Thorns of Glory, page 54
Abruptly, Melody stopped. She raised her arm to halt the rest of us. Jesus and His disciples had paused. They lingered amidst the sepulchers. A macabre place, it seemed to me, to catch one’s breath. A disciple had spoken to Jesus, provoking a response. It was difficult to hear. I missed the first few phrases. As everyone stilled, I began to register His words.
“. . . yet for a little while,” He said. “You will seek for me. Just as I said to the Jews I say to you now: Where I am going you will not be able to come.”
One disciple—Peter, I think—stepped boldly toward Jesus in protest. Two other disciples scolded Peter, speaking simultaneously, making it impossible to distinguish their words. Peter became flustered, raising his elbows to rebuff his companions. Jesus straightened and spoke directly to Peter and the other two men, mildly chastening. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.” His eyes surveyed everyone in His company. “Just as I have loved you, you will also love one another.”
His emphasis on the word also had a pressing, resolute edge. Of course I recognized this, one of the most famous verses in all of scripture, but its utterance in this setting was hardly random. It was a warning. Jesus was imploring them to understand. The two who’d scolded Peter looked downcast. One apologized, either to Peter or to Jesus. Or to both.
Peter remained defiant, challenging the Savior to explain Himself conclusively and unambiguously. “Lord, where are you going?”
Jesus drank in the features of His senior disciple, eyes weary, sad. He leaned closer as if to press His words inexorably into Peter’s mind. “Where I am going you will not be able to follow me now.” His tone lightened, compassion restored. “But you will follow me later.”
Undeterred, Peter said, “Lord, why am I not able to follow you now?” I couldn’t see Peter’s face, but he struggled to form his next words, then beat a fist against his breast, voice choked with emotion. “I will lay down my life for you.”
I glanced at Hamira, her face steeped in confusion. Melody’s and Sabrina’s eyes glittered with more tears. It was one of the most heartfelt things I’d ever heard a man say, but the Savior’s reaction was not what I would have expected.
The Master cocked His head, eyes steeled and locked with those of the fisherman. He laid his right hand on Peter’s sternum and threw Peter’s words right back. “You will lay down your life for me?” Jesus leaned close to Peter’s ear and said something inaudible. Inaudible to us, that is, but not to the disciples.
Whatever He’d said, it struck the gathering like a thunderbolt. Peter gasped, incredulous. The Master lingered another beat, gaze still piercing into the conscience of His senior disciple. He turned and continued up the stream bed, passing the last of the sepulchers. The eleven followed, albeit reluctantly. Peter’s feet, however, seemed frozen in place. The others appraised Peter as they passed.
I arose from a hunched position, then stopped. Peter still hadn’t moved. He continued to be stricken by whatever Jesus had said. Hamira, Melody, and Sabrina also didn’t move, knowing another step might alert the senior disciple.
Simon Peter uttered something to himself. “Not so.” He repeated it with greater vehemence. “Not. So.” Then, turning and quickening his step, he caught up with the others.
Hamira asked softly, “What harsh thing could your Messiah have said to him?”
Sabrina answered. “‘Before the cock crows . . . you will deny me thrice.’”
We looked at Sabrina, still cradling Gid, who was again fast asleep.
Hamira was bewildered. “Your ears heard?”
Woefully, Sabrina shook her head. “No.”
Hamira was silent. I might have guessed these were the words Jesus had spoken. That is, if I’d better known the sequence of things.
I started following. The others fell in behind. The path ascended from the creek bed. The moon swam out, now at the full, and its glory and radiance dimmed the stars, a spotlight amidst a coil of dark blue, smoky clouds rimmed with white. I couldn’t recall a night sky so brilliant with blueness, as if the firmament was hard-pressed to conceal a billion blazing suns behind the living garment of the heavens. This celestial cloak had to exert all its energies to contain the universe’s boundless expanse, prevent it from breaching the void to illumine this Earth with a brightness it had never before known.
I shrank down lower, fearing exposure, again questioning the wisdom of our reckless actions. Why did I feel so resolved—why did all of us feel resolved—to continue? We were like eavesdropping children. This thought vanished like a sprite. I’m not sure I could have turned back. Not sure I had the power. Curiosity, destiny, gravity all seemed to combine, holding me like a vise.
The moonlight was suddenly obscured by lofty branches of cypress trees. Jesus and His disciples trod among thick cobalt-colored shadows cast along the narrow way. The dark green crowns of the cypresses loomed over us like those sentries at the Water Gate, inspecting us with a similar malevolence. No, that’s not quite right. Like us and every other living thing, the trees watched . . . and waited.
Jesus and the others passed through the stone fence. After a moment, we quietly slipped through the same vine-tangled gate. Cypress trunks were replaced by the gnarled trunks of olive trees, majestic, ancient, boughs swaying with a modest and pious motion. A grassy corridor crept into view. Again the Savior had paused. He stood at the head of the gathering. I crouched behind the trunk of an olive tree. There was space for all of us, sinuous roots swelling outward, high as my chest, embracing a pair of small boulder like tentacles. I peered over the top.
Gently kissed by blazing moonlight, the Savior tried to comfort His distressed disciples. “Do not be troubled in your hearts. Believe in God, and believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you.” He pointed in turn at each disciple. “I am going to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and bring you to me so that you may also be where I am. You know the way to where I’m going.”
A disciple broke in—not sure which—but he wept fiercely and declared, “Lord we do not know the way to where you’re going. How can we know the way?”
“I am the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus replied.
His spellbound audience paused and concentrated. Some repeated each word of this abstract declaration in a bemused whisper. I tried to read the Savior’s expression. Was He anxious? Agitated? Did it frustrate Him that no one seemed to grasp His meaning?
His voice was forceful but patient. “No one comes to the Father unless it’s through me.”
He studied His disciples, judging, I think, whether His words were finally penetrating the Gordian labyrinth of their minds. I sensed the emotions of Jesus were no less fragile, no less tender, than His listeners.
He touched the arm of His tearful, trembling disciple. “If you have known me, you will know my Father also, and from this point on you know Him and have seen Him.”
Some shook their heads. Their bewilderment hadn’t abated in the least. I strained to understand as well. Jesus was trying to say goodbye—I caught that much. And it wasn’t easy for Him. The Savior did not want to leave them any more than they wanted Him to leave. If He could have remained—stayed in their presence forever, He’d have done so. This got to me somehow, plucked a cord deep inside me. He was the Messiah. He was God! How could anything be “difficult” for God? He’d spoken with deliberation, but His voice . . . faltered.
Another disciple—yet one more I couldn’t have named—said abruptly, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.”
It was no casual request. Weighty. Much heavier in its tone than I might have surmised if I’d merely read these words on a page. They bristled with finality. An air of panic. And it pierced the Savior with something I couldn’t define. Despondency? Pity? His face was too far away. Despite half of them toting flickering orange lamps, the full character of His emotions remained obscured in shadow.
“Philip, have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known me?” He addressed them all, each word imbued with emphasis to impress His message, if it were possible, onto their minds. Such things couldn’t be forced, even by the Son of God. Jesus was still mortal. Moreover, He was alone. I had the feeling—though I can’t speak with any kind of doctrinal assurance, that the Comforter, the Testifier, His third companion in the Godhead . . . was not present. And somehow, that made a difference. I can’t explain it. I felt I learned something in that moment about the Holy Spirit. This Being whose name the world had never heard and likely would not know until the end of the world—His role was vital. But the circumstances had caused Him to withdraw. The Savior was on His own.
“The one who has seen me has seen the Father,” said Jesus. He turned back to Philip. “How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” He directed His next sentence at different disciples in turn. “What I say to you I do not speak on my own behalf, but the Father who abides in me does His works.”
The way He uttered those last three words seemed to underline them. I was entranced. Laser-focused. How could anyone fully imbibe or absorb this stuff by reading it on a page? It was His tone and timbre, His way of . . . well . . . pronouncing the words. He needed His followers to know that He had no interest in spotlighting Himself. It was not about elevating His will. It was about much more.
He continued, His voice swelling—if you can believe it—with even greater specificity and emphasis. “Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me.”
He paused to let them drink this in. The disciples gaped. We gaped.
The tension broke a little as He added, “But if not, believe through the works themselves.”
I pondered His meaning. The puzzle, He meant, had more than one solution. Yet either way, it would arrive at the same foundational conclusion. If the Eternal Father of heaven and Earth had been standing there in place of His eternal Son, His message would be the same. Nothing would be altered. The information, the tidings, the events as they were about to unfold—as they had to unfold—would be identical. The Savior’s next words seemed to draw all His disciples into the same . . . what? Category? Fold? Fold of what? Fold of . . . authority, I think.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will do greater works than these because”—He paused on that word—“I am going to the Father. And whatever you ask in my name, I will do it so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” He spoke simply, succinctly. “If you ask in my name, I will do it.”
Hamira jolted. She arose and stumbled backward. The daughter of Akish was fighting some kind of internal struggle, shivering, ready to burst. I’d noted it, but I’d ignored it so as not to divide my attention. At last, I glanced back at her. She continued to withdraw, as if desperate to escape the sound of Jesus’s voice. I didn’t want to follow her. I wanted to hear more. Compassion got the better of me; I broke away from Melody, Sabrina, and Baby Gid. I caught up only after Hamira had backed into the low stone fence. She appeared on the verge of collapse, supporting her weight on the barrier, shaking like a leaf, causing a loose brick at the top edge to grind an inch or two.
“Hamira?” I said softly.
“Who is He?” she asked. “What is He?”
I shrugged. Wasn’t it obvious? No, I realized. To Hamira it wasn’t obvious at all. “He is the Savior of the world,” I declared, but too casually. I tried to bolster it by adding, “The Messiah. Not just ours. Of all of us. Among your people, the Jaredites, didn’t you . . . ? Didn’t they teach about this? About Him?”
She bent one knee, then the other, shut her eyes, and rested her forehead on the stones, still trembling. The vibration seemed to travel like a wave from the top of her head down to her feet. “How?”
I scrunched my brow. “How what?”
“How can He do this? By what means? By what . . . power?”
I pondered my reply carefully. “By His perfection. His sacrifice.”
Hamira looked up at me. “Sacrifice?”
I nodded uneasily.
“By dying?” she asked. “He will save us by dying?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“That makes no sense,” said Hamira shrilly. “Of course I was taught among my people about the coming Messiah. But my understanding of His advent was that this would be a day of unbounded joy, a day of deliverance for every creature within the magisterial realm of the Father God. Now you declare it will, instead, be forever known as a day of death, mourning, and tragedy. That cannot be. What was it all for, Joshua? His life, His mission? Princess Salomé was going to murder Him. You know this, right?”
Princess. I hadn’t known the “princess” part of Salomé’s identity.
“Why did I stop her from killing Him?” she pled. “What difference did it make?”
“Because that’s not . . . not how it’s supposed to happen.”
“How is it going to happen?”
I stammered, unsure how to answer her.
She pointed back. “Is that what He means? When He tells them He is leaving—he’s telling them He’s about to die?”
I nodded.
“Why, Joshua? Why must He die? For what inconceivable reason is it necessary for Him to die?”
I still didn’t know what to say. My first impulse was to say I didn’t know. That would’ve been honest. I couldn’t explain the reasons. The ins and outs. The math. I couldn’t claim that I understood it either. I couldn’t begin to grasp the mechanics, the rationale. What human being could? But rather than wallow in silence, I stiffened my jaw and through some spark—some impulse beyond my own ken—perhaps some thread of memory from a Sacrament meeting sermon or General Conference address, I started to reply, “It’s like the birth of a child.”
Her expression contorted in puzzlement. “What?”
I felt a twinge of silliness. How was I remotely qualified to make this analogy? Yet I pressed on. “A woman—a mother—passes through every fountain of the deepest pain and sorrow until, finally, she is delivered unto joy. The sweetest joy. Sadness, Hamira, is the parent of joy. Tragedy, I think, is the mother of triumph. That’s why, Hamira. That’s why He must die.”
I shook myself, as if awakening from a trance. I tried to ponder and recount the words I’d uttered, but it was difficult. Hamira studied me in dismay. For me the moment was so sublime that I might’ve expected her eyes to be glittering with tears. They were not. Instead, she looked more confounded than before.
I swallowed and added hastily, “He rises.”
“Rises?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Savior lives again. He will be resurrected.”
Hamira shook her head, scoffing. “That’s . . .” What was she about to say? Ludicrous? Insane? Instead, she asked, “How do you know all this, Joshua?”
I shifted my weight, feeling vulnerable and exposed. “I just do.”
“You can’t know such things.”
“But I do.”
“You can’t. Not even His followers believe or understand—”
“You’re right. They don’t. They’re . . . confused. Grieving. But I know that what He says is true, Hamira. Soon, they will know it too.”
Her gaze seemed to bore a hole between my eyes. “Who are you, Joshua?”
I hiked my brow. Odd question. Hadn’t I explained this? I thought I’d already revealed every possible secret. “I told you,” I reminded her. “I explained it as you were painting that mural against the cliff near the banks of the Shoshone—”
She interrupted, “You said you were from the future.” Her tone challenged the veracity of this. It’s not as if she’d hailed from a culture with stories like The Time Machine and Back to the Future to render such concepts mundane. The supposition must’ve boggled her mind.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m from a place and time a couple thousand years from now. Just as your home is a couple thousand years before now.”
She looked away, shuddered.
I added, “People from my time call this day—this period—the Meridian of Time. The middle of mortal reality. Where I’m from, these events have already happened. Where you’re from, they’re yet to come.”
I saw a flash of anger, bristling exasperation. Finally, she said, “So where you are from, these events are preserved by storytellers?”
“By record-keepers, yes,” I clarified. “By prophets.”
“So this is how you know? You have read these prophets’ words?”
“Yeah, some of them. Not as much, or as many, as I should have. I haven’t been home in a long, long time. And what happens here . . . I mean, there are some events I’ve already seen. I saw Him after.”
“After?”
“After He came—comes—back to life. After He becomes a perfect Being. I was small. Five or six years old. I was in another place. Closer to your home.”
She tried to digest all this but only looked more confounded. I said a prayer in my head: Give me the words again, Father. The right words.
I did not feel embraced by the same spark of wisdom that I’d experienced only a moment earlier. Relying upon my own limited intelligence and style of expression, I said, “This event . . . what’s happening right now . . . I’ve read some things. But mostly I’ve been told about it. By my parents. My Church. You and I, Hamira . . . This is a gift. We’re witnessing a miracle. It’s clear now. We’re here to witness the most important . . .” I drew a breath and repeated, “. . . the most important event in the history of the world.”
Marinating in these words, she asked, “How? What brought us here? My father’s sword? The Oracle?”
