Iscariot: A Novel of Judas (18 page)

"He told the leper to be healed, and the paralytic to get up, and they . . . they obeyed," I said.

He narrowed his eyes.

"Did you witness this healing at the Siloam Pool?"

"No," I said. "But is it such an ordinary event that we see a crippled man healed? It is a work of God, is it not?"

He looked at me sidelong. It was a grotesque angle, given the incongruity of his face. "If it is done on the authority of the Lord, then the Lord who commanded the keeping of the Sabbath will not also then command the breaking of it."

"Respectfully, Teacher, . . . but was it not Abraham whom God told to sacrifice his son on Mount Moriah, beneath the very Temple Mount, and then told not to?"

Or was it possible I even now rationalized the actions of a blasphemer?

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He considered me for a long moment before giving a slight smile. "As you say."

He had acquiesced, but somehow I felt I shouldn't have spoken. That I had thrown a stone into a river and created a ripple that might come back to me as a wave.

"So he has no affiliation with the Pharisees or the Sadducees, or even, as some have said about John, with the Essenes. That is a dangerous kind of man. Because it means that he has no loyalty or accountability."

"His loyalty, Teacher, is to the people."

"It is a careful balance we must strike, Judas," he said, sitting back. "It is an easy thing to say 'no king but God' or to talk about Messiah, but until the day that we are ready to mean it, and to back it, such a cry gains us nothing and loses us everything. Rome will not hesitate to crucify us by the thousands.

But here is something: We hear that Pilate's sponsor, Sejanus, has fallen from favor in Rome. Pilate must walk carefully here or he will find himself recalled and sent back in disgrace. There will not be another situation as happened with the treasury--he dare not risk it. Another reason why if there is to be a time, it may be soon."

He leaned forward, eyes locked on mine.

"So now listen to what I say. Your master must leave the city. It is not safe for him here. Not after today. At this rate he will not live to see Passover and he won't be the only one to suffer."

My heart thudded in my ears.

"Do you understand what I am saying, Judas? When the time is right, he must return with an army or not at all."

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"You keep it," Matthew said, tossing the moneybag to me. "I'm not blind--I see the way they look at me. None of them trust me. But you, you're a man of standing and know your way around a counting table."

I had not trusted him either--up until that moment.

I tucked the bag into my belt. It was far too light.

With Zadok's warning still in my ears, I was anxious to be as far from the Holy City as possible, as quickly as possible. As we entered Galilee again and the smell of fish thickened in my nostrils, I felt I could breathe for the first time in days.

But that wasn't the only reason. Simon had returned to us.

I wanted, with boyish exuberance, to laugh and tussle his hair. But the Simon who had come to us outside the city gate was not the same man. He was thinner in the space of days, as though he had fasted through the Feast.

His face was drawn and gaunt, and he kept to himself. I left him alone, missing him even as I followed ten paces behind him. I had not thought that anything would compel him to follow my master again, that in fact the 151

events at the Temple had turned him irrevocably away. But as we traveled he walked with the resolution of a man who shed with each step a part of himself as though he carved it from his own body.

Time enough to learn about this change of heart later. For now, I was content.

By the time we reached Heptapegon, the small coins left in the moneybag would not buy food enough for those in Jesus' innermost circle, let alone supply us for the days to come.

On the Sabbath, we followed Jesus out of the city to pray. It had become my favorite moment of the day, the sight of my own feet following after him as he went out in the morning. Of his laborer's fingers as they drew the mantle over his head and gathered its tassels together, the reverberation of the Shema rumbling up from his throat.

I never felt so close to him as I did in those moments. Salvation seemed to swell up even now beneath us, brought not by the Maccabee or the priests or the Pharisees, but by this man.

Hear, O Israel . . .

Here was something more base and transcendent and holy so that the very air seemed not so much to blow as to breathe, as though taking its cues not from cloud or sun . . . but from the one praying beside me.

The Lord our God is One.

I had wanted nothing in my life but to believe in a man such as this.

When the sun was over the mountains on the eastern side of the lake, we went down from the hills, passing by several fields on the way to town. The stalks of wheat on the fringe of the field had

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been left unharvested--food for orphans or widows to come and eat without penalty.

Or hungry disciples.

I was not such a city-dweller that I had not plucked at heads of wheat before, chewing the kernels into a gum as a boy. Matthew, however, had to watch how Peter crushed them between his hands before reaching tentatively toward a stem himself. I wondered if, having been a rich man, he had ever eaten this way in his life.

I glanced farther down the way, and there was Simon, pulling kernels from the stalk, rubbing them in his palms and putting them one after another into his mouth, chewing them doggedly. There was something primal and desperate in his eyes so that the working of his jaw seemed to have a focus all its own. I did not know what drove him, but I began to eat now in earnest as well. The sun was climbing, warming the dark curls of my head. All my life, Sabbath had been a thing of duty, but today it was beautiful, sitting among the other days like a queen.

Several of the town folk had come out to meet us, children bounding ahead of their parents, some of the young men, poor and landless and out of the habit of rising early, still bleary-eyed from sleep.

And I thought: It is well. All is well. One day soon the mass of these followers would overflow these hills, and I would look back on this day with the wistfulness of remembrance. I must cherish this, I knew it even then.

But then, as we made our way down the hill and more people came out to meet us, I saw that two men among them were wearing the tefillin of the Pharisees. They stood at the edge of the field, their robes billowing in the crisp morning breeze, and I knew that they

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would not go farther than that, having restricted themselves to the thousand cubits prescribed by many teachers as the limit one should walk on Sabbath.

I resented the sight of them immediately, even though I knew I must make it my mission to mend ways with them. For the sake of Zadok. For the sake of my master's mission. And yet I had wanted this moment--this hour, this day--

to pass as one never-ending day, without interruption.

As we came toward them, the first threw out his arm as though to indicate a mess around him.

"Your disciples are doing what is unlawful!" He was an older man and his jowls shook when he said it.

My master looked at him as one reluctantly returned from reverie.

"Why do you accuse us?" he said.

"Are you not reaping, grinding, and sifting on the Sabbath?" the Pharisee said, gesturing to our hands.

I glanced at Simon as he picked a last kernel from the palm of his hand and pushed it through his lips into his mouth. It wasn't defiance, the look on his face, though he was looking directly at the Pharisee. It was something else.

Hunger.

"David entered the Temple and ate the consecrated bread, which wasn't lawful but for the priests," Jesus said.

"You are neither David nor a priest," the Pharisee said. "You break the Sabbath, and you teach your disciples to profane it with you!"

My peace, so great only a moment ago, cracked. Why did Jesus provoke in this way? The entire nation was hungry for a messiah.

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Did he not know that they would follow him for his signs and healings alone?

The accusers left us that day, outrage in their gazes . . . foreboding in their eyes.

THE SYNAGOGUE IN HEPTAPEGON was not as fine as that in Capernaum, but it was filled with people that day--rich men and peasants alike, squeezing onto the stone benches and standing along the walls and near the door until the sheer warmth of so many bodies heated the room like the embers of a fire.

Jesus taught in his characteristic way, without citing the sages, reading from the scroll of Isaiah and saying that the scriptures had been fulfilled this day.

How I wished he might at least quote Hillel! But no matter. The people had come to see him and they had come in numbers.

It was then, toward the end of the teaching, that I began to notice something strange. There was a man near the front, where we were, looking uncomfortable all the while. I hadn't thought much about it; I had seen men tremble in the presence of my master, and women inexplicably weep at the mere sight of him.

But this man, who looked to be poor by all accounts, looked often from Jesus to the Pharisees sitting off to the side, including the man who had come out to the field earlier, now sitting in the Seat of Moses. As soon as Jesus had closed and returned the scroll, the man pulled out his arm from beneath the edge of his mantle, and I could see that it was twisted like something withered on the vine, his fingers curled inward like a dying flower about to drop

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from the stem. He held it out, as though he had not five withered fingers but five sound ones, and as though he would point toward Jesus himself.

Jesus looked at him for a long moment as a hush fell over the synagogue.

But the look on his face was not the same I had come to know so well in him--that of one bent down over something shamefully broken, in sorrow.

This time, his brows drew together and he looked from the man, holding his withered hand out like a trembling weapon, to the Pharisee sitting too comfortably in the seat of honor.

Fatigue hovered around Jesus' eyes like shadows.

"Stand up," he said to the man.

The man got shakily to his feet with a frantic glance toward the Pharisees, who leaned just perceptibly forward where they sat. And then I understood the situation: The man had been approached and given a small coin--a dinar, perhaps, enough for bread--and told to come to synagogue and sit here, near the front. Told that if he were very fortunate, perhaps the visiting teacher might take pity on him, that he might be healed, even, by the end of the day.

Jesus faced the Pharisees. He shook his head and dropped it. When he lifted it again a moment later, he said through tightened jaw, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath--to do good or to do evil? To save a life . . . or to kill?"

I knew, and the Pharisees surely knew, that it was lawful to save a life on the Sabbath if that life was in danger. To not do so would be to kill. But surely this man was not going to die from his withered hand.

The Pharisees refused to answer his question.

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"Teacher," I hissed. "It is a trap!"

Jesus sighed and then with another shake of his head said to the man in a loud voice, "Stretch out your hand!"

The man looked struck, blanched, as though he might fall over dead. But then he slowly lifted his arm again. And uncurled those furled fingers. Long and straight. They flexed back, arcing like small bows, the bones within them taut beneath the skin.

Gasps. Cries from the first rows, as others in the back leapt to their feet, some of them pushing against those ahead of them to see.

They came down from the rows of benches like stones falling down a hill, to seize the man's hand and examine it, the man himself stark-faced, his eyes bulging, his lips stretched over his gums in amazement. They came grabbing for Jesus' sleeve, to say that their aunt or uncle or small cousin was ill, or that he must come eat at their house this evening, or only to touch him, to whisper the word that had become an offense to me, but that now sounded like "Hosanna" from any lips: