American Savior (30 page)

“With the reverend’s permission,” Jesus said, turning to look at Pitchens,
“I would like to take for today’s New Testament reading a little used passage from John. Chapter 7. It is titled Feast of Booths.”

Jesus cleared his throat and began, “
Jesus moved about within Galilee. He had decided not to travel in Judea because some of the Jews were looking for a chance to kill him. However, as the Jewish feast of Booths drew near….
” He paused and looked up. “The Hebrew word for this feast is
Sukkoth,
as you may know. It was held roughly at this time of year, the autumn, and it commemorated the harvests and the time when, after the Exodus, the Jews wandered in the wilderness and lived in huts. Let me continue.
As the Jewish feast of Booths drew near, his brothers had this to say: ‘You ought to leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples there may see the works you are performing. No one who wishes to be known publicly keeps his actions hidden. If you are going to do things like these, you may as well display yourself to the world at large.’ (As a matter of fact, not even his brothers had much confidence in him
.)”

Jesus paused at that point, and looked at the pages between his hands with a curious expression, as if he were remembering something very personal. “Interesting, don’t you think,” he asked, looking up at the congregation and letting his eyes move across it from side to side, “that there were disciples in Judea. ‘Disciples’ is what it says. Not ‘friends,’ or ‘supporters,’ or ‘sympathizers,’ but ‘disciples.’ And interesting, too, that, in this translation at least, Jesus seems to have brothers. Twice that word is used.” He paused again and looked down, and it seemed to me that he was remembering those brothers, perhaps that he was nostalgic for them. He shook his head with a small movement and went on. “
Jesus answered them
—I’m skipping a couple of lines here—
‘Go up yourselves to the festival. I am not going up to this festival because the time is not yet ripe for me.’ Having said this, he stayed on in Galilee. However, once his brothers had gone up to the festival he too went up, but as if in secret and not for all to see.
”

“
As if in secret,
” he repeated, looking up again. “What could that mean?”

He seemed to actually be waiting for an answer from the congregation. No one spoke up.

“And it goes on:
During the festival, naturally, the Jews were looking for him, asking, ‘Where is that troublemaker?’ Among the crowd there was much
guarded debate about him. Some maintained, ‘He is a good man,’ while others were saying, ‘Not at all—he is only misleading the crowd!’ No one dared talk openly about him, however, for fear of the Jews.
”

Jesus looked up again. He seemed to be smiling, though what felt to me like a murderous silence had fallen over the congregation. “Just a little more,” he said. “Bear with me. So Jesus teaches at this festival—not the kind of thing that would happen in today’s society. He teaches at a festival, and the Jews marvel at his teaching because in those days rabbis would always mention, as a way of giving respect, the teachers who had instructed them, their own lineage of teachers. But Jesus did not do that. Why?”

Again, nothing but the bristling silence.

“And then, when he was finished with his teaching … well, let me read from Scripture again:
This led some of the people of Jerusalem to remark: ‘Is this not the one they want to kill? Here he is speaking in public and they don’t say a word to him! Perhaps even the authorities have decided that this is the Messiah. Still, we know where this man is from. When the Messiah comes, no one is supposed to know his origins.’

“
At this, Jesus, who was teaching in the temple area, cried out —
” And at that point, Jesus closed the Bible, looked up, and spoke the rest from memory: “
So you know me, and you know my origins? The truth is, I have not come of myself. I was sent by One who has the right to send, and him you do not know.
”

When he finished speaking these words, Jesus paused and ran his eyes back and forth over the crowd as he had done earlier. It was at once a sympathetic and a challenging look. “The Jews were my people then,” he said at last, and I saw my father sit up straighter. There was, at the same time, a scuffle or disturbance, very minor, at the back of the church, near where the person had shouted earlier. I turned and saw someone being escorted out the door, but could not, from that distance, see what was going on or who was doing the escorting. It seemed nonthreatening, though, so I stayed put. “The Jews,” Jesus repeated. More people were squirming. “Who would these Jews be?”

“We know who they are,” a young man called from midway back in the congregation. “The Christ killers.”

Jesus looked in the man’s direction. I saw him glance at my father. He went on: “The Jews, in that time and that place, were the people of religious power, under the Romans’ secular power. They were the holders of the law, the religious law, and of the ancient knowledge. They were the ones who were sure they knew what God wanted—how the Sabbath should be observed, for example. What kinds of sacrifices were appropriate. Who was condemned and who was saved.” He paused again, looked down, looked back up. “It seems to me that, in our time and place, the Jews would be not the actual Jews as we now know them. If we use the Bible as our guide, we could come to the conclusion that the Jews, as the word is used in this passage, are not an ethnic or religious group, but the ones who are sure they know, the ones who are quick to judge others for not obeying God’s word, the ones who tell us what God’s law is.”

I shifted my weight and looked around. People had begun to sense what Jesus was getting at, and there was a wave of muttering, a small epidemic of headshaking. Jesus swept his arm out over the congregation. I realized, at that moment, why he had not gone anywhere near religion on the campaign trail: everything he said on the subject, every word he uttered, was going to make someone uncomfortable, or worse. And when you make people uncomfortable, they do not usually vote for you.

“Maybe
you
would be today’s equivalent of those who are called ‘The Jews,’ in the Gospel of John,” he went on, as if the point needed further clarification.

“Heresy!” someone screamed, when this sentence had sunk in.

Jesus held up his hands, calm as ever. My heart was beating hard by then, and both Dukey and Enrica were looking at me with expressions that seemed to say, “Are you nuts? Get him out of here!” But I did not feel I could interrupt the sermon at that point. And I did not want to.

Jesus went on calmly, a bit more loudly: “Part of the crowd, it says in the Bible, was thinking, ‘He is a good man.’ In fact, a bit later in the text, when the temple guards are sent to arrest him, they come back empty-handed,
saying, ‘No one has ever talked like this before.’ And Nicodemus, in a famous passage, stands up for Jesus’s right to speak. So, you see, as painful as it might be for us to admit this, we could draw a parallel to our situation today. If—”

“You are not God!” A woman screamed. “You are not the Risen Christ!”

Jesus looked at her patiently. “I might not be,” he said slowly. “I might not be. But my question to you is this: would you know him if he came into your midst? If he came into your midst and did not look the way you expected him to look, and did not speak as you expected him to speak, would you know him?”

“Blasphemy!” a few more people shouted.

“Sinner!”

“Anti-Christ!”

One or two lunatics in the back began chanting, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

Jesus held up one hand. “Later still, in that same chapter, John writes that many in the crowd were saying, ‘When the Messiah comes, can he be expected to perform more signs than this man?’”

There was widespread yelling now, throughout the church. Reverend Pitchens made no attempt to quiet his flock. Sitting in his high-backed chair, legs crossed, he shifted his weight from one hip to the other and kept his chin cupped in one hand, as if he were giving serious consideration to what Jesus was saying.

“I’ll leave you with this,” Jesus went on, trying to speak above what had now become a tumult of accusations, threats, and curses, “and it is something I will say only once in this campaign, and only here: I was sent by him who has the right to send, and him you do not know.”

A two-count after Jesus uttered those amazing words, I saw Pitchens make a small upward movement with his right hand. It was the type of movement you’d make to someone, indicating that you wanted them to stand. Immediately the crowd was on its feet, and people were shouting, screaming, and flinging their pointed fingers in Jesus’s direction. “Blasphemer! Sinner! Cast him out!” And so on.

I rushed across the open front aisle, Dukey and Enrica and three Massachusetts motorcyclists a step behind me. I grabbed my brother first, and then Zelda and my mom and dad and pushed them hard up the carpeted steps that led onto the stage. Members of the congregation were crowding forward. The noise was absolutely deafening. Pitchens was still sitting there. Jesus had not moved either. Once on the stage, our small and highly unprofessional security force managed to get Jesus away from the pulpit and as far as the side door before we were surrounded and stopped. People were swinging at us, not punches so much as accusatory forward swings of the hand and arm. And the faces, the faces were awful to behold, contorted in rage, ugly with hatred, men and women and even a few children yelling as loud as they could, the adults reaching out over our shoulders to take hold of Jesus’s clothes and hair. He squinted, winced, did not raise his hands to defend himself. But Dukey and his pals had had enough. They started swinging. And these were not the looping right hooks of a TV sitcom, these were short, vicious pistonlike blows, aimed at the men closest to them. Enrica was flinging hard kicks at the loudest of the women, not hurting them so much as knocking them over sideways like bowling pins. She wielded her feet with an astounding accuracy. I saw—it was one in a series of quick glimpses between pushing people away—that my father had taken his boxing stance and was about to hurt someone who did not realize he was about to be hurt. That goofy old guy with the gray hair and big eyebrows? What’s he doing standing like that? And then,
bang!
There was blood sprouting from the face nearest him, and people falling over in all directions, tripping, leaping, and more screaming, and if the police hadn’t violated their agreement and come pouring into the church at that moment, God knows where it would have ended. Someone would have been killed, certainly. All it took was a few swings of the nightsticks, and we saw an opening and popped out through the side door, and pushed ourselves, and were pushed, in a mad scramble, to the doors of the limousines.

Somehow we got out of there, everyone accounted for. Stab and Zelda and my mother were weeping. My father had a broken right hand, and a bad cut over his left eye, to which my mother was attending through her
tears. My arms and legs were shaking, and I was having flashbacks to my only previous adult violent encounter, the famous mugging in the parking lot. Jesus’s tie was torn down from his neck, his shirt collar ripped wide, the sewn shoulders of his suit jacket opened at the seams. He was grimacing in pain; several blows had landed right where the bullet had cut him, and broken open a couple of the stitches.

“The bastards, the bastards,” Wales kept muttering, as he blotted my brother’s bloody face with a monogrammed handkerchief.

Enrica, who had crowded in with us and was squeezing herself against the armrest to avoid sitting on Jesus’s lap, gave me a “See, what did I tell you” look.

We were all breathing hard. The cars were back on Interstate 94 at this point, sirens all around, and it took us the whole ride back to the airport before we were able to make coherent sentences, to ask each other who was hurt and how badly. Things quieted down for a moment, and then Stab burst into tears again, and I started swearing, and my mother shushed me, and Zelda looked traumatized and was squeezing my hand hard, and when we got to the airport gates my father did the strangest thing: he took hold of Jesus’s hand with his good hand, lifted it to his lips, and kissed his fingers. It was the only thing like that I ever saw him do.

THIRTY-FIVE

Out of that whole awful hour, what reached and remained on television screens across the country was only this: the image of Jesus being chased into the limousine. A certain channel—it shall remain anonymous here, but it has the same name as an animal known for its slyness—made it a point, in newscast after newscast, to linger on the furious faces of the parishioners who had spilled out into the churchyard. Viewers heard the words “Blasphemy!” and “Heresy!” over and over again. This was followed by a brief interview with the Reverend Pitchens, whose famous line was to go down in the annals of spiritual egotism: “The members of my church,” he said, “have an instinct for false witnessing.”

It was not exactly fair and balanced coverage. And what Linneament calls “the drive-by media” did not do much better. Lost in the fuss, for instance, was the story (which came out only a week and a half later and only in a minor way) of a woman named Annabelle Rundegren who had been driven all the way from Williston, North Dakota, by her daughter, Helga. Annabelle was blind, and had told her daughter that she wanted to hear Jesus in person. She managed to get into the church, and sat with her daughter in a pew in the back. As soon as Jesus started to speak, her sight returned. She cried out, naturally, who wouldn’t (that was the first noise I’d heard, before things got crazy), and the people around her had figured her for a Jesus campaign plant, a phony, and quickly ushered her out of the building. She’d been so traumatized, first by the miracle and then by the nastiness of the others in the pew, that she’d told her
daughter not to say a word to anybody about it, and she’d holed up in her house in Williston for nine days, secretly ecstatic. Finally, when she saw the kind of press we were getting, she went to her local newspaper and told them what had happened. But her story seemed suspect to the more sophisticated news outlets, and you would have had to scour the back sections of a few national papers to find the half paragraph they gave her.