The Life of Jesus Christ

The scribes and the Pharisees meditated on God’s law, debated God’s law, and worked to apply God’s law to every aspect of daily life.  They were fastidious in their obedience to the law.  Jesus did not seem to be.  Lawbreaker, they called him.
    He, for his part, claimed that he came “not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it…For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  His objection to the religious professionals of his day was that they used the law, not to serve God, but to keep God at a distance.  In establishing our obligations to God and neighbor, the law also limited the extent of those obligations.  A person who has obeyed the law’s every jot and tittle needs to do nothing else for anyone.  In that sense, the law was like the tax.  Pay them, and the rest of the money is yours absolutely to spend as you wish.
    Not so said Jesus.  To the young man who had observed all the commandments from his youth, Jesus said, “You lack one thing; go sell what you have and give to the poor.”  He added an internal requirement to the law.  Not only must we refrain from murder, we must not be angry.  Not only must we refrain from adultery, we must not lust.  Our possessions are not our own.  We must give to anyone who asks, even to those who take us to court with frivolous claims.
    The kingdom of heaven will not be populated by an obedient citizenry, but by those who have become — or have been made — morally perfect and perfectly selfless.

The crowds that surrounded Matthew’s house became larger, denser — and more frantic to catch sight of Jesus, to touch him, to hear him speak. The only times he could leave the house occurred early in the mornings, well before first light, when he would go out alone to walk along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, to gaze out at the torches of the fishermen far out on the water.
    The crowds troubled him. They were responsive — he was, after all, performing signs that had not been seen in Israel since the days of the prophets — but the response was different in kind from what he had hoped for, from what he had expected. His call to the Kingdom, so reminiscent of John’s, was not being answered. There was, here and there, a desire to answer it — a desire for genuine repentance — but the ability to achieve it seemed entirely absent.
    He often walked for miles in the early hours before dawn. He prayed, he thought — and he felt increasingly a sense of waiting. The current pattern of his ministry would not last, though what would replace it he did not yet know. Of one thing he was increas¬ingly certain: Human beings were lost. Man could not find his way back to God, even with God standing and beckoning to him.
    It was on one of his early morning walks that Jesus came across Simon Peter. Peter stood by the water’s edge looking out at the glittering torches.
    “Are you looking for me?” Jesus asked him.
    Peter shook his head, his eyes still on the water, then he shrugged. “I knew you were out here. I’m not sure what I was looking for.”
    “You miss it, sometimes, don’t you?” Jesus nodded toward the water, and Peter sighed in response. He looked down at his hands, rough and calloused, the knuckles of the fingers large with hard use, and he held them up.
    “I’m a fisherman,” he said. “It’s what I’ve always done; it’s what I’m good at. I feel out of place indoors so much of the time, listening to religious talk and helping with the crowds.”
    Jesus nodded. “I understand.”
    “Do you?”
    “Look at my hands. All my life I’ve been a carpenter.”
    “And you miss it?”
    “Sometimes. The smell and feel of the wood, the muscular fatigue of a good day’s work . . .”
    “Do you ever think about going back to it?”
    Jesus shook his head — a little sadly, it seemed to Peter. “I’m doing my Father’s will.”
    “God’s will?”
    “Yes. And there’s satisfaction in that, too.”
    “What about me? Am I doing God’s will?”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you sure of that?”
    Jesus looked at him. “I am sure of that,” he said.
    Peter nodded reluctantly.
    Jesus put a hand on his shoulder. “You won’t be forever without the joys of fishing. Remember? I promised you that.”
    “Ah, yes.” Peter chuckled, almost to himself. “I’m to be a fisher of men. Do you think it will have the same satisfactions for me?”
    “I do. A man who has hunted for sailfish in the Great Sea, would he return to fishing for minnows in a shallow stream?”
    Peter had never fished in the Great Sea, much less for sailfish. “Fishing for men is like hunting for sailfish in the Great Sea?”
    “And more,” Jesus said. “And more.”

The crowds no longer remained in the outer courtyard. They pressed into the house. They reached out their hands to Jesus — and even to his disciples — and they picked up such small items as could be concealed easily beneath their robes, thinking to keep them as souvenirs or talismans. During the day it was impossible for Jesus to confer with his disciples alone, impossible to rest, impossible even to eat. He had added a twelfth disciple, choosing a man named Thomas out of the crowd according to some criteria known only to himself.
    One day a woman standing in the midst of the press of people in the doorway called out to Andrew, the disciple standing nearest her, “There are people here to see Jesus. They say they are his brothers.”
    Someone behind her shouted something.
    “And his mother,” she added.
    Andrew pressed toward Jesus and bent close to him to pass on the news.
    Jesus straightened, and the crowd became immediately quiet. “Tell them to come in,” Jesus called to the woman in the doorway.
    She passed the word back, and, beyond her, Jesus’ message echoed across the courtyard.
    “They want you to come out to them,” she said at last.
    Jesus shook his head. His smile was a sad one. “I can’t go to them; they must come to me.”
    The answer echoed back toward Jesus’ waiting family.
    “Are they coming?” Jesus asked.
    There was more calling, more craning of necks. “I don’t think so,” someone said.
    Andrew leaned close to him again. “Maybe you ought to,” he said. “Your mother, your brothers.”
    “Who is my mother?” Jesus said. “And my brothers? You are all here. Those who do the will of God are my mother and my brothers.”
    “That seems rather cold,” said Judas, severely.
    “Does it? My family has heard of the work I am doing, and they come to restrain me, thinking I’m not in my right mind.”
    “Are you?” someone said.
    Jesus’ eyes sought out the speaker. “I am here to start a new family, a spiritual family. It will of necessity disrupt some of the old ones.”
    “That can’t be good,” Judas said. He spoke in a role to which the crowd had become accustomed — that of devil’s advocate.
    “I have come to set brother against brother and father against son.”
    Nathaniel, who of all the disciples was closest to being a scholar of the Scripture, felt a chill working along his spine. Jesus’ words echoed those of Zechariah and Enoch, of the greatest of the rabbis: He was describing the Day of the Lord. He was laying out, however obliquely, his Messianic claim.
    “You are to call no man father,” Jesus was saying. “For each of you has but one father, the one in heaven, who waits for your return. Listen, God is like a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Give me my share of the inheritance now . . .”

Early the next morning, before the crowd had yet become large, a young man came into the house, going from one room to the next until he came upon Jesus.
    “Joseph,” Jesus said, recognizing his brother.
    “Hello, Jesus. You’ve hurt Mother, you know.”
    “I know. I’m sorry.”
    “It’s not like we brought ropes along to tie you up. All we wanted was for you to come home with us.”
    “My work is here.”
    “Are you sure?” Joseph looked at Judas and Simon the Zealot, whom he had seen in Cana and again in Nazareth, at Simon Peter and Andrew, at the corpulent Matthew. “Why not leave it for a short time? A rest might bring you new energy.”
    “Or a new perspective?”
    “Look,” Joseph said. “It’s the time of the Feast of Dedication, and the entire family’s going to Jerusalem for it. Why don’t you come with us? From all reports, you’ve been doing all kinds of wonderful things. Why waste it all on a Galilean backwater like Capernaum?”
    “I agree with him there,” Judas said. “You’ve been doing great things. You should be in Jerusalem.”
    Jesus glanced at him.
    “Why the self-effacement?” Judas said.
    Joseph, not liking the turn the conversation was taking, said, “I was thinking of a quiet celebration of the festival, all of us together as a family.”
    “You go to the feast,” Jesus said. “You and mother and the rest. It is your time for feast-going. I can’t go without entering the public eye, and it’s not yet time.”
    “When will it be time?” Judas said.
    Joseph, looking back and forth between them, said, “Time for what? What are you planning?”
    Jesus smiled, the crinkles deepening around his eyes. “Wait and see,” he said mildly. “Wait and see.”

Simon Peter woke while it was still dark. A hand was in his back, pushing at him, and he peered upward at the shadowy figure beside him. “Jesus?” he said.
    “Yes. We’re leaving for Jerusalem this morning. Help me wake the others.”
    “But I thought you said —”
    “We’re going secretly, leaving under cover of darkness.”
    “But why —”
    “God wants me in Jerusalem. I don’t yet know why.”
    Peter sat up, rolling his head about on his shoulders to relieve his cramped muscles. Jesus moved on.
    “Andrew!” Peter said, poking at his brother with his foot. “Andrew, wake up.”
    Andrew rolled onto this back and raised his head to look at him.
    “We’re setting off for Jerusalem this morning. Jesus wants to get away before daylight.”
    Andrew groaned.
    Soon everyone was astir. Because Jesus had warned him not to wake the servants, Matthew commandeered John and James to help him gather together such provisions as he had for the trip, and he walked this way and that, giving instructions.
    They left Capernaum an hour before dawn. The stars overhead blazed in the black velvet of the sky, and the cold wind cut through their layered cloaks and tunics.
    “This is important; this is good,” Judas said several times. “We should be in Jerusalem.”
    “What Jesus’ brother said to him made sense,” said Simon the Zealot. “There is only so much that can be done staying house-bound in Capernaum.”
    “This may be where it all comes together,” Judas said. “This could be a real beginning.”
    James the younger, disturbed by their talk, quickened his pace in order to catch up with John and Peter, who were walking with Jesus.
    “Your teeth are chattering,” Jesus observed when James joined them. “Keep up a good pace and move your arms back and forth.” He demonstrated as he walked.
    “I would,” James said through his clicking teeth. “But my arms seem to be frozen in place against my sides.”
    “It will warm up at daybreak,” Peter said. “Just keep moving.”
    James nodded bravely, but the ground was hard and unyielding and almost unbearably cold through the soles of his leather sandals.

They passed through Magdala at mid-morning, and the woman Mary glided out from one of the shops to fall into step beside Jesus. More than one of the disciples failed to recognize her; James, who did, was a little staggered by the change in her appearance. Her dark hair was clean, and it shone in the cold morning sun. Her dress was neat. Her eyes were no longer shadowed, but bright and clear.
    “What happened?” James said to John, pulling him aside.
    “I imagine it comes of talking to Jesus. That often seems to cause a change in people.”
    “Is she coming with us?”
    John glanced at Mary, who, beyond her first, shy greeting, had said nothing to Jesus, but who kept glancing up at him in apparent awe as they walked.
    “I wouldn’t mind,” he said. “She’s pretty to look at.”
    James looked at her, too, surprised, almost, by the delicacy of her profile, by her soft, clear skin, by the flush of cold in her cheek. “She is, isn’t she?” he said.

Mary didn’t accompany them far beyond the borders of Magdala. They stopped for the night in Tiberius, the city of Herod Antipas, at the home of Herod’s steward, Chuza, and his wife Joanna, where lights shone in the windows.
    After long knocking, footsteps sounded in the interior of the house, and Chuza pulled open the door himself, holding up a lantern to see their faces.
    His own face was a shock, smeared with black ashes. “It’s John,” he said, recognizing Jesus. “The Baptizer. Herod has executed him.”

They talked long into the night. At some time during the third watch, when all the travelers had gone to bed but Jesus and Simon Peter, Chuza said to Jesus, “Master, I have no wish to offend you.”
    “Speak freely,” Jesus said.
    “I was with John before he died. His last words were of you.”
    “And his words troubled you.” A statement, not a question.
    “He said to ask you, ‘Are you the one who was to come, or are we to wait for another?’”
    A look of pain entered Jesus’ eyes. He sighed. “It is not the first time I’ve had word of John’s question. Didn’t he get my answer?”
    “It has not been easy for John’s disciples to reach him. Nor can I now take him back an answer.”
    “Now he has his answer. I am sorry he could not have had it when he faced his death.”
    “He had heard you no longer baptized,” Chuza said, making John’s question his own.
    “That I drank wine and ate rich food?”
    “Yes. And that neither you nor your disciples kept the fast days, nor did you wash your hands as the law prescribed.”
    Jesus exhaled noisily. He suddenly looked very tired.
    “Master?” Chuza said.
    “Have you not witnessed the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy?”
    Chuza’s expression was blank.
    Jesus began in a low voice that seemed to gain strength as he spoke. “And on that day,” he said. “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. On that day the lame shall leap like the deer, and the tongues of the speechless shall sing for joy.”
    It was a familiar prophecy, one charged with emotion, and Chuza’s eyes brimmed with tears.
    “Haven’t these signs been done in your presence?” Jesus said. “Don’t the blind see and the lame walk?”
    “Master?” said Peter, and Jesus turned to him. “It is said that John taught his disciples to pray.”
    “Yes?”
    “Being with you has made me more and more aware of God’s presence. I can feel him poking at me and prodding me. I’d like to know what to say to him.”
    Jesus smiled. “Say to him what’s on your mind. If something’s troubling you, deal with it openly in God’s presence.”
    “Yes, but —”
    “You need a model.”
    “Yes.”
    “Pray with me then.” The focus of Jesus’ gaze shifted, and he seemed to see beyond the walls of the room. “Father,” he said. “Our Father who art in heaven . . .”

Commitment to work and to family are good things.  Too little commitment to either is likely to generate scorn.  Lazy bum, goof-off, philanderer—none of these are terms of respect.  Yet it is possible to be too committed to one’s work, and workaholic is not a term of approbation. 
    It is possible even to be too devoted to one’s family.  The desire to benefit relatives does not add anything to the moral quality of lying, cheating, and stealing.  Doing what is right comes first, as does our relationship with God. 
    “Love your neighbor,” as important as it is, is only the second greatest commandment.  Our first obligation is to love God, love not in the sense of emotional attachment, but in the sense of doing things to please Him, expending physical, intellectual and moral energy in His service.  To love God first puts our other loves into redeeming perspective.

Herod Antipas was entertaining that night in honor of his birthday. He had invited the leading citizens throughout his tetrarchy to a great feast, hoping the celebration would make the remote villa at Machaeraeus more tolerable to Herodias. His hope was in vain.
    “What joy can I find in men at table?” she said.
    “But —”
    “I’m not coming. I’ll be a wife to you again in Tiberius, not here.”
    He would have liked to return to his capital city on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee. The problem was John, and the difficulties involved in transporting him to Galilee. The people were convinced he was a prophet of God. Since his arrest, sympathizers had kept up a continual vigil outside the walls of the fortress. They were present day and night.
    Though tonight, on his birthday, Herod was making an effort to forget them. Pillars lined all four sides of the great hall of Herod’s palatial villa. The pillars created a passageway around its perimeter and provided numerous places of ingress and egress for the scores of servants coming and going with huge casks of wine and carts burdened with rich food. There were exotic meats and fruits — and pastries built into great towers of ostentatious confection. Before the night was many hours old, wine and the juices of the meats had stained the lips and tunics of the host and his guests. They rested between courses as the dancers swept through the hall in a long, undulating line. Trailing long strips of gauzy fabric, the dancers entered from one side of the room and exited between two of the pillars on the other, then entered again from a third side. The faint percussion of cymbals, almost imperceptible at first, grew louder until it marked time for the weaving arms and the dancing feet.
    A gauzy streamer encircled Antipas, brushing his clothes and hair, and he guffawed with boozy pleasure. A harp rippled, and the veils of the dancers dropped to the floor in rapid succession. The harp sounded again, and, beginning at the other end of the line, the robes dropped in sequence.
    The dancers were all women, flowers woven into their long hair. Anklets and bracelets jingled on their bare legs and their upstretched arms as they advanced on the dais where Antipas reclined on his couch. Herod cackled with delighted anticipation, but the line broke just before it reached him, and the dancers fanned out through guests.
    It was midway through the dance when Herod noticed Salome, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Herodias, standing at the edge of the banquet hall. She was dressed in white. One of her slim-fingered hands rested against a pillar, and her eyes were on the dancers.
    Herod held up his goblet to his steward, Chuza, who had come from Tiberius to organize the feast. Chuza bent immediately to fill the goblet. Herod tossed back the wine and again extended his goblet. As Chuza refilled it, the lead dancer advanced on Herod, a taunting smile on her sculpted face. Her head shifted from one shoulder to the other in time to the beat of an unseen drum. Her long, bare arms moved in front of her body, weaving, reaching, as she mounted the dais. The percussion changed, becoming faster, lighter, and the dancer clasped her hands above her head, exposing her abdomen. Her hips gyrated wildly.
    “Ooh,” called several of the guests, and the sound was followed by general laughter.
    Herod groped with his goblet for the table and, not finding it, let the goblet fall to the floor. The dancer leaned backward to touch her hands to the floor and, pushing off with her foot, swung down off the dais.
    Salome’s eyes stayed on Herod, whose face was flushed and perspiring. He beckoned to her, and she came to him.
    She stood before him, slim and straight, like her mother in face, but only just developing in figure. Her eyes were large in her narrow face, innocent and fawnlike. For Herod, the music and the dancers and the laughter of his hundred guests faded into the background.
    “You’re a dancer,” he said hoarsely.
    She shook her head.
    “Your mother tells me you’re quite good.”
    A shy smile touched her lips.
    “Dance for us on my birthday.”
    Her head turned toward the hall, the men reclining on couches, the dancers just exiting through the pillars on the far side.
    “Do this for me, and ask what you will of me in return,” Herod said.
    Her eyes cut toward him. “Mother wouldn’t like it.”
    “The devil with your mother. Herodias is a jealous old crow.”
    Again the half-smile, not shy this time, but full of mystery. Herod rose from his couch. “Gentlemen,” he said, clapping his hands for their attention. “Salome, the daughter of my wife Herodias, is to dance for us this evening.”
    There was applause, a few catcalls. Salome curtseyed, that enigmatic smile still playing about her lips.
    “Salome?” Herod said. “Can you begin, or do you need some time for preparation?”
    “A quarter-hour to get into my dancing costume.”
    “Granted then. Granted!”
    She departed, and he dropped back onto his couch and reached for his goblet. “Steward!” he said. “More wine.”
    Actually, he didn’t feel quite well. Currents of indigestion roiled his bowels, and, when a burst of flatulence escaped him, it did so with a sound like a clap of thunder. Most ignored it, but there was scattered applause.
    “There are few sights and sounds more revolting than those of men eating and drinking,” Herodias said, dropping down on the foot of Herod’s couch.
    “Herodias!” Herod said, blinking at her in some alarm. “You came to my party.”
    “I understand my daughter is to be on display this evening.”
    “You said she was good. You should be proud of her.”
    “Instead of being a jealous old crow?”
    “I didn’t mean . . .”
    “I know what you meant.”
    “Then she won’t be dancing? She has to dance. I’ve announced it. If she doesn’t dance, it will make me a fool.”
    “I think your foolishness is something beyond Salome’s ability to augment or diminish,” Herodias said.
    Herod’s face flushed dark. “If Salome won’t dance, then why are you here? You’ve said men disgust you.”
    “I want to see how she does with an audience.”
    “You mean . . .”
    A drum beat started up, three long beats and two short, three long beats and two short. The crowd fell silent. A flute sounded, its song at first sedate, then increasingly frenzied. Herod, suddenly uneasy, felt his pulse quicken. A figure more geometric than human cartwheeled across the room and disappeared again on the other side. The percussion became metallic, the clash of weapon on shield. The flute was joined by another, then another. Salome came from the back of the room, flipping from hands to feet, hands to feet, her body a blur in the torchlight. She ended her run directly in front of the dais in a full split, her hands upraised. Her hair was pulled back from her face into a hard knot, and streaks of dark makeup marked her face. Though her garment was flesh-toned and form-fitting, the effect was more animalistic than feminine.
    Salome rolled to her side and pushed up into a handstand, scissoring her legs forward and backward. When she dropped into a walk, she pawed twice at the ground before each step, lifting and dropping her shoulders in time to the music, her arms unnaturally stiff at her sides. At the end of the room, she turned and pointed at Herod, who still reclined on his dais. She swept her open palm back and forth as if striking him.
    Her next run toward Herod culminated in a double flip, in which she drew her knees to her chest in the air and straightened in time to land on her feet on the dais itself. She repeated the slapping gesture, the breeze she generated stirring the very hair of Herod’s beard. She strutted first one way, then the other before his couch, her hands on her boyish hips. Herod’s tongue appeared briefly between dry lips.
    Salome placed the instep of one tiny foot on Herod’s shoulder, and his chest constricted so that he found it impossible to breathe. Slowly, slowly, she lifted the slim leg so that the toes pointed toward the vaulted ceiling. She gripped her ankle and pirouetted slowly, her torso arched, her delicate ribs showing through her thin clothing.
    For Herod the world ceased to exist but for the girl. The music of the dance was all of a piece with the movements of Salome. Time slowed as she jumped and turned and moved her arms. The torches themselves had ceased to flicker.
    Herod started, aware, suddenly, that the music had stopped and the dance was over. Salome stood motionless before her audience, one foot in front of the other, her arms upraised. His face was wet with tears as he rose to his feet. He looked around as if lost, his eyes passing over his guests and servants, over Herodias, over Salome herself. Finally, he swept the wine and grapes from a silver tray and picked it up. He dropped heavily to one knee before Salome and presented her the tray. “Instruct me with what gems and precious metals I may adorn this tray. Ask what you will of me, and I will give it.”
    The half-smile again touched her face, enigmatic and mocking. “Anything?” she asked as she took the tray.
    “Anything you ask,” he said. “Up to half my kingdom.”
    As he got to his feet, his guests began to shout, stamping their feet and pounding their tables in acclamation. Herodias gestured, and Salome went to her, bending her head to receive instruction. She went again to Herod, and he put an arm about her, raising his hand for silence.
    “Well?” he said to her. “Tell me — tell all this audience — what it is you wish.”
    She held out the tray to him. Only gradually did the crowd fall silent.
    “I ask that you present the tray to me again,” she said.
    “Yes?” he said. “Adorned with what?”
    “Adorned with the head of one they call John the Baptizer.”
    Herod felt he had been struck in the chest. The audience was silent. “Adorned with what?” he said again.
    “Adorned with the head of John the Baptizer.”
    All eyes were on him. He wet his lips and laughed, though the sound was tremulous, devoid of its usual heartiness. “Ask for something else,” he said. “A ransom in diamonds. Rubies, perhaps. Pearls.”
    “I want the head of John the Baptizer.”
    Herod shook his head, bewildered. Herodias stood, drawing his eyes. “Is the king not a man of his word?” she said.
    The eyes of his guests were on him. He started to say something, but lost the sense of it as soon as he had begun to speak.
    Herodias arched an eyebrow.
    Herod cleared his throat.
    “I repeat,” she said, stepping to Salome and resting a hand glittering with jewels on her thin shoulder. “Is the king not a man of his word?”
    He grinned foolishly, shrugging his beefy shoulders. “Herodias,” he said pleadingly.
    She shook her head and stepped off the dais, guiding Salome with her through the courtiers of Herod and the important men of Perea and Galilee.
    Just as she had reached the far end of the room, Herod called to her. “Wait,” he said.
    Herodias turned with Salome.
    “All right,” he said.
    “Yes?”
    “As you ask, so let it be done,” he said.