Pete pulled away from me. “That’s not my name,” he said gruffly. “You’ve confused me with someone else.”
“Ha-ha. What a prankster you are.”
“Excuse me.” Pete pushed me away and walked deeper into the market. “I need to find a physician.”
“Hey,” I called after him, “if you see a talking donkey, she’s mine!”
CHAPTER FIVE
A Doctor in the House
There’s an entire genre of Christian cartoons and kids’ radio shows where plucky, well-meaning children are transported to the first century so that they can help the bumbling wise men find baby Jesus. It’s clearly an important place in the space-time continuum, because kids are always finding magic books, Christmas tree ornaments, and flying carpets that whisk them away to Judea so that Jesus can give them a quick lecture on morality.
I started looking for white kids in T-shirts and shorts. I didn’t have a solid plan, but I thought maybe I could snatch their magic book and fly it back home. I didn’t like the first century. It was hot. It stank. I couldn’t find the bathroom. And my tour guide, the talking donkey, had abandoned me. Whether by her own design or because an evil merchant sold her to a circus, I wasn’t sure.
Vendors sold fish, bolts of cloth, and spices. A donkey brayed, but not in English. Chickens ran around my feet. The chickens appeared to be in control of things, walking in and out of houses with impunity. Sort of like cats in our century. The only person I knew in the entire world was young Pete. I tried to follow him without being obvious. He had an intense conversation with a friend about getting a physician, and then he hurried down an alley while his friend ran the other direction.
Pete led me through a mess of interweaving streets. He looked nervous, and he moved so fast that I had a hard time keeping up. At last he turned in at a flat-roofed, whitewashed home. Modest, I was guessing. Not much different than mine maybe, just in another century.
I waited outside for about ten minutes. Some sort of stinging fly kept biting me in the neck. I killed it. But then its many relatives tried to take their revenge. I slapped at them and thought evil thoughts about them until I couldn’t take it anymore. I strode up to Pete’s front door and knocked. A beautiful young woman answered the door, her cheeks flushed, her dark hair matted to the sides of her face. The intense look of worry in her eyes relaxed slightly when she saw me, and she immediately stepped back to let me into the house.
“Come in, Doctor.” I turned around and looked behind me, but I didn’t see a doctor. “This way,” she said. “My mother is getting worse by the moment. She won’t speak any longer.”
I followed her into a back room, and the first thing that hit me was the sour smell of death. I had only smelled it before hidden under the cold, antiseptic scents of hospitals. The woman was sunk into the bed, her wrinkled face twisted in agony. I could feel the heat coming off her. The young woman perched on the edge of the bed, wiping her mother’s face with a cloth.
Pete stepped out of a corner of the room, giving me a quizzical look. “You’re the doctor?”
I cleared my throat. I thought about it and decided that as a twenty-first-century man, I was better than any primitive doctor they might get. “Yes,” I said. I stepped closer to the sick woman. I put my hand on her forehead and she groaned and turned away from me. Her head radiated heat and I yanked my hand from her, covered in her sweat. I suddenly realized that she could have bubonic plague. Was that in the first century? What was the most deadly contagious disease I could catch by being in this room? I cursed myself for not paying more attention in my History of Contagious Diseases class. Actually, I never took that class. That now appeared to have been a dangerous oversight.
“Have you given her aspirin?”
Pete and the young woman exchanged glances. “I don’t know what that is,” the woman said.
“It’s like Tylenol.” They stared at me blankly. “Advil.”
Pete gasped and the woman shrieked. “Forgive us, Doctor,” Pete said. He grabbed her hand. “But did you say that my mother-in-law has a devil?”
“What?” The ragged breathing of the woman on the bed drew my attention. “No!” Then again, thinking back on my Bible reading, it seemed like demon-possessed people were all over the place. My experience in that arena had been spotty at best. I hoped she was just sick. “She has a fever.”
“What kind of fever?” Pete asked.
“A . . . uh . . . high fever.”
Pete pulled on his thick black beard nervously. “What can we do?”
I took a deep breath. And then I thought maybe I’d just inhaled a billion bacteria. Or viruses. My heart sped up. I thought maybe I had a fever. Also, the lack of a medicine cabinet had quickly exhausted my superior medical know-how.
Now this lady was going to die because her doctor from the future had no Advil with him. Then a spectacular flash of genius came upon me. “Ice. Get me some ice.”
Pete’s wife frowned. “It’s the middle of summer, Doctor. Where will we get ice?”
“From the refrig—er—never mind.” I pushed my hair back and sighed. “Leave me alone with her for a few minutes.”
Pete and his wife backed out of the room. It looked like the young woman was about to start crying. I closed the door and leaned my head against it. This woman was going to die, and then I would contract the Ebola virus from being locked in this room and I would die here too. And I was guessing that the burial rituals would make me uncomfortable, even if I was dead already. A chicken would probably walk across my corpse. Was there no dignity in this century?
“Need some help?”
I recognized that voice. I turned and saw him standing by the bed, a big grin on his face and a bottle of aspirin in his nail-scarred hands. Imaginary Jesus. I felt the sudden burn of anger in my face. At least, I hoped it was a burn of anger and not a fever. “Yeah, I need your help,” I said. “It seems that I somehow got a parking ticket in Portland today.”
Jesus waved me off. “Let’s focus on the issues of the moment, Mikalatos. Do you want this aspirin for the lady or not?”
My hand hovered between my body and the aspirin, fluttering indecisively like a hummingbird between a bird feeder and a flower. Then it struck, grabbed the little plastic container, and struggled to open it.
“I knew you’d come back to me,” Jesus said.
“Curse these child safety caps!” I strained at it with superhuman strength. An explosion of white pills rained down on the room, rolling under the bed, covering the blankets, scattering over the woman’s face. I frantically started scooping them up and tried to get them back into the bottle.
“Do you think I just destroyed the space-time continuum?”
Jesus shrugged. “I doubt it.”
“But what if someone sees the pills and they figure out how aspirin works and then they invent it too early and that somehow saves Hitler’s life and he ends up winning World War II?”
“You read too much science fiction,” Jesus said.
I tried to get a pill into the sick woman’s mouth, but she thrashed weakly and all that happened was that I got hot saliva on my fingers. I grabbed five aspirin and downed them, just to be safe.
The door swung open and Pete and his wife walked in, followed by the misshapen man from the synagogue. “This is Y’shua,” Pete said. “We had invited him for dinner, and I’ve asked him to look at my mother-in-law.”
Y’shua’s dark, calm eyes found mine, and he seemed amused to see me. His wide mouth curled up on one side into a lopsided smile. But when he saw my Jesus standing behind me, the smile disappeared and his thick eyebrows drew down toward the center of his face.
He bent over the bed and cupped the woman’s face in one hand. “Simon,” the daughter said, pulling on her husband’s arm. “Maybe we shouldn’t disturb her. She isn’t well.”
Y’shua leaned over the sick woman and spoke directly to her, or so it seemed. He spoke sternly, his voice slightly raised and firm, and ordered t
he fever to go away. The woman relaxed and let out a deep sigh, her muscles unclenching, her face smoothing. She opened her eyes and looked into his. The temperature of the room dropped, as if a cool fall wind had drawn the sickness away.
“I’ll make dinner,” she said, and began to sit up. Her daughter took hold of her shoulders and urged her to stay in bed, but she shrugged her off. “We have a guest. Let me make the teacher a meal, dear.”
Jesus took her hands solemnly. “Thank you, madam,” he said.
Pete, a look of astonishment on his face, pulled me aside to say that I was welcome to stay but no longer needed. I looked around for Imaginary Jesus, thinking he might be able to take me home to the U. S. of A., but he was gone again.
When we walked into the front room, a few of the neighbors stuck their heads in to ask what had happened. “Y’shua rebuked the fever,” Pete informed them, “and it disappeared.”
Pete’s mother-in-law appeared, dressed and cheerful, and waved to the neighbors. She set about making the kitchen ready and sent her daughter back to the market. “A feast,” she whispered, “not just a meal. Spare no expense.”
Within an hour the house was packed, overflowing into the street. People perched on the windowsills, crowded around the table, and sat on the floor, and Y’shua stood on the hearth, sweat rolling down his dark face while he taught. He prayed for an old man with a twisted leg and it straightened until he dropped his staff. Another man brought in his little girl, who spat and cursed, her eyes rolling back into her head. A path cleared in the sea of people, and Y’shua walked through it and took hold of the girl and said, “Come out of her.” She shook and fell to the ground, and Pete carried her to the bedroom, where his wife brought her water. The girl’s father stroked her face, weeping. It had been years, he said, since he had seen his little girl without the demon in her.
Night came. The moon rose and then slid into the sea. People flowed in and out again. Sick people arrived and well people left. The lamps flickered, and in the darkness his voice came to us, round and sure, a light purer than anything else in the room. A few fell asleep listening to him talk. People brought their children to see the teacher. Men and women alike crowded into the little house. And then the sun cracked the edifice of night, and light and color flooded the house, the golden light of morning.
Somehow in the morning light, Jesus slipped away. At first people didn’t notice. The teacher had taken a well-deserved break. But after a time, a few people went outside searching for him, and then a few more. Others hung around the house, hoping he would return.
I walked outside, still trying to figure out where they kept the bathrooms. I had to go, and bad. That’s when the donkey said, “Psssst. Over here.”
CHAPTER SIX
Matt Mikalatos, Donkey Disciple
“Where were you?” I hissed. “Was there an emergency load of sticks that had to be hauled or something?”
Daisy rolled her eyes. “You think you’re the only thing I have going this week?”
“Where are the bathrooms in this place?”
“I’m a theologian, not a human sociologist,” the donkey answered.
“I’m too embarrassed to ask anyone.”
“Walk with me. Pete’s down at the lakeside, and he wants to see you.”
The crisp morning air felt great, and I could smell the water, a welcome change for my nose. Daisy said, “Pete tells me that when you two spoke earlier, you made it sound like Y’shua hypnotized him. Pete didn’t follow Y’shua because of the fish.” She paused for a moment on the road. “God had seemed silent for hundreds of years, and then a prophet showed up in Pete’s living room and healed his mother-in-law. And Y’shua taught in a way that Pete had never seen before.”
“You know a lot for a donkey,” I said. I could see the lake now, flat, wide, and beautiful. A few boats moved across the face of it, and the beach stretched out, inviting and pleasant. “Is that why Pete became his disciple—because he wanted to know how to read the Scriptures like Jesus?”
Daisy paused. “Do you understand what it means to be someone’s disciple?”
I thought about it and absently kicked at a chicken pecking at my feet. It was like a plague of chickens. “I thought it meant ‘student.’”
“Yes, but not how you think of it. You’re thinking of Y’shua like an algebra teacher. But to be a disciple means more than learning. It means to become like your teacher. It means transformation from what I am into what my teacher is. Y’shua said once, ‘Everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher.’”
“So you’re saying that if I was, for instance, your disciple—”
“You wouldn’t need to find a bathroom,” the donkey said, “because we’re walking on a perfectly fine road. You would eat when I eat, you would rest when I rest, and under the same olive tree. You wouldn’t take the shortcut while I went the long way. We would be inseparable. You would live like my shadow, mimicking my actions until you could do what I do without thinking, until you had the same instincts, thoughts, and words.”
As we neared the water’s edge I saw a huge crowd gathered near two fishermen’s boats. The crooked man sat in one of the boats, along with Peter and the other fishermen. His face had thickened, and he looked stronger. Still not the Jesus I knew. I couldn’t see any reason people would be drawn to him, at least no physical reason. He was ugly. But the people pressed near him as if he were a movie star.
“That’s not how Jesus really looked, is it?”
“Humans all look the same to me. Does it matter?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. In fact, it disturbed me deeply. Jesus shouldn’t be an ugly, twisted man. He should be compelling, beautiful, and charismatic. He should look like a president. He should look like JFK in a robe. He should look like my imaginary Jesus.
Jesus sat in the bow and taught the people. They sat on the shore. One man waded into the water so that he could hear better, unconcerned about how ridiculous he looked. Children laughed and played behind their parents. People coughed and murmured to one another. Occasionally someone would shout a question and Jesus would answer.
Toward the end of his teaching, Jesus gestured to the nets laid out on the shore. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all sorts of fish.” Pete’s face burned at that, and his men frowned. Apparently they hadn’t caught anything the night before. “When it was full, the fishermen pulled the net onto shore, and they sorted the fish. They put the good fish into baskets but threw the bad away.” The fishermen nodded. If they had any fish, they would be sorting them right now. “At the end of the age, the angels will come and separate the righteous from the wicked,” Jesus continued. “And the wicked will be thrown into the furnace, where they will sob and gnash their teeth.”
“Hey,” I said to Daisy. “I thought Jesus taught this later. Seems like the chronology is all messed up.”
Daisy snorted. “Do you really think he only spoke his parables once and then never taught them again? He taught nearly every day for three years. He often taught the same lessons again, or with slightly different wording.”
Jesus turned to Pete. “Put out into deeper water and let down your nets for a catch.”
Pete exchanged glances with his fishermen. He spoke in a low tone so his words wouldn’t carry across the water, but we heard them just the same. “Master, we’ve been fishing all night, and we haven’t caught anything.”
One of the other fishermen said, “The fishing is best at night, Master. It’s not a good time for catching fish.”
Jesus didn’t move, he just watched Pete carefully. Pete stared back. Maybe he was thinking about his mother-in-law, sick in her bed until Jesus spoke. Maybe he was thinking about his whole neighborhood crowded into his house. Pete was the first to look away. He grumbled something under his breath. “But because you say so, I will let down the nets.” He called to his men and they launched out into deeper water.
Pete’s partner called
from the shore, “Simon, what are you doing?” Pete ignored him, and he and his men gathered up the nets and cast them into the water. The entire boat jerked to the side. It looked as if a dinosaur had caught the net and yanked. Pete grabbed the side of the boat and looked into the water.
“What happened?” someone shouted.
“Pull in the nets,” Pete said. His men grabbed hold of the nets and pulled, muscles bulging. Fish, thousands of them, churned up the water inside the nets. Jesus sat in the bow, laughing and full of joy.
The boat tipped toward the fish, and water started pouring over the sides and into the boat. Pete yelled, “James, John, bring your boat! Hurry!” His partners ran to their boat and headed out. Meanwhile, the fishermen were pulling fish out of the net and throwing them into the boat. “It’s going to break. Get all the fish you can,” one of them cried.
The boat was sinking and fish swam around the fishermen’s legs. By the time James and John’s boat pulled alongside to help, Pete was thigh-deep in water and still sinking. They reached over and started to pull the nets into their boat, and soon they were sinking too. Pete stopped what he was doing and looked at Jesus, perched on the bow of the boat, his broad face split in a wide grin. Pete sloshed over to him and fell to his knees, chest-deep in the water. He grabbed hold of Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord. I am a sinful man.” He looked back at the fish.
Jesus put his hands on Pete’s shoulders. “Don’t be afraid, Simon.” He pointed back at the astonished fishermen, the fish leaping in the boat, the nets straining to hold what appeared to be every fish in the lake. “Do you see all these fish? If you follow me, I will make you a fisherman who catches people.” Pete looked into Jesus’ eyes, and I saw a flicker of confusion. Pete bit his lip, then turned and began shouting orders to his men. Somehow they managed—exhausted, soaked, and exhilarated—to get the boats back to shore, the net and the fish strung between them.
Imaginary Jesus Page 4