Mary Magdalene said we should go to Galilee. Mary Salome and Joanna agreed. They said that an angel told them that Jesus would meet us there. So we went. Everyone. All the disciples. A very happy band. Much chatter and singing. The weather was beautiful, clear and dry. The barley fields were white for harvest. I saw it all in gratitude—and in sorrow.
Jesus’ mother walked by John. She looked so lovely that I felt like crying. Thomas and Matthew were becoming good friends. My brother spent most of his time with Mary Magdalene. Shobal came with us, grinning like a puppy.
By the time we got to Capernaum, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to do something, something I could throw my body into but something familiar so I wouldn’t have to think!
I said, “I’m going fishing,” and ran away from the lot of them.
I had given my boat to my brother-in-law. He’s a careful fisherman. Nets, lines, spears, mast, sail, oars—it was all in good condition. But he wasn’t there, and I didn’t ask. I inspected the equipment and prepared the boat. Then at dusk, just as I was shoving off, here came a group of disciples, not a thought in their heads except to follow my lead.
My brother came with me. Mary Magdalene, too, tucked herself down in the middle of the boat.
James and John and Nathanael began to get their boat ready while we pulled away. They knew where we would drop nets. They would find us.
That night the stars were like sand on the seashore. The black sky was swollen with stars. Mary dozed. Andrew and I did not talk. We worked. I was grateful for the darkness and the work. It didn’t bother me that we caught nothing.
In the grey light of the morning I heard James calling, “Simon? Simon?”
I spied the Zebedee boat some distance through the mist. It was riding high in the water. They hadn’t caught anything either.
“Simon, let’s go in.”
So we shifted positions. Mary moved into the prow. My brother and I took oars and began to pull for shore. He and I faced the red bubble of the sun as it broke horizon and set the lake on fire.
Suddenly Mary said, “Who’s that?”
We looked over our shoulders. There was a man standing on the beach, his tunic like a flame in the sunrise light.
“Ho! Children!” he called to us. “Have you caught anything?”
James yelled, “No!” Their boat was just off our stern.
The man on shore called: “Cast your nets on the right side and see what you catch!”
Immediately, John stood up in his boat and swept his net open and cast it to the right. It sank for a moment, then it came to life, the water boiling and churning with fish.
James went crazy. He almost lost the lead lines when he cast his net. It, too, foamed up with fish. And Andrew cast in the same direction, and I did, too, before we realized that each net was so heavy it needed two men to haul it in.
“Simon!” John was calling. All four of us were straining just to bring the nets near the gunwales. “Simon, it’s Jesus! That is the Lord on shore!”
The word went through me like a sword, a sweet, terrible pain. I looked through the burning distance and in a mystery saw every feature of his face. So I couldn’t hold still. I lashed my net to the gunwale. I tied my work clothes close to my waist and threw myself into the sea and swam for shore as fast as I could.
Stupid! Stupid! When I came up out of the water I couldn’t think of anything to say. I stood there feeling wretched.
Jesus had kindled a charcoal fire. Bread and fish were already laid on it, breakfast for one. He didn’t look at me. He looked to the boats still struggling shoreward. So there were those who belonged to him, working and worthy—and here was I, idle and unworthy.
Andrew had also lashed his net to the gunwale. He was rowing the boat alone. Nathanael and John rowed while James kept their huge catch close to the side of the boat. As they came close, I waded back into the water and helped drag the nets onto dry land. We spread out a wide carpet of glittering fish.
Jesus said, “Bring some of the fish. Come and have breakfast with me.”
We sat. Jesus sat among us. He served us one after the other. He served me last. I couldn’t eat.
Neither was he eating. He kept looking at me.
Oh, those eyes, dead level and lidded! He would not stop looking at me. I wanted to crawl away. And I would have, but he opened his mouth and spoke to me.
“Simon son of Jonah,” he said, “do you love me more than these?”
“Yes, Lord!” I think I shouted the answer. It came immediately, all on its own: “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
He neither smiled nor blinked. Solemnly he said, “Feed my lambs.”
Did he mean it? Was he granting me a place with him? I held that notion very tenderly, very uncertainly.
But still, he did not stop staring at me.
And he spoke again.
“Simon son of Jonah, do you love me?”
The same words. The second time.
Carefully—because I meant it and I wanted him to believe that I meant it—I said, “Yes, Lord. You know that I love you.”
He said, “Tend my sheep.”
Even then this wasn’t over. He kept looking at me. And now I knew what was coming, and it did come.
For the third time he said, “Simon son of Jonah, do you love me?”
I bowed my head and started to cry like a child. He was asking and he was telling, both. He knew. He knew. He knew how many times I said I did not even know him. He knew.
I couldn’t raise my face to him. I said, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.”
There was a great silence after that. Someone was moving, but no one said anything.
And then I felt his hand on my shoulder. Jesus was kneeling in front of me. He crooked a finger beneath my chin and lifted my head, and I looked through my tears and saw his eyes filled with such kindness that I only bawled the harder.
He said, “Feed my sheep.”
Yes! Jesus was offering me a place in the kingdom.
Be a shepherd of my flock.
Yes, Lord! Yes!
“Peter, when you were a young man,” he said, “you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wanted to go. But when you grow old you will stretch out your hands and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you don’t want to go. Do you understand?” His expression was ancient and earnest, filled with meaning: Peter, do you understand? I am telling you the sort of death you will die, by which you will glorify God.
I nodded. I understood.
So then he stood up, and he said to me all over again what he had said at the very beginning.
He said, “Follow me.”
V
IN THOSE DAYS the priests in Jerusalem purchased a potter’s field south of the city at the confluence of its three valleys, the Tyropoeon, the Hin-nom, and the Kidron valleys.
They paid thirty pieces of silver for the land and designated it as a burial place for strangers who died in Jerusalem.
They had determined that this money was good for no other use. Certainly, it could never have been returned to the Temple treasury. It was, they said, blood money.
It had the taint of two deaths on it.
JUDAS ISCARIOT HAD kissed Jesus, saying, Hail, Master.
Jesus did not praise his disciple. Neither did he seize the moment or the power. He said, Betray. He called the act a betrayal.
Simon had tried to fight on the Master’s behalf. Judas had cried out his title, Messiah! But Jesus disarmed the one and rebuked the other, and every dream died, and all the world was darkness then: There shall be no legions of angels here. You have mistaken me, Judas! Of all my disciples, you have disappointed me the most.
Judas dropped his torch.
He fell back into the night.
When the procession of soldiers led Jesus through Jerusalem to the high priest’s house, Judas followed. Then he stood outside the back wall, waiting.
He had never desi
red anything for his Master but power and glory and dominion. Not the arrest. Not captivity. Not death, not ever death.
Jesus is an eloquent man. He will persuade them of his innocence.
But then the word came down from the windows above: Blasphemy!
And the question: What sentence does he deserve?
When the council began to cry, Death, death, Judas bolted from the high priest’s house. He ran down into the Tyropoeon valley then up the Temple hill. He dashed through seven degrees of holiness and even breached the eighth: through the Court of the Women, through the Court of the Israelites, into the Court of the Priests where he thrust himself between the High Altar and the porch.
Priests rushed to block him there. His presence was a profanation.
I have sinned! wailed Judas Iscariot. I sinned against innocent blood!
That’s your affair, not ours, the priests snarled. Get out of here!
Judas tore a pouch from over his shoulder. He took hold of its long leather strap and whirled it round his head like a sling. The priests scattered. The pouch was as heavy as a weapon. But then it burst open, and silver coins flew ringing over the stone floor of the porch and into the sanctuary of the Temple, the ninth degree of holiness.
Then he walked away.
Judas Iscariot crossed the Temple courts to the extreme southeastern corner. This was the largest section of Herod’s wall, brutal in size and conception. Its dressed stones were more than thirty-six feet long. They weighed one hundred tons. Within the spaces of this heavy masonry, Judas climbed stone stairs to an old storeroom. It had a high small window facing east. Outside, the wall dropped straight down from a pinnacle of the Temple into the Kidron valley. Inside, the window admitted a little dawn light.
Judas looked around the dim room. One lamp, cold and dead, hung from the ceiling by a tough hempen cord. Judas stood on stools to untie the cord, first from the ceiling and then from the lamp.
He tied one end tightly around the leg of a stool, then he set that stool under the eastern window and stood on it.
He looked out at the Mount of Olives, black in front of the grey dawning. The heavens were thick with cloud. It would storm today.
Judas tied the other end of the cord around his neck and crawled out on the window’s stone ledge. He turned so that he was facing into the room, kneeling, waiting. Slowly he rocked backward past the balance point, then he relaxed. The cord yanked the stool up from the floor. It caught in the window casements and stuck there.
REGARDING THE THIRTY PIECES of silver which Judas Iscariot had flung into the Temple, the priests said, “It isn’t lawful to put this in the treasury again. It is blood money.”
So the field which they purchased by means of that silver they called Akeldama: The Field of Blood.
ONE MORNING MARY OF BETHANY awoke with the familiar sensation that the Lord was outside, sitting in their courtyard under the grapevine, praying. For a moment she lay still, content that he should have come. But then the events of the last month rushed into her consciousness, and she cried, “Martha, Martha,” and she dressed, and she bounded outside to see if he were really there, but he wasn’t.
Yet she could not go back into the house. She was restless. She walked through Bethany looking left and right, as if she might find something important. Martha must have roused Lazarus. The two caught up with her at the edge of the village.
“Where are you going?” Martha demanded, out of breath.
“I don’t know,” Mary said. “I don’t know.”
But her intensity drew others from the houses round about, and they followed.
“Where is she going?” they asked.
Martha said, “My sister knows what she’s doing.”
Mary went a little ways on the Jericho road, then turned aside and found herself walking a thin stony path toward the tombs.
That’s where she was going. To the tombs!
And others were doing the same thing!
From towns all over that area people came, one by one, two by two, in groups; they were streaming toward that honeycomb in white rock, the places where their kin were buried.
What was this universal yearning?
They told one another that they had awoken that morning thinking of their dead. They were coming, they said, to honor the memories.
At first Mary saw about a hundred people crossing the fields from several directions. But the closer they came to the tombs, the more she saw. Like spokes on a wheel the crowd was converging, becoming more dense, numbering four and five hundred!
There was a general air of excitement.
Mary felt such a tugging in her breast that she broke into a hard run ahead of the rest.
So she was the first to see the Lord standing in front of Lazarus’ empty grave, facing her, gazing at her with his golden eyes and smiling.
Behind her the noises subsided as those arriving also saw the Lord.
And when the whole multitude had fallen mute with awe—as if they were living stones in the countryside—Jesus spoke.
“I tell you truly,” he said, “the hour is coming when your relatives lying dead in this place, and all the dead everywhere, will hear the voice of the Son of God—and those who hear will live.”
Jesus, dressed in white, stood erect as a cedar tree, his black hair cascading to his shoulders, his manner quiet and dignified.
“All those that the Father gives me will come to me,” he said. “And those who come I will never cast out. For I have descended from heaven to do the Father’s will. This is his will: that I should lose none of those whom he has given me. And this is his will: that all who see the Son and believe in him should have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day!
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus said. “Those who come to me will never hunger.
“I am the light of the world. Those who follow me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”
He said many things that morning. And by some mystery Mary remembered everything: I am the way and the truth and the life.
His beautiful voice never grew loud. Instead, it entered her mind as a music, a low, personal murmuring, like a lullaby: Do you remember the shepherd, Mary? She bowed her head to listen. The shepherd who dies for the sheep? The shepherd called Good? And do you remember that once I said I was he? I am.
Soon his voice alone consumed her attention, as though it were a soft stream flowing over pebbles, endlessly various, ever the same. After a while she lifted her eyes and saw that he wasn’t there any more.
Yet the Lord’s voice still murmured in her mind: I am. I am. I am—
IT WAS ON A TUESDAY, thirty-eight days after Jesus had risen from the dead, that the disciples received a short, urgent message from Mary and Martha and Lazarus: We have seen the Lord in Bethany!
Simon Peter didn’t hesitate. He set out immediately for Judea. The others followed.
Andrew made the journey mostly in silence, glad to hear the jubilant chatter of the rest—glad, too, to find Mary Magdalene often at his side. Their quietness was both mutual and pleasant.
On the first night of their trip south, the disciples stayed in Sychar, telling the Samaritans what they had seen and heard: that Jesus was alive, that he had appeared to them in Jerusalem and then in Galilee, that recently he had shown himself to more than five hundred people in one place, and that they were on their way to see him again. Such palpable excitement! A huge woman with henna in her hair and bracelets on both arms hit the table with her fist and cried, “I knew it!”
The second night they spent in Jericho with Zacchaeus, eating well and sleeping in his fine, large house.
From Jericho to Jerusalem the road was fifteen miles, uphill, and rocky. If they hurried, the disciples could cover the distance in about six hours. But the day was bright and cloudless, and the hearts of the disciples were expansive, so they set out midmorning at a leisurely pace.
As they walked, Andrew drew near to his brother and spoke quietl
y, so that no one else might hear the question.
“Simon, forgive me if I’m doubting you,” he said, “but did the curtain in the Temple really tear in two?”
His brother’s cheeks were clean-shaven again, scrubbed to a blush. His hair had been cut and washed and brushed until it puffed up like lamb’s wool. Simon strode chest-forward as if he were a wondrous thing to behold. This was the old Simon. That’s why Andrew could hazard the question.
“Yes,” said Simon. “I didn’t see it, you understand. But I believe that it tore from the top to the bottom.”
Simon walked a while thinking, then said, “See, the priests rushed out of the Temple scared to death. And they said it tore. And I saw a fear in them—I mean a stark terror in them—which proved it. They looked like men who had got caught staring into the Debir, you know. The Most Holy Place. They had seen the darkness of God, and they thought they were going to die.”
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 78