Jesus Of Nazareth

(3 of 7)

In the slit-eyed world of a country village, the boy's mother Miriam conceived him mysteriously. Promised in marriage to Yosef the builder, she found herself pregnant without explanation--she had known no man, not intimately. Steeped in the malice of small-town talk, she knew not to tell the story she believed--God's archangel Gabriel had visited her at the village well one early-spring morning as she lifted her jar to climb back home.

He had looked very much like an actual man, a lot like her elder brother Amos, who had been her favorite but had died in agony with a breathing demon--tuberculosis--when she was nine. The angel had Amos' startling eyes, a light brown, but his voice plainly said, "I'm Gabriel, from God, to ask if you'll agree to let him make on you his only son."

When she hesitated, assuming that this was some evil joke, the voice spoke again: "You're free to refuse, and I'm free to tell you that should you accept, your life will last much longer than most, and long years of it will feel like no pain other humans know, not even your mother with the demon that ate her breast like bread."

But before he finished that, she looked well past him--the rim of the skyline back of his shoulders--and there was an odd cloud forming itself in the shape of a dark bird rushing toward her. She met the angel's eyes again, gave an awkward nod and said, "I'm Miriam. Let me be God's slave."

So the boy grew up--she called him Yeshu from his full name, Yeshua--in the same narrow town: one narrow lane, two rows of rock houses, sealed with mud and roofed with branches daubed with mud, and each house full of the mouths he could hear saying "Bastard, Miriam's bastard boy, God's big baby!" His mother's story had leaked out somehow, likely through Yosef, who claimed that he had dreamed it but nonetheless married her, took in Yeshu and made other sons and daughters on her body. All of them grudged the favors their mother gave Yeshu as her eldest child; he was only half their brother.

By the time Yeshu grew to full manhood--the blacksmith in Yosef's building concern and the best smith in Galilee--he was still called bastard in Nazareth whispers. He had never heard Yosef deny the charge, nor even his mother, who told him only, "They're not completely right." So when he entered his 30th year, still single because he felt polluted, he left town to take baptism from his cousin John in the Jordan River well south of home. The main need licking at Yeshu's heart was to find the father he had not yet known--and never quite would.

The Temptation
Matthew and Luke give detailed descriptions of the tempting offers that Satan made to Jesus in the desert. Since Mark mentions 40 days in the desert but gives no specifics, I've imagined that it was then that Jesus began to believe--from the content of his vision at baptism--that God was a gentler kind of father than he proved to be. --R.P.

Two months into his tour through Galilee, Jesus (to revert to his English name) managed to take his 12 best students and hide out with them for three long days. It was the first calm escape they had managed since his success as a healer and exorcist had kept them mobbed night and day by the helpless.

So as they sat around him on the hilltop, they looked toward the lake and the boats in which their fathers and brothers were hauling up the fish the students had abandoned when they ran off with Jesus.

Before anybody could feel real guilt and leave for home, Jesus freed them for the first time to ask any question. Till then he had been so busy telling them the news of God's coming reign on Earth and their duties in it that they had barely had time to ask how long he would need their company.

Afraid of his answers, no one spoke at first. Then Simon Peter rushed in as if a door was slamming fast: "Sir, what's the worst temptation you've known?"

Jesus laughed--Peter's bluntness was a general source of laughter--and then he took a long wait to think. Finally, with his right hand, Jesus reached out and traced a plumb, straight line, perpendicular to the sky. Then he said, "Those 40 days I spent alone, starving by the Dead Sea, Satan himself showed up only three times. My worries were mainly snakes and rocks and no sign of water. But the final time I saw the Tempter, he came in the clothes and body of Joseph, the man who married my mother and raised me--not a bad man but hard on us all. Joseph had died just before I went to join the Baptist, and his last words to me were 'Stay gone, fool!' But though I watched him suck his last breath, here he came in the blazing noon with his mallet and saw, and this time he said, 'Boy, you're nothing but mine. You were always mine. It was just your mother, addled as ever, who tried to claim you were anything better than she and I could have built on our own.'" Jesus stopped as if his answer was finished.