She had been miserable for years, but she’d had enough life in her to seek out the healer. Her words had taken on a growing intensity. Then the flow of her words ceased, and she reached down and pressed her hand against her dress, between her legs, and began to cry at the new dryness she felt there. People were again still, marveling at the brazenness of the woman coming to touch Yeshua while she was in such a state of ritual impurity. Would he have to go to the Temple for cleansing, or could he himself forgive her?
Yeshua reached down to her arm and pulled her square to face him. The crowd moved back a little and again hummed among itself, then was silent as the man and the woman stood looking at each other.
“How do you feel now?”
“Alive,” she offered, a deep peace welling up from within her.
“Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go, peace to you, be healed of your dis-ease.”
She began to recede in the crowd, laughing and raising her arms in the air in praise, looking back in Yeshua’s direction, knowing she was not only healed but also forgiven and purified.
Peter frowned and shook his head again, knowing that this kind of display carried farther in the word-of-mouth circles than the deed itself. Here was another one that would continue spreading Yeshua’s already sizeable following, and his fame. It wasn’t as if there was anything he could do to prevent Yeshua from acting this way, and of course he wouldn’t, but it seemed as if Yeshua was usually oblivious to the consequences. More irritated than amazed, the disciple turned to the fellow with whom he had been talking and asked, “Do you know this woman? Is she typically so bold?”
“I have heard she’s indeed been bleeding for twelve years, nearly constantly, and that her deceased husband left her enough money to live on. But she exhausted her wealth—and the patience of all the physicians around, as well as some outlandish practitioners from away. You know, east of us. Damascus, even. What and whom she has not consulted I certainly don’t know. Her family abandoned her, and I think, perhaps, she’s been more nearly dying of loss of love—and someone to talk to—than loss of blood.” He looked around him and continued in an undertone, “Women especially come to seek out your Yeshua. Me, I think it’s a lot of charisma he has, no disrespect intended to you.” He shrugged, not sure if he had spoken too honestly.
“Ah. It is so very much more than charisma.” Peter smiled, and reflected on the phenomenon of the man to whom he had bound himself. He trusted that Yeshua knew what he was doing. “You watch. You wait. You’ll see. Yeshua is—Yeshua is Messiah,” and he turned back to make sure the woman had cleared her way through the crowd to leave. He often thought of himself as Yeshua’s bodyguard, and again shook his head. Even though Yeshua might be the Savior, he was a little stupid sometimes, in a practical sense.
Jairus had both marveled and grown impatient with the woman’s interruption. He was relieved when she left and the group had continued on.
Every breath of movement they made might make a difference to Aviel, and if Jairus had had a whip, he might even have used it to drive the entourage forward faster. Ever steady in the distance, the lake sparkled as they came closer to Capernaum. It was all Jairus could do to keep from breaking away from the group and running into the village, to his house.
Just then Daniel and Nathan, the two shepherds from Capernaum, came sweating and running up to the group. Jairus felt his throat constrict, and he looked warily at Nathan, whose flat expression he had never been able to fathom.
“Jairus, sir! Sir . . .” Daniel, the elder of the two, his face so plain it was beautiful, came up to the father and grasped his wrist as he went down on one knee. “Sir. Sir. Your daughter has died. There is no need for the healer. Your wife has brought in the mourners. I am—so very sorry.” He barely got out his words because he had loved Aviel since they were children and they had played together, running the sheepdogs into frenzies in the pastures. He looked pleadingly at Jairus, tears in his eyes.
A raw blade cut Jairus’s breath. He stood in silence, working his jaw, looking at no one.
Yeshua came over to Jairus. He didn’t have to muster force or power behind his words; he was simply, impossibly, directing the scene. “As I said to you before: do not fear. Only believe. There is love, and there is fear. You love your daughter.”
Jairus’s face contorted and he could only nod once, his frame turned as if to straw and dust.
Yeshua again put his hand on Jairus’s shoulder and waited for him to follow along, then turned to Peter and said, “Only you and James and John. Make the others wait here.” Peter followed Yeshua’s orders and took charge.
They were only half a mile out of the village, and, as they drew nearer, Yeshua propped up Jairus as he stumbled along. Already they could hear the lamentations of the wailers.
A circle of women who were barefoot and had their hair down moved first left, then right, wailing in antiphony around one older woman in the center. Two flute players stood off to the side, piping the dirge tunes that announced a death. Only one of the women cried in earnest, Hepsabah, Yohanon’s wife, while the others were simply somber-faced, performing their duty. The weight of grief hung heavy in the air.
Yohanon sat on his stool outside his house, his tools on the ground. Tears glittered in his eyes, and his hands lay flat on his lap, as if dead themselves.
Yeshua stopped outside Jairus’s house and the weepers.
“Why do you weep?” he said quietly enough so that it undercut the lamentation. “Why the tumult? This child—” and here he looked at Jairus, who was frozen outside his own door, and Rivka, who clung both to the doorway and her husband’s face—“this child is not dead. She is only sleeping.” He pronounced each word with emphasis. Aviel was beyond the age of being a child, and Yeshua knew it.
Rivka looked at Yeshua and blinked, her eyes swollen. Tears welled up again as the cruelty of Yeshua’s words hit her. Silently she shook her head, her mouth twisting as she began crying harder. Why would he say what was not true? Her daughter was dead!
But one of the dancing women in the circle, young, and with little in her head, started laughing at Yeshua. Next the flute players joined in, and soon the whole group of supposed mourners was ridiculing Yeshua as he stood in his light linen robe and scuffed sandals, his hair obviously unwashed and unoiled. They would have laughed at any miracle worker without his reputation, of which they were unaware.
Turning from them, the healer stepped into the doorway, coming so close to Rivka that she could smell his pleasant and mild, earthy body odor. Overwhelmed by both her grief and now his magnetic presence, she briefly remembered that she should offer him the fragranced oil to daub on his forehead and a clay bowl of water to rinse off his feet. Instead, she stepped aside. He looked in, told the other women and the young girl already in the house to go out and leave them, then he turned back to Jairus. Taking Jairus’s hand, he placed it in Rivka’s.
“Come in with me. Peter, James, John, come in here,” he called out the door to the three. John looked at his brother, and Peter cleared his throat.
They all entered the darkened house.
4
Aviel let go and slid down into floating, restful dark. Peace enveloped her. Others, many others, were nearby, also at peace, a multitude surrounding her in ceaseless shadow, gliding over and around one another. She had held on tenaciously, not wanting to release her soul from her body, but now, here—wherever here was—she knew she could float forever, blessedly free of the sweat and torque, the grinding pain slicing like shattered glass inside her body in the last hours of her life. Finally, the last sinew was cut. It was all she desired. The relief was a bliss enduring, unending, a final freedom. Eternity.
But then she felt the oddest of sensations: she was sinking up, into a transparent vessel of water, daylight at the top, her body pulling her back to the light and to the pain, as if to die again. A loud pop! and again she felt the crushing in