He ran from the cell then, leaving the baptiser behind in his stinking misery. He hurried to his wife’s chambers, seeking the comfort of her ministrations, but he found her obstinately antipathetic to his needs.
Alone and forlorn, with the night’s howling sounds and his terrors for company, he called for a messenger and dispatched him to John’s disciples in Judea with a question for Jesus, from John the Baptist:
Have I understood correctly? Are you the One long awaited, or are we to wait for another?
And he himself, waited for the answer.
38
SERMON
In the meantime, James bar Zebedee followed his master to their home, Galilee, with a glad heart. For the world had changed to his eye, it was no longer a place of woe and sadness, but a place of joy! The Sabbath was no longer a day of wrath and deathly silence, but a day of life and merriment, a wedding day! He wondered what his old father would say to it when he saw how his son was no longer shadowed by sadness, but was full of hope for each new day!
Their journey was long, but who measured the time? Days and weeks and months and leagues passed in a moment, and then again, a moment could seem to last the span of a life, it could seem like the crossing of an ocean. One day, his master walked with no apparent aim, finding everything fascinating and lingering long in small insignificant places others might overlook. Another day he would go about with a feverish purpose as if he were looking for something that eluded him. In between he taught them as they journeyed or sat at meat under the great blue expanse strewn with cloud, or beneath the cold black dome crowded with stars.
One such evening when the sun was westering, his master chose twelve men from among the seventy followers. James, happy to be among them followed him to a mountain, where he said he would teach them how to pray.
‘Open your hearts, for I will tell you something…’ he said, as night closed about them. ‘Once I travelled through these lands and came nearby to Caesarea Philippi where, not far from the township, in a Temple, I heard a voice. The voice came from the Bath-Kol, the thunder of heaven, and I was taken up by it, and it spoke a prayer of lament into my soul for the downfall of man. Now I will give you a reversal of this prayer. A prayer of the hopeful soul, that rises up from the fall towards its spirit home.’
He began it, ‘Our Father…who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…’
And oh! What majestic choruses did James hear coming from his words! All of creation seemed at that moment consumed by light! Yes, praised be God! Reversed was the original darkness of sin and the fall into degradation, and begun was the ascent towards heavenly newborn life!
The moment passed and Jesus, now sitting among them beneath the cedars, said, ‘This prayer tells that what lives in me is the kingdom, the power and the glory of heaven, come down to the earth. I have come to bring the heavenly bread, the heavenly teachings that can feed you. Whoever is fed by these teachings in life will not suffer death, for death in the body is only the beginning of life in the spirit, suffering in one life becomes the seed of joy in the next.’
James puzzled over it and said to him, ‘Can you tell us, master, what the kingdom of Heaven is like?’
Jesus sat back against the tree and it seemed that even the calm breeze was paused for his answer. ‘To others I speak in parables, but I have chosen you and brought you here because I wish to speak plain with you. The kingdom is a light, a light that shines into the darkness of your souls,’ he said to them.
There was quiet.
‘How is it like a light?’ James did not understand.
‘When a seed falls on prepared ground it creates new life. When you prepare your souls, when the light of heaven enters you, it can make your heart into an eye, which can see more than the world, it can see the spirit that lives behind the world.’
Judas, the red beard, huffed from his position, ‘On earth we have the sun we see with our eyes and now you say we need an eye in the heart?’
‘It was the light of the sun had to create your eyes before you could see the world, Judas. And similarly in your heart an eye must be created from the light of faith before you can see the world of spirit.’
‘Where is this world?’ James asked.
‘It is here, behind these trees, and behind the clouds and the meadows, my brothers,’ Jesus told them.
Andrew looked at Simon-Peter. ‘What did he say?’
Simon-Peter sighed and scratched at his beard in irritation. ‘The master said that the spirit is everywhere among us, but if we want to see it we have to make our own suns inside our hearts, so that it can illuminate it!’
Andrew frowned. ‘Make our own sun? Right here, as we sit, you say? Right here, we are among heaven?’ He shook his head. ‘I do not know…’