King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (53 page)

He replied : “A prophet has no father, mother nor brothers, except his fellow-prophets. Moreover, Moses blessed the tribe of Levi in these words : ‘They preserved the commandment of the Merciful One and kept their covenant with him, when each one of them denied his mother and father, and had no regard for his brothers and children.’ Then let each one of you deny his father, his mother, his brothers and his children, if they would restrain him from serving God in love.”

Jose reported this answer to the elders of the synagogue, and sighed : “Alas, what more can we do? Our brother has been impudent and shameless from his youth up. We wash our hands of him. Let him be handed over to the authorities, for it is written : ‘Whoever curses his father or mother, let him die the death.’ What our brother has said to his mother falls little short of cursing.”

But Mary turned on Jose and asked : “Who cursed his mother? Not my loving son. Dare you say this, you who grudged him his rightful inheritance? Dare you say this of your brother Jesus who reconciled you to Judah and Simeon? Remember the matter of the broken harness and be silent for shame.” She turned to the elders : “As for honouring his mother, what could a son do more than he has done? He made over to me his house and all his goods before he went to the Essenes of Callirrhoë. Nor did he disobey my order ; for it was Jose’s order, not mine. As the Lord lives, I have no complaint against him.”

The elders shook their heads at her pityingly, and said : “Alas, the mothers of Israel, the mothers of Israel! Always ready to forswear themselves to save the lives of worthless sons.” And whatever Mary might say to the contrary, it was generally agreed that Jesus had put her to public dishonour. When he left the tax-gatherer’s house he was waylaid in the street and upbraided by a synagogue elder.

Jesus answered : “Peace, man! If I have offended my mother, bring her in witness against me and I will ask her forgiveness. But I know a man, and you know a man, who cried
Corban
and devoted an olive orchard to the Lord’s uses. Was this done in love of the Lord? Or was it to spite his father who wished to buy the orchard from him at a price which he reckoned too low ?”

The elder turned pale and trembled for shame.

Jesus was then informed in a letter signed by the presidents of the three Capernaum synagogues that by his love of uncleanness he had separated himself from the congregation, and that if he continued to preach in the town he would be reported to the Herodian police as a trouble-maker.

He retired to Chorazin, and there preached more urgently than ever the approach of the Kingdom of God. His conception of this Kingdom was a practical return to the Golden Age, or near it ; and meanwhile he warned his disciples again and again not to think anxiously about food, clothing and money, which their God always provided for those that loved him. Let them rid themselves of all worldly encumbrances that might unfit them for the citizenship of the Kingdom ; as a jeweller might sell the whole contents of his shop for the chance of buying a single exquisite pearl.

“Obey the Doctors of the Law,” he said, “but do not think that they can draw you to the Kingdom merely by their scrupulous recensions of the Law.”

“Who then can draw us to the Kingdom?” Judas asked.

“The birds, the fish, the snakes, the wild things. They never plot and scheme. One day of life to them is as a thousand. They glorify the Lord, as they are enjoined in Daniel’s Song of the Three Children, where the worship of the holy and humble-hearted is compared with theirs. Therefore Daniel called his three companions ‘Children’ : for the Kingdom of Heaven is for the childish-hearted and simple, the eaters of pulse, not for the worldly rich.”

He enlarged on this by declaring that at Jerusalem the God of Israel was wrongfully worshipped as a proud and capricious despot ; his Temple courts were of marble and gold, his servants were haughty, jealous and greedy, and as Hillel had said : “More servants, more thefts.” The God of Israel was, in truth, the merciful father of countless sons and daughters, and his Kingdom could not come until the common people acknowledged him as their father and refused any longer to support the false pomp which money and the sword had created. This, Jesus explained, was not to counsel the abandonment of handicrafts or husbandry. Husbandry could not yet be relieved of the curse pronounced on Adam : “You shall eat bread in the sweat of your brow”, but it could be relieved of the curse of money-making. Let each village be self-supporting and let the villagers have in common all such things as ploughs, beasts, store-houses ; but let every man sit under his own fig-tree and drink from his own well, give of his superfluity to those who asked for it and take no money in return. And the rich man? If he would not work with the rest, he must starve among the gold-bags of his useless treasury.

Thomas asked : “Can all this be accomplished easily ?”

“I do not prophesy immediate peace ; I prophesy war. The sword will be drawn in defence of the present way of the world. But how can the sword prevail if the common people remember their God? By massacre the lords of this earth will defeat their own end : they will set their own house on fire—would it were already alight! For as the
prophet Malachi writes : ‘The day of the Lord comes as a burning oven and shall consume all the wicked.’ The Pangs of the Messiah which are the prelude to the thousand years of peace must begin with these very wars and massacres.”

Having thus prepared and educated his disciples in the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, he sent them out in pairs : one of each pair to preach, the other to heal. They were to carry his message of repentance and hope to those who needed it most—the beggars, the needy, the sick, the sinners—but were to visit only Israelite towns and villages, and attempt nothing in places where they were given no welcome. The mission was to be undertaken without money, food, wallet or spare garments, and every day at dawn they were to kneel down and pray for the speedy coming of the Kingdom, for the forgiveness of their sins, and for bread sufficient for the oncoming day.

James the Less complained : “Alas, that we are not better instructed in the Law.”

“Whoever has the will to obey the Law shall know it.”

He gave them authority to heal the sick in these words : Trust in the Lord : he will save.” So saying, they were to anoint with oil the affected limbs or other parts of the body : using olive oil, which as anointed prophets they had themselves blessed. He advised them to combine the simplicity of doves with the cunning of serpents, but charged them strictly : “If anyone asks you by whose authority you do what you do, make no evasions. Do not cast down your eyes, shuffle with your feet, and mumble at last : ‘Jesus of Nazareth sent us out’, but answer boldly : ‘We do these things by authority of the Lord God of Israel—blessed be his name—whose prophets we are.’ For a good shepherd has pride in his King.”

Jesus then visited Samaria alone, and is known to have attended a meeting of Samaritan priests on Mount Gerizim—he had convened the meeting on his passage through the province, just before the Passover, by a word of power spoken at the well of Sychar to their Dove-priestess—but no record survives of the transactions. Before he returned to Chorazin, where he had agreed to meet his disciples again, the grievous news reached him that John the Baptist was dead. Antipas had beheaded him at the request of Herodias and their daughter Salome.

Jesus mourned thirty days for John, and when his disciples met him at Chorazin he was emaciated and hollow-eyed. They themselves were in good heart and reported that the healing had been successful, the preaching had taken root. They brought crowds of converts with them, all eager to see the master of such disciples. With them, too, came the disciples of John, asking : “Are you the Great One whom our master prophesied, or should we look for another? We have heard marvellous accounts of your feats of healing : how the lame walk, the blind see, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear.”

“Who sent you to me ?”

“Simon of Gitta, John’s deputy.”

Jesus knew the man, the son of an apostate Zadokite who had been one of the Lady Livia’s chief agents in Syria. Simon was zealous, eloquent and courageous, but interested in power rather than in virtue. He had adopted circumcision in order to marry into a High-Priestly family ; but when his father was suddenly disgraced and lost all his money, he was in no position to implement the marriage contract, and the girl was married to someone else. Simon fell into a revengeful despair, and after various adventures in the service of an Arabian caravan-master became a disciple of John, from whom he hoped to learn the secret of prophetic power. Now that John was gone, he hoped to attach himself to Jesus, for whom John had obscurely expressed his veneration, and learn from him what John could not teach.

Peter drew Jesus aside and reported in indignation that Simon was using the healing formula which Jesus had given them ; but he replied that nobody could claim a lien on these words, which were not a secret charm of the sort used by sorcerers. However, he did not trust Simon and sent back this message : “Tell him no more than this, that I preach the mercy of God to the poor, and that I shall be happy if he is not offended by me.”

(Simon of Gitta later broke away from Judaism altogether, and took over from one Dosithens the leadership of a new syncretic cult based on that of Hercules-Melkarth and the Moon-goddess his mistress. He had twenty-eight disciples, arranged in four weeks ; and the extra day and a half that compose a lunar month were represented by himself and a woman. The woman was Jezebel, a priestess of Hierapolis, whom he married and who was thereafter known to his followers as Selene the Moon, while he was known as Simon the Telchin, or “the Abiding One who stands, stood and shall stand”, both titles making him appear an incarnation of the Sun-god. Simon claimed the power to control the weather, to bless or blast with his eye, to fly through the air on wings, to assume any shape he pleased. But none of John’s disciples followed him, and his pretensions were far greater than his capacities.)

Two synagogue elders of Chorazin visited Jesus one night, forbade him ever again to preach in their city, and at the same time advised him to leave Galilee as he valued his life. They told him that Antipas, at the request of Chuza his estate-steward, was on the point of issuing a warrant for his arrest.

“From whom have you heard this ?”

“From Joanna, Chuza’s wife. She dared not send one of her own servants to you.”

“Hating me as you do, why have you come with this warning ?”

“We are Israelites and would never let a fellow-Israelite fall into the hands of Edom if we could save him by any means in our power.”

“Yet you have forbidden me to preach in Chorazin ; and this prohibition overlies a threat.”

“Chorazin is not all Galilee.”

Jesus thanked them ironically and said : “If that fox inquires after me
in your hearing, tell him that I shall preach wherever it pleases me ; that I have no fear of the demon which possesses him ; and that we two shall meet one day in Jerusalem.”

Yet it was not Jesus’s custom, as he said, to throw pearls to the hogs ; and he never returned to preach in any town or village that had once officially rejected him. He removed from Chorazin, and crossed the Jordan to New Bethsaida, or Julias, the capital city of Philip’s tetrarchy, which adjoins Old Bethsaida. There he preached for a while, but though he had forbidden the new converts to come after him, a great many of them disobeyed and raised such an enthusiastic clamour about him that he was requested by the local magistrates to leave the city. He symbolically shook the dust off his sandals after passing through the city gates, and declared that on the Day of Judgement it would be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah, the Dead Sea cities which had been destroyed by fire from Heaven, than for New Bethsaida, Capernaum and Chorazin.

Undeterred by his rebuff, he called his disciples together and required each of them to choose out six of the new converts and send them out, two by two, on missionary journeys throughout the country. Having given this order, he went alone into Lower Transjordania to consult with his brother James the Ebionite.

When he returned and found that the disciples had performed their missions creditably he sent them down to Jerusalem to keep the Feast of Tabernacles, but told them not to expect him, since he might be prevented from coming. He reached Jerusalem on the last day of the Feast, the Day of Willows, when the Great Altar was decorated with willow boughs. Every evening of the seven it was the custom for a priest to go down to the Pool of Siloam, at the head of a festal procession, carrying a golden pitcher of the capacity of three logs. He filled it and brought it by torchlight up the hill to the sound of trumpets, then through the Water Gate of the Temple and into the Court of the Gentiles. There other priests received the pitcher from him, intoning the words of Isaiah : “You will draw water with joy from the wells of salvation”, and all the people took up the refrain. Then, while the trumpets blew again and the Levites sang psalms, waved the thyrsus and danced around the Great Altar, the water from Siloam was poured over it simultaneously with a libation of the new wine. From the altar the water ran into a silver basin and disappeared down a pipe which communicated with the Kidron brook. The authority for this rite was the ancient tradition : “The Holy one, blessed be he, said : ‘Pour out water before me at the Feast, that the rains of the year may be blessed to you.’ ” But on the evening of the Day of Willows the Levites danced not once but seven times around the Altar, to commemorate the seven days’ encompassing of the walls of Jericho.

This Day of Willows was marked by an interruption : at the moment when the priest stooped at the Pool with his pitcher, a loud sweet voice
broke the customary religious hush. “Amen, Amen : Ho, everyone that thirsts, come to the waters, whether he has money or none. Listen, and come to me! Hear, and you shall live !” Then every pious man found himself continuing in his mind the quotation from Isaiah : “And I shall make an everlasting compact with you—the sure mercies of a David. Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander of the people.”