The Life of Jesus Christ

    No one denies that Jesus had a human nature, and much of what he did, perhaps most of what he did, was through the exercise of his merely human abilities.  Intellectually, he was gifted enough for his words to inspire wonder, even among his enemies. 
    Some of what he did, though, makes sense only in reference to his divine nature.  Miracles are recorded in all four gospels.  Interwoven with all that Jesus did and said, it is impossible to delete them without rendering what is left of the gospels all but incoherent.  Of the thirty-three recorded miracles between Cana and Calvary, six were exorcisms — miracles that seem to create more problems for the modern mind than the raising of Lazarus.  If Jesus came across six cases of demonic possession in a three-year period, there is every reason to believe that demonic possession is a modern occurrence as well.  It is difficult, though, to accept that demons are the cause of some of the physical and mental afflictions we now understand, or try to understand, in scientific terms.
    Some suggest that Jesus himself did not believe in demonic possession, that he spoke as if to demons because of the beliefs of his audience.  Nowhere else, though, does Jesus nurture ignorance in spiritual matters, and he doesn’t sound like he’s pandering.  When a demon speaks, we get the impression that its superiors have put it up to ask a question:  “We know by now that you are the Christ, but what does that mean exactly?  What are your plans, and how will they impact the lord of hell?”  The gospels portray Jesus contending “not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness.”
    Gloriously, we get no impression at all that they are evenly matched.

They made camp that night by the Sea of Galilee, a lake thirteen miles long by eight miles wide. In large part because it lies 450 feet below sea level, its climate is almost tropical, even in the early spring when in the highlands of Galilee the nights are cold. Jesus rose alone during the fourth watch, well before dawn, and walked along the north shore in silence, feeling a peaceful communion with nature.
    “‘O Lord, my Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth,’” he murmured, quoting the psalm of David. The surface of the lake was luminescent in the moonlight, and in the distance torches glimmered like fireflies as fishermen plied their trade, the boats themselves visible as little more than insubstantial shadows against the water.
    “‘When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have established, what is man that you are mindful of him and the Son of Man that you care for him?’”  There was peace to be found in nature, peace in the ancient praises, peace in the presence of the Father. Of his Father. His relationship with the Lord God of Israel was unique. It was too wonderful to speak of without being labeled a lunatic, but it was equally undeniable. He had had visions and visitations: For him, the veil between this world and the next was wafer-thin.
    He was the Son of Man foretold of old. His relationship with God had existed long before his birth, and his growth into manhood had been an adventure of rediscovery. I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old . . . He had managed to mask the power that flowed in him, had managed to hide it completely but for Cana and the hillside above Nazareth. And, even then, Simon only half-believed, and Judas not at all.
    O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! He was filled with the sense of joyous expectancy. Today he was, he thought, to find new companions for his journey, a journey the end of which he could not yet see, but to which he looked forward with joyful expectancy.
    As if to mirror his mood, the sun had tinged the horizon ahead with an orange glow. A crescent of white light appeared suddenly atop the distant hills. It was morning.
    Jesus entered the town of Bethsaida in full daylight. Two boats were drawn up against the bank, and five men squatted between the boats, each working with twine to mend the tears in two great nets.
    “Any luck?” Jesus asked, stopping near them.
    Four of the men looked up; the other, grizzled and heavy, continued working on his net. One of the four sprang to his feet. “No, Rabbi. We worked all night, and we caught nothing.”
    “Andrew,” Jesus said, recognizing him. “We met in Judea, along the Jordan.”
    Andrew flushed. “Yes. John pointed you out to us.”
    “The Baptizer?” Another man got to his feet. He was clearly some relation to Andrew, but older — in his forties perhaps — with a neck thick enough and shoulders heavy enough to suggest the power of an ox.
    “This is my brother Simon,” Andrew said. “Simon, this is Jesus of Nazareth, the one I told you about.” Two of the others stood as well. They were little more than boys, awed and awkward in the presence of the prophet.
    The man on the ground spoke. “Are we going to mend these nets before going to bed? I thought we were going to mend these nets.” He glanced up, then went back to his work.
    “You caught nothing,” Jesus said. “Perhaps you were fishing off the wrong side of the boat.” On the ground, the old man snorted.
    “Are you a fisherman?” Andrew said.
    “A carpenter. I used to fish, though, when I was a boy, in a stream near my home.”
    “Huh,” the old man said.
    “Perhaps we could go out together one last time,” Jesus said.
    Simon answered him. “There’s no point,” he said. “Like Andrew said, we’ve been out there all night.”
    Jesus smiled at him. “You won’t catch any fish on the shore.”
    “Or on the lake, not today.”
    “Maybe today of all days.”
    Simon’s smile was disbelieving. “You want to go out there?” he said.
    Jesus nodded.
    The old man looked up again. “James,” he said. “John. Get back to work.”
    “But —”
    The old man fixed his eye on the youngest boy, and he subsided.
    Jesus was looking at Simon, who at last gave a shrug of his heavy shoulders. “Why not?” He lifted the prow of his boat and drove it back into the water, wading in behind it. “You realize,” he said, turning back. “You realize that if we catch nothing, there are some who will doubt you’re really a prophet.” He cocked an eyebrow.
    “Some,” Jesus said agreeably.
    “You say go, we go,” said Simon, and he pulled his boat closer to the shore. “Watch your step now… Can’t have a prophet getting his sandals wet.”
    “No, we can’t have that.” Jesus rested one hand lightly on Simon’s shoulder as he stepped into the boat.
    “Whoa,” Simon said, steadying. “You need to keep your weight low in the boat. That’s it. Andrew? Coming?”
    They all got in, and Simon used an oar to push off from the shore.
    “Are you going to put up the sail?” Jesus asked.
    “No.” Simon, slipping the oars into the oar-locks, braced his feet and began to row. Andrew had busied himself readying the nets. “We’ll take it out just far enough that there could be a shoal of fish; we’ll give it one cast, and we’ll go back in.”
    “Putting me to the test,” Jesus said.
    “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
    “Just don’t cast until I tell you.”
    “Just say the word.”
    All was silent but for the plopping sound each time the oars hit the water and the subsequent swish of the oar through water and the creak of wood.
    “You know why we fish at night, don’t you?” Andrew asked.
    “Because the water’s beautiful in the moonlight?”
    Simon laughed out loud. “You’ve got brass, prophet,” he said. “I like that.”
    “Because the fish are drawn to the light of the torches,” Andrew said. “When we see them disturb the surface of the water, we cast.”
    “Is your net ready now?” Jesus asked.
    “It’s ready.”
    “Then drop it right there,” he said, pointing.
    Andrew saw it, too, and he threw out the net, spinning it wide and watching it sink slowly below the surface of the water, dragged by the weights along its edge. He still held the rope in his hand.
    “How does it work?” Jesus asked.
    “I pull the rope, and it closes the net under the fish,” Andrew said. “Then we pull it in.” As he said that last, he began drawing swiftly on the rope.
    “We’ve got us a haul,” he said to Simon. “I think we’ve got us a haul.” Sitting and bracing his feet, he pulled, and the boat tipped alarmingly, sending Jesus and Simon against the other side of the boat to stabilize it.
    “Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” Simon said. “What did you get there, a whale?” He reached for the rope to help his brother, but each time he shifted his weight the boat began to tip. Andrew himself was reared back across his seat, his head nearly resting on the side of the boat opposite the net.
    “I’m not sure I can hold it,” he said between clenched teeth.
    Simon cupped his hands around his mouth. “Little help,” he called in the direction of the shore. “Little help.”
    They all heard the net rip.
    “Ease off there, ease off,” Simon said, reaching again for the rope and this time catching hold of it. “Don’t lose them.”
    Help, when it came, was in the persons of James and John in their father’s boat. They drew up on the other side of the net, and, reaching out, James looped a rope around the net and tied it off. Then he secured his end of the rope to his own boat.
    “What do we do now?” James said.
    “Tow it in between us,” Simon answered. “Unless you’ve got a better idea.”
    He didn’t. Andrew managed to tie his rope to a ring set near the stern of the boat. The boat was righted, and Simon sat again at the oars.
    They were longer getting back than they had been going out. When they reached the shore, Simon and Andrew and James splashed over the side of the boat and, each grasping a portion of the net, staggered up onto the bank, dragging it with them. The silver fish glinted in the sun, several escaping the net and flopping in the dirt, a couple splashing into the water.
    Everyone was grinning hugely: Simon and Andrew, James and John, and Jesus. James dropped to the ground, rolling onto his back and squinting up into the morning sun. Simon, dropping the net, stood with hands on hips watching Andrew help Jesus step from the boat to the shore and then help John pull the boats onto the shore.
    “You’re all grinning like a pack of jackals,” the old man said sourly.
    “Look,” John said. “Look what we caught.”
    Simon said, “Yes. I never thought I’d be taught to fish by a carpenter.”
    The old man stood. “Looks like I’m getting in the way of all this sweet talk. I’m going home.”
    “Don’t mind old Zebedee,” Andrew said to Jesus, speaking softly.
    “James,” Zebedee called, looking back over his shoulder. “John. It’s time to go home now.”
    James and John looked at Jesus, uncertainty plain on their faces. Zebedee stopped and walked back toward them. “Look,” he said. “When I’m gone, then you can neglect your trade and follow around after every wandering preacher that comes along. Until then —”  He jerked his head and turned back up the slope toward the mud-brick houses of Bethsaida.
    “No.” The voice was James’s. He stood very straight, and his face was set. “This is something we have to do, Father.”
    Zebedee turned back toward them, walking up to James and setting himself in front of him, his feet planted wide. “What do you mean, no?” he said. “Is this man your father? Is he the one who raised you, who taught you the difference between right and wrong, who taught you his trade? Or is he someone you’d ever laid eyes on before an hour ago?” He turned to Jesus. “You, sir. You’re a man of God, so-called. Remind my son of the great commandment: Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long upon the earth.”
    James and John both looked at Jesus, John anxiously.
    “It is not the greatest of the commandments,” Jesus said.
    “No?” Zebedee said. “What is the greatest commandment, then?” he said. “God spoke them all.”
    “Yes, but not all equally.”
    “I’m waiting to hear the greatest.”
    When he spoke, Jesus’ voice was soft, its rhythm graceful, almost lilting. “Hear, O Israel,” he said, beginning his recitation of the Shema, the confession of faith with which a Jew rose each morning and went to bed each night. “‘Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.’  That is what your sons must consider, Zebedee: Can they love God more by staying with you or by coming with me to witness the dawn of the kingdom?”
    The word kingdom was one to raise gooseflesh on everyone there. Zebedee turned again to his sons. “Well, which is it?” he said, his voice gruff.
    James and John looked at Jesus.
    “Very well.” Zebedee cleared his throat. “Very well,” he said again. He turned to start back up the slope. “A man must do what he must,” he said, perhaps to himself. “Be it right or wrong, he must do what he must.” He said more, but his voice faded to inaudibility as he drew further away.
    “That was hard, Rabbi,” John said, looking at Jesus. “That was very hard.”
    Jesus’ face was drawn up in compassion. “I know, son,” he said. “I know.”
    “Rabbi,” Simon said. “You speak of following you, but we can’t do that. I, at least, can’t do that. You are a man of God, and I’m a fisherman.”
    “Yes, and today I have shown you how to catch fish. Come with me, and I will show you how to be fishers of men.”
    Simon shook his head. “What does that mean? Fishers of men.”
    “It means that the kingdom of God is upon us.”
    Simon pointed past him. “Are those men looking for you?”
    Jesus turned and saw Judas and Simon and James of Cana walking swiftly toward him.
    “Yes, I think they are.”
    “They are your companions?”
    “Yes.”
    “Master,” James said as they approached. “We’ve been looking for you. Judas said that you’d deserted us.”
    “I won’t desert you. Judas and Simon, this is Andrew and Simon. James and John, this is James Bar-Alpheus, of Cana.”
    “This is going to get confusing,” Simon the fisherman said.
    “Yes, I see how it could be. How about Big James and Little James?”
    James of Cana looked swiftly at his older counterpart. “James the younger?” he said.
    Jesus laughed. “So be it. And Simon, I’ll call you Simon Peter. Simon —”
    “The stone,” the fisherman said. It was one of the few Greek words he happened to know. “Because I’m stone-headed?”
    “The Rock,” Jesus said. “Simon the Rock.” He thumped Simon’s hard shoulder. “Perhaps I should say Simon the Boulder.”
    Simon Peter grinned down at him. “Okay,” he said. “Simon the Rock. Who here’s had breakfast? Let’s carry these fish up the hill into town, and we’ll have some.”

Simon Peter lived with his mother-in-law in a two-room house with mud-brick walls and a thatched roof. He was evidently a good fisherman. Though dirt floors were common in Palestine, the floor in their house consisted of slabs of basalt, cracked and uneven. Simon’s straw pallet was in the front room, in a corner.
    The tiny window in the back room was covered, and the room was dark, even at mid-day. A woman lay on the pallet against the far wall, her hair matted and disheveled, her cheekbones prominent in her thin face.
    As Jesus entered the room with Simon, a long, hacking cough racked her frame. When it was over, she said in a weak voice, “Is that you, Simon? Who is it you have with you?”
    Jesus dropped to a knee beside her bed. “My name is Jesus,” he said.
    She held out a bony hand to him, and he took it in his. “Leah,” she said, giving him her own name. “I’m afraid I don’t look like much. You’d hardly believe I’m only two years older than Simon.”
    “I would believe it,” Jesus said. “But you’ve been sick, and it’s taken its toll on you.” He laid a calloused hand on her forehead.
    “How long have you been like this?” he said.
    Another fit of coughing left her too weak to answer. Simon answered for her: “Since the autumn. We’re afraid —”  He broke off.
    Leah’s breath was rasping. “Go ahead and say it,” she gasped, panting. “— afraid she doesn’t have much longer.”
    Jesus jerked his head at Simon, motioning him out. “I’ll sit with her awhile,” he said.
    Simon nodded and retreated into the other room. Jesus looked down into Leah’s face. Her eyes were dark shadows in the darkness.
    “How long has Simon been a widower?” he asked.
    “Two years. In the last two years, I’ve buried a husband and a daughter.”
    He nodded. “It’s been hard for you — though I think you’ve reached a turning point.”
    “Have I?”
    “From now on, things will be better for you.”
    For a time she didn’t answer. Her breathing had quieted so much that she might have fallen asleep. “If you say so, sir,” she said.
    “I say so.” He sat holding her hand and looking down into her face.
    “Just now I do feel better,” she said. “It seems the pain in my chest isn’t so bad as it usually is.”
    “No?”
    “No. If you’ll believe it, these are the easiest breaths I’ve taken in months.”
    He squeezed her hand.
    “As a matter of fact…” She struggled to sit up, and he helped her, slipping his arm around her and drawing her up in the bed until she could lean her back against the wall. “Ah,” she said. “That’s better.” She emitted a little chuckle, and, out in the front room, Simon’s head swung toward the back of the house. “Oh. I should have been sitting up all along, I guess.” She met Jesus’ eyes.
    “There’s something special about you, isn’t there?” she said.
    He smiled. “There’s something special about you, too,” he said.
    “I almost feel like getting up and making everyone some breakfast. It sounds like Simon has quite a crowd out there.”
    “I can pour a little water in your basin there, and you can wash up. If you’d like.”
    “I would.” She nodded, coming to a decision. “Yes, I think I’d like that.”
  
Jesus came out into the front room supporting her with a hand at her elbow, another about her waist.
    “Leah,” said Simon Peter, clearly stunned.
    She smiled at him. Her hair was combed and her face washed, and, with Jesus’ support, she swayed only slightly on her bony legs. “You’ve got some fish to clean, if you want them for breakfast,” she said.
    Simon stared.
    “I don’t know what we’ll do with the rest of them. Salt them, I guess, if we want them to keep.”
    “We . . .,” John began and stopped. “We were going to take perhaps half of them to our house, so our mother could take them to market.”
    “We do so appreciate Salome,” Leah said. “She’s been a blessing throughout all of my long illness.
    “If one of you can make me a fire, and you, Simon, clean those fish, I’ll get to work on something to go with them.”
    “Do you think —”
    “Oh, I think,” she said. “I think. You can’t know what a blessing it is to be up and doing something.”
    John stepped toward her suddenly and embraced her thin frame. “Leah,” he said. “Leah, you’re better. I’m so happy.” Jesus, who let go of her as John took her, stepped away from them.
    “I’m better,” Leah told John, as she smiled at Simon Peter over his shoulder. “I really am better.”

Some Christians seem to believe that all of God’s laws have equal weight.  Any situation that puts two of the laws into conflict then presents an ethical dilemma that cannot be resolved.  In Jesus’ day, there were 613 laws that, according to the scribes, had to be obeyed.  We can deride these many rules as man-made law, but even the ten commandments, written by God’s own finger, were subordinate to principles that were more fundamental still.
    When the scribe asked Jesus which was the greatest commandment, Jesus did not name any of the ten.  Quoting a passage in Deuteronomy, he said the greatest commandment was to love God.  The second greatest was to love people — as Leviticus put it, to love one’s neighbor as one’s self.  Even between these two obligations, there is a definite priority.  So much greater is the obligation to love God, that, in comparison, one must “hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life” (Luke 16:26).

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal sounds like it has to be disrespectful and profane — the definition of blasphemous  — and I doubt even the author would disagree that it is. It begins, “You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don’t. Trust me. I was there. I know.” With this, Moore neatly sidesteps the problem faced by any recounter of the gospel narrative: How suspenseful can a story be, when everybody already knows how it ends?

The novel begins in modern-day American and contains Buddhist and Hindu subplots. In recounting the unknown years of Jesus’ life, Moore explains the origin of the Easter bunny and other mysteries.

One MySpace blogger, praising the “rad sense of humor,” promises that the book will make you pee in your pants. She quotes a particularly vulgar passage to make her point. It seems to be the most quoted passage of the  book.

On the plus side, some of Amazon.com’s Christian customers say that the novel gave them a stronger sense of Jesus’ humanity — which, of course is the core of the gospel:  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

After spending three days in Sychar, they continued on to Galilee, going first to Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown. Nazareth was a sleepy village nestled in a hollow on the wooded, lower slopes of Galilee. There Jesus’ mother and sisters received them graciously and his brothers a little awkwardly, being dismayed to find Jesus still in the company of Zealots.
    When the Sabbath came, all the men walked to the synagogue, where everyone sat on benches along two walls. The keeper of the synagogue led them in a brief worship, all reciting the familiar prayers in unison.
    “As you know,” he said, when it came time for the reading of the scripture, “we have a practice of inviting distinguished visitors, when we have them, to select and read our scripture and to expound upon it. Today we have visiting us one of our own, one who plied his trade in carpentry among us for many years but who has embarked on a new path. I understand he has been teaching in Jerusalem in the temple itself, in Solomon’s Portico. Jesus, will you do us the honor?”
    Jesus stood, smiling, and stepped up onto the dais at one end of the room. All the members of the synagogue stood with him; no one sat for the reading of Scripture.
    Selecting a scroll from among the several the attendant held out to him, Jesus unrolled it and read from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” He read it in ancient Hebrew, which the keeper of the synagogue repeated in Aramaic, the common tongue. Only the learned could speak and understand Hebrew.
    Jesus rolled up the scroll again and returned it to the attendant. Then he sat in the chair on the platform to deliver his exposition of the passage. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your presence,” he said.
    Jesus’ brother Simon blinked.
    Jesus didn’t say anything else.
    “What do you mean?” said an old man named Levi, who owned a vineyard just east of town. “You speak very well; tell us what you mean.”
    Jesus looked around at them. Every eye was fixed on him expectantly. “Today,” he said, speaking slowly. “This scripture has been fulfilled in your presence.”
    “What is he talking about?” Levi said querulously. “Somebody tell me what he’s talking about. This is a Messianic passage, isn’t it? It refers to the Messiah who is to come?”
    Jesus looked at him.
    “You can’t mean . . .,” Levi began.
    “‘The one who is to come’ must of necessity become one day ‘the one who has arrived,’ don’t you agree?” asked Jesus.
    Jesus’ brother Simon stood, and his brothers James and Judas with him. “But I am the son of your father,” Simon said. “As is James and Judas and Joseph.”
    Jesus raised an eyebrow. “Where is it written that the Messiah will be an only child?”
    “But we know you,” said Levi. “I remember you when you were a babe in arms, when you suckled at your mother’s breast.”
    “In the words of Isaiah, ‘There shall come forth a shoot out of Jesse, and a branch shall come from his roots.’  The Messiah will be born and grow up like other men. He will have a mother to suckle him and neighbors to watch him to grow in favor with God and man.”
    “This is nonsense,” Levi said, crossly. “I’m going home.”
    “I’ve just been in Samaria,” Jesus said. “In the village of Sychar. So glad were the people there to receive me and my message that I stayed with them for three days.”
    “So what do we care? What do we care about those heathen devils?”
    “Do you remember Elijah, whom God sent to the widow in Sidon when the famine gripped all of Palestine? Do you think there were no widows in Israel?”
    Levi had stopped in the middle of the synagogue. His eyes, though dark, were bright with the intensity with which they were focused on Jesus. Everyone was staring.
    “Do you remember Elisha? Do you think there were no lepers in Israel in his time? Yet none was cleansed of his leprosy — only Naaman the Syrian.”
    Old Levi was trembling, but Jesus continued, relentlessly: “The most honored of prophets receives no honor in his own country or among his own kin or in his own house. And those who reject God’s prophet cannot receive God’s blessing. God will send his prophet elsewhere: to the Samaritans, to the Syrians, to the Gentiles.”
    Levi rushed him, brandishing his cane like a club. Jesus sidestepped its descent, but the force of Levi’s charge sent them both staggering into the wall at the end of the sanctuary, and Levi’s gnarled fingers closed on Jesus’ throat. Judas Iscariot, stepping up behind Levi, slipped his arms beneath Levi’s and brought his hands up behind Levi’s head. As he lifted him off Jesus, Levi’s skinny legs were kicking like a small child’s. “Not as good as the Gentiles, are we?” Levi screamed, his arms waving. “Not as good as the Samaritans!”
    Two of Jesus’ brothers clutched at Judas. James of Cana, when he tried to help Judas, received an elbow just below his breastbone, and he went sprawling backwards. The crowd of men surrounding Judas seemed to be a single thrashing organism, and there were others who slipped past them to clutch at Jesus, to seize him and lift him bodily and carry him out of the synagogue.
    Simon the Zealot, caught up in the same pile-up as Judas, saw what had happened, and he shouted, “They’ve got him. Jesus — they’ve taken him. He’s gone.” He dropped to the floor and pushed on all fours through the braced and thrusting legs to the door. James of Cana, still sick from his blow, saw him go. He rolled onto his hands and knees and scrambled after him, a forearm pressed hard to his abdomen.
    In the street, Simon looked wildly this way and that. He saw no one, but he heard voices, ugly voices, coming from the slope above the town. James appeared in the doorway. “Follow me,” Simon shouted to him, and he sprinted around the corner of the synagogue, his short, black beard jutting forward like the quills of an alarmed porcupine.
    From the back of the synagogue, the crowd was visible through the just-budding branches of a grove of fig trees. The crowd was pushing toward a place where the ground dropped away, and Jesus stumbled ahead of them, resisting and giving way and calling members of the crowd by name.
    Judas came out of the synagogue, a half-dozen of Jesus’ townsmen dragging at him, holding him.
    “They’re going to throw him off,” Simon called out to him, hopping and gesturing with his bony arms. “They’re going to throw him off.”
    And indeed it seemed that they would succeed. They had Jesus on the very edge of the precipice, the ground giving and crumbling beneath his feet, when a burst of light, visible for only an instant, blinded them and sent members of the crowd stumbling into each other. Jesus, himself apparently unblinded, pushed his way through them and came down the hill.
    “What happened?” Simon asked him, blinking his own eyes against the dark spots that seemed to swim before him. “What happened up there?”
    Jesus took his arm. “Come,” he said. “Come,” he said to James and to Judas, and they walked down the street and out of Nazareth without saying good-bye to anyone.

“What happened back there?” Simon asked again when they were perhaps a mile down the road that led in the direction of the Sea of Galilee. “What did you do?”
    “Nothing.”
    “But I saw a light.”
    “Do you remember the words of the Psalmist concerning those who dwell in the shadow of the Most High and rest in the shadow of the Almighty?”
    “No,” said Simon testily.
    “‘For He will command His angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways,’” Jesus said, quoting. “I’ve had the passage quoted to me recently, in another context.”
    “What context?”
    “I’ll tell you later, when you’re ready to hear it.”
    “You mean an angel saved you?” James asked him.
    “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Judas said dryly. “I too saw a flash of light, reflecting off a glass or a mirror.”
    “I didn’t see any glass,” Simon said.
    “You need to have seen neither a glass nor an angel to believe one was there,” Jesus told him. “The question is, Are you more ready to believe in a chance reflection or in God’s providence?”
    Simon’s mouth worked as he thought about it. “I don’t know what to believe,” he said.
    “Ask Judas. He’ll tell you.”
    Judas looked sharply at Jesus, but said nothing.

Two friends run across each other in an airport.  Is chance at work, or divine providence?  Each is at the airport as the result of a chain of decisions and events, but the presence of both at the same moment cannot be explained by the causes that have determined their independent paths.  Chance?  If chance refers to something God did not foresee and did not plan for, then Christianity denies the existence of chance.  Nothing happens at random in the world. 
    Augustine said that chance, what he called “fortuitous cause,” refers not to the absence of causes but merely to hidden causes - ultimately, to God’s will.  Aquinas asks us to imagine two servants sent by their master to the same place.  To them their meeting appears to be by chance, but it has been fully foreseen, even purposed by their master. 
    To believe, with Aquinas, that “all things must of necessity come under God’s ordering” requires faith, but a belief in blind chance requires a faith of its own.

In 1998 the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Jose Saramago, “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.”

His book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ has been described as “irreverent, profound, skeptical, funny, heretical, deeply philosophical, provocative and compelling.“  In the novel, Joseph overheard a soldier talking about Herod’s plan to slaughter the infant boys of Bethlehem (rather than learning it from an angel, as in the gospels).  Joseph acted in stealth to save his own son, but did nothing to avert the general carnage.  Guilt plagued him for the remainder of his life, as Saramago works out his astonishment at Joseph’s chosen course of action.

Written in Portugese under the title O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, it is available to English-speakers in translation.

They left the next day to return to Galilee, saying good-bye to Lazarus and his sisters. Jesus led the way north along the road, and Simon and Judas and James followed at a little distance.
    Simon said to Judas, “Why are we going this way?”
    “Ask him,” Judas said, gesturing toward Jesus ahead of them.
    “Does he know we didn’t bring provisions for our trip?”
    “I don’t know what he knows.”
    Simon took a breath. “I’ll talk to him,” he said, and he quickened his pace until he drew abreast of Jesus.
    “Master,” he said.
    Jesus looked at him, nodded. “Simon,” he said.
    “Do you realize that this road passes through Samaria?”
    “Does it?” And he continued walking.
    “Master . . .”  Though his legs were longer, Simon was having some trouble matching Jesus’ stride.  “Master, I…”
    Jesus turned his head toward him again, and Simon fell silent.
    “Have you ever looked at a map, Simon?”
    “Of course.”
    “It is true that we can walk a day’s journey to the Jordan, go up the river along the other side, and cross back over the Jordan again into Galilee —”
    “Yes,” Simon said, nodding. “That is the way it is always done. Especially since we must purchase food and water along the way.”
    “But it’s a circuitous route that requires six days of travel. If we walk in a straight line, we can make our trip in three.”
    “But the Samaritans —”
    “Simon. Are you trying to tell me that Samaritans live in Samaria?”
    Simon’s face cleared. “Yes, that’s it. That’s it exactly.” Israel’s northern kingdom — the capital city of which had been Samaria — had been conquered by the Assyrians seven centuries ago and its people deported into foreign lands. Unlike the Jews of Judah, themselves conquered and deported some centuries later, the deported Israelites had intermarried and disappeared in the foreign lands, never to return. The Israelites left in Israel, mostly those too old or too young or too weak or too sick to survive a journey, had intermarried with the people the Assyrians brought in from other countries. They had given up their racial and religious purity and their right to be called Jews.
    “You’re concerned that we’ve brought no provisions with us from the house of Lazarus,” Jesus said.
    “Remember the words of the rabbi: ‘Let no man eat of the bread of the Samaritans, for to eat of their bread is to eat the flesh of swine.’”  Simon, though no scholar, was familiar with those writings and traditions that condemned the Gentiles, and such he considered the Samaritans — Gentiles, and, because of their heritage, particularly odious.
    “And the flesh of swine is unclean, forbidden to God’s people,” Jesus said. All this time, he had continued northward, walking at a brisk pace. “I see,” he said.
    “We can hardly go three days without eating, Master.”
    “No. We can hardly do that.” But he continued walking.
    Routed, Simon dropped back to walk with the others. “It does no good,” he said. “I can’t reason with him.”

Shortly before noon, they came to a fork in the road, just short of the town of Sychar. Jesus approached the well and sat on the stones at the edge of it.
    “Without a rope or a bucket, we have no means to draw water from it,” Judas said. All of them were hot and flushed from the exertions of travel, and Judas was in a foul mood as well.
    Jesus put his head over the well, and he felt the cool, damp air against his skin. He sighed. “Ah, what I’d give for a sip of that water,” he said.
    Judas grimaced in exasperation. “We shouldn’t have come this way. We all need something to drink — and eat, too.”
    Jesus wiped his forehead with his palm, and it came away wet with perspiration. “Fortunately, there’s a town nearby.”
    “I’m not going into Sychar,” Simon said.
    “Nor am I,” Judas said.
    Jesus looked at James. James looked startled.
    “With you? Wherever you’re going, I’m willing to follow.”
    Jesus shifted his gaze to Judas and Simon.
    For a moment, neither said anything. “Oh, of course, if you really want to go into Sychar, we’ll go with you,” Judas said.
    Jesus nodded, smiling briefly. He stood to go, then stopped. “I need to stay here,” he said.
    “I thought you said…,” Judas began.
    “We need provisions from Sychar,” Jesus said, cutting him off, “but you’ll have to go without me.”
    Judas folded his arms across his chest. His feet were planted, his exasperation plain. Simon looked uncertain. James, noting their unwillingness, said, almost before he thought, “I’ll go.”
    Judas said, “Alone? Among Samaritans?  You won’t be safe.” To Jesus he said, “You’re not going to let the boy go into Sychar by himself, are you?”
    Jesus looked up at him and continued looking until Judas’s gaze shifted uncomfortably. “If only we had a couple of armed men here to go with him,” he said. “The boy wouldn’t have to go alone.”
    “I’ll go,” Simon said.
    Judas’s head swung toward him.
    In the end, they all three went, leaving Jesus still sitting at the edge of the well. He looked after them until the dust of the road obscured them, and he continued watching as another shape came out of the dust — a woman, walking slowly beneath a great clay pitcher.
    She stopped at a distance of some dozen paces from the well, her eyes on the ground. After standing a moment, she turned to walk the half-mile back into Sychar.
    “Did you come for water?” Jesus said, and she jumped, nearly dropping her pitcher. She stood stock still, without turning toward him.
    “Because if you did come for water, it’s still here,” he said. “I haven’t poisoned the well.”
    Her head turned, and she studied him. After giving her a moment to adjust to his appearance, he smiled at her.
    “I myself am very thirsty,” he said. “I see you brought your rope with you, and a bucket.”
    She did a full turn toward him. “What?” she said, not comprehending.
    “I’m asking for water.”
    “From me?”
    He smiled encouragingly.
    “You’re a Jew, aren’t you? Am I wrong about that?”
    “No. I am a Jew,” he said. “Is that a problem?”
    She spluttered. “A problem!” she repeated. “You’re a Jew, and I’m a Samaritan.  Doesn’t that sound like a problem?’”
    He raised his eyebrows. A half-smile touched her features.
    “Okay, so maybe it’s not a problem,” she said. “Sure, I’ll give you a drink.” Approaching the well, she put down her clay jar and uncoiled her rope and bucket from her shoulder.
    “If you knew who I am, you’d ask me for a drink,” Jesus said as she lowered the bucket.
    “It doesn’t matter who you are; you haven’t got a bucket.” Her own bucket hit the water with a faint sound that echoed far below them. “Or a rope, for that matter. I think the heat must be getting to you.”
    “Do you think so?” He wiped more sweat from his forehead. He was perspiring freely.
    “I don’t know what to think. You, a Jew, initiate a conversation with me, a Samaritan woman. You ask me for water; you offer me water — what am I supposed to think?” She drew up her bucket, pulling it hand over hand.
    “Perhaps you and I aren’t talking about the same kind of water.”
    “There’re different kinds of water? No. Water is water, my friend.” She reached down to grasp her bucket and pulled it out. “I just have the one ladle,” she said. “From what you’ve said so far, I don’t guess that’s a problem, either.”
    Jesus smiled and took the ladle from her. His head went back, and his throat worked as he drank.
    Watching him, the woman said, “So what kind of water are you talking about?”
    “Living water.”
    She stood looking down at him, her fists resting lightly on slender hips. “Do you know who dug this well?”
    “Jacob.”
    “Yes, Jacob. The patriarch. He dug the well, and he drank from it, as did his sons and his livestock. Are you greater than Jacob?”
    Jesus handed her back the ladle. “Jacob was a great man — but those who drink this water become thirsty again.”
    “You want more?” She dipped the ladle again in her bucket and handed it back to him.
    “Living water becomes a gushing spring inside you, going on forever.”
    She looked at him, then turned to look back in the direction she had come. She sat abruptly beside Jesus on the stones at the edge of the well. “Mister,” she said. “It is a half-mile from the village to this well. I come here for water every day of my life. I could use some of this living water.”
    “And how about your husband? Go and get him and bring him here.”
    She looked sidelong at him. “I don’t have a husband.”
    “But you have had a husband.”
    “How would you know?”
    “Isn’t that why you come to this well alone in the heat of the day? To avoid the other women of your village?” The women of Sychar would do as the women of any village did, gathering each morning at the well to pound soiled clothes on rocks, to gossip, to carry pitchers of water home on their heads.
    “Okay, I’ve had a husband.”
    “More than one perhaps.”
    Her mouth curled as she turned her face toward him. “You tell me,” she said.
    Jesus returned her gaze. Nothing happened but that they each sat staring into the eyes of the other. The faintest of smiles had begun to stretch her mouth when he said, “Five.”
    The smile disappeared.
    “And you are now living with a man who is not your husband.”
    She dropped her eyes. “Just my luck,” she said, looking at the ground. “When I’ve made every mistake a woman can make, who do I meet at Jacob’s well but a prophet?”
    “A little more than luck, wouldn’t you say?”
    “What would you call it?”
    “Providence.”
    “You haven’t denied being a prophet.”
    “No.”
    “A prophet to the Jews or to the Samaritans?”
    “God sends his prophets to all his people.”
    “Huh. So tell me, can God only be worshipped at Jerusalem, as the Jews say, or does he honor worship on that mountain as well?” She gestured toward Mount Gerizim, which rose from the plain immediately to the west of them. Even from there they could see the white of the temple on top of it.
    “God is spirit,” Jesus said. “Those who honor him in spirit can worship him anywhere.”
    “So the Jews are wrong.”
    “No. God is as the Jews believe him to be. Though you Samari¬tans worship him, too, you don’t see as clearly who it is you are worshiping.”
    “So what’s your role?”
    “To tell you what God is like. To offer reconciliation.”
    “I thought it was the Messiah who was going to set things right between God and His people.”
    “It is.” He sat looking at her, and her eyes widened.
    “It can’t be,” she said.
    “Can’t it?”
    A man coughed, interrupting them, and the woman jumped to her feet. It was Judas, with James and Simon, returned from Sychar.
    “Oh,” the woman said. “Oh.” She bent and began gathering up her rope, not bothering to coil it but merely bundling it to her chest.
    “It’s all right,” Jesus told her.
    “Oh. Yes. Yes, of course.” And she dropped her rope. “It was a pleasure meeting you,” she said, backing. “I mean it was really good to meet you. I mean . . .”
    “I know what you mean.”
    “Good. Very good.” She bobbed her head at him a few more times, then turned north toward her village and began walking swiftly away. Jesus’ disciples stood looking after her.
    “That was odd,” Judas said.
    “She left her bucket and her water jar,” James said.
    Jesus nodded. “She was very excited.”
    “About what?”
    Jesus got to his feet without answering, and Simon held out a cloth sack.
    “Here. We brought food — some salted fish, some fruitcake.”
    Jesus held open the mouth of the bag. “Looks good. I don’t think I need it now.”
    “But —”
    “You three share it. I’ve had all the nourishment I need for the moment.”
    The disciples looked at one another.
    “Come on, let’s go.” He started off on the road into Sychar, leaving them standing.
    “Do you think she brought him food?” James whispered.
    Ahead of them, Jesus turned back. “Are you coming?”
    Judas made a face. “We’re coming.”

“You’re about to see something exciting,” Jesus said as they caught up to him.
    “What kind of food did the woman bring you?” James asked him.
    “No food.”
    “But . . .”
    Jesus grinned at James and rested an arm on James’s shoulders. “My food is to do the will of the One who sent me.”
    “You mean God?”
    “So what exciting is about to happen?” Judas asked.
    “Look about you,” Jesus said to Judas. “See how the fields are ripe for harvesting?”
    Judas did look, and what he saw were fields newly plowed and fields whose grasses were tinged with the first green of spring.
    “You’re speaking metaphorically again,” he said dryly.
    Jesus laughed out loud. “Yes, you look at these fields, and you say, ‘Four months until the harvest.’  But listen, if you had eyes to see it, you would see that the fields are already ripe for harvesting. The seed has been sown, and the reaper is gathering grain. You and I will share in that work.”
    Simon said, “Master — none of us knows what you’re talking about.”
    “Look.”
    A crowd had come out from Sychar to meet them, men and women, children in their twelfth year, just short of the responsibili¬ties of adulthood, and babes in arms. One of the men stepped forward ahead of the rest and said, “Rabbi? Shera’s been telling us about you.”
    “That you told her everything she had ever done.”
    “That you are a prophet,” said a woman, stepping forward.
    “The Messiah,” said another.
    The man who had first spoken cleared his throat. “We would like — that is, we would be most appreciative —”
    “We want you to come stay with us awhile and teach us,” the woman said.
    Jesus smiled at her. “I would like that very much,” he said.
    Anyone looking at his disciples would have seen consternation on the face of James and no expression at all on the faces of Simon and Judas; their faces might have been turned to stone.