by Jane Lebak
She kissed the light baby’s forehead, and the baby disappeared. With a choke, she turned down her head and closed her eyes.
Behind her, her husband said, “Please forgive me. I thought I was doing what was best.”
Jesus kissed the man on the cheek. “Your sins are forgiven too. Be in peace. Grieve an honest grief.”
There were hours more until daylight. Jesus moved toward the door, but the man said, “Please accept my hospitality.”
Jesus said, “Thank you, but no.”
He went onto the street, Raphael at his side. “Where are we going?”
Jesus said, “Outside the city. Let’s find someplace quiet to pray until sunrise, and tomorrow we’ll head to other towns. There are more wounds to heal.”
#
Despite strong admonitions not to spread word of what he’d done, many people told everyone they knew about Jesus’s healings, and they came to him in crowds. Some people came, got what they wanted, and left. Others came, left, and came back again. Some began staying all the time, though.
And other people, it galled Gabriel to realize, stayed just to gather information so they could argue.
“It’s not supposed to be like that,” Gabriel insisted to Raphael as they entered the synagogue. “Yes, Cherubim argue, and skepticism has its place, but some of these people began with the preferred conclusion, and they’re gathering only data in support of that conclusion. That’s called confirmation bias, and it’s not conducive to obtaining accurate results.”
Raphael may or may not have been humoring him, but he sent his fire into Gabriel. “You love a good argument.”
Gabriel said, “A good argument makes me love the opposing opinion enough to embrace it. Although I may modify it,” he corrected himself. “They’re not doing that.”
People fell into several clearly-defined categories, and Gabriel reviewed those present with Michael: people who wanted something from Jesus. They’d get what they want and leave, no problem. People who didn’t care one way or the other: again, not a security issue for Jesus or for his ministry, although obviously it would benefit them to become more interested. “But of the opponents,” Gabriel said, “we have some individuals in power who are afraid they’re going to lose authority.”
Michael ran his fingers over his scabbard. “Like Herod.”
“Herod isn’t here now. But the Pharisees and the teachers are nervous because he keeps challenging them.” Gabriel’s eyes lit up. “See, I’d love that, but for some reason they don’t. Maybe they don’t recognize the ways an honest argument would lead them to a more highly-defined truth, but they’re scared. And people afraid of losing power are unpredictable.”
Michael said, “I’ve got forces listening. I’m also monitoring the Romans, but for the moment the Romans don’t seem to care.”
“The Romans don’t worry me as much because their core beliefs aren’t being challenged. It’s all alien to them.” Gabriel shrugged. “Still, I can’t help but wonder how Jesus will win them over.”
Gabriel followed Jesus to the front where he began teaching. Some of the elders watched with mistrustful eyes, and Gabriel tightened his wings against their stares even though they couldn’t see him. The judging looks — too familiar. He’d passed judgment like that in the past. And others had passed judgment on him.
He looked impulsively at Raphael, and Raphael turned to him with a smile. “It’s okay.”
Gabriel shivered.
Jesus noticed a man whose hand was crumpled, and he walked closer to him.
The nearest Pharisees leaned forward.
Jesus said to the man, “Come here.” The man’s arm was scarred around the wrist, and his left hand was noticeably smaller than the right. The bony fingers twisted around each other. Raphael probed the man’s body and named the problems one after the next: atrophy; neuropathy; the remnants of a crushing injury to the wrist decades old, before the bones had stopped growing.
Jesus turned to the Pharisees. “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil? Is it lawful to save a life?”
The men didn’t answer, but Jesus’s face hardened with anger. He turned to the man and said, “Stretch out your hand.”
The man seemed surprised, but he opened his hand, and it was whole.
Jesus glared at the Pharisees, but none of them said anything to him. One whispered to another, though, and then both slipped out.
Michael followed, then returned “We may want to get out of here. They’re talking about contacting Herod.”
“But that was brilliant!” Gabriel exclaimed. “It was beyond brilliant—they can’t condemn him because there’s nothing illegal about stretching out your hand on the Sabbath. Jesus didn’t do anything to indicate he was even performing the healing. In order to claim he healed on the Sabbath, they need to testify to his divine healing power. How can they?”
Michael didn’t seem convinced.
Jesus stayed another few hours, then left the town. They stopped at the edge of a Sabbath’s journey and waited for sundown, then continued toward the hills. The group at this point was mostly the followers who never left. Andrew. Simeon. Philip. Nathaniel.
At night when the disciples settled down, Jesus went up the mountain to pray, Raphael with him. Gabriel stayed at Jesus’s side, enjoying the vibrations of the gentle talk between Father and Son as he went over what was happening and what he planned.
Jesus widened his gaze and looked over the world as the sun rose. Satan offered me all this, he sent to Raphael. But I’m about to engage in a little bit of thievery.
Raphael chuckled.
Jesus opened his heart, and Raphael stopped laughing to radiate shock. Gabriel reached into Raphael to feel whatever had startled him, and there before him he felt humanity. All of it.
Millions of souls. Billions. Waiting, arrayed through time and space.
Jesus surveyed them all, and he began calling the ones he wanted. Not with his voice, but rather with his heart, as if there were harp strings from each of them back to him and he were the peg holding them into creation. Like a harpist stroking her instrument, Jesus reached into time and strummed through all those souls, finding the ones he wanted especially to serve him and become his apostles. He called them wherever they were hidden, summoning them with the soul’s equivalent of music.
Gabriel tucked closer to him, wrapping himself in that harmony of loving God together. Because as Jesus called them, they responded. They neared him even if they didn’t know now what it was they longed for. God had time: they didn’t need to come now, but they needed to come someday. A young girl raised in a believing family surrounded by holiness all her life. A man deemed ineducable and yet with piercing insight into the human heart. A crippled girl hated by her own family and forced to live in the barn, all the while filled with care for the poor and hungry. A poet who literally stripped naked in the street just to divest himself of the world.
All of these, Jesus prayed. These are the ones I want.
The sun nudged above the horizon, and Jesus prayed and summoned and prayed some more. And then, as dawn overspread the world, he descended the mountain into the crowd of people who had followed him this far. He chose twelve.
Simon and Andrew were obvious choices. Another set of brothers, James and John, also joined. There was Philip and Nathaniel. There were two zealots, Judas and Simon.
“This is so exciting,” said Nivalis, guardian angel to Judas Iscariot. She and Gabriel sat overhead on a tree branch. “He’s always wanted to work for God and change the world, and here he is! I never dared dream he’d come this close to the Messiah!”
They listened to Jesus as intently as the human crowd did, Gabriel hungering to take in these stories and re-create them word-for-word in a document where he could analyze the word choice and the stresses and the vocal tone. He’d heard so many of these stories before, and yet here they came again, and here he listened again, and it was so easy to become the players in these stories. He could be a woma
n sweeping a house to find a missing coin. He could be a farmer scattering seed (actually, he had been a farmer scattering seed, hadn’t he?) and he certainly remembered what it was like to be a shepherd.
Nivalis said, “Wasn’t Jesus working as a carpenter? Why doesn’t he ever use carpentry in his parables?”
Gabriel chuckled. “I asked him that. He wants people to relate to the situations he’s bringing up. Most of them would have no clue what he meant if he said, ‘The kingdom of God is like a bradawl.’”
Nivalis said, “The Kingdom of God is like a table built with cedar wood rather than soft pine.”
Gabriel laughed. She went on, “To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God? A man uses a level that is flat. If the level is warped, what good then will the shelf be? The resulting furniture is useful for nothing but throwing into the fire.”
“There you go,” said Gabriel. “He’d make it work, but the people around him would wonder why they’d gotten a carpentry lesson and start asking if he could heal their bunions.”
Nivalis said, “They do that anyhow. Judas is just itching for the day they start really building the Kingdom, though. Get these people fired up enough and they could bring down Rome.”
Eleven
Year Thirty-One
In the darkness, Mary whispered, “Gabriel? Are you around?”
After so long, she knew how many deep breaths it took until either an angel appeared or else an angel wasn’t going to respond. She never asked what caused the slight delay, since they could disappear from one spot and reappear in another without moving through the spaces between, but she imagined it took time to send word and then to take leave of whatever they were doing, and of course if they were on assignment for God, they wouldn’t respond at all. As it should be.
This time, on the last breath, Gabriel’s presence prickled on the edge of her consciousness. She waited, and he prompted her without appearing: Was she all right?
Mary hesitated. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked for Gabriel. Except who else could she ask? Raphael needed to stay with Jesus. Michael was fighting evil. Gabriel had important work to do too, a thing she never doubted, and yet he seemed to have more mobility than the others. But he was so…well, logical about things.
“Oh, you’re not all right.” He became tangible and seeable, and he reached for her hand. “You’re…scared?”
She chuckled weakly. “It’s obvious?”
Obvious in the midnight dark. Obvious to an angel’s eyes.
Gabriel said, “I’m looking at the chemicals you’re putting out in your brain. They look like fear.”
“More like worry.” She extended a hand, and he took it. “How is Jesus doing?”
He squeezed. “He’s the Son of God. He’s doing God’s work.”
“That’s not an answer.” Her eyes watered, but she didn’t sit up and she didn’t swipe back the tears. “John— They just beheaded John.”
“I know. I was there.” Gabriel tilted his head, and his eyes gleamed silver in the dark. “I can’t assure you Jesus is perfectly safe and comfortable every hour of every day. But he’s eating and sleeping, and he’s in good health.”
Mary said, “And people want him dead.”
Gabriel leaned forward. “If they didn’t, he wouldn’t be doing his job.”
She huffed. “You’re not helping.”
“Once again, I have no children,” Gabriel said, “and my kind don’t suffer and die, so it’s a struggle to relate to your concerns. I’m trying.”
She relaxed back onto her bed. “Thank you.”
“But it’s not satisfactory.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “Is there any way I can help you, since I can’t offer reassurance? I could put you straight to sleep.”
She shook her head. “I’ll just worry again in the morning.”
“Worries are bigger in the dark,” Gabriel said. “I remember how that surprised me.”
Mary picked up her head. “Tell me a story. Tell me about that time when you became a man.”
Gabriel sat back. “That’s not a bedtime story.”
“Well, then tell me about the winnowing.”
Gabriel’s eyes widened. “That’s even less a bedtime story. You really won’t get any sleep.”
Gabriel turned his attention to Uriel, and from both sides she felt a back-and-forth too quick to follow. Finally Gabriel said, “If I tell you the story, will you let me spin some of your fleece?”
She frowned in the dark. “Let you?” His discomfort prickled in her mind. “You’d be doing me a favor, and then you’d be doing me another favor in exchange for it?”
Gabriel sounded gentle. “I enjoy spinning, but I can’t just sneak into someone’s supply closet and use up the fleece supply.”
Mary said, “What will I do with it? I mean, I can’t sell it.”
“Why not?” Gabriel hesitated. “If it comes out sub-par, I’ll return it to fleece and you can re-spin it to sell it then.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean, yarn made by angels would be priceless.”
Gabriel chuckled. “Don’t tell them they can’t afford it.”
A soft noise told Mary the basket and the spindle had appeared in front of Gabriel, and then more sounds got some fleece started on the spindle.
“Okay, so close your eyes, and think about a time when all the morning stars sang together.” Gabriel twirled the spindle, paying attention to the fleece as it twisted into yarn. Mary could tell from the sound that he was making it fine, strong.
With her eyes closed, Mary began feeling a sensation she couldn’t name. She was, but she wasn’t. She felt comfortable, and she’d existed a long time, but a part of her knew she was still young in a way she didn’t recognize at the moment. She was Gabriel, a Gabriel back a long time ago.
God called, and Gabriel appeared before Him in a hall with a cavernous ceiling and a throne at the front. She knelt, and the Spirit began speaking inside.
That as the head of her choir, she had an assignment.
That God would engage in a new act of Creation.
That God would take a material form.
That the angels would be expected to worship God in that form.
The story stopped here, and Mary jolted back to herself. Gabriel stopped his spindle, eyes ashine. “You have no idea why that’s strange.”
Mary rolled to face him. “If God wants to do something, He should do it.”
“If God told you He was going to take the form of a sheep, you wouldn’t be more than a little disquieted?”
Mary squinted. “You appear disquieted.”
Gabriel took a deep breath. “I explained to the Spirit why that wasn’t a good idea.”
“You didn’t!”
A flash of his eyes. Gabriel probably had no idea how fierce he looked when that happened, and Mary shivered. “Absolutely I did! Let me tell you what it’s like, I said. You won’t know everything. You’ll find you have limits. There will be things you have to guess and areas of darkness in your mind. You’ll feel clumsy and inadequate at times. Everything is fine the way it is, and I love you the way you are.”
He spun the spindle again, but it was too fast. That yarn was going to come out thin as a hair and strong as copper wire.
“Let’s say God tells you he’s going to become a sheep.” Gabriel looked ferocious as he worked the spindle. “And your first reaction is, ‘But sheep stink. Sheep are stupid. Sheep generate random sheep-pies. Why would you do that?’ and He says, ‘Because I like sheep.’ So your next thought makes it almost palatable: ‘It’ll be a special kind of sheep? At least able to talk?’ No, it’s just going to be a sheep. ‘But it will at least be a smart sheep?’ Not especially.” Gabriel shuddered. “Wouldn’t you think it was insane? And then God shows you this sheep and says, ‘Now worship it.’ But it’s just a sheep!”
Mary said, “And God didn’t change his mind, I take it.”
“Close your eyes again,” he said.
Gabriel tore
out of the Judgment Hall crazed. She flung herself at Raphael, incoherent enough that she needed to explain three times before he even understood what had happened. Yet she had to prepare the rest of the Cherubim for this and help sort out the ones who had problems, when she couldn’t even figure it out for herself.
Raphael called for Lucifer, who had just come out of his own interview. Gabriel ranted at him in a rage, and Lucifer held her, soothed her, reassured her that he’d take care of it. He’d talk to God again and it would be fine. If I can do it, you can do it. “You’re not thinking,” Gabriel insisted. “Consider what we’re being asked to do. It’s not reasonable or sane.”
Lucifer said, “It’s not God’s job to be reasonable or sane, is it? He only has to give the orders, and it’s our lot to respond. The whim of God is law to us. God isn’t constrained by logic. Work with me. I’ve got an idea.”
“That’s the first time,” Gabriel said out loud to Mary, “that I ever needed to have faith. Up until then, everything had a reason I could discern. Raphael insisted it didn’t diminish us in any way to do this, but it certainly felt like it would.”
“I can’t imagine you crazed,” Mary murmured. “But I still don’t see an issue about God in a material form.”
“You’re a material being.” Gabriel sounded a little less strident now. “Worshiping a sheep isn’t quite a good parallel for you. Imagine if God asked you to worship him as that loaf of bread, or that cup of wine.”
Mary said, “Were animals already around? Did Adam exist yet?”
“Animals, yes. Not yet Adam.” A whirl as Gabriel resumed spinning. “I’m not sure it would have made a difference. The intelligence you possess is a mock-up of what we have. It would have been easier to bear if God had suggested he would take the form of a tree or a mountain or an ocean.”
Mary hunched down in her bed..
“You asked,” Gabriel said. “I don’t still feel that way or I wouldn’t be here turning fleece into yarn.” He offered a smile. “Do you have any other questions that I can answer so you can perceive it as an insult?”