Fifth Gospel(76)
The rabbis could say nothing, they seemed confused by his words, and this had stilled their tongues. They made to leave.
Judas said to them, ‘Wait!’
But they did not wait.
He went to Jesus and said to him, ‘Why do you not reason with them? Surely it is good to have them on our side. Teach them of your greatness! Perform some miracle to convince them!’
Jesus turned to him with a look he had seen before. A look that was quizzical and serene, and yet it pierced the heart and winkled out the truth from its opposite. ‘There are as many men who can perform miracles, Judas, as there are teachers in the world. My task is not perform miracles or to teach, it is to live and to die.’
‘But why not tell them of the mysterious things you have told us, the secrets of existence and of the kingdom of God?’
‘Would you give grass to a dog, Judas, or meat to a cow? I look at the condition of a man’s soul and I give him what he can bear, according to whether I see in him an animal, or a man. Only to my brothers do I give the fullness of my teachings.’
He led Judas and the others away then, across the forum and through the Sheep Gate. They were headed for Olivet, where they would spend the night and to do so they had to pass a place called Bethesda, the ‘House of Healing’.
Bethesda consisted of five porches, which enclosed a pool made from the waters of an intermittent spring. The bubbling up, or ‘troubling’ of this pool, was said to foreshadow healings attributed to an angel. Around it, sick people congregated and when the spring began to swirl, the sick and afflicted scrambled to enter its waters to be healed, and for this reason every expectant eye was fixed on the pool.
Judas saw Jesus go to the most wretched man of all, a man who sat without an attendant or friend to help him to the pool. Jesus asked this man if he had the will to stand. The man said that he did. Jesus looked at him full of love and told him to take up his coverlet and to go since he was healed. When the man did as he said, all were amazed, not only because the man had been healed but also because this healing infringed upon rabbinic law, which forbade work on a Sabbath.
Judas did not know what to think.
The next day when they came again to the Temple, the Rabbis and Pharisees were gathered waiting for him. They had heard of the healing.
‘You healed a man on the Sabbath!’ one Pharisee said, pointing a dry bone of a finger at him.
‘It is true,’ said Jesus, tranquilly.
‘Did you tell him to take up his bed and to walk, knowing this to be unlawful?’
His voice was so quiet that the old men who had gathered around had to cup their ears to hear it, ‘I am the Lord of the Sabbath, if I wish to do good on a Sabbath, then I will do it. You, on the other hand, should be ashamed, for you do not care about the man’s cure or the spirit that enabled it. You think only that he took up his bed on the Sabbath.’ He looked at them and his face did not change but his voice became deeper. ‘Your rigid laws need to be broken! You see God as a God of death, but I tell you He is a God of life! You see him as hateful and disdainful, a God Who longs for revenge, but I have come to show that He is a God of love and warmth and light. He comes to bring salvation and redemption of sin to mankind; to save it from the fear that you cultivate!’
Angered, the rabbis shouted, ‘How can a man bring redemption? You cannot forgive sins! This is only for God to do!’
‘I can forgive sins because what lives in me is above the laws of the Sabbath, the laws of the Sabbath are the laws of necessity, the laws of death. But I can free a man from necessity, I have come to free him from sin, for my power does not come from dark Saturn which names your Sabbath, my power comes from the Sun and my day is Sun-day, the day of light, and life!’
After that, there was heated discussion. The priests were displeased and left to confer amongst themselves. Judas followed them to the hall of justice where, after a further scrutiny of the blind man’s evidence, they plotted against Jesus.
Backwards and forwards they disagreed on the finer points of the law. In the end, they resolved that Jesus was certainly more than a prophet, or perhaps even more than a priest, but they could not allow the people to know it. The people, that childish rabble full of lusts and desires and propensities to sin, had to be kept in their place, and such a man had a mind to set them free! Free from sin, free from the Sabbath rule! What would result, if they began to believe in a God of love? What consequences would befall Israel from evildoers if they were robbed of their fear of the pain, disease and death that God inflicted on the iniquitous? Healings and speeches were one thing, yes, but what next, the expulsion of the priests from their positions, the tearing down of the Temple, and the burning of the sacred writings of our forefathers?