A few days later, during the Feast of Dedication, Jesus was again in the temple area preaching in Solomon’s Portico. Among those who were gathered about him were a number of Jews in the employ of the Sanhedrin. One of them interrupted him to say, “Why do you speak in riddles? To build suspense or for some other reason? If you are the Messiah, tell us, and tell us plainly.”
“I have told you.”
“No.”
“Yes. You didn’t understand because your lack of faith prevents you from grasping even the possibility.”
“So you are the Messiah?”
“Not your Messiah. Some the Father has set aside for me; these are my people. I know them, and they know me.”
The man who had challenged him was a lawyer. He said, “These people who cluster around you are sensation seekers. You are the curiosity of the moment. Tomorrow it will be someone else.”
“Some of them are curiosity seekers, true. Others are mine. The Father has given them to me, and no one can snatch them out of my hand.”
“What father?”
“My Father.”
The lawyer’s face didn’t change.
“God,” Jesus said. “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Lord God Almighty. What He holds in His hand, no one can snatch away.”
“You claim to be God’s son?”
Jesus looked at him.
“Blasphemer.” The word was a signal. Stones appeared from beneath the robes of a dozen men.
“Blasphemer,” shouted another.
There was a commotion in the crowd. Jonah Bartimaeus broke through to Jesus and stood beside him. The cripple he had healed by the Sheep’s Gate long ago was beside him, too, pressing close to shield him. Those with raised stones hesitated, and in the moment of hesitation Jesus spoke.
“Cripples walk and the blind see. For which of these miracles do you stone me?”
“For neither of them,” the lawyer said. “But for blasphemy. You, a mere man, have claimed to be God.”
A group of temple guards were coming toward them, the tramp of their boots clearly audible.
“You are a lawyer,” Jesus said. “Your law quotes God Himself as saying to men, ‘I tell you that you are gods; you are all sons of the Most High.’”
It seemed to take a moment for the lawyer to recognize the quotation from the psalm of Asaph. He glanced around uneasily, realizing that most of the eyes on him were distinctly unfriendly.
“If God Himself calls men gods, what about the one whom He set apart as His very own and sent into the world? Would you stone the son of man because he calls himself God’s son?”
The lawyer threw his stone, but it sailed past Jesus’ head and clattered harmlessly on the tile far beyond him.
“Do not believe me if I’m am not engaged in my Father’s redemptive work.” He laid a palm on Jonah’s back. “But even if you don’t believe me, believe in the miracles. They alone should tell you that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”
The temple guards were pushing through the crowd. “Seize him,” the lawyer said, pointing. “He must be taken before the high priest.”
With a great deal of shoving and shouting and scuffing of feet, the crowd came together around Jesus in an impenetrable barrier. Several of the guards fell to the ground; others staggered into each other. The crowd hemmed them in so closely that their spears were of no use to them and they were unable even to draw their swords.
“Perhaps I must be,” Jesus called to the lawyer over the heads of the crowd. “But not today. And not on your order.”
As Jesus moved toward the gate, pushed and jostled by the very crowd that protected him, the lawyer shouted, “You can never come back. You know that. You can’t blaspheme the Lord God and show your face in here. We’ll be ready for you next time. We’ll be ready.”
The stopover in Bethany was brief. “I’m going beyond the Jordan to the area where John preached and baptized,” he told Lazarus and his sisters after recounting the events of the day. “The lawyer was right. When I appear again in Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin will move against me in force. The time isn’t right for that.”
“I thought it was right,” Lazarus said. “I thought it was why you came back.”
Jesus smiled. “The time is close.”
“Close.”
“Just not quite here. I’ll know when it comes.”
Judas said, “The time is now. You saw how the people flocked around you.”
Jesus shook his head. “We came closer to stoning than you realize. The lawyer had half the crowd persuaded.”
“And why? Why all that talk about being the son of God? What does it mean, anyway? ‘I and the father are one. I am in the father, and he is in me.’”
“You really don’t understand, do you?”
“‘My sheep listen to my voice. I know them, and they know me.’ Listen. Jesus. You’re my shepherd. I’m part of your flock if anyone is. I’m prepared to fight to the death for you, to spill my last drop of blood.”
A sad smile had appeared on Jesus’ face. “And I will do the same for you,” he said.
“No. I’m expendable. The movement needs you. If you die, the whole thing collapses.”
“So you agree that a trip beyond the Jordan now would be advisable.”
Judas scowled. “I don’t know. Maybe. It wouldn’t be necessary, if you left off this God-talk. Nobody understands it. The Messiah is a concept people can grasp. Even the son of man. But ‘I and the Father are one’ doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”
Jesus’ eyes went from Judas’s face to Peter’s, to Philip’s, to Andrew’s.
“So how long will you be gone this time?” Lazarus asked. “When can we expect you back?”
Jesus, his eyes still on his disciples, shook his head. “We’ve got work to do,” he said. “It may be awhile.”
It was, in fact, a little over three months. When the rain of the winter months had loosened the ground, Lazarus began plowing and planting, walking for long hours behind his two oxen, struggling with the single curved blade that tore farrows in the earth. First he planted his barley crop, then his wheat crop, both of which were necessary to feed his family and servants throughout the year. Early in the month of Adar, mid-February according to the Roman calendar, he was plowing his vegetable garden in preparation for planting cucumbers, garlic, onions, and leeks, when a rain-storm swept in with a cold front and soaked him to the skin. By the time he had tended to the oxen and returned to the house, his teeth were chattering and his fingers were brittle with the cold. Pneumonia set in, beginning as a fever that was soon accompanied by a painful cough. The physician who came from Jerusalem could do nothing.
“We shouldn’t be surprised at his failure,” Lazarus told his sisters. A fit of coughing interrupted him. “Remember King Asa. ‘Though his disease was severe, even in his illness he did not seek help from the Lord, but only from physicians.’ We must pray, Mary. Martha. Pray that the Lord will forgive me my sins and heal my body.”
Later that same day, his clothes and his hair wet with perspiration, he said, “I would like to see Jesus once again before I die.”
Martha had been thinking much the same thing. In fact, she had been thinking that if Jesus came, Lazarus would not die. Hadn’t he healed Peter’s mother-in-law up in Bethsaida? Hadn’t she heard reports without number of paralytics who walked, of lepers made whole? If Jesus came, everything would be all right. She sent the stableboy to Bethany Beyond-the-Jordan, where John the Baptizer had lived. “Ask after him there. If Jesus is nearby, the people will have heard of him. Tell Jesus that Lazarus, his friend, is ill, ill to the point of death. He must hurry if he is to be in time to save him.”
It took Martha’s servant two days to reach Bethany and another day to find Jesus, who was camped some distance away with his twelve disciples. When he had heard the message, Jesus sat for a long time staring moodily into the fire.
“It’s too dangerous for him to go,” John said to his brother.
“Perhaps there’s no need. Jesus will know how sick his friend Lazarus is.”
“How will he know that?”
“The same way he knows everything. Master?” James asked, turning to Jesus. “Will the sickness end in death?”
Jesus seemed to focus on him only with difficulty. “End there? No, it will not end in death.”
“So there is no need to return to Jerusalem.”
“I don’t know.” Jesus stood. “I’m going to go away by myself a little while,” he said. “Wait here till I return.”
“A little while?” Peter said when he heard Jesus had gone. “A few hours? A few days?”
Martha’s servant said, “Lazarus was on the point of death when I left him. If Jesus is to save him, he must hurry.”
“He can’t go,” Peter said.
“He can,” Judas said. “It’s time, and I think he knows it; time to return to Jerusalem to challenge Rome.”
Nobody looked happy to hear it.
“He can do it,” Judas said. “It’s what he’s prepared for all his life.”
Peter nodded, slowly. What, indeed, could Jesus not do? He could make bread to feed an army, and he could raise up the wounded from where they had fallen.
And yet -
And yet.
He couldn’t help but feel it was going to end badly.
The raising of Lazarus within a few miles of Jerusalem was no chance miracle, and few miracles are set up with such detail. As a result of it, the high priest proclaimed that “Jesus must die for the nation of Israel,” and the Sadducees joined the Pharisees in plotting how to bring that death about.