“He spake unto James. Remember? And you just told your brother that he wants him to sell the land. So I assumed that he had appeared unto you and spoken unto you, too. He warned me that there’d be a lot of that going around, by the way.”
Mary B turned red as she finally got my drift.
“No, he did not appear to me,” she said through clenched teeth. “Or speak to me.”
For a moment, I felt sorry for baiting her. That she had no mystical visions had always been a sore point with this brilliant woman. At our very first encounter, she had dragged me to a vantage point overlooking the Beautiful Gates. We had watched the sun come up, and when the gates turned gold, she had demanded to know what I saw. As if at her command, I did have visions, dreadful ones. One had come to pass already; I hoped the other never would.
“I am following his teachings,” she added fiercely.
“His teachings?” I repeated.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what we have to go by; that’s what he gave us. Some people may have visions, but we must scrutinize them in the light of his teachings. Don’t you agree?”
“Well, yes, I suppose.” I hadn’t given the matter a lot of thought, but Mary B was right about one thing, I’d better start paying attention to what was happening in my beloved’s name. “But I can’t recall him teaching anything about a man who is a good steward of the land selling it to go live a life he’s not at all suited for in the city.”
Mary pursed her lips and knit her brows in a way that reminded me of Jesus. If she had chewed her cheek the way he used to, she would look more like him than his own sister. In any case, I knew I was in for trouble.
“He called Peter and Andrew, James and John to put down their fishing nets,” she observed. “He called Matthew away from a secure job as a tax collector. He called you from the whorehouse.”
“That is not exactly how it happened, Mary. In point of fact, when I asked to go with him, he told me my place was at Temple Magdalen as a priestess of Isis.”
“Well, he obviously changed his mind, didn’t he?” Mary B attempted a smile, but it didn’t quite work. One corner of her mouth just wouldn’t budge and her brows still bristled.
“No, I don’t think he really did,” I paused to consider. “It was more like he threw up his hands and gave in.”
“You can’t really think that!” Mary B protested. “He married you.”
“Well, he would have married you long before, if you had let him.”
“Could we get back to the point?” Mary B sighed.
“Which is?”
“If you two Marys don’t mind, I’ll just get on with checking the vines,” Lazarus sounded desperate.
“Stay,” Mary ordered.
“Let him go,” I countered. “Let’s you and me duke it out, Mary. Fair fight.”
“Oh, all right.” Mary B loosed her brother’s sleeve, and Lazarus turned and fled. “You’re the biggest stumbling block. If I can move you the rest should be easy.”
“You said you had a point,” I reminded her.
“I do.” She took a deep breath. “The point is, he calls us all to new life. When he does, we leave the old one without a backward glance. Or we are not worthy of his kingdom. He said that over and over in the parables. Don’t you remember? People who made excuses were left behind. Surely you paid some attention to his teachings.”
“I did, Mary, and I also paid attention to him. He would get angry sometimes. He made mistakes. He was rather dreadful to his mother. He was human. I loved him. Love him still.”
“Do you deny who he is?”
“Who is he, Mary?” I asked her.
“He is the righteous teacher who was foretold,” she lowered her voice, as if someone might overhear—the birds rising up from the fields, scattering over the sky, the thirsty grapes trying to ripen. “He is the one who is to come, the one who shall deliver my people Israel from the bondage not of foreign oppressors. That was Judas’s mistake. He was so literal. We are in bondage to our own ignorance, blindness. We will be free from all oppression and all oppressors when we know, know who we are—that we, that we are him. We, too, can become Christs. Do you understand? Do you see?”
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to do just that. The memory came of the first time I witnessed my beloved’s public ministry—or rather barged in on it. I got my friends to help me lower a paralytic through the roof of Peter’s house. The man had been so insistent on seeing Jesus, I had denied who I was, denied the power of my own healing hands, to help the man see Jesus. What I remember best about that day is how Jesus looked at the man. How, for the paralytic, getting up and walking again was a minor and bewildering side effect of being wholly seen and known.
I opened my eyes to find Mary B waiting for me, calling her impatience to heel. A disciple. One who was disciplined for her cause, her beliefs. Then I tried to see past that, tried to see Mary the way Jesus saw the crippled man. Clearly, without anything in the way. I saw the fierceness of her, not leaping flame but coal, hard, hot, lasting.
“I will go with you to Jerusalem,” I heard myself saying. “But you must leave Lazarus alone. Do you hear me? Lazarus never held anything back from Jesus, Mary. Jesus never had to call him. He was already there.”
To my astonishment, Mary B nodded. Slowly, thoughtfully.
“I do hear you, Mary,” she said. “Even if I don’t understand. When you speak, well, not always, but sometimes when you speak, I can hear him. The men won’t understand, they won’t like it. Maybe, if you can explain it to them, as you did just now—”
“Oh, Mary,” I sighed and put my arms around her. “Get real.”
CHAPTER SIX
IN WHICH MA AND I ARE INTRODUCED TO THE ECCLESIA
“THIS IS OUR LORD Jesus’s mother, Miriam, and our Lord’s wife, Mary,” Mary B said over and over as she towed Miriam and me around the crowded room. (Yes, Miriam had come, too. Martha had made it clear to Mary B that Ma and I were a package deal.)
Some forty or so people had gathered in the courtyard of a spacious though modest house on the outskirts of the fashionable upper city, one of several owned by the Jerusalem ecclesia. I was a little surprised that I didn’t recognize anyone. Since the twelve came bursting out of the upper room talking in tongues, the community had grown. And it was becoming organized. People knew where to go in the evening for the communal meal. In the morning they went as a group to pray in the Temple. Now as they waited for evening prayers to begin, some people talked in small groups, while others (yes, mostly women) set forth simple but ample food.
“Our Master’s mother and wife,” Mary said again.
“His what?” An old woman with a sharp face finally said what the other more polite people appeared to be thinking. “I didn’t know the Master had relations.” She said the word relations with pronounced distaste, and it was not clear if she meant relatives or the other kind of relations. “Nobody ever mentioned that before.”
“Mother, you know he had a family,” said a young man with a sparse beard that could not hide bad skin; he had better look to Leviticus to clear that up. “Surely you remember James the brother of Jesus leading us in prayer the other night.”
“Brother? I thought we were all brothers and sisters in Christ? Besides, half the men around here are named James. You can’t expect me to keep them straight.”
“Hush,