Sacrifices here were as gory as the originals. Those smells lingered. So did the bleats and moans of dying animals. Eric had heard that the Israeli SPCA tried to get an injunction to stop the killings. After fire came down from the heavens, the animal-rights people couldn’t find a judge who’d give them one. Who wanted to take chances with the Guy Upstairs, now that He was back from vacation?
Thoughts like that rose in Eric’s mind all the time. For better and worse, he was a modern man, with millions like him. What God would do with—or to—such a cross-grained throng was another interesting question. It was the interesting question.
Watching a menorah getting consecrated promised to be interesting, and also not bloody. Smoke from the morning tamid offering was already rising when he and Orly got to the Temple, but he couldn’t do anything about that.
In English, he whispered, “You know what the smell of the sacrifice reminds me of?”
“A barbecue joint,” she whispered back, also in English. “Me, too. And you know something else?”
“What?” he said.
“Almost as many people here know English as Hebrew.”
“Yeah, yeah.” But using English made Eric feel less blasphemous. Speaking the language of the Old Testament didn’t mean you had to be serious about God—but it helped.
He saw Chaim Avigad and Muhammad al-Muntazar come into the square just outside the Holy Place. He’d left Orly behind by then; she had to stay in the Women’s Court. She didn’t like that; neither did most Israeli women. Nobody listened to them, which was the fate of most women through most of history.
Eric could legally go anywhere except inside the Holy of Holies—and, thanks to Chaim, he’d gone there. Being a Katz, a cohen, a priest, had advantages.
The seven-branched menorah stood near the altar on a prosaic wheeled cart. With the cart, it was taller than Eric. It gleamed. You saw something that big, you didn’t think it could be solid gold. But it was. Nothing but the best for God. And, with the restoration of the Temple, getting gold out of people was a lot easier than it had been.
TV cameras watched the menorah. Eric wondered if their crews were cohanim or Levites, depending on placement. He wouldn’t have been surprised. Not much surprised him any more.
So he told himself, till he saw people looking away from the gold candelabra and into the air. Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…It wasn’t anything nearly so trivial as Superman.
“Oh, Jesus!” Eric muttered. A heartbeat later, he realized that should have been a vocative—O Jesus!—and not the mild oath it almost always was.
Who else would be descending from heaven with no visible means of support? Yeah, Who? Eric’s mind gibbered. In case the sight of a man—or a Man—coming down as if on an invisible escalator wasn’t enough, glory streamed from Jesus.
Glory looked more like the Northern Lights than anything else Eric could think of. But the Northern Lights didn’t show up at Jerusalem’s latitude. And they didn’t show up in broad daylight.
Jesus stared down at the city where He’d preached and died. His face was preternaturally—or supernaturally—calm. Eric wondered whether He’d float to the Temple or to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The lady or the tiger? he thought wildly. He wasn’t in very good shape.
He glanced at Shlomo Kupferman. The rabbi’s face was anything but calm. A handful of words summed up his expression: give me a fucking break. All this time, Jews had died for saying Jesus wasn’t the Son of God. But here He was. If that wasn’t a miracle putting him up in the air there, Industrial Light & Magic was behind it. Eric didn’t think special effects could match what was going on.
Chaim Avigad and Muhammad al-Muntazar watched Jesus descend with identical awed anticipation. They didn’t think He was a special effect. If they didn’t, Eric didn’t. If He wasn’t, though, the whole world might bust loose any minute now.
Messiah. Mahdi. Son of God (or maybe only—only!—prophet). Together again for the first time. I really am losing it, Eric thought.
It was going to be the Temple, unless Jesus adjusted His flight plan at the last minute. That wasn’t impossible. Nothing was impossible these days. Nothing at all.
That might have been the scariest thought he’d ever had.
Robe fluttering around Him, Jesus dropped into the courtyard outside the Holy Place. His face, long, lean, and bearded, wasn’t like the ones on Byzantine mosaics—He looked too Jewish—but they came closer than the Western Christs Eric had seen.
The courtyard had been crowded, but nobody wanted to get near Jesus. He said something. It wasn’t Hebrew. To Eric’s surprise, he understood it anyway: Aramaic, close cousin to Hebrew and Arabic.
“I have returned.”
That was what He said. You and General MacArthur, Eric thought wildly. But MacArthur needed only three years to get back to the Philippines. Jesus had been away a little longer than that.
* * *
—
Jesus gestured. The glory streamed out from him again. It enveloped Chaim and Muhammad al-Muntazar. Yitzhak Avigad stared at his nephew through the pearly light surrounding him. Chaim looked amazed, but not unhappy or pained. The same was true for Muhammad, not that Yitzhak cared so much. If Jesus did anything to Chaim…
Jesus gestured. This time, it meant Come here. Chaim and Muhammad both came. Nobody else, not even Shlomo Kupferman, dared move. Yitzhak wanted to yell No! at the top of his lungs. For his nephew to go to—that…
He kept quiet. He’d seen hell in combat, but he couldn’t open his mouth in the face of what plainly came from heaven. And Chaim wouldn’t have listened to him if he yelled. To Yitzhak, the kid was too young to have to make choices like that. But God had other ideas. How old was David when he went out to face Goliath? Not old enough, his father would have said. David did what he had to do, though.
Chaim would, too. Whatever it turned out to be. And whatever it cost.
* * *
—
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most amazing moment in the history of the world,” Lester Stark said, staring at the monitors that brought images of the Second Coming from the Temple. “Prophecy is fulfilled! Jesus has come again!”
“Are you relieved to be able to say that, Reverend?” Gabriela Sandoval asked.
He glanced over at her in something close to resentment. Didn’t she have any spiritual sense at all? Evidently not—she just sounded like a reporter doing her job. And she did it well enough to get an honest answer out of him: “To tell you the truth, I am. For all my faith, I had doubts. I wondered if this day would ever come, but here it is!”
What will the Jews say now, when they’ve denied Jesus’ divinity for the past two thousand years? He didn’t say that out loud, no matter how much he wanted to. But what occurred to him first was Oops!
“Don’t you wish we could see this with our own eyes, not just on TV?” Gabriela said.
She did find questions that cut to the heart of things. “I sure do,” Stark replied. “But we aren’t Jews, and so we aren’t allowed to come close enough to the central Temple precincts to do ourselves any good.”
“Like most of Jerusalem, like almost all of Israel, like everyone else in the world, all we can do is watch and wonder,” she said. Her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “And try to explain a bit to our audience.”
“Try, yes. Chaim Avigad vouched for Muhammad al-Muntazar, which is why the Muslims have a presence in the Temple. I thought it was unfair that Christians didn’t. But there’s Jesus Himself, standing in the courtyard. Things do even out,” Stark said.
Jesus made a come-hither gesture. Slowly, Chaim Avigad and Muhammad al-Muntazar walked toward him. Suffer the little children to come unto me, Stark thought. But Chaim was not a little child, Muhammad a young man. Thinking of a quotation didn’t make it fit.
“What will happen wh
en the Messiah and the Mahdi meet the…the Son of God?” Gabriela needed an effort, but she said it.
“I have no idea. We’ll all find out together.”
“Do you wish you could be out there with them?”
Of course I do! Stark almost screamed it—Gabriela’s questions could cut deep. What he did say was, “Yes, but this is about what God wishes. What can I do about it?”
He knew the answer to that: nothing. If he regretted it for the rest of his days—and maybe for all eternity as well—that was also part of God’s plan…wasn’t it?
* * *
—
When Jesus descended on the Temple, Jamal Ashrawi hoped it was to scourge the Zionists for everything they’d done to the Palestinians, to all the Muslims around them. “Our day is come at last!” he said. “The prophet will give us the victory that is rightly ours!”
“Inshallah,” Abdallah said. His new bodyguard was a man of few words. He didn’t go on and on, the way Ibrahim had. That let Haji Jamal talk more.
“Of course God will be willing!” he exclaimed. “When was God ever unwilling to punish those people?” Abdallah only grunted.
But when Jesus showed no sign of blasting the Temple or smiting Jerusalem in a way that would make the dirty bomb look like a blessing, Haji Jamal’s suspicions leaped to life again. “Maybe it’s not Jesus at all,” he said. “Maybe it’s trick photography. If the movies can do it…”
Abdallah grunted again. “I don’t think so,” he said.
The Grand Mufti almost called him a fool. But Ashrawi was shrewd. If you insulted your chief bodyguard, bad things would happen to you. Abdallah would be sorry afterwards. He’d say he was, anyhow. Much good that would do me, Haji Jamal thought.
“There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God!” Abdallah murmured. He didn’t think he was watching special effects. Haji Jamal didn’t, either.
He wondered why none of the accounts of the End of Days had the Prophet returning from heaven. The Mahdi took his place. That the Mahdi should be an Iranian, a Shiite, infuriated the Grand Mufti. He kept hoping the ayatollahs were lying.
But the Jewish so-called Messiah accepted Muhammad al-Muntazar. Jesus seemed to, as well. The prophet (not the Son of God, as the Qur’an made plain in the suras called The Table Spread and Repentance) gestured to the Mahdi—and to the Messiah, too. So Jesus also accepted the Jew!
They both came toward Jesus. The Grand Mufti fumed. He was the chief Muslim prelate of Jerusalem. Why wasn’t Jesus summoning him?
“The Jews will be sorry for what they’ve done to me,” he growled. His bodyguard sent him a curious look.
* * *
—
Chaim Avigad’s heart pounded. He’d never expected Jesus to appear. Who would have?—who that was Jewish, anyhow? He’d never expected to meet the Mahdi, either. And he’d really never expected to like him. But he had, and he did. If Jesus was coming down from the heavens, what could anybody, even the Messiah, do about it?
Not much.
He could, and did, watch in awe as Jesus descended. A vagrant was somebody without visible means of support. By that standard, Jesus was a vagrant. He flew through the air, as if God had repealed the law of gravity just for Him. Chances were God had.
Chaim wanted to reach out for the iridescent, opalescent glory streaming from Jesus. He did, to discover it was insubstantial. He could see it, but he couldn’t feel it or touch it.
Next to him, Muhammad al-Muntazar was doing the same thing. When Chaim’s eyes met his, Muhammad gave back a sheepish grin. Did he feel he’d been caught acting like a baby playing with something shiny? Chaim had, too.
Jesus came down in the courtyard close by the Holy Place. “I have returned,” He said. His words sounded something like Hebrew, but they weren’t. Aramaic? Chaim wondered. It didn’t matter, not to him. He understood Jesus whether he knew His language or not, the same way he understood Muhammad. God…provided.
Rabbi Kupferman stood on the altar in the High Priest’s fancy regalia. His eyes looked ready to bug out of his head. Chaim had upstaged him by becoming the Messiah after Kupferman sacrificed Rosie. Now here he was, presiding over another sacrifice, in the middle of the Second Coming. Does that make you feel three centimeters tall? Something ought to, don’t you think? Chaim wasn’t sorry to see Kupferman learn humility.
The rabbi wasn’t the only one behaving as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. No one in the Python sketch—which Chaim had seen a dozen times, with Hebrew subtitles—expected the Spanish Inquisition. No one here expected the Second Coming.
And what people didn’t expect, they feared and hated. Chaim saw that on lots of faces. Get used to it. Get over it, he thought. What choice do you have?
Jesus gestured to Chaim and Muhammad al-Muntazar. Chaim looked at Muhammad. The Mahdi was looking back at him, as if asking what he wanted to do. No one had ever done that with him before. It made him feel grown up: much more so than saying Today I am a man at his bar mitzvah when he plainly wasn’t. Somebody was looking for his judgment. Pride warmed him.
He only wished they had more choice. If Jesus called you, you had to see what He wanted. Chaim took the first step toward Him. Muhammad al-Muntazar followed a fraction of a second later.
“Welcome,” Jesus said when they came to him. He set His right hand on Chaim’s shoulder. The hand felt like…a hand. Chaim didn’t know what he expected it to feel like, but not that, somehow. Jesus nodded to him. “My elder brother.” He put His left hand on Muhammad’s shoulder and nodded to him. “My younger brother.”
For a second, Chaim thought that was nuts. Jesus was eons older than he was. Muhammad was older than he was, too. But then Chaim’s head started working again—or maybe the knowledge came straight from God through Jesus’ hand. Who could guess?
But Judaism was older than Christianity, while Islam was younger. That had to be what Jesus meant. Parables, Chaim thought. Jesus talks in parables. Riddles, like. He’d heard that. He’d never dreamt it would matter to him.
The American archaeologist probably knew more about how Jesus worked. Not because he was an archaeologist. Because he was an American. Jews there—Muslims, too—had to live in a country where Christianity was bigger. They couldn’t help soaking up stuff about Jesus.
Chaim was getting his education now, straight from the source. “You two will understand…some of what I am, what I’ve been through,” Jesus said. “Some burdens are too large to lay on a man, but there are times when you have to bear them anyway.”
“Yes,” Chaim said, as Muhammad whispered, “Oh, yes.”
“I never knew anyone before who could grasp even part of it—except God, of course,” Jesus said. “I never knew a man who could grasp it, I should say. God is…different.”
“Why—? Why did You come back now?” Chaim asked.
“Because it was time,” Jesus answered. “Because the End Times, the time for the last battles against evil, may be at hand.”
“Which side is evil?” That was Muhammad al-Muntazar, also stumbling over his words.
“By their works shall you know them,” Jesus said—a response that was liable to cause more trouble than none at all.
“What…do you want with us?” Chaim asked.
Jesus’ eyes met his. “Is it not written: ‘Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord; and so we shall ever be with the Lord’?”
“Not in my Scripture,” Chaim said stubbornly.
“Not in mine, either,” Muhammad agreed.
“Your Scripture is true, in its way,” Jesus said to Chaim. He turned to Muhammad. “And so is yours. And so is that other one.”
That’s impossible. They can’t all be true at once, Chaim thought. But a lot of impossible things had happened lately. If Jesus said God had arranged thing
s this way, Chaim couldn’t tell Him He was out of His tree.
Muhammad al-Muntazar had something else on his mind. “Where is the prophet Muhammad, peace be unto him?” he asked.
“He is with God and with the other prophets, and peace has come to him,” Jesus replied.
“Why didn’t he come to earth?” the Mahdi persisted.
“God did not will that he should,” Jesus said, and Muhammad bowed his head. When you got an answer like that, and got it from Someone like this, what could you do but accept it?
Which brought Chaim to a question of his own: “What are You going to do with us?”
“Why, what I told you before,” Jesus said.
“Huh?” As soon as Chaim made the uncouth noise, he realized you probably weren’t supposed to say Huh? to Jesus.
To his relief, Jesus smiled, which made Him seem a little less awe-inspiring. “What is written in that Scripture neither one of you cares for,” He said.
Chaim’s jaw dropped. “You’re gonna take us up into heaven?” he blurted.
“That is why I have come,” Jesus said.
“Truly there is no God but God,” Muhammad said in a low voice.
“The Lord is one,” Chaim agreed. But if the Lord was one, what was Jesus doing here? Was He just—just!—a prophet? Was He man and God at the same time, the way the Christians said? Or was God using Him as a projection and mouthpiece? Christians would probably figure that was heresy, but Chaim didn’t care. Jesus said everything in all the Scriptures was true, but it looked to Chaim as if everything in all of them was partly wrong, too. Everybody would have to get used to that.
Or else everybody would have to start fighting about it. Wasn’t that part of what the End Times were all about?
“Do we have a choice about this?” he asked slowly.
“You always have a choice.” Jesus’ voice was deep and serious. “You can choose to obey God, or you can choose to disobey Him. And you will bear forever what springs from your choice now.”
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