The Life of Jesus Christ

Caiaphas and Annas and a handful of others sat and paced in the high priest’s chambers, and one by one the officers in charge of the temple guards reported back to them.
   “He has eluded us,” Annas said, finally, striking his hand on a table and getting to his feet. “Once again, he has slipped away.”
   “When we see him tomorrow. . .,” Caiaphas began.
   “. . . he will again have the crowd around him.”
   “We can put out a reward for information as to his whereabouts,” someone said, but Annas shook his head.
   “We can do nothing openly. Our hold on the crowd is . . . tenuous. Perhaps nonexistent.”
   “Whereas he holds them in a fist of iron.”
   “Yes.”
   “So what do we do?”
   “What can we do, but bide our time?” Annas said.
   “And if Pilate decides we are unable to keep the peace?”
   “I don’t know,” Annas said.
   “But -,” Caiaphas began.
   “And you don’t know either,” Annas shouted, turning on him.
   Caiaphas raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, but he said no more.

It was two miles from Bethany to Jerusalem, and the crowd walked ahead of them and all around them, growing in numbers as travelers on the road joined them and people came out from Jerusalem to see what was happening. “Hosanna! Hosanna!” the crowd shouted, their voices swelling like the roar of the sea. “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” People took off their cloaks and spread them on the road for Jesus’ donkey to walk on. When he had passed, they picked up their coats again. Some ran to catch up with Jesus, to get in front of him and spread their coats on the road before him a second time, and a third. Some stripped branches from the trees and spread them on the road. Always, always, they were chanting and shouting, “Hosanna, hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”
   As they entered Jerusalem by the Fountain Gate, people were standing in the streets near their shops and their homes, craning their necks to see what was going on, to see what accounted for the noise of the crowd. When Jesus appeared, clad in white and riding the donkey, they shouted, and the shouts were heard in the temple, rumbling and crashing like thunder.
   Caiaphas and Annas and others of the Sanhedrin stood on the temple steps, and they saw Jesus in the street below them, the vortex of a whirling sea of humanity, surging through the streets. Nicodemus said, “At last, at last. The King of Israel.”
   Annas looked at him sourly. Joseph of Arimethea, his eyes not leaving Jesus, ran down the steps and into the crowd. Jesus was coming toward them, riding the donkey up the broad steps into the Court of Gentiles, the outermost court of the temple.
   “Jesus!” Caiaphas shouted. “Jesus of Nazareth.” He pushed toward him but was soon overwhelmed by the force of the crowd.
   “Caiaphas,” Annas cried. “Don’t be a silly ninny.”
   But Caiaphas pushed through to Jesus and fell up against the donkey on which Jesus rode. “Jesus,” Caiaphas shouted. “Talk to them! Quiet them! Pilate’s in the city, and he won’t tolerate another riot. You’ve got to disperse the people before the streets are wet with blood.”
   Jesus shook his head. “No.”
   “Disperse them, I say.”
   “They can’t be quieted. They can’t be dispersed. Today, Jerusalem welcomes her king.”
   “Hosanna!” the crowd shouted. “Hosanna!”  And like a refrain, “Blessed is he, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Riotous shouting, the words becoming indistinguishable.
   Caiaphas, a big, beefy man, grabbed the donkey’s halter and swung its head toward him. “You must, you must quiet them.”
   His wrists were seized, painfully; the reins dropped from his nerveless hands. He turned to find himself looking into the broad, grizzled face of Peter.
   “Control your disciples,” Caiaphas called to Jesus, but whatever he said next was drowned out by the cries of hosanna. The press of the crowd was driving them forward, further into the temple.
   “If everyone fell silent, the noise would continue,” Jesus called to Caiaphas as the crowd forced them apart. “The rocks themselves would cry out for joy.” He was grinning hugely, reaching out with his hands to touch this one and that one in the crowd. Though Peter and Andrew and the others feared he would be torn from his donkey, he remained in his seat.
   Caiaphas fell back to where Annas was standing. The old man’s face was grim. “The crowd’s gone mad; there’s nothing we can do,” Annas said. “The revolt against Rome begins today.”
   The people around Jesus weren’t all Jews. There were dark-skinned men with smooth faces, men from Egypt and Ethiopia in their strange garb, Nabataean tradesmen, Idumaeans and Syrians and those from Asia Minor.
   “It’s the whole world,” said Caiaphas, agreeing. “The whole world’s gone over to him.”
   Jesus, on foot now, mounted the steps to the gate called Beautiful, and he extended his hands over the crowd. Gradually, the shouting subsided.
   “The hour has come for the son of man to be glorified,” Jesus said.
   The crowd, which was packed shoulder to shoulder and chest to back, erupted again in noise. Still more people pressed into the temple.
   Jesus held up his hands again. “A kernel of wheat, unless it falls to the ground and dies, remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces a multitude.”
   Confused buzzing. Judas, pressing close to him, said fiercely, “Don’t do it, Jesus. You’ve got them. They’re yours. Don’t perplex them again and send them away.”
   Looking at Judas, Jesus said, loudly enough for many in the crowd to hear, “The man who loves his life will lose it. To find life, you must hold life forfeit. Give your life, and God will give you life in the spirit, which is eternal.”
   In the pause that followed, a voice shouted, “So fight with courage,” and the clamor of the crowd broke out again full force.
   Jesus raised his hands once more. When he could be heard, he said, “What shall I say? Shall I pray, Father, save me from this hour?”
   “No,” the man in the crowd shouted.
   “No,” the crowd shouted.
   “No! It was for this very reason I came,” Jesus cried. “Father! Lord God! Glorify your name!”
   The crowd roared.
   “Glory to God in the highest,” Jesus shouted. “Glory be to God!”
   And the thunder of the crowd echoed him. The people raised their hands in the air and cheered. “Blessed is the Lord’s anointed! May he reign forever!”
   Jesus turned and strode through the gate called Beautiful into the Court of Women. The chief priests, Caiaphas and his fellows, closed in behind him, pulling shut the gates, and outside the guards moved into the crowd, shouting and shoving, to disperse it.
   But Jesus led his disciples through the Court of Women and out of it again through another gate, and he slipped unnoticed through the people in the Court of Gentiles.
   By nightfall, he was back in the house of Lazarus, in Bethany.

Peter and John went out. Some boys followed them a little way, then went back, unwilling to leave the house where Jesus was staying. Fifteen minutes walk brought Peter and John to Bethphage, and they saw the colt standing in the street, just as Jesus had said they would, its halter tied to the rail of a fence that encircled a small yard.
   “Hey, you there. That’s my donkey. What are you doing?” someone called to them.
   They turned to look. Three men were coming toward them along the street. John wet his lips and said what Jesus had told them to say: “The Lord has need of it.”
   “He does, does he?”
   “And how would you know?” said another of the men.
   “He sent us after it.”
   “The Lord God sent you after it,” the man said, mocking.
   “The Lord Jesus,” Peter said.
   It served to focus their attention on him, on his thick neck and corded forearms.
   “Jesus of Nazareth?” said one of them.
   “Jesus of Nazareth.”
   The man held out his hands, palms up, in invitation.
   John untied the rope.
   “Let’s go,” Peter said, taking the rope from John and wrapping it around his fist. He tugged at the donkey, and it started off willingly enough.
   The three men fell in behind them and followed them back to Bethany.

Their arrival with the colt seemed to excite the crowd. The excitement grew when Jesus came out of Lazarus’s house dressed, not in his travel clothes, but in a white robe and tunic.
   As Jesus came toward them, Peter said, “Wait, Lord,” and he shrugged out of his cloak and threw it over the back of the donkey. John, seeing what he was doing, took off his own cloak as well.
   The crowd was moving around them, not getting so close as to crowd them, but talking and calling to one another so that it was difficult for the disciples even to hear each other. Jesus lifted a leg to rest his hip on the donkey’s back, and it started off, moving slowly, Jesus riding sideways with his sandaled feet dangling just above the hard-packed dirt.
   The crowd’s immediate reaction seemed to be puzzlement.
   “Hosanna!” Nathaniel intoned, falling in behind the colt. “Lord, save us now, we beseech you.”
   The crowd got it, and a shout went up.
   “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” Nathaniel said, shouting now to be heard over the clamor of the crowd. “Blessed is the King of Israel!”
   They were words from the psalm the people had shouted and sung at the procession of Judas Maccabeus, Judas the Hammer, after he had conquered Acra and wrested it from Syrian dominion more than a hundred years before.
   Judas Maccabeus, though, had been riding a war horse.

By the next day news had reached Jerusalem that Jesus had returned to Bethany. People got up early to go see him; those who went found still others who had camped the night there, eating the fruit and vegetables from Lazarus’s garden. Martha was vexed with them, but Jesus told her to consider her garden a gift to God. “God will repay you in kind,” he said. “For the rest of the season, your garden shall produce ten times the food it ever has before.”
   “Is that a blessing on her garden, or merely a prediction?” James said, curious.
   “Does it matter?” Jesus went to the window and held up his hand. “Blessed art thou, oh garden of Martha,” he said. “From this time forth thou shalt produce much fruit.” He turned back. “Satisfied?” A grin flickered at the corners of his mouth.
   “I am,” Martha said. “Perhaps those people out there would like to dismantle my house as well.”
   Everybody laughed.
   “I could use a new one,” she said. “Ten times the size.”
   More laughter.
   “One with a larger cook area anyway. Perhaps with a comfortable chair for Mary to sit and keep me company while I work.”
   Mary blushed, and Martha touched a hand to her cheek. “I’m only teasing you,” she said. “You’re a big help, and you lighten my spirits besides.”
   Judas came in, back from Jerusalem and breathless from having worked his way through the crowd. “They’re talking about you in Jerusalem,” he said. “It’s rumored that the Sanhedrin is looking to arrest you.” His eyes scanned the room, settling finally on Lazarus. “Even Lazarus is in danger,” he said. “They would prefer a dead Lazarus to a rejuvenated one.”
   Both Lazarus’s sisters looked alarmed, but Jesus held up a hand to calm them. “He’ll be all right,” he said.
   “What are we going to do?” Peter asked. “Advance or retreat?”
   Jesus smiled. “Battle terms,” he observed.
   “They seem appropriate.”
   “Before we do anything,” Jesus said, “I need you and John to run an errand for me.”
   “Yes?”
   John stood up.
   “Bethphage is only a mile from here. A man there has a donkey colt that’s never been ridden. You’ll see it tied to a rail as you enter the town.”
   They looked at him, wondering when he had seen the colt and how he could be sure it was still there.
   “You want the colt?” Peter asked.
   Jesus nodded. “I need you to fetch it for me.”
   Nathaniel stood, his expression one of awe, his eyes alight with religious fervor. “You’re going to ride the donkey colt?”
   “Yes.”
   “This is it, then.”
   “I don’t understand,” the younger James said. “What is it? Why ride a colt that has never been ridden?”
   “Suitable for religious purposes,” Nathaniel said. “The ark of the covenant was drawn by oxen that had never been yoked.”
   “Why a colt at all?”
   “‘Rejoice greatly, oh daughter of Zion,’” Philip said, quoting the prophet Zechariah. “‘Shout out loud, oh daughter of Jerusalem.’”
   Nathaniel continued the quotation: “‘See, your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious, yet humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”
   Jesus looked at James. “I defer to our resident scholars of sacred literature,” he said. Judas stared at him fixedly, almost as if trying to read his mind.

Jewish law required every male who could to travel to the temple in Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover, which began on the fourteenth day of Nisan. As the time neared, and Jerusalem became crowded with devout Jews, everyone looked for Jesus. Few had seen him since the raising of Lazarus.
   “What do you think?” they asked each other. “Is he coming to the feast or not?”
   “Not if he knows what’s good for him. The chief priests and the Pharisees have offered a reward for information as to his whereabouts.”
   Some traveled out to Bethany to see Lazarus, whom Jesus was reported to have raised from the dead. “I won’t believe it unless I see him,” one would say.
   “See him? What will that prove unless you had seen his corpse?”
   “I would have had to have been there,” said another. “I would have had to see him come to life with my own eyes.”
   But still they went, hoping to see Jesus, but content to see Lazarus and to talk to him, to hear him tell again the amazing story of what it had been like in the world of the dead. Many who heard believed, and, though many more did not believe, all participated in the general feeling of excitement and expectation.

The Sanhedrin, meanwhile, was again in session, Caiaphas the high priest presiding. “Everyone in Jerusalem is going to Bethany,” he said.
   “Jesus isn’t there.”
   “No, but Lazarus is. It seems everyone has heard of him. Everyone wants to see the man who was raised from the dead. Despite our best efforts -”
   “We haven’t been able to come up with evidence to refute the claim,” said Joseph of Arimethea.
   Caiaphas frowned. Annas said, “You and Nicodemus both.”
   “Both what?”
   “Both admirers of this Jesus. Aren’t you?”
   “If he is of God, there is nothing we can do to stop him,” Nicodemus said. “And nothing we should do to try.”
   “If he is of God,” Annas said in mimicry. “You believe it then.”
   “And if he is not of God, he will fail all on his own, for he presumes much.”
   “Too much,” boomed Caiaphas. “I hope we are still in agreement, that for the sake of all of us this Jesus must die.”
   “How if we can’t find him?”
   “What about this Lazarus?” said someone. “If we could produce his body, we could expose this Jesus for the fraud he is.”
   “Lazarus is up there in Bethany tending his garden,” Annas said.
   “He is now.”
   “What are you suggesting? That we try to interest Rome in a farmer? Or are you suggesting something more devious?”
   “Less direct perhaps -”
   “We could orchestrate a stoning -”
   “Or simply find someone to assassinate him.”
   “We may have to,” Annas said. “If Jesus himself doesn’t surface soon, we may have to.”

Jesus had withdrawn to the village of Ephraim, not quite a day’s journey north of Jerusalem. When he returned to Bethany six days before the Passover, the curiosity-seekers were still in evidence. Some who recognized him hurried off with news of his return. Others called out to him in hopes of getting a response; these seemed pleased when Jesus raised a hand in greeting or made in the air the sign of peace.
   On seeing Jesus’ approach, Lazarus, who had been mending a fence to keep the goats out of his vegetables, began to wave excitedly. He started down the road toward them, then turned back as if to fetch his sisters, then turned again and strode toward them. “Jesus,” he said. “I thought they’d run you off for good. You wouldn’t believe all the people who’ve come out to see me. You’d think they’d never seen an animated corpse before.” He chuckled. “Of course, I don’t feel like an animated corpse. I feel amazingly good. I suppose I must die again someday - do you suppose next time I could come back fifteen years younger?” He fell in with them as they walked on toward the house.
   “We killed a calf last night,” Lazarus said. “We’ll have us a feast - meat and vegetables until we can eat no more. Wine - I’ll have to send Jonathan into Jerusalem for more wine. Your visits always leave me with a depleted cellar.” Lazarus seemed half-drunk already with delight. Jesus, too, was beaming, as were most of his disciples. The sense of foreboding that had seemed to hover over them was all but forgotten.
   Jonathan, before leaving for town, brought water to wash the dust from their feet. He motioned for Jesus to sit so he could wash his feet first, but Mary, Lazarus’s sister, motioned him aside, and she knelt before Jesus not with water but with a jar of pure nard.
   “Part of my dowry,” she said, looking up at him shyly.
   “I’m honored.”
   Mary poured the perfume over his feet, and the sweet scent of lavender permeated the room. Martha, coming in from the kitchen, saw what Mary was doing and opened her mouth to protest. She hesitated, then closed her mouth again without saying anything.
   “Ah, that’s wonderful,” Jesus said, wiggling his toes. “Wonderful.”
   Mary smiled up at him. Then she undid her hair and shook it out. Everyone sat stunned, hardly breathing, as Mary bent over Jesus’ feet to wipe them clean with her hair.
   Lazarus coughed, his face flushed with embarrassment.
   Judas said, “I suppose you realize this is a terrific waste.” His voice was dry.
   Jesus looked up at him sharply.
   “We’re supposed to be in the business of bringing healing to the sick and good news to the poor,” Judas said. “What better news than that we’ve sold a jar of ridiculously expensive perfume so we could distribute the proceeds? It’s got to be worth a year’s wages.”
   “And it’s not yours,” Jesus said. “Leave her alone. I won’t be with you long, and the remainder of this jar will be used at my burial.”
   “But the poor -”
   “What do you care about the poor? Don’t use the faceless poor as an excuse to ignore those whom God has placed around you. Mary’s act of devotion will be remembered and recounted until the trumpet blows on the last day.”
   “What are we even doing here?” Judas said. “We come to Jerusalem, then retreat beyond the Jordan. We return and retreat again to Ephraim in the desert. We come back and here we sit wasting yet more time and more resources. Do you plan to lead us against Rome, or don’t you?”
   Mary, looking back and forth between them, began to cry, silent tears running down her cheeks, and Jesus laid a hand on her head to comfort her. “I am here to redeem Israel,” he said.
   “Does that mean you intend to cast off the shackles of  -”
   “And through her Rome,” Jesus said.
   “Rome,” Judas repeated.
   “And all the world.”
   “You’re mad,” Judas said, his voice suddenly soft.
   “The work I have been sent to complete is greater than you imagine.”
   “A megalomaniac,” Judas said.
   “Will you follow where I lead?” Jesus said.
   “Where are you leading? You’re headed for a confrontation with Rome’s Jewish puppets, and you don’t even realize it. Do you expect me to pour out my life’s blood for nothing?”
   “If you pour it out in an attempt to destroy Rome, then it will be for nothing,” Jesus said. “It is you and those like you who are driving Jerusalem to destruction.”
   “To freedom.”
   “The kind of freedom you seek is only an illusion.”
   “An illusion? It’s my life.”
   Jesus shook his head, a rather sad smile lifting one corner of his mouth. “There’s no life in it,” he said.
   Judas opened his mouth as if to reply, the turned abruptly and pushed through the door, opening it on a crowd of faces straining for a glimpse of Jesus. Then the door banged shut behind Judas, and they were alone again.
   From outside came the first rumble of distant thunder.

We have a tendency to be too calculating in our love — charity, as agape used to be translated.  We hold back in meeting the needs of those around us, because, after all, we have our own obligations.  There are others with claims on our charity. 
    More than once, Charles Dickens had hard words for charitable societies that focused zealously on the abstract poor in far away places, while ignoring the very real needy all around them on the streets of London.  Love for faceless, abstract people has a tendency to become abstract itself and largely imaginary.
    “Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you.”  Is Jesus saying that we must pour out everything we have to whomever God puts before us?  That we must love with blinders on?  Maybe not.  Picture a newlywed who spends his entire paycheck on roses for his wife.  When she comes home, there are roses in every container that will hold water, roses in the bathtub, roses piled on the bed.  Will his wife be pleased — or dismayed?  Even in loving his wife, the man must be calculating.  His wife needs to eat.  The gas bill must be paid.
    This extravagant pouring-out is not a sin to which we are prone, though.  Almost always, our error is in the other direction.  We are too calculating, too stingy with those whom God has put before us.  We must learn to cast our bread upon the waters with faith that it will return to us.

It was two days before Jesus returned from the hills east of the Jordan. The morning air was filled with mist, and he appeared out of it like a wraith, almost grim in his determination.
   “We must go,” he said.
   “Will we be in time? Martha’s servant said -”
   “I know what he said. Each day has twelve hours of daylight to do what must be done. It is enough.”
   “Lazarus isn’t dead then?”
   Jesus laid a hand on the top of James’s curly head. “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep. I am going to wake him.”
   “If he can sleep, that’s good,” James said. “He’s getting better.”
   Jesus’ mouth twitched. “He’s dead, James. Stone, cold dead. The time has come for God to reveal his son.” He bent and lifted a bag of their provisions, and he swung the strap over his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.
   The disciples exchanged glances.
   “He’s going to his death,” Peter said.
   “Maybe.”
   Thomas said, “Let’s go, too, then. So we can die with him.”
   Everyone looked at him.
   Judas was the first to stand.

It took two days to get to Bethany. Martha’s servant Jonathan, running ahead of Jesus and his disciples, found the house crowded with visitors and Martha alone in the back room, kneading dough for bread.
   “Jesus is coming. He’s on his way.”
   But Jesus was too late and Jonathan knew it. There were too many people to be visiting a sick man: neighboring farmers with their families and servants; friends from Jerusalem, only two miles away; a few of the leaders of the local synagogue; even one or two members of the priestly aristocracy, the Sadducees. Mourners. People there to comfort Martha and Mary on the passing of their brother. Martha was dressed in the traditional coarse sacking, and a line of smeared ash marked her forehead.
   She took a breath, pressing her hands for a moment against her sides, leaving smudges of flour. Her arms were white with it to the elbows.
   “When?” Jonathan said, his voice cracking.
   “Four days ago.”
   “Just as I found Jesus.”
   Martha’s eyes closed against the tears that threatened to fall. “How far is he?” she said.
   “Just outside town. No more than a mile now at most.”
   “Take me to him. No, the back way. Let’s avoid the crowd.”

Jesus saw her coming and stopped in the road to wait for her. The disciples fell silent. Martha walked straight to Jesus and put her arms around him, pressing her head against his chest. She began to shake, her face contorting with grief. Her first tears since Lazarus’s death wet her cheeks. “You’ve come. Thank God, you’ve come,” she said, and he stood holding her and stroking her hair.
   “Martha,” he said. “Dear Martha.”
   “Oh, Master, if you’d only been here, he wouldn’t have died.”
   He pushed her back to look into her face, now smeared with dirt and flour and ashes. “Your brother will rise again,” he said.
   She nodded, sniffling. “I know,” she said. “I know. Like all of us, he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” She stepped back, making an effort to control her grief, wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands.
   “I am the resurrection,” Jesus said.
   Martha nodded, sniffing again, loudly. “Mary will want to know you’re here. I slipped out without her. Oh, Master, there’re so many people to do for.”
   Jesus smiled, faintly.
   “Jonathan here will take you to his tomb. I’ll get Mary.”

“That one.” Jonathan pointed to the stone blocking the entrance to one of a dozen caves in the hillside. “He’s in that one.”
   Jesus approached the tomb and placed a hand on the heavy stone. “Oh, Lazarus,” he said softly. “Lazarus.”
   “See how he loved him?” said the younger James to Simon the Zealot.
   Simon nodded. “He could have saved him. I know that.”
   They heard people approaching long before anyone got there. Mary appeared at the gate, frail and wan, and the mourners who followed crowded around her.
   “Mary,” Jesus said. He turned and went toward her, his own eyes moist with unshed tears.
   “Master.” She looked up into his face and fell against him. He had to catch her to keep her from falling to the ground. Her thin body jerked with her sobbing. “Lord, if you had only been here,” she said, looking up. “He wouldn’t have died. He wouldn’t have.”
   Looking past her, Jesus saw the crowd of people, pushing and craning their necks to see. His name was spoken and echoed and echoed again as those pressing from behind called for information about what was going on.
   “No, not that Jesus,” someone said.
   “Jesus, the one who opened the eyes of the blind man,” said someone else.
   “- healed Jonah Bartimaeus, the man born blind.”
   “I heard he -”
   ” - there was the cripple he healed by the pool at the Sheep’s Gate -”
   “Surely, if he had been here, he could have kept his friend from dying.”
   Jesus raised his voice. “Come through the gate one at a time. Don’t crowd. Give us room around the cave.”
   He left Mary with Martha and approached the stone over the entrance. “Can you move it?” he said to Peter. “You and Andrew together, perhaps?”
   Peter set his shoulder against the stone, but it wasn’t until Andrew joined him that he felt it give.
   “Jesus?” Martha called, tentatively. “It’s been four days since he died.”
   The stone lifted and fell to the side.
   “There’s going to be an odor,” Martha said, in some distress. “A bad one.”
   Jesus walked back to her. “Believe,” he said, softly. “Believe, and you will see God’s glory.” Peter and Andrew stood in the tomb’s entrance, the sleeves of their cloaks drawn over their faces. Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you for always hearing me.”
   “What’s he doing?” someone said.
   “Praying. He calls God Father.”
   Jesus turned back to the tomb. Jesus gestured to Peter and Andrew, and they moved aside.
   “Lazarus,” Jesus called in a loud voice. “Lazarus! Lazarus, come out.”
   Silence. No movement, not even a stir of air.
   “He’s lost his mind,” someone whispered audibly.
   “His grief has unhinged him.”
   Silence again, and not a comfortable one. The crowd shifted uneasily. Jesus did not react to the people, if indeed he was even aware of them. A clatter of stones sounded from inside the cave, and the crowd gave a collective start.
   “What is it?” said a voice, elderly and petulant. “What’s he doing?”
   There was another clatter of stones, this one followed by the sound of shuffling. A woman in the crowd have a little shriek, but was quickly silenced.
   For a time it seemed that nothing more would happen.
   Then a man staggered into the doorway, or at least something in the shape of a man.  There was a cloth over his face, and his entire body, including his arms and legs, was wrapped with strips of linen. At the sight of him, several in the crowd turned and ran blindly into those standing behind them. Others jolted forward, necks outstretched and eyes straining. Someone fell with a cry.
   As the mummified corpse shuffled toward them, blindly and awkwardly, his arms raised in front of him, a hysterical screaming broke out from somewhere in the crowd.
   “Lord?” the dead man said in a quavering voice. “Lord?”
   Pandemonium.

The news took little time to reach Jerusalem. By mid-afternoon, the council of the Sanhedrin was in full session.
   “We have spoken against him,” Annas said, after the debate had gone on for nearly an hour. “Denounced him in so far as we dared, yet he is still as popular as ever.”
   “Even more popular.”
   “The people don’t like us,” said a Pharisee. “They respect us, to a degree, but they have never liked us.”
   “Whereas they adore him.”
   “Exactly,” Annas said. “They adore him. Their adoration only increases with time. We try to warn him off, and he keeps preaching. We try to run him off, and he returns. Now we get reports of a man raised from the dead, raised in front of a hundred witnesses. What can we say to counteract the effect of that on the people?”
   “And whatever we say, even if it were enough to turn the people against him, what happens tomorrow when he performs his next miraculous sign?”
   “When we denounce him, we endanger only ourselves.”
   Nicodemus said, “Listen to you! Listen to all of you. What are you saying? Jesus raises men from the dead, and you ask, What effect will it have on the people? Better to ask what effect it will have on us. On the whole world. If this Jesus is raising people from the dead, then the Day of the Lord is upon us. Indeed, it is already here.”
   “Ridiculous,” Annas snarled. He bared his teeth. “You must be one of his followers.”
   “Ridiculous, you say,” said Nicodemus. “Fine. Lazarus remains dead, and Jesus is a fraud. Let’s expose him.”
   “Expose him how?” someone said.
   “Talk to those witnesses. How many people actually claim to have seen this man raised from the dead?”
   “Can we produce his corpse?” said another.
   “A relevant question,” Nicodemus said. “Can we?”
   “One thing is certain, we can’t allow Jesus to go on as before,” Annas said. The people believe in him. He’ll raise them in revolt.”
   “Then Rome will crush them and take away all we have.”
   “Take the temple away from us. Our positions.”
   “The very nation will cease to exist.”
   “Exactly,” Caiaphas boomed. “Exactly. This Jesus is a threat to the nation of Israel.”
   They looked at him.
   “Is it better for a man to die, or for a whole nation?” Caiaphas demanded.
   “What are you saying?”
   “I’m saying,” Caiaphas said. “That Jesus must die for the nation of Israel. The next time he enters the city, our guards will seize him. He’s a revolutionary. We’ll turn him over to Pilate for execution.”
   “Seize him in public? With the crowds around him?” someone objected.
   “You’ll incite the very revolution you hope to forestall.”
   “No,” Annas said. “Not in public. Not with the people around him.”
   “How then?”
   “Where does he spend his nights? In the home of this Lazarus fellow?”
   “If Lazarus is really alive.”
   “Let’s find out where Jesus spends his nights,” Annas said. “The man has friends. Surely one of them can be prevailed upon to talk.”

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.
    In all his parables, Jesus had named only one character:  Lazarus, who “died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom.”  A rich man died also and was buried in hell.  After learning that there could be no relief for his anguish, the rich man begged Abraham to send Lazarus to his five brothers to warn them, “lest they also come into this place of torment.”  Abraham refused.  They would not believe, Abraham said, even if Lazarus should rise from the dead.
    Jesus, returning to Bethany, was about to provide literal proof of Abraham’s assertion. 

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.

“I and the Father are one,” Jesus said in the portico of Solomon.  The Greek word one is gender neutral.  A better translation might be, “I and the Father are one thing.”  However puzzling the statement might have been, it was a clear claim of divinity, blasphemy to the Jewish mind.  To us the words establish an important element of the doctrine of the Trinity.  The Son and the Father are two Persons, but one Substance.  Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…one in Being with the Father.”
    It was too much.  The temple leaders tried to stone him — again — and Jesus walked away.  His intention, he said, was to lay down his life for his sheep, but not then and not by stoning.  He was saving himself for a more terrible death.  His time was not yet come. 
    To fulfill his destiny, it was necessary for him to leave Judea.  Curiously, his summons to return came with a message of human need.  A friend whom he loved had fallen ill and had taken to his deathbed.  “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”  In returning to Bethany, Jesus gave us not just words to obey, but an example to inspire us.