The Life of Jesus Christ

Early in his ministry, Jesus had revealed who he was to the Samaritan woman he met by the well in Sychar.  Many months later, he still had not told his disciples, and they, evidently, had not liked to ask. 
    Nothing in the Jewish religion had prepared them for the incarnation of God, and their Messianic expectations were not expectations that he planned to fulfill.  Ultimately, they would be faced with a new paradigm.  God was not one Person but Three.  As the parable of the sower had suggested, the Jews were not to be taken in a body into the kingdom of God; rather membership in the kingdom would depend on individual response.  As other parables suggested — the one about the great supper, and others — Gentiles would be full members in the kingdom, and the Jewish people would lose their special place.
    But Jesus began his teaching with the inner principles of the kingdom, not with its external structures.  He began with revelations of his character, his personality, and his power.  When the disciples were ready, God the Father would make the necessary revelation.

Jesus left the premises immediately, leading his disciples quickly toward the lake. Only a fraction of those who had followed him to the house of Jairus followed now. Simon Peter’s boat was there in Capernaum, drawn up on the shore. At Jesus’ direction, Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John got it into the water, and all the disciples waded out to it, the mucky lake bottom tugging at their sandals.
    There was a good easterly breeze, and, as Peter and Andrew hoisted the sail, the wind caught it and drove them quickly out into the lake. Along the shore a score of people stood looking after them, their hands empty and at their sides, their faces at that distance no more than blank ovals.
    Dusk came quickly, but the moon was full and myriad stars glittered high in a sky of black velvet. “Where to, Master?” Simon Peter asked him.
    “The opposite shore? Just away. I’m tired.”
    “Away it is,” Peter said. They ran before the wind all the way across the Sea of Galilee and early in the third watch pulled up on the desolate eastern shore, where cocoa-colored mountains thrust their foothills into the sea.
    Half the disciples had fallen asleep during the journey, slumped against the side of the boat, and they roused themselves only enough to stagger onto the shore and to fling themselves down on the hard ground.

It was about midday when the crowd began arriving, first in groups of two or three, then in groups of as many as twenty.
    “Where are they coming from?” Philip asked Andrew in some alarm. “Is there no escaping them?”
    Andrew shook his head. “Jairus’s daughter. They think he’s raised her from the dead.”
    “Didn’t he?”
    “Ask Peter,” Andrew said with a shake of his head. “I wasn’t there.”
    Andrew was right about the reason the crowd had followed them. The sight of Lila had electrified them. “Just who is this man anyway?” someone asked, and the answer led to a debate over whether Jesus was in fact Elijah, or was even John the Baptizer, supernaturally restored to life.
    “I’ve heard that Herod himself has heard of Jesus and fears him, thinking he is John returned to haunt him.”
    “John never performed miracles like these.”
    They argued and debated, but always, lurking in the recesses of everybody’s mind, was the question few dared voice: Could this at last be the long-awaited Messiah?
    They had set off in pursuit of Jesus, and in search of answers to their many questions.

Though the disciples tried to protect Jesus, people kept slipping past them. Among the first to find Jesus was a woman whose arm was drawn up twisted and useless at her side.
    He was just finishing his morning ablutions, washing his hands and face in a bowl of water he had filled at the nearby stream. He looked at her as he flicked water from his hands and wiped his face on the edge of his cloak. “Well, daughter,” he said. “You have come a long way.”
    She nodded, apparently too breathless to speak.
    “Did you walk all night?”
    Again she nodded. Andrew, stopping near Jesus, wondered if she could speak.
    “How long has your arm been this way?” Jesus asked, as he reached out for it.
    She jerked back, alarmed, then, with apparent effort, allowed him to touch it. He took the hand and drew the arm out straight.
    “Since last year,” she said, speaking in so low a whisper that Andrew barely caught it. “Last year,” she repeated. “At about this time.”
    Jesus’ face drew up in sympathy, and he stroked the arm. “Go easy on it,” he said. “The arm is still very weak.”
    He lowered it gently to her side, and it hung there, wasted still but relaxed and straight. Andrew’s eyes went to Jesus, searching out his face, but he read only compassion there, nothing else — no evidence of divinity, no conscious awareness of power.
    The throng soon surrounded them. There were thousands of them, more even than had followed them to Capernaum. Most amazing of all were the lame and damaged among them: the boy hopping along on his single crutch; the blind girl led by her father; the old man bent beneath the weight of his twisted back. Jesus talked to each of them. He reached out to touch them. As he moved away, the boy followed without his crutch, though limping badly. The girl was left squinting and blinking as if dazzled by a great light. The man straightened to walk erect — to walk carefully and deliberately, but erect.
    “Miracles of healing?” Simon the Zealot said to Judas.
    “They think so,” Judas said, nodding.
    Jesus held up his hands as the people crowded close, and he prayed, “Thank you, Father, for bringing your kingdom to us. Thank you for life and health and for strength of mind. Thank you for those we love, and for those who love you.” He moved into a Psalm, the transition to praise as natural to him as breathing. “Bless the Lord, oh my soul and all that is within me,” he said. “Bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and forget not all his benefits.”
    He passed through the crowd, arms outstretched. “The Lord be gracious unto you and bless you. The Lord make the light of his countenance to shine upon you and bring you peace.” The blessing was one of his favorites, the blessing the Lord gave Moses to bestow on the people.
    “How shall we recognize the kingdom?” called someone, and Jesus turned toward him, his eyes seeking out his face in the crowd. He found it.
    “How shall you recognize it?” he asked rhetorically. “Listen. The kingdom of God is like seed someone scatters on the ground. He sleeps and he wakes, and the seed sprouts and grows, though he knows not how. First the stalk appears, then the head, then the full grain. And when the grain is ripe, he knows. He goes in at once with his sickle, because the harvest is come.”
    “And has the harvest come?”
    “It is coming. You ask how to recognize the kingdom.” He pointed at a mustard plant, one of the biggest any of them had ever seen. “The kingdom is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on earth. When it is sown, it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, putting forth large branches.” He walked to the plant and reached out to grasp one of the branches, pulling it down so that they could see the sparrow’s nest attached to it. “Branches large enough that the birds of the air can make nests within its shade.”

He was there one moment, and then he was gone, having stepped between Peter and Andrew to disappear from view. The disciples turned to follow him, and the crowd surged after, all but carrying them forward.
    Jesus had gone up the hill, seeking out a large open space. When Peter and Andrew entered the clearing, he was there above them, seated next to Philip on a rock, using a hand to shade his eyes from the midday sun.
    “Where is Judas?” Jesus said. “Judas! Do we have money enough in the purse to feed all these people?”
    “There are thousands of them,” Philip answered in a low voice as Judas shook his head.
    “Two hundred denarii would still be insufficient,” Judas said.
    “I take it, then, that we have accumulated something less than two hundred denarii?”
    “Master, that would be six month’s wages.”
    The crowd spread out across the clearing, spreading cloaks here and there on the grass to sit on. A few boys climbed up onto the twisted branches of the scrub oaks in search of a good view. A few sat on rocks and on the trunks of fallen trees. Still others remained standing.
    “Pity them, Philip. They are like sheep without a shepherd.” Jesus sighed, already sounding tired. “Go out among them and try to seat them in groups of fifty,” he said. “Count them, if you can, to see how many there are.”
    As Andrew approached, Jesus said to him, “These people have travelled a long way without eating. Let’s see what we have among ourselves to give them.”
    Andrew shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Scarcely enough for ourselves.”
    Jesus looked at him.
    “It would be better to send them out into the surrounding villages to scour for food.”
    “See what we have,” Jesus said.
    The rest of the disciples came and sat near him. Jesus for his part sat looking around himself, making eye-contact with this one and that one and smiling. Philip and Andrew passed among the people, Philip pointing and moving his lips as he counted to himself, Andrew leaning down here and there to whisper to someone.
    “What’s happening?” Peter asked Jesus in a low voice. “What’s going on? Andrew asked me if any of us had brought any food.”
    “Had you?”
    Peter shook his head. “If we had, it wouldn’t matter. This crowd would devour it instantly, and everyone would still be hungry.”
    Andrew was climbing back up the hill, and with him was a small boy. The boy stopped in front of Jesus and held up a small cloth sack.
    “What’s this?” Jesus said, smiling, reaching down and lifting the boy to his knee. “What’s your name?”
    “Thaddeus,” the boy said. He had dark, curly hair and a dimple in one cheek when he smiled.
    “Thaddeus,” Jesus repeated. “What an important sounding name. Do you see that fellow right there? His name is Thaddeus, too. Do you think you might grow up to be like him someday?”
    Thaddeus smiled at the boy, showing a missing tooth. The boy nodded, but looked doubtful.
    “Thaddeus has five small bread loaves in that sack,” Andrew said. “Five loaves and two fish.”
    “They’re barley loaves,” the boy said. “My mother made them.”
    “Then I’m sure they’re excellent loaves,” Jesus said. “Where is your mother? Did she come with you?”
    He shook his head, his dark eyes solemn. “My uncle brought me, my Uncle Levi.” The man the boy indicated was on his feet near the edge of the crowd. His expression suggested that he was concerned that his nephew was making a nuisance of himself with the great rabbi but was more concerned about making a nuisance of himself by coming up to inquire. When Jesus looked at him and nodded, Levi bobbed his head and took a step forward before coming to a stop again.
    “His name is Levi,” Jesus said to Thaddeus, pointing out Matthew.
    “The fat man?”
    Jesus’ smile broadened. “He’s much thinner now than when I met him. I worry sometimes that the wind will catch him and carry him away.”
    Thaddeus laughed and clapped his small hands.
    “Perhaps we should tie a string to him, so we won’t lose him if that should happen. Do you think we should?”
    The boy nodded.
    “Actually, he likes to be called Matthew, in honor of his father.”
    The boy whispered something in Jesus’ ear.
    “Is he? Is he really?” Jesus said, in a slightly louder whisper than the boy had used. “Did you know that’s my name in Hebrew?”
    The boy whispered something else, and a shadow crossed Jesus’ face. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “I know you miss him.”
    The boy nodded.
    “How about your father’s father? Is he still living?”
    The boy shook his head.
    “So your father has gone to be with his father, just as someday you will go to be with both of them. And both of them are with God.”
    The boy flung his arms about Jesus’ neck, and Jesus stood with him, stroking his back. “And with the great Joshua himself,” Jesus said. “Joshua son of Nun, who led Israel home again, and who is now of course with his own father.” Jesus held the boy away from him to look into the small, tear-streaked face. “That would be old Nun himself,” Jesus said.
    Andrew was left holding the boy’s sack — a small sack — and he looked from time to time down into it, not having the least idea what he should do with it. Jesus, noticing him, set little Thaddeus on the rock where he himself had been sitting. Philip came up then, panting. “Five thousand,” he said. “I can’t say exactly, but I think five thousand men, plus all the women and children.”
    Jesus took the sack from Andrew, giving him a wink of encouragement — though in truth the wink left Andrew more bewildered than encouraged. Jesus sat again on the rock beside Thaddeus. He smiled at the boy. “Five barley loaves and two fish,” he said.
    The boy nodded.
    “All you brought with you to eat today.”
    Again he nodded.
    “But you’re willing to give it to me to help feed all these people.”
    Thaddeus’s head turned, and his gaze swept out over the crowd. When his head turned back again to Jesus, his eyes were wide.
    Jesus gave him a wink, too, and the boy smiled. “Do you think it’s enough?” Jesus said, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial tone.
    The boy shook his head solemnly.
    “Suppose I told you it was more than enough.”
    Immediately the boy began nodding, and Jesus laughed. He reached out to tousle the boy’s hair. “The first rule of plenty,” Jesus said. “Put all you have at the service of God. Will you remember that? Even when it doesn’t seem to be nearly enough.”
    He stepped up onto the rock. “Fellow Jews,” he said, addressing the crowd. “Sons of Abraham. We have a boy among us named Thaddeus who has graciously offered to share his lunch with us.” Jesus held up the sack. “He has five barley loaves — made by his mother — and with them two small fish. Did she say what kind of fish they were, Thaddeus?”
    He shook his head.
    “Perch,” Andrew said, and Jesus looked at him. “They’re perch,” Andrew repeated.
    “Five barley loaves and two small perch. Is anybody hungry?”
    Several looked at each other, but none responded. Jesus pointed to a man near the front, one with the barrel-shaped body of the well-to-do. “You sir, you look like a man in need of sustenance.”
    There was general laughter.
    “Could I interest you in half a barley loaf and perhaps a bit of fish?”
    There was more laughter. Several hands reached out to slap the man on his back and his shoulders. The man looked around and, in response to all the smiling faces, began smiling himself. He bobbed his head and, turning again toward Jesus, shrugged his beefy shoulders.
    “First we must thank our father in heaven, from whom comes every good thing.” Reaching one hand upward, Jesus prayed, “Thank you, Father, for this gift from your bounty. Bless it to our nourishment, bless us to your service. May your kingdom grow and grow until all humanity can take shade in its branches.”
    He looked out again over the people. “Amen?” he said.
    “Amen.” In unison. Heads nodding firmly. Jesus took each of the loaves out of Thaddeus’s little bag, and he tore it in half. He did likewise with the fish, dropping the fragments back in again and handing the bag to Andrew.
    Andrew took the bag and looked at him.
    “Go and distribute the food among the people,” Jesus said.
    Andrew hesitated. He shrugged then and went to the group nearest them. Kneeling down, he held open the bag.
    “No, thank you. Martha packed us some food,” the man said, nodding at his wife.
    Andrew offered the bag to the next man. Who reached in and took half a loaf. Who reached in again for a bit of fish.
    His wife swatted his hand. “Look how many,” she said, jerking her head. But when he pulled out his hand again, he clutched a piece of the salted perch.
    “Many thanks,” he said. “Many thanks.” His wife, despite her objections, reached in for a bit of bread. The family next to them took food as well.
    As did the next.
    And the next.
    Andrew, moving like a sleepwalker, not daring to look in the bag, not daring even to feel of the bag to see what might be in it, moved down the line, offering it to everyone. Not everyone needed food. A surprising number had brought their own, and they were spreading their food out around them and offering it to their neighbors.
    When Andrew got to the second group of fifty, someone actually put fish into the bag. Then someone gave him a basket. “Here, empty it into this,” he said, but Andrew didn’t dare.
    Judas was standing next to Philip. “What do you think?” he said. Andrew had moved to the third group. He still had the bag, and now the basket was full as well.
    Nathaniel and Matthew and Peter were already out in the crowd, each with a basket of his own. “It’s a miracle,” Philip said, watching.
    “Yes, but what kind of miracle?”
    “Pardon?”
    “Is he multiplying fishes, or is he getting a bunch of stingy Galileans to share their food?”
    Philip ignored the implied criticism of his native province. “I’m needed.” He broke away from Judas and went out into the crowd. Someone handed him a basket full of food. He looked into it curiously, but saw nothing but bread and fish — more specifically, nothing but salted perch and barley loaves. It was indeed a miracle. Philip took it to the group farthest from Jesus and began distributing food.

There were twelve baskets of food left over. Jesus sat on the rock before the crowd, one of the baskets between him and the boy Thaddeus, enjoying bread and salted perch as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on.
    “You’re the Messiah, aren’t you?” the boy said, looking up into his face.
    “Who is the Messiah?” Jesus asked him. “What will he do when he comes?”
    “He’s to be a son of David,” the boy said, speaking slowly, as if by rote. “A son of David who will throw off the yoke of the Romans and restore God’s people to greatness.”
    “Then I am not the Messiah.”
    Thaddeus looked hurt and sad, and Jesus placed a hand against the boy’s chest. “The kingdom of God is here; it is among us,” he said. “Peace with God and with each other does not depend on political arrangements. Do you understand?”
    The boy looked as if he were trying very hard to. The conversation of the crowd, growing louder, suggested that others also were grappling with the Messianic question. “Is this not the one who is to come?” they were saying. “He can even make bread to feed his armies.”
    “It is surely the Prophet.”
    “He who is to come into the world.”
    Jesus gestured for James the younger. “Stay with Thaddeus until his uncle finds him,” Jesus said.
    “Where are you going?”
    “Up into the mountain to pray. Wait for me until dark, then if I am not back, sail for Capernaum without me.”
    The crowd, louder now, more vocal, was on its feet. “King Jesus,” a Judean voice shouted from somewhere in the crowd.
    “King Jesus,” a voice echoed.
    Faces were flushed. Hands were raised. As one the crowd cried, “King Jesus, lord and savior.” The crowd surged forward, and James glanced nervously toward Jesus.
    But Jesus was gone.
    James pulled Thaddeus close as the crowd pressed around them. In response, Thaddeus put his arms around James and pressed his chubby cheek into his cloak.

Before Jesus proclaimed that he was the bread of life, he performed the only miracle found in all four gospels.  The miracle was feeding five thousand (plus women and children) with five barley loaves and two salted fish.  Jesus did not multiply the loaves, which would have been miraculous enough.  Rather, he fed the five thousand with five loaves without multiplying the loaves — and when all had had their fill, what was left was still the same five loaves.  “They gathered them up,” John tells us, “and filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves.”  Earlier miracles had shown Jesus’ power; this one suggests something unexpected about time and space.
    Later, at the Last Supper, he would break bread and say to his disciples, “This is my body,” when, of course, his body was sitting right there in front of them, holding the bread.  Again, something unexpected, though it was foreshadowed with the five thousand by the Sea of Galilee.  “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever,” Jesus said to those he had fed with barley loaves.  When we participate in the Lord’s Supper, we share — somehow — in that same promise. 

The road to Jericho wound its way through twenty-three miles of brown, barren mountains before reaching the lush green valley of Jericho, which lay like a sprig of parsley in the bottom of a bowl. Before descending to the valley road to begin the journey, Jesus paused on the ridge overlooking Jerusalem.
    The holy city was built on two low hills divided by the Valley of the Cheesemakers, a name whose origin had been long forgotten. Facing them were the pillared porticos of the temple’s east wall and beyond it the Fortress Antonio. Most of the houses visible to the left of the temple and below it were made from whitish gray limestone cut from the surrounding hills. The streets that wound among them were empty. The entire city gleamed in the first sun of the morning, its temple, consisting of marble and white limestone, seemed to sit atop it like a crown of light, too brilliant for mortal eyes.
    James of Cana, standing with Jesus, was thinking not of Jerusalem but of the road to Jericho. Bandits preyed on travelers between the two cities, those traveling in small groups and without armed escort. They had never been a problem for Jesus and his disciples, but for James at least they were a recurring worry. He glanced up into Jesus’ face and saw that his eyes were wet, tears running down his face until they disappeared into his beard.
    “Jesus?”
    Jesus shook his head. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” he murmured.
    His words attracted the attention of the other disciples as well, but Jesus seemed not to notice. “How I long to gather you to me!”
    The disciples exchanged glances, associating his apparent grief with the recent slaughter. No one spoke. After several minutes, Jesus turned away in silence. He and his disciples began their descent.

Herod Antipas was in Jerusalem for the feast. He knew there had been a riot and that Pilate had suppressed it ruthlessly, but he had had no word from Pilate, no official communication, and he was still gathering intelligence, trying to piece together what had happened.
    “What’s the latest on the body count?” he said.
    “At least ten thousand,” said an advisor. “Perhaps twice that.”
    “And how many of them were native Judeans?”
    They had no idea on that, as yet. Jerusalem had a population of 120,000, but during festivals the population swelled to twice that, extra rooms and inns filling to capacity in Jerusalem and the surrounding villages, campers covering the hillside. Many of the pilgrims were Galileans, Herod’s subjects. Many Galileans were among the slaughtered.
    The sergeant-at-arms announced the arrival of Annas and Caiaphas. Herod waved for him to show them in.
    They strode down the receiving hall’s central aisle side by side, their gaits quick with resolve and purpose. Herod leaned back in his throne, watching.
    “Your majesty,” Annas said.
    “Your majesty,” Caiaphas boomed beside him. Annas inclined his head, and Caiaphas made a more elaborate obeisance.
    “What do you want?” Herod said, sourly.
    “I assume you’ve heard,” Annas said.
    “I have. What was your part in it?”
    Annas shook his head. “To attempt to resolve the conflict: either to persuade Pilate to relent and return the funds to the temple treasury, or to persuade the people to leave off their protesting.”
    Herod made a face. “Neither, apparently, would listen to reason.”
    “You know how inflexible a mob can be, once it forms.”
    “And how inflexible a procurator can be as well,” Herod said.
    “We assume you and he weren’t acting in concert.”
    Herod frowned at them fiercely. “I wasn’t even informed until this morning,” he said. “And then not by the procurator.”
    “We are petitioning the emperor for redress,” Caiaphas said. “It’s all we can do.”
    “Thousands of your tax-paying subjects have been massacred,” Annas said. “Perhaps you should apply for redress as well.”
    Herod’s gaze was fixed.
    “Well,” Annas said.
    When Herod said nothing else, Annas turned to leave. Herod waited until they were halfway to the massive double doors. “It’s a disgrace,” he said thickly.
    Annas and Caiaphas turned toward him.
    “An absolute disgrace.”
    They waited.
    “Be assured, gentlemen. When your complaint goes to Rome, my own will accompany it.”
    Annas gave a nod. When Herod said nothing else, he motioned to Caiaphas, and together they left the chamber.

Several days later, Jesus and his disciples were walking north along the east bank of the Jordan River through the Decapolis. They crossed into Galilee just south of the Sea of Galilee and spent the night with Chuza and Joanna in the city of Tiberius. The next day they continued north to Magdala.
    There Jesus attracted a crowd of several dozen, including Mary, who drifted up to them as they entered the city and stayed as close as possible to Jesus for the several hours they were there. In Gennesaret, on the main street of the village, they were confronted by Jairus of the Capernaum synagogue.
    “Jairus,” Jesus said. “What’s wrong?”
    Jairus’s face was pale, the cheekbones too prominent, his knuckles looking large and white in his hands. His hair stood out in all directions, and there were ashes on his face. “Jesus,” he said, gasping, clutching Jesus’ arm. “I heard you were coming.”
    “What is it, man? What’s wrong?”
    “Thank God you’re here.”
    “Are you ill? Is your wife ill?”
    “My daughter, Lila. She’s ill to the point of death. She’s dying.”
    “Of what?” Simon Peter asked. He shouldered back a couple of onlookers who had pressed too close.
    Nathaniel asked, “Has a physician seen her?”
    The crowd around them had grown, doubling from a few dozen to many dozen, and doubling again.
    “The doctors tell us there is no hope,” Jairus said, avoiding their eyes. “Her body burns with fever, and she shakes. For two days now we have been unable to wake her.” His eyes returned to Jesus. “I have seen the wonderful things you have done.”
    “And you think I can help her?”
    Jairus shook his head, then nodded. “Will you come? If you will come with me now, quickly, you can save my daughter.”
    “I will come.”
    “Quickly, then, for there is little time.”
    When they started out, the crowd started with them, buffeting Jesus and his little band of disciples this way and that, twice causing Jairus to stumble against him. The street narrowed for the length of several houses, and several of the disciples found it difficult even to breath.
    “The heat,” said James the younger to John. “I feel like I’m going to pass out.” John, himself flushed and sweaty, gripped James’s arm and pulled him on. People pressed in on them from every side, blocking their view of anything but cloaks that seemed to rise up around them.
    Quite abruptly, the whole crowd stopped, people crowding into the boys from behind and pressing them into those in front of them. They felt like they were suffocating.
    John heard Jesus say — incredibly, inexplicably — “Who touched me?”
    “What do you mean, who touched you?” Peter said, expostulating. “Who hasn’t touched you? Who hasn’t touched you, poked you, prodded you, done all but knocked you down?” As if in illustration, the constraining force that had been building in the press of people slipped suddenly and drove them forward into a wider portion of the street. Jesus’ eyes swept the faces of those nearest him.
    “I’m not talking about that,” he said. “I felt power go out of me.” His eyes settled on the face of a woman not far away, and her distress broke from her in a great wail.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was I. It was I who touched you.”
    “You, daughter?”
    “I’ve been so ill. I bleed almost all the time, and I feel so weak.”
    “The doctors —”
    “Can do nothing. I’ve been to this doctor and that one, doctors from as far away as Tiberius. I pay their fees, and I take their treatments, but none of it does me any good. I’ve heard of you, sir. I know your reputation. A holy man, they say. A prophet. One gifted with the powers of healing. I thought, if only I can but touch the hem of his cloak. I didn’t mean to bother you, sir. I had no wish to intrude. If you wish —”
    “Daughter,” he said again, and her flow of words stopped as abruptly as it had begun. “Peace, daughter,” he said. “You have believed, and your faith has made you well.”
    Her face cleared. “It has? I’m well? I won’t . . . I will no longer bleed?”
    Jesus was smiling at her, almost grinning. “No longer,” he said.
    Jairus tugged at the sleeve of Jesus’ cloak. “Please, sir. My daughter,” he said. “There’s so little time.”
    Jesus nodded. “Of course.” He took the woman’s hand and led her into the shelter of a column. With a nod and a smile of encouragement he turned, and they pressed on, leaving Gennesaret and stretching their strides as they headed along the north shore of Galilee toward Capernaum.
    The crowd that followed seemed to number in the hundreds. People were laughing and joking with one another. Children skipped, and boys threw stones at the trunks of the occasional tree along the roadway and, where the road passed close to the Sea of Galilee, sent their stones skipping over the water.
    “Everyone’s on holiday,” Andrew said in a low voice to his brother Peter.
    “Yes.”
    “The crowd is behind him as never before.”
    “For now,” Peter said.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t trust the crowds, I guess. They scare me.”
    Judas, who had been walking nearby, said, “They’ll only grow larger. It was the trip to Jerusalem. It has increased his stature among the people, just as I predicted.”
    A man was coming toward them, the dust of the roadway rising up around his feet and shrouding him in gloom. Though he walked swiftly, his head was down and his shoulders hunched as if in pain.
    As he came closer, the crowd could see that his cloak was torn, that dirt and ashes were in his hair. Jairus, on seeing him, was shaken with a fit of palsy. “Channoch,” he called out, his voice thick with grief. “No. No.”
    Channoch looked up and saw them, then put his head down and continued toward them. He stopped in front of Jairus, drawing himself upright with apparent effort. “Your daughter is dead,” he said heavily. He looked at Jesus. “No need to trouble the teacher further.”
    Jesus gripped Jairus’s arm. “Don’t give up hope,” he said.
    “She’s dead,” Jairus said. “She’s dead. If only we’d been a little sooner, I know you could have saved her.”
    “Take me to see her.”
    Jairus shook his head. “She’s dead, didn’t you hear him? She’s dead.”
    “If you had faith in me once, have faith in me still.”
    They continued on their way, but with Jairus’s head down, the trembling still in his hands.
    A sober crowd entered Capernaum. Jesus led the way, walking beside Jairus and Channoch. Behind him were his disciples, and further back the rest of the crowd. Long before they reached the house of Jairus, they could hear the weeping and wailing of his friends and family and of the professional mourners. When the mourners saw Jairus, and Jesus with him, the volume of their wailing increased by a factor of two as they goaded themselves toward an emotional frenzy.
    Jesus pushed through them, ignoring them, his lips pressed together in a firm line. He went into the house, where he found a little girl of perhaps ten or eleven lying on a wool coverlet. He felt of her forehead, found it already cooling, bent down so that his face was against her cheek. Then he straightened.
    “Let’s go outside,” he said. “Everyone.” He herded them out so that the girl was left alone.
    As he and Jairus and Jairus’s wife came out through the doorway behind the others of the household, the wailing redoubled. Jesus raised a hand to silence them.
    “Friends,” he said. “There is no call for weeping.”
    They stared at him balefully with dirt-smeared faces.
    “I have examined the little girl,” he said. “She is not dead, but only sleeping.”
    His announcement was met with a silence that stretched out for two heartbeats, then three. A woman nearby emitted a high-pitched, hysterical giggle, tried to muffle it with her hand, and failed. A gust of laughter bent her nearly double, racking her frame, and the crowd stirred uneasily. The faces turned toward Jesus were now thin-lipped and angry.
    “She is deep asleep,” Jesus said. “She needs but a call to wake her. Come,” he said, gesturing to Jairus and his wife, and to Peter and the sons of Zebedee, James and John. Others would have followed, but he held up his hand. “No,” he said. “Wait and pray.”
    And he turned and went inside with the others.
    The girl lay on the coverlet in the same position as before. No quiver of hand or cheek gave any suggestion of life. No hint of respiration moved her chest.
    She looks dead, John thought to himself, looking first at his brother James and then at Peter. And dead is dead.
    It was said by some that the spirit of a person lingered near its body for three days after death, hoping to be restored to it, but no tale was told of such a restoration ever occurring — except once, perhaps, in the days of Elijah. John, recalling that story, looked for Jesus to stretch himself out on the body of the little girl.
    He did not. He sat beside her on the edge of the bed, took up her hand in his and with his other stroked her matted hair.
    “Lila,” he called softly. “Lila.” Lila’s body remained unmoving. He tugged at her hand. “Get up now,” he said. “Get up, little one.”
    Her eyes were open, John noticed with a start. They had been closed, he would have sworn it, but suddenly they were open.
    “Here,” Jesus said, and he slipped an arm around her to help her sit up.
    She looked around at her father Jairus, then at her mother, many years her father’s junior. Both stood still as stone, as if in shock.
    “She’s very weak,” Jesus said. “She’ll need some food.”
    The mother stirred. “Yes,” she said mechanically. “Certainly.” But she made no move to obey.
    “But first,” Jesus said. “Let’s be clear on what happened here. The girl was asleep, and I awakened her.”
    “Momma?” the little girl said, uncertainly.
    Feeling came back to her mother in a rush. With a cry, she stepped forward and pulled the little girl up into her arms. “Lila,” she murmured. “Thank God. Lila.”
    Jesus stood. His eyes met those of Jairus, and he smiled, a little tiredly, as they clasped hands.
    Tears streamed down Jairus’s cheeks, but he seemed unable to speak.
    Jesus gripped his arm and, without a word, departed.