Bright Dark Madonna

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  I felt that prickle of alarm that was becoming more and more familiar to me at the sound of that pronoun spoken in a certain tone. Or perhaps I should say invoked.

  “But how do you know, Mary?”

  “How can you not know is more the question. Lazarus, you of all people should know who he is. He called you back from death!”

  If I’d had any doubt (and I didn’t) which “he” she meant I knew now for sure. It was Lazarus who took me by surprise.

  “Actually, he didn’t.”

  Mary was silenced for a moment.

  “Lazarus, what can you mean? We were all there when he called you from the tomb and you came forth.”

  “I wasn’t dead,” he said in a low voice, as if it were a shameful secret.

  “You were. I was there. Martha and I anointed you and swaddled you for the grave with our own hands.”

  “Do you remember what Mary of Magdala did then?”

  I couldn’t see Mary B’s face but I could feel her frowning.

  “I was beside myself with grief; I wasn’t paying attention to her. I don’t think she was with us when we, well, prepared your body,” Mary paused, perhaps suddenly struck by the strangeness of reminiscing about a burial with someone who had been the corpse. “No, she wasn’t with us. Martha told her to go away. She was angry with her. I can’t remember exactly why, but then Martha has never liked her.”

  “I can remember.”

  “You—”

  “I keep telling you, I wasn’t dead. She tried to tell you, too, but you and Martha wouldn’t listen. Finally, I told her not to bother.”

  “You…were talking to her.”

  “She was with me at the river. The whole time.”

  “What river?” said Mary; I could hear her increasing confusion and distress.

  “You know, the river,” Lazarus repeated helplessly. “There’s a shoal in the river where you have to wait, until Moses calls you.”

  “A place between life and death? There is no mention of such a place in the Torah,” Mary’s mind clicked into action. “It sounds pagan, perhaps Egyptian.”

  “Moses was there,” Lazarus reminded her.

  And Isis had been there, too; I had seen her. Mary B wasn’t so far off. All rivers belong to Isis, but Moses had been quite at home. Well, why wouldn’t he. He’d spent his earliest infancy floating on the Nile.

  “And you say Mary of Magdala was there with you? How can that be?”

  Lazarus shrugged and then threw up his hands. “I don’t know, Mary. Maybe it is a mistake to talk about these things. But I will tell you one thing more. I didn’t want to come back. I came back for him, because he wept, because he was my friend, and he needed me. And now he’s gone.”

  And Lazarus began to weep, and Mary reached for him, and tried to comfort him.

  “But he’s not,” she said. “He’s still with us, whenever two or more are gathered together in his name. That’s what he said that last night. Remember? We have to love each other now as he loved us.”

  I was weeping now, too. I did love Mary and Lazarus. I wanted to go and join their embrace. I took a step towards them when Mary spoke again.

  “Don’t you see, Lazarus? We need you to be part of our community, our communion, our ecclesia. You and Martha, and Mary of Magdala, too. She shouldn’t be hiding out here. None of you should. How can you keep yourselves separate, apart from his ecclesia when you were so close to him in life?”

  I tensed, waiting for Lazarus’ answer, hoping it would give me a clue to my own answer, for it seemed the question was also directed to me. I wouldn’t be able to dodge it much longer.

  “Forgive me, Mary, my mind is not as quick as yours. I still don’t understand why you want me to sell the land. Or why he wants me to, if you say he does.”

  Sell the land! I was shocked. Lazarus lived for the land, and Jesus had always loved this place and found such comfort with Lazarus talking about crops and weather.

  “In the Jerusalem community, we own all things in common, don’t you see? No one is rich; no one is poor. We are not bound by blood ties or by obligations of rank or function. We are one in the Spirit. Everyone equal. Men and women, master and slave. For we are all servants, and we are all priests. We are all one in his name.”

  I could not see her face, but her voice was shining. The curse of being born a woman, a source of great bitterness to her, had been lifted from her by the grace of the Spirit. She was free to be who she was born to be. Her exultation was equaled only by her determination that nothing and no one should stand in the way of the new order.

  “You want me to sell the land?” Lazarus repeated, still struggling to take it in. “And give the money to, to…”

  “The community,” Mary prompted. “It’s not what I want that matters, it’s what he wants, what he’s asking of us all.”

  It was back to that. Suddenly I’d had it.

  “Mary!” I stepped out from behind a fig tree.

  “Mary,” she whirled around. “What are you doing here?”

  “Eavesdropping, obviously.”

  “It saves me having to fill you in, then.” Mary B was practical. “You need to know what’s going on and stop sitting around like a fat, mindless sow.”

  “I love you, too, Mary.”

  “All I’m saying is you need to come to Jerusalem. You need to be part of the community. It was never my idea to whisk you off here, even though you did make a fool of yourself in the porticoes.”

  “Whose idea was it then?”

  “Guess.”

  “Peter’s? Well, no doubt he spake unto Peter and said unto him: get the wife of my bosom the hell out of here before she ruins everything.”

  Mary eyed me warily; she knew I was up to something, but she didn’t know what yet. She liked a good argument, but I didn’t always follow the rules of rabbinical debate. In fact, I hardly ever did.

  “Why are you mimicking James?” she asked.

  At that point, Lazarus, seeing his sister distracted, began to back quietly away, but Mary B reached out and grabbed his sleeve all without taking her eyes off me.

  “Because,” I said, “of all the appearing unto and speaking unto that seems to be going on around here.”

  “I have not the slightest idea what you’re talking about. I know it is difficult for you in your condition, but please try to be coherent,” she said as if the rabbis had clearly ruled that pregnancy produces mind rot.

  “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 che
ek 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, mother, be polite,” said her son. “I’m sorry. My mother is a little—”

  Miriam waved his apology away and favored the old woman with a dreamy smile.

  “And that one,” his mother dropped her voice to a whisper, her concession to politeness. “Gentile by the look of her and a bun in the oven.”

  An awkward silence had fallen over the room; conversations stalled, and no one wanted to start them up again for fear of being overheard. People were trying hard not to stare, but of course they were curious, and perhaps some were appalled at the idea of Jesus having something as ordinary and human as a wife and mother. Trust me, it had not yet occurred to anyone to venerate Miriam, though a couple of women recovered themselves and escorted Miriam to one of the only couches in the room. Two other women, who looked as though they might be sisters, approached me, trying not to eye my belly, and invited me to sit down while Mary B went to talk to someone about arranging a place for us to sleep that night.

  “When do we eat?” was my opening conversational gambit, I’m afraid. “The food looks wonderful.”

  “After the prayers,” explained the older of the two. “We’re waiting for Brother Peter and some of the others.”

  “Were you really his wife?” the younger burst out suddenly.

  “Shh, Serena, that is rude,” said the older one.

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” I said. “Yes, I…I was.” It still felt funny to speak of him in the past tense.

  “Don’t scold, Hannah. What was it like? What was he like?” the younger woman said breathlessly.

  “Serena, you must not trouble our guest with personal questions. That is not for us to know. We know the Master by faith, not by flesh.”

  I don’t think she meant it unkindly, but I felt relegated to a lower status.

  “Tell me,” I decided to change the subject. “Do you all live here together in this house?”

  “Some of us do, some of us don’t,” the older woman said. “But we all gather to pray and break bread together in Jesus’s name, and we all give what we own or earn to the ecclesia. We are one in His Spirit.”

  “So I gather,” I said, suspecting I was going to hear a
lot of that phrase.

  Before I got to ask any more questions, there was a stir of excitement in the room, like a breeze turning all the leaves, and everyone turned as Peter, James (the brother of Jesus) and John of the Thunder Brothers (so nicknamed by Jesus for their boisterousness) strode into the room with a man and a woman I did not recognize. The pair looked well heeled and, if not Roman, they dressed in the Roman style.

  “Greetings, beloved brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. His grace and peace be with you.”

  “And also with you,” everyone answered back.

  There followed some foot washing, the men vying with each other for who would wash the most feet. I smiled (a bit tearfully) remembering our last night together when Jesus had washed everyone’s feet. Peter, always one for the grand gesture, had offered his whole body when Jesus rebuked him for resisting. I was touched that Peter had taken this particular teaching to heart, though I did wish he’d get on with it. It seemed to have become a long and solemn procedure, and I was beginning to feel faint with hunger.

  When the apostolic feet were clean, the prayers began. As well as the prescribed Hebrew prayers that I knew from Jesus, there were extemporaneous prayers that seemed more like sermons. Peter gave one; James gave one; John, goddess bless him, passed. Then Mary B, unsolicited, offered one. (I hope you don’t expect me to reproduce these prayers, because to tell you the truth after a while I wasn’t paying attention). I did catch on pretty fast that the word Amen didn’t mean a prayer was over. It was an expression of fervor, a way for the rest of us to participate. I started shouting “Amen!” with the best of them in order to distract myself from the scent of the fresh bread and the lentil stew going cold. Finally in the middle of one of Mary B’s more complicated, theological sentences Peter uttered a loud, definitive “A-men.” Mary B’s eyebrows bristled fiercely, and she doggedly completed her sentence, but she brought her prayer to a close. Before anyone else could jump in, Peter motioned for everyone to be seated.

  “Praise Jesus!” I said out loud, but I was premature in my rejoicing.

  “I have an announcement to make before we eat,” said Peter still standing.