The Life of Jesus Christ

Jesus stood slowly, the crack of his knee sounding loud in the silence. Jairus was the first to speak. He cleared his throat and said, “What was it that Jonah called you?”
    Jesus smiled at him. “He obviously was out of his head.”
    Another man said, his voice hoarse, “It was not Jonah who spoke, but the demon.”
    Still another: “Not one demon, but many. And you spoke to them and banished them.”
    Jesus’ eyes became sad. “You may find the banishment short-lived.” Reaching out a hand to Jonah, he pulled him to his feet.
    “Master,” Jonah said, standing shakily, his eyes on Jesus.
    “Jonah. Go and sin no more.”
    “What do you mean, the banishment may be short-lived?” asked the man who had last spoken.
    “Master,” Jonah said, his eyes remaining on Jesus.
    “Jonah. If you do not enter into God’s kingdom, whatever evil spirits possessed you will return and each will bring with it seven spirits more wicked than itself. Do you understand? A man’s soul cannot remain empty and swept clean. Something must fill it. Seek God and His kingdom, or you will find yourself worse off than before.”
    Jonah nodded, slowly and soberly. “I will,” he said. “Thank you.”
    Jesus smiled gently, giving him a brief nod.
    Jonah walked unsteadily to the door of the synagogue, pausing for a moment in the doorway to look back.
    “You are not far from the kingdom,” Jesus said.
    A slow smile spread across Jonah’s features in answer to Jesus’ own. Then he walked through the doorway and was gone.
    “Well,” Jairus said. “Well, well.”
    Another man said, “When you say that the day of the Lord is upon us . . .”
    It was nearly an hour before he got away, and even as he left the synagogue, many of the men of Capernaum crowded close to him. Everyone was talking excitedly.
    “Perhaps the kingdom is upon us, and perhaps it isn’t,” one man in the crowd said to another. “It can’t do any harm to watch and wait, I always say. Watch and wait and we will see what comes of it.”
    Jesus’ disciples — those who had come with him to Capernaum — grouped together, staying as close as possible to each other and to Jesus.
    “Look there,” Simon the Zealot said softly into the ear of Judas. “The doors and windows.”
    The women of Capernaum stood in their doorways, children about their feet and hanging from the windows of the mud-brick houses. A few men were visible, too, coming toward them.
    “What does it mean?” asked James of Cana, who had overheard. “Where did they come from?”
    Judas shook his head. “He draws them. Somehow.”
    They turned a corner, then, and saw Jonah ahead of them, standing in the open space around the city’s well. “I’m all right,” he was saying. “I’m in my right mind, and I owe it all to a man called Jesus, who is preaching here in the synagogue.” He spotted Jesus at the head of the crowd coming toward him. “There he is! There is the man who healed me. The man who spoke to the demons which possessed me and commanded them to leave.”
    Necks craned from the doorways. Heads turned this way and that. A small crowd of boys ran toward them, calling out to each other and to their fathers, who stood around Jesus. The women came out of their houses.
    “They’re going to mob us,” said Philip, just loudly enough to be heard over the noise of the crowd. “We need to get out of town and into the open.”
    They were headed that way, walking faster as they went, but as they neared the outskirts of Capernaum they saw Jonah again, now standing with the tax collector at the toll booth on the road to the east. Jonah was pointing, and the black beard of the tax collector bristled as he craned his fat neck, searching the crowd for the man of whom Jonah spoke.
    “Levi,” Jesus called.
    The tax collector started. Though Jews did not travel on the Sabbath, others did, which was why he was at his booth. His habitual breaching of the Jewish law made him as unpopular as did collecting taxes for Rome in the first place.
    “Levi! Your house is one of the largest in Capernaum. I have need of it.”
    “My house, Master?”
    “Your house.” The crowd pressing around him was no longer silent. Voices called questions, and hands reached out to tug at his robe.
    “But what . . . what should I . . .” Levi’s pudgy hands indicated the toll booth.
    “Now, Levi.”
    He came out of the booth, a fat man with his distended abdomen straining at his tunic. “This way, Master.”
    Jesus caught Simon Peter’s eye and gestured with his head. Simon Peter linked arms with him and applied his shoulder to the seemingly amorphous crowd. It shifted subtly — far enough for them to make the turn off the main road in pursuit of Levi.
    This street was narrower, and the pressure of the crowd against them increased. The younger James whimpered. The noise of the crowd had grown to a dull roar, any words indistinguishable.
    “Must have . . . every person . . . in this blessed town here with us,” said Simon Peter, driving and pulling them through the bottleneck of the narrow lane.
    “Here. In here.” Levi was ahead of them, on the stoop of a large house.
    “Follow him,” Jesus said.
    Jesus mounted the stoop and entered the house with Simon Peter, John, and the younger James crowding in close behind him.
    “Quick, bar the door,” said Simon Peter.
    “No.” Jesus’ eyes swept the room. “Can we place the couch up on that heavy oaken table?”
    Levi nodded, his hands clasped in front of his expansive stomach. “Anything, Master.”
    Jesus bent to one end of the couch, nodding for Simon to take the other. They lifted it onto the table. There were people all around them, now, filling the courtyard without, filtering through the door as a couple of boys, unable to compete with the press of people, climbed through a window.
    “Let’s swing this whole thing back against the wall,” Jesus said. He and Simon Peter lifted, the cords in Jesus’ neck standing out and even Simon Peter’s face reddening with the strain. When the table was against the wall, Jesus stepped up onto it and sat down on the couch.
    “Good people of Capernaum,” he said in ringing tones that silenced the general hubbub. “Why do you follow me so closely? Is it because you find your friend Jonah restored to his right mind?” To call Jonah a friend was to speak euphemistically; Jonah was unbalanced, and as such was an outcast, a pariah. “No, you have glimpsed a treasure half-buried in a field. Do you feel it, the sense of tremulous expectation? In your joy you would sell everything you have to buy that field. The kingdom of heaven is a pearl of great price. A gem merchant, when he glimpses it, will sell everything he has to possess it.” A shaft of sunlight broke through the roof to shine on Jesus’ face and to outline his hair. Several in the crowd, their excitement at a fever pitch, mistook the light for glory, blazing down from heaven. When Jesus raised his eyes, everyone else looked up as well.
    The sun was coming through a hole in the mud-caked reeds that made up the roof. Beyond the hole were people, several of them, standing on the roof. Another mat of reeds came away, expanding the hole, and chunks of mud fell down into the house.
    “Hey, you there,” Levi called angrily. “That’s my roof. Hey!”
    The men on the roof moved something over the hole, blocking the sunlight. The something was a man tied to a stiff pallet, his legs angling in through the roof. The sunlight appeared about him again as he was lowered into the house, suspended by ropes. He came to rest on the floor of the house directly in front of Jesus. He was pale and thin. His legs were sticks, emaciated and useless.
    “Good sir,” he said, his voice cracking. “Good sir.”
    “Yes, my son?”
    “Pray for me, Rabbi. Will you pray for me?”
    “What would you have me pray?”
    “It is said that the prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much, and I have been like this all of my life.”
    Jesus looked down at him, his brows knit together, his expres¬sion compassionate.
    “I have sinned. I have sinned as have my fathers before me. It is my sin which has done this to me.”
    “Has it?”
    “Rabbi, I feel the weight of it. It is a restless burden that never goes away.”
    “Be at peace, then. Your sins are forgiven you.”
    Exclamations of surprise echoed back and forth among the crowd, accompanied by the hiss of much whispering.
    “Jesus,” Jairus said in a scolding voice. “Only God may forgive sins.”
    The paralytic twisted his neck toward the sound of the voice.
    “You think I speak idly?” Jesus said. “No. Rejoice with me, for this day God has given to one man the power to forgive sins.”
    “You refer to yourself, sir? That would be blasphemy.”
    “Which is it easier to say to this man, ‘Your sins are forgiven’ or ‘Arise, pick up your mat, and walk’?”
    Jairus smiled condescendingly. “A man may say either of those things easily enough,” he said. “With little effect in either case.”
    “I suppose he may.” Jesus looked down at the paralytic before them. “What is your name, son?”
    “Jether, Rabbi.”
    “Arise, Jether. Pick up your mat and walk.”
    All eyes were on Jesus; then gradually, one set at a time, they turned to the young man, the paralytic. Jether’s larynx bobbed in his thin neck, and tears welled in his eyes. “Rabbi, I cannot,” he said.
    “By faith a man may do all things,” Jesus said. “If a man has faith the size of a mustard seed, he may say to a mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and the mountain will move. I say now to you, ‘Get up.’”
    Jether’s face had become the color of raw liver. His mouth opened, and, as tears started down his cheeks, his face crumpled into a mask of abject misery. “Rabbi, I cannot,” he repeated.
    “If you say you cannot, you cannot indeed. Would you be a cripple all your life?”
    A sob broke from him, sounding no more human than a donkey’s bray. He rolled to his side and with his hand drew a knee up under him. For some time he lay like that, his face pressed hard against the limestone floor, tears working their way out of eyes squeezed tightly shut and dripping from his face to the floor. Except for the sound of his labored breathing, the room was silent.
    Jesus got down from the elevated couch and knelt beside him. His hand gripping Jether’s thin upper arm, he said, “Come on now. Let’s get up together.”
    Jether lifted his head.
    Jesus smiled encouragingly. “Come on,” he said.
    Jether drew his other leg under him. There was a gasp from someone nearby: Jether had moved the leg without help from his hands. Jesus pulled him up, and Jether staggered as his foot turned so that the sole of it touched the ground. Jesus held onto him until he was on both feet, standing hunched and swaying.
    “You did it,” Jesus said to him. “You’re standing.”
    Jether looked at him, his mouth half-open in stunned disbelief.
    “Go on.”
    Eyes wide with fright, Jether straightened.
    “Reach down for your mat.”
    Slowly, he stooped for it, groping, Jesus still holding to his arm. He stood again with his mat. He looked out over the watching crowd. He took a step toward them, and the crowd scrambled back as if he were a corpse risen from the grave, clearing a path for him all the way to the door.
    Jether looked back at Jesus, and Jesus nodded. “Go on,” he said.
    Jether turned and, tottering, went out.
    The path through the crowd closed up again. All eyes were on Jesus. Old Jairus was staring, too, his arm out and his finger extended, trembling, toward Jesus. “You,” he said. “You healed that man.”
    “What happened?” said another voice. “What did you do?”
    “It’s some sort of trick.”
    “A trick?” Jesus said. “How long has Jether lived among you?”
    “Heal me, Master,” came a quavering voice. “Heal my crippled hands.”
    “Come with me to my house and bless my child.”
    The crowd closed on him, hands reaching out from it to grasp and clutch at him.
    One of the hands was Levi’s. “This way, Master,” he said. “This way.”
    Jesus followed him into the next room, and from that room to the next. His disciples struggled after him, pushing at the crowd that followed.
    “Through the window,” Levi said, and Jesus stepped up onto a carved chest of reddish mahogany and from there to the sill of the window.

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