But John said, “Go, my son. Go. That’s the man whom I told you about, whose sandal I’m not worthy to unloose because he is so much greater than I am. I baptize with water for this very reason, that he might be revealed to Israel. Why shouldn’t that begin with my own disciples?”
John kissed the anxious young man and whispered, “Andrew, it is right: he must increase, while I must decrease. Go.”
VI
WHEN HEROD THE GREAT had died a generation ago, his dreams of a proper succession died with him.
The final codicil of his final will had named his son Archelaus as king. It had also granted limited territories to two other sons who thus became “tetrarchs.” Philip received lands north and east of the Sea of Galilee. Antipas controlled two provinces: Galilee in regions west of that Sea, and Perea east of Jordan and the Dead Sea as far south as the fortress Machaerus, as far north as the city of Pella.
But because of immediate infighting with his brothers and a spontaneous revolt in his own lands, Rome stripped Archelaus of his title as king, demanding first that he prove he deserved to rule. In the next ten years he proved, rather, that he merited no power at all. He treated both the Jews and the Samaritans with such cruel brutality that Caesar Augustus banished him to Gaul and reduced both Judea and Samaria to a common province under a governor.
Thereafter Rome allowed no “king” at all in the lands that Herod the Great once had ruled.
Tetrarch Philip governed in quiet obscurity for thirty-eight years. He died without children to receive his territories.
Antipas, on the other hand, mimicked his father. He founded a city on the western shores of the Sea of Galilee and built it according to Greek designs. He named it after the Roman Emperor Tiberius. And since, like his father, he cared little for Jewish laws and sensibilities, he blandly chose as the site of this new city a very old burial ground. Jews absolutely shunned the handsome and unclean place. Antipas responded by importing Gentiles in order to bring a population into his city. In Jewry, then, this ruler’s arrogance created a Roman invasion, a community which was oblivious to all that was holy.
But who could make a public condemnation of these actions? Antipas maintained a standing army, weaponed, suspicious, and violent; and like his father, Antipas would easily murder the mouths that threatened his strength. He called himself by his father’s name: Herod Antipas.
When Herod Antipas was forty years old, he fell in love with the wife of his brother. Her name was Herodias. She had a daughter named Salome.
But Herod Antipas was already married. Therefore he divorced his wife—bringing down upon himself the rage of her father, king of the desert kingdom, Nabataea—and then married Herodias.
Such was the power of a tetrarch. His will was law, whether or not it alienated his subjects, offended his neighbors, or broke the holy commands of God.
THE MORE JOHN PREACHED, the less people connected his name to the name of his father, Zechariah. Throughout Judea and Samaria and Galilee and Perea, up and down both sides of the Jordan, he became known as “John the Baptizer.”
And that ceaseless cry, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, rang like a tocsin wherever he went. John caused distress in cities and in the countryside: some suffered spiritual distress, truly striving to prepare for the kingdom, while others feared that a heavenly kingdom must displace earthly kingdoms and economies. Moreover, certain authorities worried that the desire for heaven’s approach would drive zealots mad enough to sabotage the more worldly powers.
A tocsin wherever he went—and John seemed to appear wherever the water was. He baptized multitudes everywhere on the Jordan, from the lowland near the Dead Sea even as far north as Salim where springs produced abundant water.
And all his baptizing was given the sawtooth of the law. He announced the need of each person’s purity before God. He demanded a deep, internal turning of the heart. He declared that an impassable gulf divided worldly governance from governance of the Lord, and as a caustic example he referred to the flagrant disregard of covenant displayed by the tetrarch of the very province in which he, John, and this great congregation presently were standing.
“Herod Antipas, do you hear me?” John the Baptizer cried. Ears burned at the royal name; faces went down; but a hundred minds remembered what John said.
“I stand in a low valley,” he crowed. “You sit on mountains of power. Yet my voice will reach you.” John raised that voice to the pitch of an eagle’s shriek and cried: “Listen, Antipas! It is not lawful for any man to take his brother’s wife! Why do you think you are different? However you whitewash the union, you and Herodias have bound yourselves with cords of sinning! But the Lord has sent his anointed here, here!—and he comes like a farmer at harvest coming to his threshing floor. Even now the winnowing fork is in his hand. He is ready to clear it, Antipas! Wheat he will gather into his bins, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire!”
THREE MONTHS AFTER he had baptized Jesus of Nazareth, while John and his disciples were strolling over dry hills east of the Dead Sea—just at eventide—a band of soldiers came riding up the slopes on strong Egyptian mares. Twenty horsemen. They made such a headlong thunder of their coming that the ground trembled. John stopped and looked. The bloody light of the sunset bathed their helmets. To a man they were dressed in battle gear.
But they were following no road nor discernible path. They came like a low cloud, gathering density as they ascended the hills. Soon enough it became apparent that the Baptizer was the target of this swift contingent.
John told his disciples to leave him immediately. They took several steps backward, but they could not leave. They became a silent, helpless audience.
Among the galloping horses was a cart, bouncing on light wheels. Suddenly, in dust and sound, the soldiers surrounded John. Two of them leaped to the ground. One grabbed the Baptizer by his hair; the other looped rope around his legs and his torso and, finally, his neck. As huge as John’s hands were, the outline of his body under such a binding revealed him to be miserably lean.
So this lean man was lifted up and heaved into the cart, and without a word the soldiers mounted, reined their horses around, and galloped back down the slopes the way they had come.
John’s disciples stood a while in silence. Then the entire company began as one body to walk.
They walked all night long in the dark, in a southerly direction, for they had recognized the insignia of the troops that had taken their master away. They were walking toward the fortress at Machaerus, a massive, unbreachable stronghold, one residence of the tetrarch.
They had no doubt: Herod Antipas had imprisoned John the Baptizer in his dungeons there.
THIREY-THREE
Andrew
I
PERHAPS THE BROTHERS Andrew and Simon were alike at the core. Perhaps they shared a sort of tympanic sensitivity, highly alert to the people and the events around them. But the effects of that awareness were different in each, and they managed their feelings differently, and they could not have had bodies more dissimilar.
Andrew’s mood was ever blowing left and right in the winds of the people around him. In glad company he, too, was glad and gladder than most, beaming blessings on everyone. If there arose contention, he grew gloomy and withdrew. If there was some unreadable silence, Andrew felt isolated and suffered anxieties for the future. He was long-fingered, quick, twitchy, and watchful. But he was so trammeled by shyness that he suppressed whatever might call attention to himself: his heart and his mind went tripping forward at furious speeds. But in public his tongue grew thick and his thoughts too small to mention.
Simon, on the other hand, was a blunt fellow. Physically blunt: short-fingered, broad-chested, powerfully knit and crowned with a skullbone as round as a Roman’s. He wore a beard so thick and dark, the whole head looked like a war club. He could explode in talk. No ties to his tongue. He gave every impression of self-confidence. Simon was the wind that blew his brother about, in almost any
company the source of a boisterous gladness, or of contention. But one sign of a vulnerable heart within him may have been the bluff cynicism with which Simon met matters of consequence and human emotion. Ho, ho! You can’t dupe me. I won’t be anybody’s fool. Or perhaps he wore the suspicious exterior for protection, since he could be a man of sudden, deep, and dangerous loyalties—dangerous because they were so absolute.
Simon was full of young bluster, girding himself and going wherever he wanted to go!
Andrew went one way only—following Jesus.
“He stopped. He turned and he saw me, but I hadn’t made a sound. I’d been creeping, you know—hiding, sort of. He said, ‘What are you looking for?’ And I said the first thing that came to my mind. I said, ‘Where are you staying?’ No, Simon, actually I said, ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’ I called him Rabbi, and then I blushed and almost ran back to John, because who gave me permission to call him my teacher? But he said, ‘Come and see.’ No blame. No question. No hesitation. He told me to go with him, and I did. We forded the Jordan together. What do you think about that? We went to a small house near Jericho, and he invited me in, and I went in, and I spent the night with him. What do you think about that?”
“What should I think?” Simon said.
“Well, but it’s Jesus,” said Andrew.
“You said that. I know six men named Jesus, and five of them are madmen.”
“But John said he was the Lamb of God.”
“The what?”
“The Lamb of God—who takes away the sin of the world.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Sacrifice, maybe?”
“You sacrifice a goat for sins. I never heard of a lamb that bore the sins of the people.”
“There’s the Passover lamb. Ask John.”
“Andrew, I like John. I traveled with him, didn’t I? A whole year through, the same as you. But I didn’t always take his meaning, even when I went and asked him four times over. Besides, he’s in jail.”
Andrew paused, stood up straight, and fixed his brother with an anxious look. His voice grew soft with intensity. “But I’m not in jail,” he said. “And I know what I’ve seen with my own eyes and touched with my own hands, and I know what he has done to me. Jesus, Simon. This one is not a madman. Jesus, deep as a root in the ground. And in my breast. Even now, while I’m away from him, my heart yearns to be back again.”
Andrew’s eyes were shiny with emotion. Simon had also stood up by now, though his gaze was turned to the mist that sailed the still waters of the lake. The brothers were mending breaks in their fishnets with new flaxen cord. Dusk was descending. There was only a little light left in the day.
Simon said, “I’m sorry, little brother. I didn’t mean to fight with you. Tell me what you’ve seen.”
Andrew said, “I didn’t always understand John either. But I was too nervous to ask.”
“He was always talking about fire,” said Simon. “The man seemed so fierce, I kept waiting for him to burst into flame.”
Andrew and Simon now shook out two hand-casting nets and laid them open on the grass. The nets were made of a hemp meshing, cone-shaped, with weights around the wide mouth to pull it below the surface. Simon began to string a new cord through the loops of the smaller mouth.
Andrew said, “They tried to kill him.”
“Kill John?”
“No, Jesus. They tried to throw him off a cliff. It was his own hometown. The people he grew up with. His own synagogue.
“When Herod Antipas arrested John, Jesus decided to return to Galilee. We took a route straight through Samaria. Simon, everything the man does has a strange, calm power. He met a woman at the well outside of Sychar, and just by talking to her—by his words alone—he caused such awe in her that she ran back to town saying, ‘Could this be the Messiah?’
“We stayed two days in that place, so we didn’t get to Nazareth until the day before the Sabbath.
“But as soon as we arrived, Jesus’ mother went to tell an elder of the synagogue that he was there, and the elder invited her son to read from the prophets and to preach the next day.
“I like her. I like Mary. She and Jesus look alike. They have the same wide forehead and the same widow’s peak. But she’s so proud of him and so sure she knows what’s best for him, that sometimes she pushes him into embarrassing positions.
“When we entered the synagogue that Sabbath, old men patted his head, saying, ‘Yeshi, Yeshi, do well today.’
“Little children ran to him screaming, ‘Do me! Do me!’ Jesus didn’t seem offended. ‘See how sick I am?’ the children cried, running in circles around him. ‘Two broken legs. I’m dying. Heal me, Miracle Man.’ The news precedes us wherever we go. Everyone knows what Jesus can do.
“He knelt down and snatched two children to himself, one in each arm. He gave them kisses on their necks until they squealed at the whisker-tickling and laughed with delight. No, he was not offended by their games.
“Worship began. Prayers, a reading from the Law, then the attendant handed Jesus the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled it and he read it. He sat down and began to preach—and that was the beginning of our trouble.”
By now the brothers had folded their nets and stowed them fore and aft in a wide-bodied rowboat. The boat had a short mast center-forward, wooden bins for sorting fish, some barbed fishing spears lodged along the gunwales, and a rough flooring since the fishermen stood up to cast the nets, then knelt to pull them in again.
Together they pushed the prow into the lake. Andrew jumped in and moved forward. Simon bowed behind the stern, shoved the boat free of the grassy bank, then stepped inside and took an oar. It was dark on the waters. The last light was dying in the west, the direction which the brothers faced as they rowed away from the land.
Andrew kept talking:
“Jesus read the passage in Isaiah where it says, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me. Anointed ‘me’—anointed someone to preach good news, to give sight to the blind, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. So far, so good. But when he preached, Jesus turned himself into that ‘someone.’
“He said, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’
“Right away I heard somebody grumble, ‘Who does he think he is?’
“Jesus said, ‘The time foreseen by the prophets has come. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent,’ he said—just like John. But then the next thing John would never dare to say: ‘Repent and believe what you hear and see in me.’
“Well, that did it. The whole synagogue took offense. They shouted that he was only a carpenter’s boy and had no right to such proud language.
“But Jesus did not back down. He said, ‘No prophet is acceptable in his own country.’
“People hollered even louder. ‘Prophet? So, Yeshi, you’re a prophet now? You are both the anointed one of God and a prophet?’
“They couldn’t stand it. Simon, I don’t know how their anger changed from shouting to action—but soon the men had carried Jesus out of the synagogue and were driving him up the hill behind Nazareth. I ran to be with him. This was a mob. These people were enraged. They were forcing Jesus toward the edge of the hill. Simon, they planned to throw him over the cliff!
“But then Jesus grabbed my arm and pulled me sideways, and suddenly we were hidden in the bushes. He grinned and winked at me. ‘All my childhood I played in these hills,’ he said, and he led me away by another path.
“Even then he was calm. That’s what I’m telling you, Simon—how confident the man is. He knows something. He has something that no one else has. What is that thing? Well, I’m starting to believe him. When he says, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, I think he is telling the truth.”
Andrew moved to the prow of the boat where he lit an oil lamp. It made an island of yellow light, while all around them the sea was black.
“So we left Nazareth,” he said. “Six days later we came here
to Capernaum.”
Andrew opened his net and laid it loosely on the floor. Simon, in the stern, did the same. Each brother in his own time took hold of the weighted rim of his net, then lifted it, whirled it, spun it out into the darkness where it made a flat slapping on the water and sank.
They stood a while in contemplative silence, holding the drawstrings of their nets and staring up into the night sky busy with a million stars. Then they knelt and dragged their nets back in. No need to kneel: both nets were empty.
For the rest of the night they cast their nets but caught nothing at all.
II
ON THE MORNING after they had arrived in Capernaum, Jesus and Andrew separated for the day. Andrew was anxious to find his brother. He’d heard that Simon was staying with his wife’s family in Capernaum.
Jesus went to the synagogue. It was a remarkably balanced and beautiful building—built, in fact, by a Gentile, a centurion, a righteous man who honored the Jews by means of this expensive gift.
But this was the Sabbath, and Jesus had come to observe the day, to worship, and then to teach whomever he found willing to listen.
By mid-afternoon he was sitting among a group of pious Jews who were curious to hear the Scriptural exposition of this new rabbi.
But the more they listened, the more curious they became, because this man offered no exposition at all. All the scribes and rabbis grounded their teaching on passages from the Scripture—except Jesus of Nazareth! This fellow didn’t support his word by reference to Moses or the prophets. Instead, he spoke as if he were his own authority. He seemed to assume that his word was true for this reason alone, that he had spoken it!
It was an astonishing display—for some Jews a disturbing one, but for others, bold and admirable. Something new was happening in Galilee!
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 58