The Crown and the Cross: The Life of Christ (10 page)

For the third time, Jesus answered the mocking, deriding, ever-tempting voice of evil. To use God’s power for His own glorification, He knew now, would be to worship evil. There could be only one answer; the words had been spoken long ago by God Himself to Moses and came easily to Jesus’ tongue. “You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.”

With the act of speaking the words aloud, Jesus felt His indecision and the tempting voice vanish. The will of God, He understood now, would be revealed to Him in good time.

This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory.

John 2:11

The success of John the Baptist in an area less than twenty miles from Jerusalem, beside one of the busiest thoroughfares for people going and coming from the Holy City, had inevitable repercussions there. The priestly group headed by the high priest Caiaphas had never allowed themselves to be disturbed by the appearance of religious fanatics who claimed to be prophets and, occasionally, the Messiah. But when an Essene, whose teachings fitted neither the liberal beliefs of the Sadducees nor the strict attendance to the Torah and its interpretation practiced by the Pharisees, gained such a large following and at the same time denounced the legal tetrarch of a province, there was grave danger that he might stir up the common people to acts of violence which conceivably could bring down the wrath of Rome upon Israel as a whole.

On the day of His return journey to Galilee that Jesus reached Bethabara, sometimes called Bethany-beyond-Jordan to distinguish it from the other Bethany that was actually a suburb of Jerusalem, a delegation of priests, Pharisees, and Levites from Jerusalem arrived there. The delegation found John near the spring just outside Bethabara, preaching in the grove of white poplars that formed his favorite amphitheater. When John had finished speaking and had baptized those who requested it, the delegation approached the lean Essene in his rough robe and leather girdle as he sat on a rock with his immediate followers surrounding him. Jesus remained in the background but John had seen Him and knew He was there.

The Jerusalem delegation was at first inclined to be contemptuous of John, but they were not fools and could see that he exerted a tremendous hold upon those who came to hear him and upon the group of men, largely Galileans and therefore doubly to be watched, who made up his immediate disciples.

“Who are you?” the chief of the delegation asked.

John realized what was behind the question and made no attempt to dissemble. “I am not the Christ,” he said positively.

“Are you Elijah?” the priest insisted. The return to earth of the prophet Elijah, who according to the sacred writings had been taken bodily up into heaven, had been predicted by other prophets. It was generally believed that his coming would herald the Messiah.

“I am not,” John repeated.

Are you the Prophet?”

“No.”

“We must give an answer to the authorities at Jerusalem who sent us,” the priest said impatiently. “What do you say of yourself?”

John turned his eyes southward to the wild country around the Sea of Judgment where he had dwelt so long in preparation for his ministry. Large crowds had listened eagerly to John’s voice every day and because of his message thousands had repented of their sins and been baptized. He experienced a natural desire to impress these haughty men too. The mere act of publicly identifying the Son of God whose coming he had announced would cause a sensation, particularly with the representatives of the temple here at Bethabara, and his own role as discoverer of the Messiah would undoubtedly be great. But John did not yield to the temptation to glorify himself.

“I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ he answered, “as the prophet Isaiah said.”

The Sadducees had the answer they sought. John had admitted he was not the Messiah or even a prophet but only an itinerant preacher warning people to be conscious of their sins. There was no reason for them to take any action against him.

The Pharisees among the deputation were not content to leave matters as they were, however. Minute points of the Torah, as interpreted by the rabbis, were involved here and they never overlooked an opportunity to argue on such questions.

“Why then do you baptize if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” the leader asked.

John knew many of his disciples considered him to be the Messiah or at least one of the great prophets of old returned to earth. To answer truthfully the question put to him by the Pharisee, he must destroy that belief and perhaps with it their faith in him, yet he did not hesitate.

“I baptize with water,” he said, “but there stands One among you whom you do not know. It is He who, coming after me, is preferred before me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose.”

No clearer statement of the difference in station between John and the Messiah could have been made. When guests arrived at a Jewish home, it was a mark of greatest respect on the part of the host to kneel and loosen their shoes so they could be removed and the dirt of travel washed from their feet. A murmur of disappointment went up from John’s disciples at his admission that he was neither the Messiah nor even an important prophet. Some of the Galileans who had become his disciples in the belief that the Baptist was the Messiah now turned away in disappointment and began to prepare for the return home.

As Jesus’ ministry expanded, John realized that his own role must grow smaller and smaller, and by the shrunken number of his disciples when he began to teach the next morning. But John was a servant of God, and, as an Essene, accustomed to denying himself in order to further divine purpose. He did not rebel against the fact of his own abasement but, as always, taught and baptized and afterwards gathered his disciples around him for a more intimate communion.

He was thus engaged on the following day when he saw Jesus standing at the edge of the group listening but doing nothing to attract attention to Himself. Forthright and honest, John could not remain silent; he could not permit himself to benefit from a refusal to call his disciples’ attention to one immeasurably greater than he. “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” he said, looking across the heads of the disciples to where Jesus stood.

Some of the Galileans among the disciples of John knew Him, and two of these, John, one of the sons of Zebedee, and Andrew, got up and left the group to follow Him as He moved away from the crowd.

“What do you seek?” He asked the two men gravely.

“Rabbi, where are You staying?” Andrew asked, using the title to which, having heard Jesus preach in the synagogue at Nazareth, he knew He was entitled.

“Come and see,” Jesus told them simply and began to walk along the path leading from the grove to the caravansary nearby. The two remained with Him most of the day there and, long before it was over, they were ready to leave John—as indeed they had already decided to do—and follow Jesus. When night began to fall, Andrew went to fetch his brother Simon, John his brother James.

Simon of Bethsaida was a big man with enormous strength to haul in the nets. He was known up and down the length of the Sea of Galilee and well into the area around it as the best fisherman in the entire region. But more than for his physical prowess, he was admired because of his greatness of heart, his impetuous generosity, and his deep-seated love of God.

Like many another devout Jew, and with the natural fervor of a Galilean, Simon yearned for the kingdom of God, when the Anointed Messiah would lead Israel to its manifest destiny. Being a man of action rather than a thinker, he had never troubled himself about just how or when this would happen. When John first began to preach, though, Simon had wondered if here was not the way to gain the freedom from foreign oppression which all desired—through the Messiah whose coming the Baptist announced daily. Caught up by John’s fiery spirit, Simon had dared to hope that John himself was to be that mighty leader. That is, he had been hoping it until yesterday. But now Simon was a disillusioned man, ready to go back to Galilee and his nets, to the realities that had never betrayed him as had his attempt to understand the will of God.

Andrew was in many ways more serious than Simon, for the tall fisherman, when he felt something deeply, was likely to be impetuous in both action and speech. When Andrew came to him now as he was preparing the evening meal over a small fire near the poplar grove, Simon was impressed by his brother’s glowing eyes and his obvious conviction—impressed until he learned the cause.

“We have found the Messiah, Simon!” Andrew announced.

Simon looked up morosely from the fire. He had been disappointed in one possible Messiah and was not ready to run after another. Work and the satisfactions it brought were things he could understand and appreciate; these he could return to on the morrow.

“Leave the Messiahs to the priests,” he growled. “Your food is ready.”

“But I have found Him,” Andrew insisted. “The true Messiah!”

“Who is He?”

“Jesus, the Teacher of Nazareth.”

Simon already knew Jesus as an eloquent teacher in the synagogue and a carpenter of rare skill, but not as a Messiah. He and Jesus were probably even distantly related, as were so many families in Galilee—another reason why he could not consider Him divine. “Come and eat,” he said. “It will calm you.”

“Will you go and talk to Him?”

“Why should I?”

“John and I have been with Jesus since morning,” Andrew said. “He has gone to get James.”

“Does John think the Nazarene is the Messiah?” Simon asked.

“We both do.”

Simon looked thoughtfully at the bed of glowing coals. John and James, the fishing partners of Simon and Andrew, worked for their father Zebedee, who operated near the city of Capernaum, one of the largest fishing establishments on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The four were very close, with the deep, enduring friendship of men who faced danger together in the storms that often lashed the waters of this inland sea into a maelstrom. If John were so impressed by the Teacher of Nazareth, Simon told himself, there must be something more to Him than at first thought had seemed likely.

“Eat your supper,” he said to Andrew. “Then we will go to see the Nazarene.”

James and John were already sitting with Jesus around a small fire when Simon and Andrew approached the caravansary. When the tall fisherman loomed out of the shadows, dwarfing them all by his size, Jesus looked up and smiled. “You are Simon the son of Jonah,” He said. “From now on you shall be called Cephas.” The word Cephas, or Peter, meant a stone, a tribute to Simon’s size and his solid strength.

A feeling warm and pleasant passed between the two men, a forerunner of the great love that was to bind Simon Peter, along with James and John, as part of Jesus’ inner circle, for these three would become closest to Him. And Simon, who was here now only to please his brother Andrew and because his two friends, the sons of Zebedee, had been listening to the Nazarene Teacher, found himself sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening eagerly with the others.

The five men spent the night there together and early the next morning began preparations for the return journey to Galilee. While they were making ready, another Galilean from Bethsaida joined them. His name was Philip and when he heard them talking about Jesus and His teachings, he went in search of his brother Nathanael so that they might all journey northward together.

Nathanael was standing in the shade of a fig tree, listening to John the Baptist, when Philip approached. He was a rather deliberate man, less impetuous than most Galileans and somewhat older than Philip. Like them, he had been disappointed when John had been forced to admit yesterday that he was no more than a forerunner of the Messiah who was yet to come. But he had not let disappointment blind him to John’s obvious virtues or to the truth of the message that the gaunt Essene brought in his daily sermons.

“We have found Him!” Philip cried, obviously much excited.

Nathanael regarded his brother with a tolerant smile. “Who is it this time?” he asked. Philip had been fully as enthusiastic when they had first come to John here at Bethabara.

“The One whom Moses and the prophets wrote of, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph!”

Nathanael knew Nazareth well for he lived not far away. In his estimation not even a prophet could be expected to come from so mean a place, much less the Expected One. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” he asked amiably.

“Come and see!” Philip urged him.

It would be simpler to let Philip have his way, Nathanael decided; the younger brother would be disillusioned soon enough. He said no more but left the shade of the fig tree and went with Philip.

Jesus and the others were standing near the caravansary, waiting for Philip to rejoin them before taking the road northward. When the two men approached, Jesus said, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!”

Nathanael was startled. “How do You know me?” he asked. “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you,” Jesus told him.

Nathanael turned to look in the direction from whence he had come. The fig tree was invisible from this point and Philip had brought him directly here, so there was no possibility that Jesus could have seen him except by some miraculous power.

Moved by an impulse he had never felt before, Nathanael said earnestly, “Rabbi, You are the Son of God!”

Jesus looked at him intently for a moment, as if He were probing Nathanael’s soul. “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe?” He asked. “You will see greater things than these.”