wrapped around his face? Why not the neighbor boy, who stutters so badly the children mock him and pelt him with stones? Is this man special because he runs the synagogue?”
Peter and James began to shoulder their way through the crowd towards the man, though Yeshua kept walking.
Looming large in the bitter man’s direction, Peter snarled, “Yeshua blesses whom he chooses! Would you place yourself in the position of being the one to choose, the one to decide who receives God’s forgiveness of sins? Be grateful you don’t have the responsibility! Who are you? Where are you from?” Peter was imposing, and he wanted the man to feel his presence.
“If his message is so very important, why doesn’t he take it to Sepphoris, or Tiberius, ten times the size of miserable Capernaum!” harassed the man in a last attempt. But the crowd buzzed around his bile and he slunk off.
Yeshua simply kept moving, now with Nabby and Jairus alongside him. Who chose to be in the following group came along.
They moved quickly, death pressing them through the dry land. After a short while, Yeshua abruptly stopped and looked down.
“I feel—odd.” Light played across his face. Peter came alongside him, and Yeshua looked at him and asked, “Who touched me? Who touched my garments?” He wasn’t angry, just puzzled. He turned and scanned the faces of the people around him.
“You see all this crowd around you, and yet you’re asking who touched you?” At times Yeshua’s quirks frustrated Peter, and it was hard for him to reconcile the otherworldliness of the prophet with some very real annoyances about a person many said was simply odd.
Yeshua stood, still looking about him. A woman a few layers back in the crowd came and knelt before him, afraid to look at him directly.
“It was I, rabbi! I’m sorry! Please forgive.” She wrung out her words. “I knew if I reached out to you I would be well. For twelve years my life has drained. I know I am forbidden from touching you. I know. But I thought, I said to my companion, I thought, if only I could touch even the hem of his garments, I would be healed. I knew this. In my heart. Right here.” She thumped the center of her chest with her fingers. Then she flung out her arm and pointed. “I have paid out money to every physician and every wizard in this area and beyond, and I am destitute. But I knew you could heal me. I’ve heard the reports.”
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
