‘You will hear my words,
But you will not understand;
You will see what I do,
But you will not perceive its meaning.
For the hearts of these people are hardened,
And their ears cannot hear,
And they have closed their eyes-
So their eyes cannot see,
And their ears cannot hear,
And their hearts cannot understand,
And they cannot turn to me and let me heal them.’
As he finishes the quote from Isaiah he stands up and faces his seated disciples. They don’t perceive it, but in doing so he’s turned his face so that he’s looking directly into the bushes where I’m concealed. More than that, he’s clearly looking at me and speaking to me personally as he starts to teach again.
“But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. I assure you, many prophets and godly people have longed to see and hear what you have seen and heard, but they could not,” Jesus says directly to me.
I realize I’ve been holding my breath so as not to miss a word and I force myself to breathe.
Jesus Christ just spoke to me. I came here to prove him a fraud but here I am hoping I’m wrong.
I think about life in 2202. We have every earthly thing of which our human minds can conceive and build and yet we wander, lost and broken from one pleasure to another.
I listen to Jesus teach his disciples until its late afternoon. He doesn’t look my way again until he and one disciple are the last on shore and the others are in the boat.
“Come Cephas,” he says, again looking at me. I try to stand but I’m rooted to the spot when the last disciple on shore says, “I’m coming,” and walks towards Jesus. Jesus smiles at me, then he and the disciple push the boat off the sand and jump into it.
Once they’re gone I feel as though I’ve been released from a paralysis that was holding me in place. For the entire hour I sat without the slightest cramp or pain but now I’m sore all over from having sat so long without moving.
Jesus using my name makes sense. He renamed Simon “Peter”. In Greek the name Peter is Petrus but in Aramaic the name Peter is “Cephas”.
So was Jesus talking to Simon? Or did Jesus just ask me to follow him?
***
I spend the night curled up right there in the leaves. The next morning I find a man with a boat who’s willing to ferry me back across the river for one of the bronze coins I was given yesterday. It’s much more comfortable than swimming in the cold water and walking around wet for hours.
When I get back to the road that leads from Jericho to Jerusalem I find it already jammed with a crowd following Jesus. Since my legs are long I quickly make my way along the crowd but when I’ve almost caught up with Jesus, he stops. There are two blind men beside the road shouting to Jesus and asking him for mercy. The crowd tells them to be quiet but they only shout all the louder.
“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks.
“Lord, we want to see!”
While everyone else is waiting to see what happens next I notice two men making their way along the edge of the crowd, looking at me. They have numerous scars on their faces and hands but appear to be otherwise healthy and strong. Each is wearing clothing that appears Egyptian in origin but they don’t look Egyptian. One of them is a few centimeters taller than me and looks more like a Roman in his complexion. The other one is much smaller and has the complexion of everyone else around me. If he were to change his clothes his face would be lost in the crowd to anyone else, but to me he’d still look like a puzzle piece that’s been jammed into the wrong spot.
It dawns on me that they may be criminals who have joined the crowd to pickpocket people and that as a mute I’d make an easy target to rob. Before I can try to make an escape there’s a great shout of joy and the crowd surges forward to see what has happened. The two men who had claimed to be blind are now walking around claiming Jesus has restored their sight. The two men in Egyptian garb who were watching me are lost in the moving crowd and I take the opportunity to disappear. I make my way close to Jesus again, hoping being near the center of attention will keep me safe.
Many times along the walk we stop as Jesus heals the sick and lame. We’re nearing Bethany when I see the man with the crippled hand I met yesterday. He’s trying to get close to Jesus to ask for healing but his large pack is preventing him. I make motions to indicate I’ll carry his pack so he can get through and he hands his burden over to me with a smile.
It’s not long before the crowd stops again. Jesus heals a man with some sort of skin disease and then turns to the man with the crippled hand. I can’t see what’s happening but I hear Jesus say “Go, your faith has made you well,” followed by the man saying “Heal my friend the mute, make him speak!”
He points at me and before I know it the crowd is pushing me forward.
This is NOT a good way to keep a low profile.
The man with the healed hand says to me “Your faith will make you well.” I look at his hand. What was a gnarled club is now a normal looking hand.
Do you have faith enough to be healed Cephas?
In just the last few hours I’ve witnessed the blind given sight and the maimed and diseased made whole, but does that mean I now have faith? My entire life has been spent in pursuing and punishing the faithful. Am I ready to turn my back on ‘Man’s Garden of Eden’? What will I say when I return to my own time?
Jesus smiles at me and says nothing. I look downward, I’m afraid to meet his gaze. If he heals me then everything I’ve known my entire life has been wrong. I don’t know what I’m more afraid of: that I’ll be healed because I’ve nurtured a forbidden faith that will get me killed when I return home or that I won’t be healed because I’m a faithless person standing in the presence of God made man.
The doctors in my time can fix my vocal cords in seconds when I get back. I don’t need to make this choice for the sake of my voice. The choice is much larger than that. I glance upwards but still don’t meet his eyes with mine. There’s no outward mask I can wear that this man cannot see through. He knows me. He knows every thought that’s passing through my head.
I’m just not ready to choose. And he knows that too.
I turn my back and walk away. In just three steps I’m hit by the enormity of what I’ve done. I’ve turned my back on God. My entire generation, my entire world has turned its back on Him but I just did it in a very personal and literal fashion.
There’s a tree not far away so I sit under it while the crowd moves on with Jesus towards Jerusalem. The man with the healed hand comes to retrieve his pack.
“Why do you cry my friend?”
I reach up and touch my cheek. I didn’t realize I was crying.
“Were you scared of being healed?”
I nod.
“Were you afraid that your faith isn’t strong enough to give you your voice back? After you saw my hand was healed you still did not believe? Your faith is truly weak then isn’t it? Imagine all those who have not seen what you have seen and yet believe anyway. They are the ones who truly have faith. I hope you can find your faith my friend.”
He rejoins the crowd following Jesus and disappears.
Not long ago Martha said in class that when I have something to say, nobody can shut me up. As I sit against the tree I think perhaps I’ve been made mute because shutting me up was the only way He could get me to listen to Him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I sit under the tree until the crowds have all passed and then continue sitting for hours even after the sun has set. The proof of Christ’s deity was right in front of me and I turned my back because I was afraid of how it would change my comfortable life. I think about my challenge to Thomas when I said that a lack of belief is still a belief system. What a hypocrite I am. When my own belief system was challenged I turned tail and ran.
But then, what is my belief system
? My parents made no mention of the subject at all and I was raised from the age of eight by my Atheist Aunt to believe there is no God. On the day their coworkers held a life celebration to honor my dead parents my Aunt refused to let me go and said “if your parents have proven anything it’s that this is all there is, so make the best of it.” For most people “making the best of it” is to center their lives around physical pleasures by cramming in as much sex and drugs as possible.
I think about Martha’s essay. Her conclusion was that even with all of our wonderful technology, man still has a basic need that we can’t fulfill by ourselves. It’s such a fundamental part of our being that perhaps we sometimes forget it’s there. It drives us to seek answers to the questions philosophers have asked for centuries. Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going?
I’m stunned by the depths of my hypocrisy. I sought out a position in life where I could be privileged to read every ancient religious text imaginable. I pondered their meanings for countless hours and never understood them at all. Worse, I used the information to persecute those who had true faith because I couldn’t see all of my efforts were a vain attempt to fill my own emptiness.
“Vanity,” I try to croak the word from the book of Ecclesiastes. Hover cars, fusion reactors, time machines. All of them are just part of the vanity of mankind.
So what do I do now? Can I really be an Atheist one minute and a Christian the next? Is it possible to believe in God when a minute ago I believed in nothing?
I examine that thought. Is it really true that I believed in nothing? Even before I read the Bible I was always searching for meaning in things. Could it be that I’ve been using puzzles in a search for faith? I’ve wanted a puzzle that I couldn’t solve by myself. Is God the puzzle that I’ve wanted to find all along?
Right now I can’t help but feel the people who try to fill their lives with sex and drugs are better off than I am. They don’t know how empty they truly are while I’m sitting here staring into the abyss of my emptiness, no longer fooling myself into believing I can fill it up myself.
“Father?” I croak.
I don’t know how to pray, but I decide to try even if I can’t say the words aloud.
Well God, here I am. I’m alone and mute and finally listening. Could it be you’ve been trying to speak to me my entire life and I just wouldn’t shut up long enough to hear you? Or maybe you’re the one who’s been listening and waiting for me to reach out to you? If you’re there and you’re listening then I guess I should say…
My mind goes blank. I have no idea what to say. Should I beg for forgiveness for my years as a cult hunter? Should I acknowledge my sins? I clear my mind and say the first thing that pops into my head.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Thank you for this life, even if it included doing evil things. Thank you for my love of puzzles. Thank you for bringing Martha and Jocie and Thomas and even Henry into my life. So that’s all I want to say. Let me know if there’s anything you want to say to me.
I continue to sit, I don’t know for how long and watch the moon rise and then become covered with clouds so I’m in pitch blackness. I don’t worry about the Egyptian men returning or others coming to rob me. Somehow under this tree I feel safe, like I’m being watched over. At some point I drift off and begin to dream.
I’m in an ancient blacksmith’s shop with a long row of lit forges where men and women are working, hammering pieces of metal. The people pay no attention to me but as I walk along I notice from their clothing they’re from many different time periods. The last few people even have coms in their ears which strikes me as funny because I’ve never seen anyone in my time do such difficult manual labor. One forge is lit but there’s nobody working at it. There are many pieces of metal waiting to be worked and get the sense I need to select one. I run my hands over the pieces seeking one that’s strong but not brittle. When I see the perfect piece I pick it up and stick it into the fire.
“Cephas?”
I hear someone say in my dream. I want it to be Martha, but it’s not Martha’s voice I’m hearing.
Someone touches my shoulder. I open my eyes to see Esther. I’m still against the tree outside Bethany. I slept through the night and it’s now late morning.
“Did you sleep here last night?”
I nod.
“Come with me into Jerusalem. Everyone says Jesus of Nazareth is there. They say he’s healing the sick and the lame.”
I nod and get to my feet. I turn to pick up Eli’s staff where I leaned it against the tree but it’s gone. I check the pockets inside my cloak and everything is still in place. If I was so sound asleep that someone could approach me and take the staff why didn’t they rob me at the same time?
“Are you ready to seek Jesus?”
I nod.
I’m ready. But what’s more, I think I might actually believe.
***
There are still branches that people cut and spread on the road when Jesus entered the city riding on a colt. I regret that I missed it.
I buy some bread and meat for myself and Esther. She wants to go to the market where she plans to buy sheep with the money I gave her and start her own flock but I point to the temple. It’s Monday and Jesus should be there. She shows me the home of a cousin where I can sleep in a hayloft and we part ways.
It’s still early in the day and I wonder if Jesus is already in the temple. My wondering ends when I hear a great commotion inside including the crashing of tables being overturned and money hitting the floor. I smile as I hear him accuse the merchants of turning his Father’s temple into a den of thieves.
The commotion lasts for quite a while as the merchants clear their wares and leave and is then followed by a great tide of people entering the temple to hear Jesus teach. If I’m supposed to pay some sort of offering or be cleansed in some way to enter the temple I don’t see it. The people are flooding in at too great a rate to listen to the instructions of the priests and teachers of religious law anyway.
Many sick and lame people have been brought to the temple and Jesus is healing them. I join the crowd as it pushes forward. The Disciples are trying to maintain some sort of order but it isn’t going well. I come face to face with my namesake, Simon Peter and smile at him.
“Have you found your faith brother?” he asks me.
I smile and nod.
If I do this, my old life will be gone when I return to my time. I’ll have nothing of it left. But what will I have lost in giving up that life?
I’m getting closer to Jesus by the minute when out of the corner of my eye I see the two rough men in Egyptian clothes who were watching me yesterday on the road from Jericho. They have zeroed in on me once again. I start to suspect that Esther or her boys told someone in her family that I have money. They’re working their way closer to me as I get closer to Jesus.
When I get to the front Jesus is turned away from me as he heals a blind woman. I want to reach out and touch him. Like the woman who had faith she would be healed if only she could touch the hem of his garment, I feel like I would be healed as well.
Jesus turns to face me, like he heard my thoughts and is ready to respond. I’m sure my eyes go wide with surprise and Jesus smiles. This time I look him straight in the eyes. I want him to see the good that’s in me and ignore all the evil, but that’s not what I find at all. His eyes perfectly reflect all the best and all the worst of me for me to see. Jesus is my perfect mirror, the mirror I’ve been looking for my entire life. The mirror that allows me to look into my own eyes and understand.
I know now why my life never made sense to me. I know what was missing.
“Your voice is just one of many gifts you’ve been given.”
Jesus’ attention isn’t focused solely on me as he says it. He’s looking up into the crowd of people and smiling like he’s hearing a joke that he can’t let me in on.
“Now return to your people and use your gifts.”
He touc
hes my neck and I feel a slight vibration in my throat.
“I’ll use my gifts for you Lord,” I say in English without even a hint of a scratch in my voice.
Jesus looks at the two men who have been following me, shakes his head then looks back to me.
“Go now in peace, your faith has made you well.”
I leave the crowd. The two men in Egyptian robes follow me so I stop to confront them and make them understand I’m no longer a mute. When they reach me their eyes scan over me but they walk past like they can no longer recognize me. I feel like I’m under Jesus’ protection now.
***
I spend the entire morning listening to Jesus teach in the temple and watching him heal people. I hear many of the parables that I know from the Bible but also hear others that are new to me.
As noon approaches, a man that I recognize as one of the Pharisees starts to organize the others to break up the crowd. They don’t dare challenge Jesus or even the disciples directly but I hear them start whisperings all through the crowd. They say Jesus can cast out demons because he is one, they say Jesus can’t be the Messiah because he’s from Nazareth, they say it’s all just tricks. One of them sees me on the edge of the crowd just watching and listening.
“What are you doing in here gentile?”
“I came to be healed, I stayed to worship,” I say in Aramaic.
He swears at me in Greek so I respond in Greek, which sets him back a step.
“I read and write too. Including Hebrew.”
“Out of my temple, gentile.”
“Is there no room in your temple for me? He seems to have room in his heart for everyone”
I nod towards Jesus and the Pharisee motions to the temple guards.
“It’s okay. I was just leaving.”
I take a few steps and then turn back to face him.
“I speak a lot of languages but there’s a language I didn’t try. Perhaps it’s the language men like you understand better than all others.”
I flip a silver coin into the air, which he catches. He looks furious but slips it into his pocket just the same.