Daughter of Jerusalem (26 page)

The following morning Simon Peter came to see me. Jesus had spent the night at his house, but Peter told me the Master had risen
early and gone out alone into the countryside. Peter and Andrew and the sons of Zebedee followed him, begging him to return to Capernaum. He said that he would return but that he needed time alone to be with his father.

There it was again. His father. There was something peculiar about the way he spoke of his father.

Peter found me in my garden, working on the roses. It would be a few years before they would look like the roses I had grown in Sepphoris, and I tended to them with painstaking care.

I stood there silently with the garden scissors in my hand, waiting for Peter to get to the reason for his visit.

He said, “The Master is determined to travel to all the towns he hasn’t yet reached in Galilee. He wants me and Andrew and James and John to go with him, Mary. He’s chosen us to be his followers.”

I put my scissors down to study Simon Peter’s face, trying to see something in it I might have missed. But I saw nothing more than the man I knew. A following that included Peter and other common men like him hardly seemed an auspicious way to start a ministry.

I said, “Do you want to go with him?”

“We all want to go. Very much. Jesus of Nazareth isn’t like anyone we’ve ever seen before, Mary. He has come to us as an emissary from the Lord. I’m sure of it.” Peter’s brown eyes were glowing. His whole face was glowing. He said, “I think he might be the Messiah.”

My head snapped back. “Are you serious?”

“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

And I had never heard him sound so serious. “Andrew wants to go as well?”

“Andrew, James, and John, we all want to go.”

Andrew was a surprise. Peter could be volatile, but Andrew was steady, a man who could be relied on to rein in Peter’s more farfetched enthusiasms. And Zebedee’s two sons were another surprise. Zebedee owned a number of boats, and his sons looked to inherit a thriving business. James and John were well aware of their worth and didn’t seem the kind of men who would turn their backs on their inheritance to follow an unproven teacher, or prophet, or whatever Jesus of Nazareth was.

“How long would you be gone?” I asked.

Peter looked anxious. “That’s just it . . . I’m not sure. The Master wants to preach in all the towns. We could be away for a month, maybe more.”

I was beginning to understand why he had come to me. “And your wife? Your children?”

Peter’s face had flushed scarlet. He mumbled, “We were hoping that perhaps you could take care of them until we returned.”

He was looking down at his sandals, unable to meet my eyes. It impressed me that this proud man could feel so strongly about Jesus of Nazareth that he would humble himself to ask for money.

I couldn’t let him humiliate himself any further. “Of course I’ll take care of your families, Simon Peter. Consider it my gift to your Master.”

Tears glistened in his eyes. He took my hand and pressed it. “Thank you, Mary. You are a good woman, and the Lord will bless you for your many kindnesses.”

“I certainly hope so,” I replied with a smile.

My attempt to defuse his emotion worked, and he smiled back. “I’ll speak to Rebecca now.”

“Tell her I’ll be by to see her later this afternoon.”

“I will.”

I watched as he strode across my garden, an ordinary fisherman transformed by a preacher from Nazareth.

Galilee has its own system of spreading news from town to town, so Capernaum received regular reports about Jesus of Nazareth and the miracles he was performing around the province.

This information was delivered in various ways—by people who had seen the miracles themselves, by a family member of someone who had seen the miracles, and by our rabbi, who received news from other synagogue leaders about the amazing things that were happening.

Jesus cast out demons. He cured a man with a withered hand. He cured a man who was paralyzed. He cured a leper.

This last was the most unsettling miracle of all. Jews believed that leprosy was God’s punishment on those who had sinned gravely. If this was true, it must follow that only God can cure a leper, because the sin must be forgiven before the body can be healed. And only God can forgive sin. Consequently there was great division in town about this supposed “cure.” The Pharisees didn’t believe it, and even the rabbi was uncertain.

Then one day a stranger came to our synagogue and told us the most astounding story. It was brutally hot on that particular Sabbath, and I was crammed between Rebecca and Ruth on the synagogue
benches. The service had almost finished when the rabbi invited the stranger to step forward and address us.

When the tall, thin man took his place before us, my only thought was
I hope he doesn’t talk too long
. I was anxious to get home to my garden and the cool breeze off the lake. The restlessness that ran around the congregation told me I wasn’t the only one eager to escape from the broiling synagogue.

Then the speaker introduced himself as Joshua bar Isaac, “the brother of the leper whom Jesus of Nazareth cured.”

Suddenly every eye was glued to the man in front of us. He looked around at all our faces and said, “I am here to testify to the truth of this miracle.”

Ezra bar Matthias stood and objected, but the rabbi told the Pharisee to let the man speak.

Joshua said, “My brother was a leper for many years. Everyone in our village knew him. Every day he stood with his begging bowl on the road that led in and out of town. I saw with my own eyes the progression of his illness. I saw how the white patches of dead skin grew to cover his face. I saw the tip of his nose begin to crumble. I left him food and spoke to him every day, and it broke my heart that I couldn’t approach him, that I couldn’t take his hand or give him the kiss of peace.

“On this particular day, my brother was at his usual post, and I was standing as close as I dared, telling him some news about our sister, when we both saw the teacher approaching with his following. As I watched in horror, my brother ran past me onto the road and threw himself at the teacher’s feet.

“Everyone began to back away, shouting at my brother to get away from them, saying they would kill him if he dared to touch the teacher.”

I glanced at Rebecca to see how she was taking this. Her gaze was riveted to the speaker’s face.

Joshua paused. I had never heard the synagogue so silent. “The teacher didn’t back away from my brother. Instead, he reached out and touched his cheek.”

I felt a chill of horror run up my spine. How could Jesus have done such a thing? To touch the dead skin on a leper’s face? How could he?

Joshua paused again, to allow us to take in the full power of what he had just described. His voice became a trifle louder, “Then the teacher said to my brother, ‘
Be made clean.
’ ”

I don’t think anyone in the synagogue was breathing, so intently were we listening.

Joshua stretched out his arms. “And my brother was cured! It happened, my friends, under the eyes of us all. The dead skin on his face dropped away, leaving healthy skin in its place. His nose, his hands . . . everything that had begun to crumble was made whole again! My brother was cured!”

For a moment, there wasn’t even a rustle of clothing in the synagogue. Then Ezra bar Matthias leaped to his feet. “You lie!” he shouted. “The Nazarene has paid you to go around telling this tale to boost his reputation!”

Joshua’s face set into hard lines as he answered Ezra’s accusation: “I tell the truth. That is why I have come here—and will go elsewhere—to testify to the truth. After the cure, the teacher told my brother to go and show himself to the priests so he could formally be declared clean. The priests knew my brother. They knew that he was a leper. They knew what they saw when he came to them. Talk to them, why don’t you?”

Ezra turned to face the congregation. “This is a lie and a trick! Only God can cure a leper, because only God can forgive sins.”

Suddenly, talk erupted among the listeners as they turned to each other to express their feelings about this story.

Rebecca said, “Let’s go outside. It is stifling in here.”

As I followed her up the aisle, I wondered:
If this man’s story is true, then who is Jesus of Nazareth?

Shavuot came and went, and the reports about Jesus of Nazareth continued to flow into Capernaum. There were too many cures to question their validity. This teacher had the gift of healing.

I began to think about Lazarus. If Jesus could cure a man with leprosy, surely he could cure my brother of his headaches. So I wrote to Lazarus and begged him and Martha to come visit me. I didn’t mention Jesus; I only said that I missed them and wanted them to see my house, now that it was furnished and the gardens were growing.

They arrived two weeks later, hot and dusty from the road. I sent Martha to my room so she could luxuriate in the Roman bath, and Lazarus dipped into the lake to cool down.

We met at the table in my garden. I had built a level stone patio into the sloping land so I could sit comfortably and enjoy the breeze. The lake was calm today, and all the fishing boats were out. I never tired of that scene.

We chatted for a while about what was happening in Bethany, and then I asked if they had heard about Jesus of Nazareth. They had.

Lazarus said, “He has angered many of the scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem. They say he doesn’t obey the cleanliness laws, that he and his disciples eat their food without the ritual washing of hands.
He even went to dinner in the house of a tax collector—and then he called the man to be one of his followers. A tax collector, Mary! People were outraged.”

Tax collectors were universally hated and despised by the ordinary citizens of Galilee, and they were never allowed in the synagogue because they collected taxes for Rome.

“I hadn’t heard about that,” I said. “But he did cure a leper. The man’s brother came to our synagogue and testified to the truth of the miracle. Ezra bar Matthias was livid.”

Martha asked, “Have you seen Jesus, Mary?”

“Once. He came to dinner in my house, but I was so busy serving food that I never got a chance to listen to him.”

“I would like to meet him,” Lazarus said. “Everything about him sounds extraordinary.”

Martha met my eyes, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was.

“Is he coming back to Capernaum?” she asked.

“I believe he is. Many of his disciples are from here, and they’ll want to visit their families. If you stay for a while, I’m sure you’ll have a chance to meet him.”

“Good,” said Martha, and we both looked at Lazarus, who was turning his cup in his hands and gazing peacefully at the lake.

A few afternoons later Fulvius Petrus came calling. I invited him into the house, where Lazarus and I were sitting in the cool of the atrium. The sun in the garden had been too bright for Lazarus; he was afraid it might bring on a headache. Martha was in the kitchen with Elisabeth, planning dinner.

I had been relieved that my sister and my housekeeper got along so well. Elisabeth was my friend as well as my servant. She had taken over the kitchen as her private space, and I never interfered with her. There would be no keeping Martha out of the kitchen, however, and I was nervous that Elisabeth would be upset. To my enormous relief, she and Martha had taken to each other like sisters.