The Redeemer (7 page)

“You know Adonai is no match for me on His own. That’s why He threw me out of heaven. I can’t touch Him as long as He hides out under Your protection. So just let me remind You that if He stays on the earth, He’s in my domain.” Satan thumped his chest. “He plays by my rules.” Satan growled and paced back and forth, then shook his hand at where he supposed God to be.

“He doesn’t have the stamina. He’ll never go through with it. Then where does that leave You? You know the terms of the deal. To buy them back takes innocent blood.”

Blood! I always knew there was something about the blood. Now I was finally going to find out what it was.

“Even if He could do it, what kind of God does that make You? Would You let Your Son spill His blood to buy back the worthless humans who’ve rejected You from the start? It’s me they want, not You. What does it take to convince You?”

Silence from God; snorting and growling from Satan.

The air was getting heavier, so I lay down on the cold granite and tucked my wings beneath me.

“You don’t talk because You have nothing to say. I’ll win Him over. He’ll fare no better than Adam. If I don’t prevail, I’ll kill Him before He gets to the cross. And when I do, prophecy nullified. Game over. You’re going to lose, killer God. You’ll lose it all: Your worthless humans, Your precious Son. I’m warning You. This is Your last chance. Call Him back now!”

I wondered if he realized he was insane. I wished I had the nerve to say what I was thinking:
“Tell me, O Fallen One, how did you lose your mind? Was it piece by piece, or did you just wake up one day, and it was gone?”

I knew what would happen next; Satan would work himself into a fit. I’d seen it happen before when he tried to challenge God. Just as I expected, he let out a howl, frothed at the mouth, and rolled on the hard rock in a manic seizure. He cursed and swung his fist into the empty air.

I hunkered down even more in case God would finally have had enough and let loose a lightning bolt at the writhing archdemon who dared spit the foulest of curses at the most high God. Since I was pretty well shielded by the rock, I almost hoped He would, but He didn’t.

Then there was silence. Satan lay exhausted and still. I wished I could just leave him there and go try to talk to God before He left. Struggling against the weight of the glory, I managed to get on my claw hands and knees, and I crept over and leaned into Satan’s face to see if he was still breathing. He was, but barely. He opened one yellow eye.

“Get me out of here.”

“Give me just one minute.”

“Now!” He went unconscious.

Did I dare take the time to talk to God? Smoke snorted through Satan’s nostrils. That would be a no.

“God,” I said in a low voice, “could You wait right here? I’ll hurry back.”

I’m not sure if the heaviness lifted, or if I found strength I didn’t know I had, but somehow I managed to hoist Satan’s enormous weight on my shoulders and carried him to the steps of his palace. The guards looked away as I laid him down just inside the door.

I ran as fast as I could back to the rim of the abyss, but God was gone.

C
HAPTER 7

B
Y THE TIME
I got back to the earth, Herod’s genocide of all Hebrew baby boys under two years of age was in full rampage. Although it was the second time in the history of the Jews that I’d seen it happen, the first being the slaughter of baby boys by Pharaoh when Moses was a baby, somehow this seemed far worse. I couldn’t force myself to stay in Israel and listen to the wailing that poured out from the streets and homes day and night. Neither could I go back to the second heaven. Satan would be furious if he thought any demon—especially me—had developed sympathy for the Jews. He’d already accused me of being a traitor to his cause more than once. So I decided to go to Egypt and look for Jesus, maybe stay with Mary and Joseph for a while.

They weren’t hard to find. The Jewish community in Egypt was small but very closely knit. Some of Joseph’s relatives had made the journey with them, and they were all living together in a nice house near the city. Before I knew it, Jesus was a toddler. I watched Him grow into a little boy not much different from any of the other boys who played with Him. He was good at games but never showed any extraordinary talent. Well, except for that one time when He raised a bird from the dead. That was an attention-getter, for sure.

While playing and roughhousing, one of the boys threw a rock and hit a small bird that fell from his nest to the ground, dead.

“Look what you did,” Jason, the youngest, cried out.

“You killed him,” one of the others sobbed.

“Don’t cry,” said James confidently. “Jesus can fix him.”

Jesus was not more than four or five years old, and without thinking about what He was doing, He ran to the little bird, cupped it in His hands, and blew on it; then He opened His hands wide and the bird flew away.

“Jesus healed the bird,” the children cried out gleefully.

Mary and Joseph were beside themselves when they learned what had happened—but not like you might think at learning their little boy showed real potential for the medical field.

“Jesus,” Mary got down on her knees to meet Him at eye level, “you must never do anything like this again. Now promise me.”

At first I didn’t understand their reaction. Most parents would have been bragging about having a child prodigy.

“He didn’t plan to do it, Mary,” Joseph said. “He isn’t old enough to know He must restrain His abilities. We’ll just have to keep a keener eye on Him.”

“I know, but this will be on the town grapevine for weeks. These people don’t need any further provocation to speculate about us. It’s hard enough now knowing how people talk about us behind our backs.”

Mary was right. The first thing I learned when I got to their village was how the rumor mill ground when it came to the family from Bethlehem. Many of the townspeople had heard reports about the angels and Jesus’ birth. However, by the time it was told over and over, the story was significantly changed from what had actually happened. Oh, it wasn’t that nobody believed the angels were involved. It was
how
they were involved that fueled the speculation. I can remember the first time I heard the men talking about it around a town bonfire one night.

“You know they had to get married, don’t you? She was already pregnant.”

“They didn’t
have
to do anything. Joseph could have put her away or had her stoned. He chose this path, though no one knows why.”

“I heard that when he found out she was pregnant, he made up his mind to take care of the matter privately, but then he was visited by an angel who told him to go ahead and marry her.”

“Handsome young craftsman like Joseph could have had his pick of
real
virgins.”

“The cover story according to the family is that she got pregnant supernaturally.”

Laughter came from both people.

“I guess Joseph found out how
supernatural
it was all right when the angels appeared at the baby’s birth.”

“Right, you might say the angels returned to the scene of the crime.”

More laughter.

“Don’t you know how ashamed Joseph felt when he finally figured out that Mary was impregnated by an angel?”

“Is that what really happened?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? Why do you think they left Israel in such a hurry?”

Now you may wonder how the rumor got started that Jesus was the son of an angel. To the Jews of the time, impregnation by an angel was far more believable than a young virgin being overcome by Ruah Ha Kadosh—Holy Spirit—and ending up pregnant. Jewish history was full of such stories about human women and angels. Everyone knew how the watcher angels whom God had appointed to govern the nations of the earth when it was new were persuaded by
guess who
to receive the adulation and praise from the people. It was a short jump from receiving adoration to developing a lust for it.

“Have you considered the daughters of man?” Satan had asked the guarding angels.

That’s when the
real
angelic rebellion occurred, if you ask me— when the watchers raped the human women, and the Nephilim were born. The reason for Noah’s flood was to cleanse the gene pool of humanity from the Nephilim bloodline. Most were destroyed, but not all of them.

The idea that Mary was pregnant by an angel was not a stretch for the imagination, especially so when Joseph told someone how an angel had urged him to go ahead and marry her anyway, and then how the same angel returned later and told him to take Mary and Jesus and escape to Egypt.

“Why do you think the angel didn’t warn any of the other Jews to flee from Herod’s slaughter of the baby boys?” asked someone else around the fire that night.

“It’s obvious as can be. The angel was only protecting his own. None of those other baby boys were half-breed angels.”

“The story goes that the angel who impregnated Mary was the same one who told Joseph to go ahead and marry her and came back later to warn them to flee to Egypt,” said one of the men.

The story was so widely circulated that Joseph faced resistance from the rabbis to allow Jesus into the synagogue for worship.

“Who is his father?” asked the chief rabbi, blocking Joseph’s entrance.

“I am his father,” Joseph declared.

The rabbis let them pass, but it was clear to everyone they were suspicious. Either Jesus was half angel, or He was the illegitimate son of a promiscuous woman. It was hard to guess which they thought was worse.

I was relieved for Mary when the messenger angel appeared again to Joseph months later. I recognized him immediately.

“You’re back. I was hoping to see you again.”

“Why? I’m here to speak to Joseph.”

“As you can see, he’s asleep. Maybe we can chat a minute.”

“About what?”

“First, let me ask you, do you by any chance know who I am?”

“No idea.”

I’m sure my face fell to the floor. It was a foolish dream I know, but I had somehow hoped that all the times I’d called out to God over the centuries might have been heard about by the rank-and-file angelic realm. I’d imagined that God had talked about me with the angels; perhaps they were all thinking about my predicament and how to save me. It was disappointing to know there wasn’t the slightest remembrance of me in the third heaven.

“Listen,” the angel said, “I’d love to stay and talk, but I’ve got a message for Joseph, and I’m on a schedule.”

“He’s not awake.”

“I can speak into his dream.”

“Right, I know the drill,” I sighed. “Go ahead.”

The angel hovered over Joseph’s sleeping body, just like before.

“Joseph, Herod is dead. It’s time for you to take Mary and Jesus to Nazareth.”

He was just about to leave when I stopped him.

“Wait, can I ask you another question?”

“Make it snappy.”

“OK, well, um…How shall I put this?”

“Sorry, gotta go.”

“How well do you know Mary?” I managed to spit the words out.

“Know Mary?” He looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you
know
Mary—in the biblical way?” I could feel my face turning red from embarrassment.

He looked at me as if I were odd.

“Never met the lady,” he gave me one more look and took off.

The next morning Joseph told Mary they were going home. She was thrilled. At least in their hometown there were kindred spirits for them. Mary’s aunt Elizabeth had also given birth to a son under unusual circumstances. The gossip about her gained traction in the rumor mill when she named him John, refusing to name her son after her husband, Zechariah. John and Jesus grew up together, sharing a bond beyond that of second cousins. They were both the objects of considerable speculation as to who their fathers were.

When the boys were twelve years old, Elizabeth and Zechariah sent John to the desert to live with the Essenes, an extreme religious faction that ran what I would describe as a spiritual boot camp. Mary and Joseph joined a caravan and made their way to Jerusalem to celebrate the holy days. I went along with the caravan.

There must have been fifty adults and a hundred children in that convoy, along with the animals for the sacrifice. It isn’t hard to imagine how one of the children could mix in with the crowd and not be missed for a couple of days. That’s what happened to Jesus. Neither Mary nor Joseph saw Him when He slipped away from the group and made His way to the temple, but I did. I followed right behind Him, anxious to see what He was up to.

At first He stood in front of the East Gate and stared at it. I must tell you, it was magnificent. Herod may have been a megalomaniac of a king, but he was a brilliant architect. After a few minutes, Jesus took off running up the steps and toward the court of the Gentiles. He ran right through the middle of the traders and money exchangers, then through the women’s court, then through the outer court, which is as far as I hoped He would go. I thought He would be uncomfortable if He got into the inner court. Maybe it was me who would be uncomfortable. I don’t know how He got so far without being stopped by an adult. I was hoping someone would prevent us from going farther, because I was in as deep as I dared go.

As Jesus neared a thick curtain that separated the priest’s quarters from the inner court, it was suddenly thrust open, revealing a priest, who blocked His way. I was so relieved. The holy man was old and frail, but his eyes were clear and sharp. He reached out with long, bony fingers and stopped Jesus from going in.

“Halt there, boy. You are not allowed to come in here.”

“I’ve been here before,” Jesus answered softly.

“Is that right? Who do you belong to?”

The old priest bent down and looked deep into Jesus’ eyes, trying to recollect if he’d seen Him before. I could have helped him remember, if only he could have heard me.

It was right after Jesus was born. Joseph and Mary and I took Him to the temple to be dedicated. When we got there we saw an old man named Simeon, who was pretty much a fixture at the temple. He was there every morning before anyone arrived and was still there in the evening after everyone left. No one ever saw him come or go. Mary and Joseph didn’t pay any attention to him, and I wouldn’t have either except for the angel I saw standing behind him.