by Mary Rakow
19
Jesus Calling His Disciples
PERHAPS HE THOUGHT he would find those bruised like himself, men and women who asked themselves similar questions, or those who also saw that figure in the sky, that kingdom on its way, and imminent.
Perhaps he was embarrassed often, flinging himself at others who looked away, disinterested, perplexed, or mocking. Perhaps he faltered, unskilled at reading what he saw in their eyes. “Leave your wife, your children and follow me.” His invitation was harsh. “I am that knife blade, that severing force.” It was an irrevocable demand and he was unable to soften it. The kingdom could demand all a person had, every comfort, every assumption. That narrow gate. Knowing that the narrow gate was not a metaphor.
Maybe in the end he stopped inviting others completely. He had twelve, which was not the fifty he’d hoped for, but it was something.
20
Wedding at Cana
IT WAS NEW and so welcome to feel peace, to have his life work laid out ahead with clarity, that it would be this and not that. So why now, he wondered, this question? He’d been home less than a week and already sensed that nauseating feeling of losing himself, that glide back into confusion and self-loathing. It angered him, her suggestion taking away what was so fragile, so that he ignored her and kept dancing, feverishly, in every line the men formed, carrying the groom on their shoulders. Right in the midst of this, gay and festive, he was angry, despite the tambourine and drum, feeling the abyss that lay between himself and his mother, himself and the world.
SHE HAD FELT agitated, as if an opportunity was announcing itself, an opening. Dance after dance she watched her son, glad to see him capable of happiness, but the pressure inside kept rising, demanding an action.
Then he saw something compelling in her expression, asking a question as if it were, or could become, his question, putting herself again at a precipice, at the edge of understanding, so that he stopped dancing and drew near. By the time he stood breathless at her table, she was able to say with confidence, “Take this risk.” The belly dancer assumed the floor, the guests returned to their tables, and he left behind the very clarity that had given him peace.
WET BURLAP WAS draped over the fruits and sliced meats to keep them cool. The kitchen smelled of oven-baked aubergine, oil beads on the vine leaves stuffed with rice and herbs, the tart fragrance of vinegar, pickled cucumbers and chilies, lamb sausages splattered on the grill, the hearty smell of fava bean croquettes, his favorite, it was voluptuous and overpowering against the force of his concentration, waiters bustling past with trays held high on their fingertips.
He sat on the floor in the dark back hall, the water jars in a stately row. Just beyond the shade, a lizard watched from his hot stone.
SOMETHING was ratified.
HE DID NOT return to the dance floor but remained at the side when the first cup was poured. The groom cheered, his surprise and pleasure, and across the room, his mother stared at him, wiping her eyes.
THEY DIDN’T SPEAK while walking home. A future lay beyond the darkness of his life, a foreign landscape he could see now, with pines and snow and brittle light.
IN PART, SHE wished she’d been wrong. If her son could change water into wine, what else would come? She wondered where Joseph was just then.
“If he is a prophet,” she could say to him if he were there, “he will die a prophet. He will be hated by many who danced with him today.”
She missed Joseph, missed what was good between them, what had been good, and wondered, what will become of this dancer, our son?
21
The Woman with an Issue of Blood
THE WORDS OF the Law came to her with the dawn light just as they had for twelve years without ceasing, in her sleep and waking so that being “unclean” eclipsed everything else she knew about herself—her facial features, her hair color, the sound of her laugh, the shape of her thigh, the names of her cousins, her favorite bread, the words to songs she was taught as a child. The constant flow of blood eclipsed her hopes for marriage, a family, travel, and eventually even visitors. With luck, her education was one thing preserved because she could read and could ask her neighbor, a scholar of some merit, to lend her books, which he did, being Greek, not a Hebrew, and unafraid of her condition.
Her neck, arms, feet, breasts, all unclean, whatever she touched, even clothing, also unclean.
“If a woman have an issue of blood many days beyond the days of her separation, she shall be unclean. Every bed she lies upon shall be unclean, whatsoever she sits upon. Whosoever touches these things shall be unclean and shall wash himself and his clothes. . . .”
A visitor would have to bathe and wash all of her own clothes afterward even though, to prepare, the woman with the issue of blood washed her floors, her table, and sheets.
At first neighbors had visited her with regularity, the blood draining away her strength, and they could see this. They rotated the chores among themselves, the constant rinsing of the rags in cold water, then boiling them, hanging them to dry then folding. The bed sheets, the blankets, all of the furniture washed, not because blood had touched it but because the woman had.
Eventually she removed all fabric, the cushion from her chair, the tablecloths, the curtains, the bedding, so that she slept on wood, sat on wood, ate on wood, and in this way saved energy, which was the focus of her mind, how to battle the deadening fatigue.
In those first days the women agreed among themselves to make an exception to custom and trained not only their daughters but also their sons to help, to haul the copious supply of water for rinsing, washing, rinsing again. Young sons, seven years old and up, were eager, created teams, named themselves Badger, Owl, Rat. They set jars of water outside her door, knocked, ran away. She lifted them in, returned them to the mat empty. For a few years she set out with the empty jars cards, cookies, sweets. Then just notes.
The women visited when she had the bare wood then not at all and the sons and daughters tired of the job and drifted away one by one. She hired strangers but the constant visits to the doctors, all to no avail, left her penniless with neither companionship nor cure. Her life had become a circular pattern of the body moving in space, to the basin, the stove, to the walls, the bed for rest, back to the basin, the stove, the walls again.
A handyman from Galilee, new to the village, built her wood drying racks that attached to the walls and could fold back against them when empty. The rags hung in straight white rows. “You’ll entertain again,” he said, nailing the last one, but, knowing this wasn’t true, she only weakened and grew scared.
WHEN NEWS CAME that a prophet was healing others, she went to see him and in the dense crowd, reached to touch the back hem of his robe. Right away she felt the flow of blood stop and some of her energy return. The cure was complete and instantaneous, which caused Jesus to turn in her direction and say, to no one in particular, “Something just left me.”
The disciples murmured first that such a woman had come into the press of the crowd. Then some heard Jesus say to her, “Your faith has made you whole,” but faith in what? they wondered. She hadn’t professed any faith, hadn’t said anything at all, not even his name. “He’s going to her house,” they murmured, shaking their heads.
“I KNOW THE rules,” she assured him once they sat down on the two wooden chairs at her small square table, its short, rough planks. She mentioned Leviticus, chapter 15. “Noble and solemn,” she granted, “but not perfect.”
“You didn’t repent, yet you were healed,” Jesus said.
“I was.”
She felt again how personal it was to discuss matters of the body. That her body felt personal to her again was another healing. “I didn’t feel contrite. I felt ill and tired,” she explained.
She offered and he accepted a cup of tea.
“You have great power,” she continued, setting down the cup. “Perhaps instead of feeling it leave, you could learn to release it intentionally. Maybe it can be gathered and
aimed.”
“I didn’t even touch you. Yet something crossed that gap.”
“Like love does,” she said.
It was nice to see him take the tea and put it to his mouth. To drink from it without hesitating.
“WHAT DO YOU believe in?” he asked her.
“The empirical.”
She poured herself a second cup.
“You said you went to many physicians and none healed you.”
“If they were good physicians, they would have. The body is a kingdom,” she said, “with laws of its own. What they offered me didn’t help because they hadn’t studied this kingdom,” she touched her chest.
“So you came to me.”
“I was desperate.”
“And you received a miracle,” he said a second time.
“I did.”
At this they both stopped.
“AND I’M GRATEFUL for it,” she began again. “But I also want to study the natural world, to better see when nature is superseded, to better see the miraculous when it occurs. I want that differentiation. I read the Scriptures. But I’ve also read Hippocrates.”
He lifted his cup to toast her.
“You can do something about this. If you change the language you’ll change perception. Contagion is not a moral issue. It’s a matter of hygiene.” As she spoke, Jesus saw her whole body become young and centered and pensive, her feet grew large as if grounding her vision on the earth, her hands large also. The house no longer smelled of blood, but of mint, parsley and cinnamon. “The study of the body could also be a form of faith,” she speculated. “To address the body on its own could be a religious act.” Here he smiled.
She told him she often heard terms she did not know: autopsy, dissection, sterilization, isolation, vaccination, anesthesia, airborne pathogens. In her visions she saw the study of blood, organs, fluids of all kinds, and saw new jobs with new names like “surgeon,” “nurse,” and “infectious disease specialist.” Others followed after Hippocrates. Galen, Lister, Pasteur, Charcot, Paré, Fractastorius, Nightingale.
She told him she’d named this vision that would save others like herself, “Medicine, the Beautiful Science.”
And Jesus said, “It’s the future.”
At this, she wept.
22
The Woman with an Issue of Blood, II
LOOKING AT THE rags on the drying racks, she realized she would fold them into neat piles and give them to the poor. A joyful act.
WHEN JESUS STOOD to leave she paused. A daydream came in which people clipped strands of his hair and fingernails from his body, cut swatches from what he wore. The robe that she’d touched had been plain linen, but in her daydream it was embroidered and trimmed with jewels. That door through which something more than nature had come.
“HERE, TAKE ONE,” she pressed one of the folded clean rags into his palm. “White,” she said, “the color of your resurrection.”
This troubled him. Not because it was a completely new idea, but because it was an idea he hadn’t shared with anyone, not even John, the disciple whom he most loved.
23
Legion
JESUS AND HIS disciples crossed the sea and when they landed came upon a man who dwelled among the tombs, so fierce he broke through the chains and fetters by which he was bound. He cut himself with stone, and no man could tame him.
“Don’t torment me!” he screamed, seeing Jesus.
“What is your name?”
“Don’t send me into the swine!”
“Tell me, what is your name?”
“Legion,” the man said, “because we are many.”
REMEMBERING THE WOMAN with the issue of blood, Jesus gathered the power that was his and aimed it at the ferocity of Legion, ordering the spirits that tormented him into the swine nearby, a herd of about two thousand, who ran down the cliff and into the sea.
Astonished, the swineherds fled to the city and told what they had seen and when the people saw that the man they called “the maniac” was sitting and clothed and in his right mind they were afraid and begged Jesus to depart from their coasts.
But Jesus refused.
“Those are all me,” Legion said when he saw the swine bobbing in the water.
FOR DAYS JESUS watched Legion haul the carcasses up the cliff, two on each shoulder, slapping the bodies down onto the grass. “They’re smart animals,” he told Jesus. “Did you have to do it that way?”
Again and again Legion climbed down the cliff and returned. He buried each in a grave, intentionally dug shallow so that the mounds could be seen all at once. “I want to see all the parts of myself,” he explained. He buried them in a grid. “Because they belong together,” he said.
And Jesus saw how violent healing could be. How easy it was to be violent. And he decided to resist violence when it came to him and to not inflict any. He vowed to never again heal a person in that way. And he repented for the violence with which he had healed Legion.
“TELL ME WHAT happened,” he said.
Legion tried to explain, but as he spoke he became agitated and could no longer sit peacefully. “Today is flaring up,” he said, “today is flaring up!”
“What do you mean?”
“I see a bloodstained toad instead of my white kitten.” He paced back and forth. “God has gone away!” Then he ran. “Love is punctured!”
LEGION RAN BETWEEN the tombs, yelling, crashing into Jesus, running again, between the headstones and monuments, slapping his hands against them, scraping his hands on the cement, marble, stone, until they bled. His palms bloody from the stones then running away again. Dried blood on the headstones, new red blood dripping down the sides.
Sometimes he ran until nightfall while Jesus stood in the posture of orans, hands lifted to the sky, to express the immutability of what he was witnessing, that ancient gesture of prayer. Each time he returned, Jesus held Legion. He’d watched him, had not taken his eyes off him as he ran.
“Not once?” Legion asked, once he calmed.
“Not once,” Jesus said, weeping.
TOUCHING ONE OF the scars where Legion had cut himself with a stone, Jesus saw, on the insides of each forearm, scars white from age, a lattice of fine lines intersecting like a mesh.
“Let me see all of them,” Jesus asked carefully, and, standing, Legion removed his shirt. His chest and shoulders and arms were cross-hatched with scars like threads.
“Are there more?”
Legion turned away, sure that Jesus would leave him if he saw his legs and back. But instead he heard that Jesus was very close. He heard that he was crying.
“No one has ever wept with me before.”
“Maybe the swine did,” Jesus offered.
“I WOULD LIKE to see all of them, if you’re willing,” he said.
So Legion took off his sandals and showed the network of scars on the soles of his feet. Then he dropped his pants. The scars were dense on his buttocks, his thighs and calves, his lower back, the web of raised white lines so thorough that Legion’s skin was barely visible, as if clothed in white lace, white socks, white gloves, white stockings, white pants. At his groin his skin was solid white, as if buried under a fall of snow.
He carefully dressed again, smoothed his hair, his beard, tipped his head to one side then the other, the pop sound of tension released, and fell silent.
Jesus could not believe how much cruelty could come to one child and again he repented for the violence with which he had healed Legion.
“I WANT TO go with you,” Legion said on the forty-first day when all that needed to be spoken was spoken, and all that needed to be shown.
“You can’t,” Jesus answered.
“Please!” Legion implored him.
“If you follow me, you will suffer. You’ve suffered enough already.” Then he picked up his satchel and threw it over his shoulder. “Tell your story to others. The bad parts and the good. It will help them. And besides, you don’t need me anymore. You have all of yours
elf now.”
Legion handed Jesus his sharpened stones, the edges like blades, one by one so that later when Jesus boarded the boat his pockets were heavy with them.
“Keep one,” he gave one back to Legion. “Don’t be afraid of it. It’s a sign of your victory.”
LEGION SLAPPED HIS chest. “Don’t overlook the body when you go about your father’s business,” he smiled. “Don’t forget about touch.” And then they hugged.
Jesus headed down the coast to where the ship was anchored and turning back, saw Legion on the top of the cliff having followed him the three miles.
IN TIME LEGION left the cemetery. He left his field of mounds and then he left Judah altogether. He went to a country where he was not known, married, and had seven sons. He continued to be called Legion because he was rich with offspring and he loved them as he wanted to have been loved by his parents, with exceeding tenderness. When he spoke of what happened to him in the field, men and women marveled.
MANY TIMES JESUS thought of Legion and their time together. When he rebuked the scribes and the Pharisees for their hypocrisy he compared them to white sepulchers and then saw again in his mind’s eye Legion running through the night, moonlight on his scars and body whiter than in the sun.