I’d forgotten all about this. I wrote it four years ago, and failed to think about it again. Now I’ve stumbled onto it again, and I kind of like it. Parts of it anyway. Anyway, I’m happy to read anything anyone else might have to say about it.
It’s kind of sort of in the tradition of The Last Temptation of Christ but much less portentious and much more pretentious.
He Felt The Power Go Out Of Him
He had caught the glances of the servants. He could feel, from the corner of his eye, a look, as one of them poured the wine. He turned to see, but the glance was gone, the servant now murmuring into the ear of another as he finished off the pour. The second servant looked up, avoiding his gaze, running off, busy. As though the first had simply given the other a command or asked for another jug or something.
No, he knew what was going on. He knew what they were saying.
A few minutes ago, the wine they were pouring had not been wine. They had run out. There wasn’t any more. And then there was.
It was to be kept a secret from the guests. Stupidly, feeling pathetically grandiose even as he said it, he had muttered something about how it was “not yet my time.” Mama nodded, understanding. (She always understood.) He repeated the instructions. The thing occurred. And now the servants couldn’t stop staring at him.
But he hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t done anything. He had said what they would find. That was all.
Several years ago, he had heard the call. He’d gone down to his cousin’s place, outside the city. It had never been clear just what sect John had belonged to, or which teacher he followed. Nothing about him made much sense in any way that you could write down. That was half the appeal.
He dunked people in the river. That he had gotten from the Essenes. A ritual designed to clean off people’s guilt.
Jesus had gone to live with John’s group before. Several times, in fact. He’d stay with them for a few weeks, fasting with them, watching the baptisms, listening to John preach, sometimes talking back. He watched the baptisms, John’s followers rattling off sins as though they were harvest statistics—or sometimes as though they’d been possessed by angels—then holding their breath.
John would implore him, exhort him, practically demand of him, that he go down to the river. And occasionally, Jesus would oblige. He’d get all the way into the water, held up by John himself, right on the verge of dunking.
The problem was the part about confessing sins. Everyone else who got baptized seemed to have no difficulty remembering countless sins. It was common for people to come back five, six times, as they discovered new sins they had either forgotten or had committed since their last baptism.
But when John would smile at him and ask, “What sins have you come to wash away?” Jesus would answer, “I can’t think of any.”
John had heard this before. When they were kids Jesus had said he didn’t really understand what it meant to feel guilty. He’d never felt particularly bad about anything he’d done. It had aggravated John then, and it exasperated him now. As though continuing that boyhood conversation, he would deman “Your sins, Jesus, your sins!”
“I can’t think of any!”
“I remember,” John would accuse, “I remember a boy who wouldn’t go where his parents told him, who would run away to debate Pharisees, talk to elders in the temple. Do you remember such a boy?”
“But I knew they’d know where to find me. We had great conversations. I learned a lot. They learned a lot. I just got in the way when I was around Mama and Papa anyway. They were thinking about sending me to live with a rabbi. You know the stories they tell about me, what they think of me.”
“Excuses!”
“My motives were pure!”
“Excuses!” John would wave his hands dismissively. “You must confess. I can not baptize you.”
This happened all the time. Each time John would remind him of a different purported sin. Each time Jesus had a perfect excuse. There was nothing for it. Jesus could not think of anything he had ever done wrong.
“You arrogant, son of a bitch!” John had said once. He’d fasted for weeks after that. Then he accused Jesus of leading his fellow man to anger. No luck.
“So,” he asked John once while they were roasting up a locust. “Do you think you might be the Messiah?” John had laughed, and the group there with them that day had laughed too. Jesus joined in, but it had been a perfectly innocent question.
“You think the one to come will be a bug eater?”
Jesus pondered this. “Didn’t you say something once about people eating the Messiah?”
John’s face fell at this. “I did not say that.”
“You did. I remember.” Jesus plowed on. He never could shut up. “You said even if he somehow got himself killed, people would receive blessings from his dead flesh. Even the Satans that killed him would find all forgiven as they victoriously cooked and ate his body.”
“I did not say any such thing as that.”
There were scattered nervous giggles from the crowd. “Huh,” said Jesus. “I really thought you did.” He looked around at the aghast faces of the others. “The image stuck in my mind.” People were looking down, looking away. Some looked bored. He made a lame little circular gesture as if to say, “continue.” As though John needed his permission for anything.
John didn’t ask him to get baptized that day. In fact, come to think of it, John hadn’t singled him out as a potential baptizee ever since that day.
This bothered Jesus. And one day some weeks later, Jesus got up from the wood he was working with, and walked past Mama and Papa and out the door. (They didn’t bother to try to keep him at his work anymore. Mama had thrown up her hand in the face of laziness. Papa tried to keep a positive spin on it—he had important things to do, surely!—but Mama would not be fooled.) He walked down to the river. As he was coming over the last hill, he heard John yelling, somewhat louder than he had remembered John yelling in recent memory.
Something about “I’m not fit to wash his feet.”
Then John gestured towards his own left, gestured to the left and up. Without looking, he gestured towards the top of the hill. “There he is!” he cried. “There he is! The one I was telling you about!”
Then John looked up to see what he was pointing at.
Jesus stopped short. Dozens of faces were turned up toward him expectantly. There in the middle of it all was his cousin, waving his arm up and down towards the hill Jesus was standing on. The look on John’s face was priceless. He was horrified.
He was horrified, even as he began to run up to greet Jesus. Jesus took a few steps, but stopped, puzzled by John’s behavior as he ran up the hill. John grabbed him by the shoulders, looked him deeply in the eyes.
“John…” said Jesus.
John made a hissing noise, a shushing. Jesus could feel John’s weight, becoming heavier and heavier.
“I should be baptized by you,” is what John said. The intonation was that of a statement, a declarative. But the look in John’s face was clear. It was a question. An incredulous, disbelieving, angry question.
Then, louder, such that everyone could hear. “I. Should be baptized. By you!”
“No, no, no,” demurred Jesus.
“Yes, yes, yes” said John. He smiled, and his smile was not comforting.
“No, please, I… I came to be baptized.”
There on top of the hill, John scowled. “But you will confess no sin. I can not baptize someone who will not confess. You do me instead.”
“Please,” said Jesus.
“Why, then, do you want to be baptized, O sinless one?” John mocked a deferential posture.
Jesus hesitated. He’d made the trip, but dumbly, he hadn’t prepared an answer to this obvious question. “I think I figured out a sin.”
John glanced quickly down at the crowd below. They were waiting expectantly. It did not appear any of them had heard. John leaned in. “Ah. You figured out a sin. Confess it then.”
“My sin,” said Jesus, “is sinlessness.”
Forgetting the audience below, John let his eyes go wide, his hand hit his head, he shook his head back and forth.
Defensively, Jesus raised his voice. “There’s something wrong with me!” At John’s gesture, he lowered his voice again, and repeated, “There’s something wrong with me. Every son of man is guilty. Every single one. But I am not. This is not right. There is something wrong.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
Jesus closed his eyes. “All right. My sin is this. My sin is…”
He took a breath, hoping for something great.
“I don’t know what I am doing,” he confessed. “Forgive me.”
The words felt flat. A confession should be a hammer. This was the silent slipping of velvet on oil. There was nothing there.
It was not satisfactory. But John remained aware of the eager crowd below. He knew there was no way to regret what he had said at the bottom of this hill. He knew what had become necessary. He led Jesus down the hill, and Jesus was baptized.
It was not on the occasion of his baptism that Jesus heard the abovementioned call.
After the baptism, he’d spent some time in the desert, fasting, meditating, thinking, praying. That’s when he heard the call. It was literally a voice. He heard a voice.
“You are the son of God. Turn these rocks into bread.”
Jesus looked around. He asked, unthinkingly, “Who spoke?”
“You are the son of God. Turn these rocks into bread.”
Jesus picked up a rock. “This rock?”
“Turn these rocks into bread.”
There was a voice telling him he was the son of God. He had been invited to commit a miracle. There was no reason, really, not to try. He was fasting, to be sure, but if he could turn a stone into bread, surely he could turn it right back. Why limit himself? Why turn it into bread at all? Why not a frog? Or a man? An Israelite?
But he didn’t try. He threw the rock away, as far as he could.
“Why did you do that?”
“Bread’s not important. I’m here for higher purposes.” Excuses. Excuses!
“You are the son of God. Call the angels to protect you.”
This was it, the real deal. He was hearing voices. He was well and truly blessed. Still, he didn’t even try.
“Why do you not call the angels?”
“I know God will protect those whom he will protect.” Excuses!
“You are the son of God. Take your place on the throne of the world.”
Jesus could see it—the entire world, its entire history, all of it before him, available to his grasp. What would he do with it if he had it? Presumably, something wonderful if, as the voice said, he was the son of God. And if he wasn’t, why would the voice have bothered with all of this?
Perhaps one of his fingers twitched. Perhaps it didn’t. But the important thing was, he had it within his grasp, and he let it go.
“Why do you not reach out to take the world into your hands?”
“Go away.”
“Why do you not reach out to take the world into your hands?”
“Go away.”
The voice went away. And he never heard from it again. He spent the rest of his time in the desert wondering what he had just blown.
A long time later, he heard from John again. John was in jail, and everyone knew he didn’t have long to live. But he still had his group, and they visited him every day, writing down everything he said. And he heard from John through them. They came with a request.
The incident with the wine had repeated itself, in various guises, in various ways, many, many times. He would run across men completely failing to catch any fish. Jesus didn’t do anything. He had no idea where the fish were. He had no reason to tell people to do things like throwing their nets on the other side, or drinking from this or that pool, or call their husbands so he could speak to them. He had no reason to report that a boy he’d never seen before but whom he had heard was sick, was in fact now cured. He had no reason to say these things—but he did. And there was no reason for the things he said to turn out to be true. And yet they were.
How was he to know how five loaves of bread could feed a crowd of hundreds? Why had he insisted on trying it? He didn’t know.
“But I didn’t do anything!” he would often say. Everyone understood what he meant. He meant it wasn’t he, but God in him, effecting these miracles. But that’s not what he meant.
So John had heard about all this. And the question he had for Jesus was this. “Are you the one who was to come?”
Of course in the beginning John had declared loudly to everyone in hearing that Jesus was the one who was to come. It had made quite a stir at first. But Jesus didn’t do anything, and John’s people gradually lost interest, and the incident had been forgotten. Which had been all well and good as far as John was concerned. And exactly what he had expected out of Jesus.
Jesus knew this was what John thought of him, even now.
“Tell him this,” said Jesus. He picked his words here, perhaps, as carefully as he had ever picked any words before. “Tell him, the blind see, the lame are healed, the dead walk, the hungry are fed. Tell him that. Those exact words. Notice the passive construction. And then tell him this. Tell him that I would not want to see him lose his faith over someone like me.”
“This must be wrong” is what he thought to himself as he began beating shopkeepers in the temple. This quickly escalated into a riot, and he was quickly arrested. Had he finally, after all these years, finally committed a sin?
He searched himself as they led him to his trials. Just as he was about to be addressed by the temple officials, he came to his disappointing conclusion. The shopkeepers really didn’t belong there. Their livelihood was itself an injustice. Pain teaches lessons. No one had been seriously hurt. He would gladly give the shopkeepers everything he had in the next instant, if it would help them.
He sighed. His motives were, after all, pure.
Hanging from nails, he had long since lost track of his agony. Someone had challenged him to rescue himself by calling on angels to spirit him away. He hadn’t tried it. Maybe it would have worked, maybe it wouldn’t have. He couldn’t know. Right now all he could think of was the fact that, finally, his luck had run out. He looked up, he gathered up his strength, he looked up at the sky. He remembered a scripture from synagogue. “My God, why have you forsaken me?” He said it as loud as he could. Those below were incapable of understanding that that shaking, wheezing, horrid coughing sound that accompanied this cry was a painful, life-ending bout of laughter.
When he found himself alive and well in the tomb, he laughed once again.