The Jesus Novel: Chapter 18.
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.