Jesus Christ: A Fictional History. Chapter 7.
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.