sleeping mat and walk!” he commanded.

The old man rose quickly. He took a step forward. “Why, I can walk!” he exclaimed.

Suddenly Jesus realized that if he wanted to continue his holiday, he must avoid praise and recognition for healing the old man. Jesus quietly slipped back and away.

“I can walk!” the old man shouted, staggering about on his long-unused legs.

Everyone turned and looked. People began pressing around him and coming out of the water to look at him.

“See?” he told them. “I am cured!”

A healthy and flushing Pharisee priest pushed his way through the crowd. “What are you doing, carrying that sleeping mat!” he snapped. “This is the Sabbath, and carrying sleeping mats is a violation of the Laws against work!”

“But I am healed!” the old man exclaimed, stepping forward. His eyebrows rose.

“That makes no difference!” the darkly-robed priest exclaimed. “You have committed a serious crime against the Sabbath!”

The old man shook his head slowly. “The man who healed me,” he said, “it was he who told me to pick up my mat.” He looked around for Jesus, but couldn’t see him anywhere.

“Don’t do it again,” the Pharisee said. “Put it down right now and leave it here!”

The old man obeyed.

The crowd broke up, and the old man slowly hobbled off toward the Temple. Later he saw Jesus standing in the Temple in the outer Court of the Gentiles, watching the moneychangers at their work. The old man hurried up to the young Galilean as quickly as he could. He spoke to the red-haired man’s back. “Who are you, young master?” he asked.

Startled, Jesus turned in surprise. “I am Jesus of Capernaum!”

The old man left quickly, his feet striking the stone pavement lightly.

A few minutes later, Jesus found himself surrounded by a handful of angry priests. Most of them were dressed in black or dark-colored robes because it was the Sabbath. One, an assistant of the high priest Caiaphas, wore grey marked with yellows and reds.

“So!” exclaimed one of the priests. “It really is you! I thought I recognized you the other day!”

“I have just heard of you!” the priest from the pool exclaimed. “you have broken the Sabbath at the pool! Shame!”

Jesus’ head whirled. His first reaction was to get away. He took refuge within himself and began breathing deeply.

“What is wrong?” called another priest, whom Jesus could see striding quickly across the pavement toward them. Other priests were also coming.

The grey-robed assistant of Caiaphas stroked his long, pointed beard. “We have here,” he said with a thoughtful sneer, “the man who thinks he is the Messiah.”

The mouths of several of the priests who had just arrived dropped open. Other priests looked at Jesus with hate and fear.

Jesus’ own anger began to well up.

“This,” continued Caiaphas’ assistant, “is the man of whom we have asked, ‘Should we not somehow rid ourselves of him?’”

Jesus pierced the priest with a glare. “My Poppa has been at work through me and continues working!” Jesus snapped.

Many of the priests gasped.

“Blasphemy!” exclaimed a small, dark-bearded one. “He speaks of God as if he is God’s own son in familiar terms!”

A large, wide-shouldered priest who smelled of the blood of sacrificial animals pulled out his sacrificial knife. It was a sharp, curved blade for cutting into the throats of the beasts. Two other priests pulled out their small shaving knives, used normally for ritual haircutting.

“You think you are equal to God?” Caiaphas’ assistant asked. His hand was tightly clasped into a fist around his beard.

“We are all sons of our of our Father!” Jesus exclaimed. “Do you not see?”

“Not even a son of God would violate the Sabbath!” the assistant growled. He tugged violently at his beard. “You have healed a man, and such work on this day is illegal!”

The priests holding the knives pressed closer.

Jesus felt he could not contain his fury. He took a deep breath and unclenched his hands. “Just as our Father reincarnates the dead and gives them a fresh body on any day,” Jesus exclaimed, “so should our spirit selves heal sickness and disease whenever we can!”

Some of the calmer Pharisees nodded almost automatically, so persuasive did Jesus’ logic appear to them. They believed in reincarnation of the dead into new bodies. If that could be called healing, then perhaps healing on the Sabbath was a good thing after all.

“None of you are yet sons of the Father,” Jesus told them, “for you have not discovered oneness with the Father. Listen, you scribblers and talkers! There is a light within you that you don’t even know about because you are too busy accusing everyone with your thousands of Laws!”

Several priests began to interrupt him angrily.

“Wait!” Jesus held his hands out. He saw the priests’ knife hands tightening. “Don’t you see? You have misinterpreted even the Laws! Do you think Moses, our Lawmaker, intended his first laws to be a jail of iron bars? No! He meant them to be a chariot that would take us to the heart of God. Listen! ‘Thou shalt not steal’ means simply that Thou–the deepest self within us–does not steal. All we have to do is find it! Moses wanted us to search for this deepest self within us, so that with it we would be able to follow all true laws! It is this self, this light within us, that we must struggle to find, rather than wasting our energy over perfect obedience to every last detail of human laws!”

“But the Laws are sacred!” exclaimed the high priest’s assistant. Even he was caught up by Jesus’ reasoning. He looked around the crowded courtyard uneasily, as if he was searching for some kind of physical object that would prove himself right and Jesus wrong.

“Yes!” Jesus nodded. “But the Laws were made for humans, not humans for the Laws. Our first sacred duty is to ourselves–our true selves–and finding the light within us that is one with God.”

He pushed his way suddenly through the circle of startled Pharisees, as a fish pushes through water. His red hair and beard and angrily flushed face disappeared in the crowds in the Temple court, before any of the surprised priests found the presence of mind to go after him. He had spoken of their own Laws in a way that, they knew, only a true prophet or a madman could speak them.

By the time they began searching for him in earnest once more, this time to question him further, Jesus had already left for home.

After that Passover, Jesus began to travel more. He made a short trip with Miriam and several of the other envoys and friends through Tyre and Sidon to the north, staying for a time in the house of one of the rich people who supported his work. Then, together with the envoys and many others, he traveled the whole region around Galilee from the slopes of Mount Hermon in the far north to the busy cities of the Decapolis in the east.

Part of the reason for these travels was to get out of King Herod’s reach. Herod, ruler of Galilee and Perea and son of Herod the Great, thought that John the Forerunner’s spirit had reincarnated in Jesus’ body. It was Herod who had killed John. The King was, for a time, so afraid of more condemnation from this resurrected spirit of John that Jesus’ life was in immediate danger. Herod’s spies followed Jesus wherever he and the envoys went, even outside of Herod’s kingdoms.

About this time Jesus also lost some of his followers, for he angered them. This was when he began teaching that his body is the bread of life that we must eat. This teaching started with what seemed at the time like just a brief remark. Jesus had fed many people from the bread and fish he multiplied near Bethsaida. These people, and others, kept coming to him time and again for more surprising wonders. He finally became tired of them.

“You just want miracles!” he angrily told a large group of them one day. They were gathering outside his villa in Capernaum as he was trying to leave, begging him for another sign.

“The true bread of life,” he told them, “is not our Mother’s physical bread! It is the spirit that she and the Father have given us! I am busy making my flesh and blood the true bread. You who really would follow me must eat this bread!”

“What?” some people yelled. Others asked, “Are you telling us to eat your flesh and blood?” The crowd shifted uneasily on the grass before the stucco villa.

“Don’t you see?” Jesus told them, shaking his head. “We must bring out the spirit of the Mother in each particle of flesh and blood within us and turn it to perfect life. The Mother’s elements, her air, water, fire, earth, and energy all are in us. Those parts of us will all become the bread of life, because we have searched out their spirit and made them so, feeding us for all times when the bread of men leads to death!”

Jesus shook his head. He felt more sad than angry at the crowd. He raised his head and continued. “You men and women come to me saying, ‘Give us this!’ and ‘Give us that!’ But I tell you that you must all learn to eat your flesh and drink your blood with your inner self, before I or the Mother can give you eternal life.”

This saying was confusing even to Jesus’ envoys. Many of the friends were disgusted, for they still could not understand. Some still thought Jesus meant we must really eat human flesh. Others, disliking even their normal body processes, thought it very wrong to meditate more deeply on these processes to discover and make the bread of life. many of these friends left.

In his villa in Capernaum while the envoys and family were eating dinner with him, Jesus told a story to explain why people were leaving him.

Water in large earthen bowls was flowing freely as everyone washed their hands and feet before sitting down. It was late summer, so many of the envoys and Jesus wetted bands of cloth in the cool water and wrapped them across their foreheads. This also helped keep their long hair off of their faces and necks. It was an especially hot summer.

The dinner was light because of the heat. The wine had been kept, until serving, in a deep pit beneath the flowering tree behind the villa. The wine was pleasantly cool. Pomegranates came up out of the pit after the wine. The cold, pulpy seeds refreshed everyone. Many thanked Judas. As keeper of the purse, he was going through a time of gracious spending, allowing some extras in the way of food, which made everyone’s life more pleasant at mealtimes.

As everyone slowly ate the pomegranates, depositing the hard seeds carefully in ittle bronze bowls before them, Peter spoke out. “What will we do, Master, now that so many people are displeased with our teachings?”

Jesus looked in turn at each of the people around him. When he glanced at Miriam, who lay beside him, she flicked her long red hair back and laid her hand on his arm.

“Once,” he said, “there was a miller in Jerusalem who turned his large grindstone with a donkey. His flour was of the finest quality, and the servants of rich women all around would come and buy his product.

“Yet one day,” Jesus continued, “the grindstone broke. Instead of fixing it as most people would, the miller was rich enough to buy a new one that would last longer than the old. As soon as the new stone was in place and before it had even begun to turn, the people complained.
“‘The stone is too rough,’ said some.

“‘It is too smooth,’ said others.

“’Oh dear,’ said most of the people, ‘even if it does work, the flour will never be as good again.’”

Jesus paused and looked at one of the sons of Zebedee, who smiled back. A sweet, fruity scent of drying stacte drifted in from the drying rocks in back. The stacte was being prepared on the hot, sunlit rocks for medicinal use.

“Can the miller quit,” Jesus asked, “because most people are dissatisfied with his new grindstone?”

“No!” Peter exclaimed, grabbing his beard quickly. “If he quits, then many people will have no bread!”

Jesus turned to the envoy. “Neither will we quit, Simon Peter, for many people still are depending on us. The old grindstone is the old way of knowing and sensing things. The new grindstone is the awakened awareness that we are encouraging people to find. And by our work, we will prove that the new grindstone, the awakened awareness, will turn out even better flour than the old. For we are teaching everyone to make the new bread of the spirit.”

“How will we know this bread when we see it?” Thomas asked. Like the lawyer he was, he was always seeking proofs and logical understanding.

A shiver ran quickly down Jesus’ spine. He turned to Thomas. “The first proof you will see,” Jesus told him, “is the messiah lying in his tomb; then he will be reincarnated from death in the same body.”

Jesus shook his shoulders and began eating his pomegranate again. He had been teaching this vision of the tomb this closest followers for several months, now. He had had a dream in which he had been rising to his feet in a grave. He awakened from the dream feeling good. He knew the dream was true in some way, for it had a solid physical feeling about it that only dreams that come true can have. But he didn’t yet understand how.

The room quieted after he had spoken. He could feel many of the people in the room watching him, waiting for him to go on. Someone accidentally flicked the leather covering aside from a west-facing window for a second. Hot sunlight flashed in.

Jesus sighed and raised his head. He felt tired. “I know nothing more about this than I have spoken,” he told them. “The time draws near. When it comes, we will all learn what it means.”

The envoys turned to each other and began to debate this teaching. They had heard it several times, now, and it confused them.

Finally James, Jesus’ brother, could contain himself no longer. He jumped up and leaned across the table. “But surely you know something!” he exclaimed.

Jesus looked up at him. “We will see, James. I cannot predict what I will do any more. Our choices are becoming fewer, for everywhere there are the pharisees and Herod’s spies, and people who are disappointed in me. I can only sense my way, hour by hour, as the possibilities narrow.”

Jude, who was beside James, pulled his brother down. Then he turned his head with its dark, curly hair toward Jesus. “We are sorry, Jesus. We easily forget the difficulties you face.”

‘Thank you, Jude.” Jesus looked deeply into his younger brother’s eyes. Jude was often a source of peace to him as other followers and friends fell away.

Looking around once more at all of them collected in this room, he stood up. “Come,” he said. “It is time we went back outside. people are waiting to be healed.”

He strode to the door, his forehead furrowed in concentration and his eyes slightly unfocused, for he was looking inward and concentrating on the particles of his own body. He did this often, now, in the minutes between teaching and eating when no one was talking to him. He was learning, in his meditation, every smallest movement and action of the deepest parts of his body.

The envoys and many of the others slowly rose and followed him. They knew that much of his great force and power was now focused inward, for he had told them. But still it was much like a man already facing death and slowly closing the tomb door after him. They were afraid for him and afraid for the tens of thousands of people who believed in hm still.

Most of all, though, they were afraid for themselves. His new apartness and talk of his own death left them feeling lonely and confused. If he were killed or imprisoned, they realized, it probably would be their turn to be arrested next. And they would have no leader to guide them. They had become secure in knowing there was always someone to tell them what to do. Each of them, quietly and with hardly a word to the others, was beginning to think of his special plans for the future when the Master was gone.

In the fall as leaves were dripping from trees in the Galilee hills, and farmers were bringing in their sheaves of barley and wheat, Jesus attended another feast in Jerusalem, the Feast of Tabernacles. Again he went alone and in secret, and again, no longer able to contain himself after several days, his presence became public knowledge and he got into trouble with the priests. He was saved from being arrested only because the Temple guards, Judean hill men who kept guard for a year’s duty at a time, would not touch him. They had heard his reputation and took no chances. They did not want to be credited with arresting Israel’s Messiah.

When Jesus returned again to Galilee and Capernaum, it was mainly to collect his envoys and closest followers to return south. He seemed heedless of the dangers, for from this time on he spent most of his time in Judea and nearby Perea during the winter months. There by the Jordan River, before it enters the Dead Sea, and in the valley climbing up on either side of it, the winter was warm.

He and the envoys taught and healed tens of thousands who had heard of his word in Galilee to the north, but had rarely, if ever, seen him. His life was frequently in danger. He acted as if he no longer cared about it. His power seemed increased tenfold by the very danger he was in. Several times he was almost stoned, and one time rocks flew after him and the envoys, even as they were quickly leaving a small village. Thomas the lawyer was struck in the head. His blood flowed, but it was a superficial wound. Jesus was hit behind his left knee by a large, fist-sized rock. This made him limp for several weeks.

“Heal yourself, Messiah!” troublemakers yelled, taunting him during those weeks.

He said nothing to them. But to his friends he explained it. “They know little,” he told the envoys who were resting under a palm tree by the Jordan. “I soon would have lost all use of this leg if I were not meditating upon it. It was broken. Even our Mother’s healing sometimes takes time.”

All that winter and spring, death seemed to be hovering close about everyone. Even the envoys felt it this time, and many got in the habit of looking over their shoulders whenever a cold numbness would briefly brush against their spines. The angel of death was always near.

Then it struck.

First news of it came to Jesus and his envoys in Perea, where they had fled after a particularly ugly incident in Judea. A crowd of Judean thieves, angry at what they thought was Jesus’ criticism of them, leaped on him and almost crushed his face with a rock while he was under them on the ground. The envoys helped Jesus break free.

It never would have happened in the carefree days when everything seemed to be going so well and Jesus was not concentrating so deeply within his own body. As it was, sometimes his concentration was so inwardly drawn that he stumbled and fell on the roads. Often the enjoys had to remind him to eat and drink at least enough to keep himself from starving.

While he and the envoys were in a tent camp east of the Jordan, watching spring coming to the hot, wild hills, a messenger from Bethany came.

He was breathing rapidly when he arrived. He had been running. He stood before Jesus and spoke between gasps of breath. “It is Lazarus, Master,” he said. “His condition has become much worse. He is dying.”

Jesus was sitting on a rock, deep in meditation. He slowly looked up and frowned. “Who sends you?” he asked.

The messenger, a well-built young man who delivered all of Lazarus’ messages, looked at him in surprise. “Miriam, Master! And her sister Martha! Do you not remember me?”

Jesus nodded slowly. His face softened a little. Whenever anyone even mentioned Miriam’s name, in his mind he could see her red, flowing hair and feel her soft hands touching his forehead. Since Lazarus’ illness began, she had stayed in Bethany to care for him.

Yet even Miriam’s name was not enough to budge him. He reached inside the ever-widening and more complex rooms of his body and spirit that he was exploring in his meditations, and from one of those rooms he found a clear and compelling message. He transferred it out loud to the messenger, trembling once as he did so.

“I will not go yet,” he said, looking the messenger in the eye.

“But he is dying!” the young man exclaimed, throwing his hands out in supplication.

Jesus shook his head. “I do not need to go yet,” he said. He wondered, in himself, at how cold and unloving he seemed. yet he had come to completely trust most of his psychic senses. He had learned to use them better than anyone he knew. They lied to him no more than his eyes or his fingertips did.

The messenger left, shaking his head wearily.

In two days he was back. His face was pale when he confronted Jesus again. This time Jesus was walking along the dusty track to a small village nearby. The envoys were walking beside and ahead of him.

“My master is dead,” the messenger told Jesus, walking to one side of him.

Jesus raised his head and stopped. He looked at each of the envoys around him in turn. “Now,” he stated. “We will go now. The time feels right.”

“But Master!” Thomas exclaimed. “We thought you were staying her because we don’t dare go back into Judea this week!”

“Do you want us all to die!” Judas exclaimed. He was irritable from the dust that had been making him sneeze. Even the beauty of his handsome face was dimmed by the layer of fine grit coating his body, as it was everyone’s.

“Do you have the light to guide you that I have?” Jesus asked him? “Have you seen inside yourself as much as I can see? Please, Judas, learn to believe that such sight is possible. When will you learn to trust me, all of you?”

He swept his eyes over the envoys. Some of them hung their heads. Others met his gaze.

“Well,” Thomas said, speaking to the others, “let us at least go with him. We may as well die together.”

“We will not die this time,” Jesus commented. He nodded his head once. Then, grim and tired of being an outcast in the desolate wildernesses of Perea, he turned back toward the Jerusalem-Bethany road. He felt his heart lift when he realized he would be seeing Miriam soon.

Two days later they arrived at the outskirts of Bethany. The town, before the Romans destroyed it years later, was a quiet village on the slope of the Mount of Olives east of Jerusalem. On the Mount all around, olive and almond trees were blossoming in bursts of white and red, the sweet scents from them lightening the air with happiness. The fig trees were producing their first little green fruits, before even all the leaves of their trees could appear.

The town was well filled with villas, for it was an expensive place to live. Men such as Lazarus and the king’s scribe lived there in large white homes with pools and stone fencing. Because Lazarus was so well known, many Jerusalem dwellers had crossed over the Mount of Olives by the wide road to be at his funeral rites. The whole village was overflowing with rich and poor alike, all Lazarus’ friends, waling about with drawn faces and solemn eyes along the wide, carefully paved streets.

Word had travelled ahead of Jesus and the envoys that he was coming. Martha, Lazarus’ sister, stood waiting for him in her dark mourning clothes. Her tightly bound head and upper arms made her white skin seem swollen.

Jesus slowly walked up to her. He felt a great sadness wash over and through him when he saw her face. It was rigidly lined with sorrow. Her jaws were clamped tightly shut and her gaze was angrily piercing his eyes. “You,” she said, “could have saved him, if you had come in time. Even now I know you can do it if you will!”

“Martha,” Jesus softly said. “Lazarus will reincarnate from the dead.”

Martha tore her eyes away from him and looked up into the green hills. “I believe that,” she said. “But when will his next life be? Will he come as a baby again in ten years, fifty, three hundred? That doesn’t help the rest of us now.”

“You will see,” Jesus quietly told her. “Now go and call Miriam, for I have looked forward to seeing her.”

A few minutes later Miriam came walking toward him, her face a trembling conflict of gladness at seeing that he was still safe and whole after these months she had not seen him, and red-eyed misery because her brother was dead. She ran to Jesus and, falling to the ground, she threw her arms around his legs. “If you had been here, you could have saved him!” she cried out. “Why didn’t you come?” She began weeping again.

Jesus trembled and shook. He felt his heart pierced by her loneliness and confusion. His head and body began swaying with the combined weight of her suffering and the weeping of others around them. Suddenly it was as if he were just a young man again, with little power to heal. He had loved Lazarus, and even more than Lazarus he loved Miriam, whose spirit was to him like the cofort and beauty of all the Mother’s fullest joy itself. Every part of him absorbed and vibrated with the sorrow she felt. The sorrow became his own, too, and it felt eternal, as he could do nothing to help.

He lad his hands gently on her head. Crying with her, he cupped her face and lifted it up. Heer tears were coursing down her cheeks.

“Show me where he is buried,” he said.

Miriam, head hanging down, took him by the hand and slowly led him further out of town to the rock face of the cliff in which Lazarus’ tomb was carved.

The cliff extended far to the left and the right, though it was not more than three men’s lengths in height. Many people were following Miriam and Jesus as they slowly climbed up the grassy knoll to the front of the cliff. Martha and more-distant relatives of the family were among them. They pressed forward, planning to join with the ritual mourning that Miriam and Jesus, they thought, were about to start in front of the closed tomb.

Instead Jesus pointed at the large disc of rock that sealed the tomb’s entrance.

“Remove the stone,” he said.

Miriam looked up at his face in surprise.

Martha, standing just behind them, cried out in shock. “But Master,” she exclaimed, “he is already dead! The smell from his decayed body might bring sickness to us all!”

“Did I not say he would reincarnate?” Jesus asked her. “Do as I tell you, for the moment of his rebirth has come.”

Wide-eyed, doubting even in this moment of having her wish granted, Martha gave the orders. Servants ran up to the huge stone and pushed it away.

The hole of the tomb was empty and dark. Deep within lay Lazarus and many other, much older, bodies of men and women of his line. A large black beetle, dazzled by the sudden light and fresh air, ran quickly out, then swiveled and scurried back in. A damp, rotting odor began to drift down toward the onlookers. Many covered their noses with the hems of their robes.

Jesus said a short prayer. He did so in order that those around him would remember the source of his inner powers.

Then, stilling his crying and sadness, and plunging deep within his own self, he sought out the darkest and most immobile particles of his body. He had discovered these same dark particles in just the previous few months.

They were the particles of death, the smallest motes of flesh and blood within him that were dead or dying. For months he had been learning to stimulate some of them by shaking them up, to keep them from dying so soon. He had not yet brought back to life any of them that were already completely dead.

He now focused on one of these dead particles in himself. Though he was aware of it with a sense other than vision, it was like seeing the wreck of a small sailing ship whose sides and sail are torn and gaping open, and whose men, like specks of dust, have abandoned her. He tried calling specks of living, circling dust from other living ship-like particles in his body. He sent these specks into the dead particle. Then he began encouraging them to repair the damage.

Instead, they began dying.

He concentrated harder.

They sluggishly began moving about, duplicating themselves here and there.

He concentrated harder still. They began working more rapidly.

Then, memorizing the patter of what he had just done, he took his awareness out of his own body and sent it in an instant into the dark tomb. Quickly his awareness found Lazarus’ body. It was very definitely dead. Concentrating on it, he began to feel cold and numb all over. Sending his awareness into the smallest corners and ripples of its flesh was like falling into a bottomless cavern of cold, oozing mud. In his own body, he felt the skin on the back of his neck prickling.

He searched quickly through the particles of Lazarus’ body. Finally, deep within it, he found particles that still had life in them. He nudged them. They stirred under his awareness.

Then he began the work of making them spread their life-giving parts to the dead particles around them. Immediately he came up against an obstacle. Though they would obey him, they were working in new patterns of growth that were not like those of the body before its death. He couldn’t control the growing well enough. He didn’t know this body as he knew his own, nor was it a matter of simply healing a broken bone or destroying a sickness. Important parts of Lazarus’ flesh, especially in his head and within the center of the series of bones in his spine, needed exact duplication. Only Lazarus’ own personality, the self he had been, could do this.

Jesus realized there was only one thing to do. He would have needed to do it anyway in several minutes. He had to call Lazarus’ spirit back to its body.

He sent out an overwhelming psychic call to Lazarus, in the direction of the dark he sensed Lazarus spirit had gone. He was vaguely aware that his real voice was echoing his psychic call. He heard himself shout loudly, “Lazarus, Lazarus, return here now!”

And Lazarus came. He drifted through the layers of Jesus’ awareness from top to bottom. Quietly, without a word or impression, the spirit settled down within its dead body.

Jesus concentrated again, and Lazarus simply rested. His presence was enough. Suddenly with a psychic snap that echoed painfully through both of their minds, the rebirthing of the fleshly particles was done.

Lazarus immediately rose and, stumbling once because of the grave cloth bound over his face, walked out into the sunlight.

Jesus returned with full awareness to his own body just in time to hear the gasps of horror and awe that swept through the crowd. Miriam beside him was clamping his arm so tightly in her hands that his fingers were growing numb.

“Remove his burial clothes,” Jesus told the family members around him. “Let him be free.”

Shaking from head to foot, two of the five servants ran to obey. The other three couldn’t walk.

Miriam turned and looked up at him.

“You,” she said, huskily. Her blue eyes were wider and more perplexed than he’d ever seen them before. “you can do anything.” She shuddered.

“Miriam,” he said softly. He put his free hand over hers. “Let us go to your house and wait for your brother to wash the death out of his pores and present himself. He will, I believe, have much to tell us.”

Miriam nodded, staring at him. “Thank you,” she whispered.

The awestruck relatives and friends of the family trailed unevenly back to the house in the cool spring evening, cautiously following the reincarnated Lazarus, whose servants were helping him walk slowly back to his villa. Other bystanders began racing the short distance to Jerusalem to spread the news.

One of these bystanders was a straight, handsome young man wearing the dark robes of a Temple priest. He was almost as good-looking as Judas, though this man’s face was lighter and his eyes set slightly closer together.

He was one of the high priest Caiaphas’ assistants. He wasn’t sure what to think concerning this apparent miracle. But he believed in magic. He knew Jesus’ reputation as the supposed Christ of Israel. This, coupled with the powerful and possibly deceitful magic he had just witnessed, made him decide that Jesus was ten times more dangerous, no, a hundred times, than the Temple priests had once thought.

The young assistant intended to tell Caiaphas and the others everything he had seen. He wanted to warn them of this vastly increased danger. No man who had power over even death, the priest told himself, could dare be allowed to live.

---

---
Most recent revision of text: 1 Oct. 2020.