(5 of 12)
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.
Most of the Twelve faced each other and nodded, not understanding of course but not asking.
Then Peter said, "Sir, what was wrong with that?"
Some of the others frowned; Judas sneered.
But Jesus grinned and answered him plainly, though on the bias: "Peter, aren't we learning that God is my father?"
Peter said, "Sir, I'm wondering if you're not wrong there, just in that one place."