Chapter 30: A Last Supper; the Governor Visits

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book II: The Rabbi
Part Five–Messiah
                                      

The next day, Thursday, Jesus sent two of his envoys to Nicodemus, a well-to-do follower who had a pleasant two-story stucco home in the upper city not far from Caiaphas’ home.

“Ask Nicodemus if we may use his banquet room upstairs,” Jesus told them, smiling at the envoys. He was looking forward to this special meal with his closest friends. “Say that we will bring our own food for the Feast of Unleavened Bread tonight, and our own serving ware.”

At dusk he led the way to Nicodemus’ house. The envoys and several other followers were carrying food and bowls wrapped in covered baskets, and several small goatskins of wine. The fresh odors of steaming-hot bread and rice floated up and into their noses as they walked the wider, cobbled streets of the upper city. Some of the women and several wives of the envoys had carefully prepared the food in another friend’s house in the lower city. Two of the envoys had helped them.

Jesus and the others went straight to the top of the house and entered into the banquet room quietly. The walls were a crumbling white and the floor was dust. Nicodemus hadn’t had the time to have servants clean it thoroughly, and the room had not been used much in recent years, anyway. Nicodemus’ popularity as a dinner-party host in the upper city had fallen rapidly since he had become a follower of Jesus.

Jesus chose the middle couch of the handful set around the low wooden table for dining. He reclined on it and breathed deeply, thankful for the opportunity to rest. He had been busy in the Temple–again all day–talking with people and healing those who came to him because they were sick.

The envoys quickly set the table. Everyone reclined, sharing the long couches among themselves.

“Peter,” Jesus said, “please pour some water into that wooden basin in the corner and bring it here.”

“Yes, Master,” Peter said.

Jesus stood up and removed his dusty robe. The flesh of his upper body was pale brown except for his arms and face, which were deeply tanned. He tied the towel, which had been beside the basin, around his waist and over the loincloth covering his middle. Then he took the wood basin of water in his calloused hands.

“Master, what are you doing!” Peter exclaimed.

Jesus smiled tiredly and gently at him. “I am going to wash your feet.”

Peter laid his hands on the rim of the basin. “No, let me wash your feet!”

Jesus gently pulled it away. “I am the host today, Peter. I have called you to this meal.”

Peter unhappily sat down. Jesus wash the feet of Zebedee’s sons, splashing drops of water on the dusty floor. But when it was Peter’s turn the envoy again objected.

“My Rock,” Jesus said, “don’t you want to have any part of me? For those who wash each other have made a special inner connection between their bodies, which is of the spirit. Come.” He smiled at Peter. “A little washing surely will not hurt you.”

The other envoys looked across the table at each other at the two men arguing, and they smiled. They all joked with Peter about his often-untrimmed beard and his rough appearance.

“As you say, Master.” He blushed and grinned. “If this gives me a part in you, then wash all of me!”

Jesus laughed.

“Let us eat, now,” he said when he had finished with everyone.

Nathanael, the quiet envoy, carefully served out the food in several large bowls, placing each of them where a group of three or four people could dip into it and pick up the food in the fingers or with their pieces of bread. Others who were among the closest followers also ate there, but on smaller tables set up at either end of the large one at which the envoys sat. Nathanael served them, too.

Though the meal was simple, even by the standards of Galilean farmers and fishermen, everyone nodded with anticipation and smiled at each other. They ate little, usually, in Jesus’ company, and often their food was little more than dried bread or fish as they walked along the roads. Here before them now was boiled fish, its tender white flesh steaming as quiet Nathanael lifted its cloth covering away. Hot rice, laced thickly with leaks, made their mouths begin watering. And the wine was a deep, earthy red, sweet instead of the usual inexpensive sour kind. Philip, tall and graceful, had risen and poured the smooth red liquid into a large earthenware jug with a cracked handle and broken lip. Several loaves of flat barley bread, thick in spite of their lack of leavening, added their rich, grainy scent to that of the fish and rice.

Jesus ate slowly, joking and laughing with the others reclining all around the room. Jesus felt good. He realized it was because he was sharing a meal once again with just the envoys and a few other closest friends, and no one else. It was almost like old times when he was still less well known, and he and the envoys walked the roads in rain and sun together, singing and talking as they went and reclining by a brook to eat.

He also felt that his death was so soon that he wondered if he would even see another full day. Death, a great dark shroud pressing in like a large cloak woven of night, was all about him each day. But while he ate here, in this quiet and out of the way upper room, the shroud remained outside the building. An increasing warmth and joy kept welling out from his chest as he looked around at each of his friends in turn. He was comforted and secure.

But when his glance happened to fall on Judas Ischariot, who was eating beside him, Jesus opened his eyes wide in surprise. For he was feeling death radiating from Judas’ body even more strongly than from his own. Judas’ face was dark and Jesus saw a brief vision: a rope, impossibly tight, circling around Judas’ neck.

Then, in quick sequence, Jesus’ deeper vision showed him brief sights and sounds of what Judas had been doing. Without even thinking about it, Jesus suddenly interrupted several of the envoys in the middle of laughing at a story.

“One of you will betray me,” he whispered loudly, staring at Judas’ face.

A shock of surprise rippled around the entire table as each person in turn whipped his head around to stare at Jesus.

Judas, too, turned his head. When he saw Jesus eyes looking deeply into his own, a bolt of fear traveled through him. In one second he was shaking all over.

Jesus felt one of the envoys touching his hand. “Who, Master?” he heard the envoy ask.

Jesus felt fear touching his own spine. He took a deep breath. “The betrayer,” he said, looking down at the bowl from which he was dipping a piece of fish, “is he who also is eating from this bowl.”

Judas froze totally. His hand was in the bowl, too. Slowly he forced his fingers to withdraw from the rice and leaks into which they had been dipping. “No, Master,” he said with a husky gasp.

“It is he,” Jesus said, suddenly feeling a great despair and sorrow overwhelm him, bringing a tear to his eyes, “to whom I give this bite of food.”

Slowly, his own arm steady but feeling impossibly heavy, he raised the bite of fish that he had been about to take and touched it to Judas’ lips.

Judas glanced down quickly at the fish, then automatically opened his mouth and ate it. He swallowed it convulsively, almost choking.

“I am trying to help you!” he exclaimed.

Jesus forced his gaze ever deeper into Judas until he touched the envoy’s true self, and saw the mixture of half-lie and selfishness, the blazing devotion, and the fear that made up the conflicting mixture of what Judas felt for him.

“You are doing it for money, Judas.” Jesus felt his whole chest becoming heavy with defeat. “And pride in your own ability to decide that I must be king. But you are also helping me, for you are bringing me closer to my death by this. Yet you will die before I do.”

Judas paled. “I do not want to die.”

“Neither do I, Judas, not by the hand of a friend. But by your actions and deeds you are condemning both of us.”

“Wait!” Judas exclaimed. “Please don’t judge me yet! They will make you King!”

Jesus nodded. “Yes, they will, Judas. But not in the way you would have it. Go now. Hurry! If you must do this thing, do it quickly. Take your purse with you. You will need it to gather the offering they have made you!”

Judas rose and backed away. When he reached the door, he stumbled once, then turned and hurried out.

Jesus looked around him. All the others at the tables were staring at him with looks of confusion and surprise. He realized that none of them understood what was going on.

“I will never betray you!” Philip exclaimed, his graceful beard and long red robe shaking with worry.

“Nor I!” exclaimed several of the others.

“Master,” Peter broke in, staring at the door, “what has Judas done? Has he betrayed all of us by spending our money foolishly? I could not do such a thing!”

Jesus stared at Peter and felt his own chest grow even tighter and heavier. Again he had a brief flash of the future. He saw Peter shrinking back from several men and women pointing at him. “You, Peter,” Jesus said sadly, “will deny me three times before the rooster crows at dawn!”

“Not I, Master! Let it not happen!” He grabbed the edge of the table.

Jesus looked around at all of them. “Don’t you yet understand?” he asked. “This is our last meal together. My death had begun. I see it in every one of your faces, in what you will be doing tomorrow and in the days that follow. Tomorrow I die!”

Several of the envoys and one or two of the others rose and approached him from around the room. All of their faces were suddenly pale.

Jesus rose, too. “No!” he exclaimed. “Stay where you are. Are you so surprised at this? Listen. This is our time together, when we have ourselves and no one else to whom we must attend.”

He looked at each one slowly, in turn. “I will miss all of you. But after I am gone there will be a spirit to care for you, the spirit that guides the world as it turns and controls the seasons of nature and of man and woman. That spirit, the Shekinah as the prophets of old have described her, will be the messenger of our Father in heaven and the helper of our Mother in the earth. Believe in this spirit, and follow her, for she will guide you and teach you wherever you go.”

Philip rose halfway off his couch and spoke. “Master, he said, “show us the Father and the Mother now, before you leave, so that we may know them as they really are.”

“Have I been with you all this time,” Jesus asked, “and still you all fail to understand? Have patience! The true self, the spirit within each of us, is one with our Father and our Mother! Find your Self, and lie within it long enough, and you will also see our Father and our Mother!”

“Master!” Thomas the lawyer held out his hand from his couch where he lay. He was crying. “Let us at least go with you to your death!”

Jesus reached out as far as he could and touched Thomas’ fingertips. “I am glad that you are beginning to understand that I am about to die,” Jesus told him. “But you cannot follow me, not yet. Someday we will all be together, after you have reincarnated several times and after I have reincarnated in a short time. For I tell you again, I will not be dead long! I will rise from the dead, with a new body that is no longer dead but living!”

Andrew, normally calm and steady, now also had tears dropping down onto his spotlessly clean robe. “We believe you, Master,” he said.

Jesus looked at him and at the others, seeing their tears and drawn faces. “You do believe,” he said. Love for them washed through him.

He reached out for the last loaf of barley bread. Breaking it in two, he passed one part to his left and one part to his right, saving a fragment for himself.

“Here,” he said. “Take this bread and eat. For this is my body and that of the Mother who can reincarnate all our bodies to living flesh.”

Jesus swallowed his portion, and in doing so, he concentrated on the bread with all of his strength and might until, like a veil ripping apart, he found the slumbering consciousness hidden within its smallest particles. He focused his purest love, from the center of his chest, on this consciousness. The particles rearranged themselves, becoming completely awakened and filled with energy. Then Jesus concentrated all at once on the bread going into the mouths of the others, bringing to it the same kind of change as they ate it.

He took up the final pitcher of wine.

“Take and drink of this, for this is my blood. It is the blood of the new purifying of our bodies, in agreement with the will of the Father. It is better than the agreement of old, made by the blood of Abraham’s sacrifice, for in this new agreement we shall all become gods.”

He quietly passed the wine out to them, taking some himself. He concentrated on the wine as he had on the bread. As the envoys and the other friends put down their wine flagons one by one, looking to him for further instruction, he could see the wine and bread working in them. The force and power of purified and awakened consciousness that he had put into the wine and bread were making all their eyes glow with peace and alert well-being. He could not give them a vision of the Father or Mother on demand, he knew. But it was satisfying to him that he could make their bodies feel exactly like they had just had such a vision.

“Let us sing, now,” he said. He led them in a song of the ancients that began in this way:

He who meditates in his own secret place of the Most High,

in the inner place that is like the Almighty,

he will say to the great I-AM,

“You are my refuge and my fortress,

my God, in whom I trust.”

They sang all of that song and others. When they were done, quietly and thoughtfully, their bodies full of well-being, they all walked to their nightly place of meditation on the Mount of Olives. Jesus felt surrounded by their concern and love.

But on the way through Jerusalem to the east city gate, a Roman soldier clattering down the street in his leather tunic quickly approached them. Dark had fallen. The moon shone on his medallions. “Hail to all of you!” he called. “Is one of you the man from Galilee?”

A thrill of fear caught at Jesus’ stomach. Was this, he wondered, how it was to end? Was he to be arrested and executed by the Romans? Yet he felt confused, for he was sure Judas was in league with the Sanhedrin, not the Roman authorities. Jesus stood and watched quietly while he sent his awareness toward the soldier, trying to sense what the soldier was doing.

The envoys and close friends surrounding him were looking at each other in the dark with quick glances and furrowed brows. None of them dared speak. They weren’t about to reveal Jesus’ presence even by a glance, especially after he had accused Judas of betraying him.

Two of them, who carried swords a revolutionary follower had given them earlier in the week, loosened the long, wide blades beneath their robes.

Peter finally spoke. “We are all men of Galilee,” he said gruffly. “What do you want?”

“I have a message for Jesus, known as the Christ,” the soldier answered. He looked hopefully, and innocently, at them all.

“Here I am,” Jesus said. He could feel no deceit, no tension or danger, coming from the man.

The soldier smiled. “Good,” he said. “I was afraid I might miss you. I come unofficially to tell you that our governor, Pilate, wishes to see you.”

Jesus nodded. He felt, rather than saw, the sudden tense alertness of his followers in the night around him.

“The whole of the city is in an uproar,” the soldier continued. “The Sanhedrin has been spreading discontent everywhere all day, speaking against you and telling the people you are a sorcerer and a false prophet. Bands of angered men even now are passing through the streets seeking you, to stone you. Pilate wishes to talk with you immediately, if you will go to him.”

Jesus turned to Peter. “Take the others,” he told Peter, “and wait for me across the Kidron Brook, out of sight under the large olive tree.”

“But Master!” Peter exclaimed.

“I will not be long, my Rock.”

Peter opened his mouth to protest once more but Jesus had already turned and was walking away with the guard.

As they passed through the city streets, now dim and dark in spite of the moonlight, late revelers occasionally passed them. The guard immediately motioned to Jesus to remain silent so that no one would recognize him by his voice. Jesus was in no mood to speak anyway. His senses were alert and he was casting his awareness out through the sea of darkness ahead of them, sensing a danger growing steadily nearer. Soon the danger, or at least one vital thrust of it, seemed to be just down the street they were entering.

Jesus put his hand on the soldier’s arm and drew him back into the shadow of a doorway.

The guard looked at him, startled, and began to speak. Jesus laid his hand briefly across the man’s lips and pointed up the street.

They both suddenly heard half-drunken calls and the sound of sandaled feet slapping against the dust. “We’ll get him!” they heard. “This way!”

“No, this way, and close your loud mouth. You sound like a goat getting its innards cut in the Temple!”

“You two, be quiet! Do you want the Romans on our heads?”

Jesus and the soldier sank more deeply into the black shadows until the unruly mob carrying torches had passed.

In five more minutes, they were at the low outer wall surrounding Pilate’s Jerusalem residence.

There, waiting at the gate, was a tall and grey-haired but youthful-looking man watching them with wide eyes. He watched quietly and confidently as Jesus came up to him.

With a wave of his hand the man dismissed the soldier.

“Young man,” Pilate said, for it was he, “I know your brother-in-law, Philoas.” He looked with interest at Jesus.

Jesus nodded once, politely. He knew that Ruth’s husband, Philoas, as a census taker, reported all information of interest to the Roman authorities. This was his job.

“You have made for yourself a very impressive record,” Pilate said. “I have been watching you closely and, thanks to your brother-in-law, most favorably. I have Philoas’ own reports on what you actually have said, rather than”–he waved his hand angrily in the direction of the Temple–“just these foolish and wild accusations that the priests level against you!”

He stared at Jesus, waiting for an answer.

Jesus nodded quietly again.

“Listen!” Pilate exclaimed. “They accuse you of threatening to tear down the Temple and seeking to become a king. Foolish charges! But the result of them is this: they have inflamed mobs of people against you. Civil unrest is disturbing the city.”

He leaned slightly toward Jesus, trying to see the young man’s face better in the light of the torches stuck behind him on the porch of his house. “For the sake of the city’s peace,” he told Jesus, “and to save your own life, I suggest that you flee. I have a small group of excellent soldiers waiting, with their horses, to escort you safely. Go now. Do not even wait for morning.”

They stared at each other for a full minute. Neither of them spoke. Jesus felt shivers running up and down his back at the thought of being on a horse, fleeing swiftly from his danger.

He bowed graciously. “Thank you, Pilate,” he said. “Your words are full of wisdom, and at any ordinary time I would thankfully accept your offer. I have been leaving places, for the sake of my safety, for three years, now.”

He breathed deeply. “Not any more, though. This time I will stay. I have a greater job here than just teaching and healing. Have you not heard what I did for Lazarus?”

“Yes,” Pilate answered, looking quickly around the open square beyond the gate where they stood. “I have heard. How did you do it?”

Jesus waved the question away. “I will do the same thing for myself.”

Pilate peered at him in the darkness. “That I cannot believe,” the grey-haired man said.

“I do not expect you to,” Jesus answered. “Even my closest followers doubt it. Yet do you believe that I am guided by a force, a power, that is greater than all of us?”

Pilate nodded slowly. “Yes, I must believe that. How else could you have done all that you have?”

Jesus held out his hand. He felt like putting his arm around the older man’s shoulders and comforting him. But he knew if he were to do so, Pilate would become stiff and tense. Few Romans enjoyed being embraced by Hebrews.

“Then believe this, prince of Rome, Jesus said. “I must stay here in Jerusalem and accept whatever comes. It is what the force beyond both of us wishes.”

Pilate frowned. A muscle in his cheek twitched.

“You leave me no choice! Yet I tell you, Jesus of Galilee, my Roman swords will protect you!”

“No,” Jesus said, “Roman swords can have no effect on the final outcome. If you kill others to protect me, you will have a riot on your hands. You are sworn by your duty as Governor to ensure law and order.”

Pilate lifted his hands. They cast long shadows in the light of the torches above and behind him. “You teach me my own job! What can I do? Yet I promise you this. I will continue to protect you as best I can.”

Jesus bowed low once more. “Thank you for your concern, Pilate. I must now join my followers.”

Pilate bowed in return. As Jesus was walking away, the older man snapped his fingers. An orderly ran out from the front door under the porh, across the short inner courtyard, and to the gate where Pilate stood alone.

“Send a double guard with that man to protect him.” He pointed at Jesus departing back.

Half a minute later, two soldiers hurried through the darkened square from Pilate’s house, in the direction Jesus had gone. Though there were only two possible ways he could have taken, they couldn’t find him. They searched for some time before they gave up.

Meanwhile Jesus quietly walked through the city streets unnoticed. He wasn’t really invisible. It was just that he was able to completely ignore his own awareness of every living thing around him. Because of this, passersby caught no answering spark of recognition when their own awarenesses touched his. Their eyes flicked away from him without registering that they had seen him, and their bodies automatically moved out of the way without telling their conscious minds that they had done so.

It was really a very nice, and quiet, way of traveling. In a few short minutes, Jesus was on the east side of the Temple porch and going out at the east gate unnoticed, on his way to meet the envoys at the foot of the Mount of Olives.

He shuddered once, violently, in the chill of the night air as a breeze drifted down the Kidron Brook and stirred the hem and sleeves of his robe. He began breathing deeply. He knew he was not shuddering from cold alone. The beginning of his last few hours of freedom was upon him, he realized. He could feel freedom slipping away from him, minute by minute, with every pore of his being.

He spied his envoys and the few close followers with them, waiting under the old olive tree as he had directed. Quickly he began walking toward them. He wanted to spend one last night meditating together with them, one last time before it might be too late.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Oct. 2020.