The Crown and the Cross: The Life of Christ (14 page)

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

John 3:16

Jesus and His Galilean followers were busy that winter moving about Galilee while He taught and healed the sick. Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John, with Matthew the tax gatherer who had been called as he sat in his booth at the customs station on the Way of the Sea, were with Him always. As time went on, others became members of this inner circle which accompanied Him wherever He went.

When spring came, Jesus journeyed to Jerusalem with His small group of intimate followers to celebrate the Passover at the fountainhead of the Jewish faith, the Holy City with its gleaming golden temple. As He went about Jerusalem, a crowd soon began to follow, for word of the wonderful things He had been accomplishing in Galilee had gone before Him. At the same time He was closely watched by the scribes and Pharisees because neither He nor His teachings, they felt, gave proper respect to the Law.

Among the many lapses of which they accused Him was failure to observe the ritual of handwashing. The true Pharisee kept a jug of water standing never more than three paces from his bed, since the Law let him go no farther without washing his hands upon arising. In addition he washed before entering the synagogue, when he returned home from any public place, and both before and after eating. Some of the strictest Pharisees even washed between the courses of a meal.

Nor was the washing merely a perfunctory dipping of the hands into a basin of water. First the hands were carefully washed to remove any dirt, whether visible or not. Because they became defiled by the dirty water after washing, they were next rinsed with clear water, the hands being held up so the water would run down the arms and drop off the elbows. If it did not reach as far as the wrist during this rinsing, the hands were not considered clean and had to be washed again. By insisting upon such strictness, the Pharisees made it impossible for the ordinary working Jew to maintain complete purity under the Law, as they interpreted it.

Jewish custom demanded that when praying, the pious should wear, attached to a band around the forehead and the wrist, a small leather box called a phylactery containing pieces of parchment upon which were written portions of the Law. The boxes grew larger and more noticeable as time passed, and many Pharisees had come to wear them continually except when asleep, so that the over-large phylactery had become a badge of the self-righteous Pharisee.

An ancient custom also dictated that Jews should wear blue fringes or tassels at the four corners of the robe or mantle. Again the Pharisees, believing that their piety increased with the width of the fringes, wore broad and heavily ornamented ones which could be seen by the world. They made themselves conspicuous, too, by stopping to pray in public places where they would be seen by men and admired for their great piety.

Nowhere was the absurdity of Pharisaic custom more evident than in the observance of the Sabbath. A wedding could not be celebrated on the Sabbath or on the days preceding and following it lest the feast extend over into the holy day. No removable teeth could be worn on the Sabbath because that would constitute carrying a burden, nor could more than two letters of the alphabet be written. A gray hair could not be plucked from the head, or a husk of wheat shelled. One who had a sore throat could not gargle on the Sabbath because he would be practicing medicine and therefore doing work. If a man suffered an aching tooth, he must find a Gentle to extract it. And nothing heavier than a scroll of the holy writings could be carried; even in the case of fire, a really pious Pharisee could flee his house on the Sabbath with only the clothing he wore, lest again he be accused of carrying a burden. Thus the Pharisees had reduced almost to an absurdity what was originally a day of rest and thanksgiving to God, and had made it practically impossible for one who did not concern himself every moment with the Law to avoid breaking some portion of it.

Jesus ignored these minute and literal interpretations which perverted the spirit of the Law, and the Pharisees were angered because He did not encourage the people to follow these strict precepts. Knowing that the easiest way to discredit Jesus would be to catch Him in the act of breaking the Law, the group who sought to destroy Him trailed Him everywhere He went in Jerusalem and watched His every act.

North of the temple where the road entered from the Mount of Olives and the suburb of Bethany was the Sheep Gate, so named because it was near the sheep market. Near this gate was a pool fed by an underground spring. Known as the Pool of Bezatha, or more popularly Bethesda, it was surrounded by five terraces, sometimes called porches, one of which projected into the pool and almost separated it into two parts.

Intermittently the rush of water from a subterranean spring feeding one section of the Pool of Bezatha caused the water to boil up. Pious Jews believed an angel roiled the waters of the pool at these times, and tradition said that the first sick or afflicted person who stepped into the water after it was disturbed would be healed. As a result, there was always a group of the afflicted lining the terraces at the Pool of Bezatha, and there was a great scramble to be first into the water when it boiled up.

On a Sabbath day during this visit to Jerusalem, Jesus came to the Pool of Bezatha and stood looking down at the poor unfortunates gathered there. Every eye except His was on the water, eager to detect the periodic roiling and be the first into the pool.

Jesus noticed one man whom He had seen in this same spot on several previous journeys to Jerusalem. In fact, it was said that this man had been afflicted for thirty-eight years with a paralysis, never once having been able to enter the pool at the moment when it boiled.

“Do you want to be made well?” Jesus asked the afflicted man.

The paralytic took his eyes off the pool with some reluctance, lest he miss the next stirring up of the waters. “Sir,” he said, “I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; but while I am coming, another always steps down before me.”

He was not complaining nor had he lost his faith that God would heal him when he was the first to enter the pool. The fault, in his opinion, was not God’s but his own.

“Rise, take up your bed and walk,” Jesus told him. Immediately the man got to his feet, rolled up the scrap of quilt upon which he had been lying, and walked away from the terraces of the pool.

He had not gone far when a scribe stopped him. “It is the Sabbath,” the scribe said severely. “And it is not lawful for you to carry your bed.”

“He who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your bed and walk,’” the healed man replied.

“Who told you this?” the scribe demanded.

But Jesus was by now lost in the crowd that came and went around the pool, and the healed man could not point Him out. So the scribes were deprived of an opportunity to accuse Him of breaking the Law both in healing the man and in directing Him to carry a burden upon the Sabbath.

The next day Jesus saw in the temple the man who had been paralyzed. “See, you have been made well,” He told him. “Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.”

Recognizing his benefactor, the man went to the scribes and pointed out Jesus as the one who had healed him and directed him to do work on the Sabbath. The scribes were naturally overjoyed. At last, it seemed, they had an opportunity to convict Jesus of a crime. And in Jerusalem they could be sure that the court which would hear the charges would be of their way of thinking.

When they began to accuse Jesus, He stopped them with the stern warning, “My Father works even now, so I work.”

At that His accusers set up a mighty clamor, accusing Him not only of having broken the Sabbath but of blasphemy in saying that God was His Father, for that would have made Him the equal of God, which in their sight, no man could be.

“The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do,” Jesus told them, “for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself does; and He will show Him greater works than these, that you may marvel.”

The scribes were taken aback by His words, for He spoke as He had in the synagogues of Galilee, with authority, not as one who was simply interpreting the Law. He had not named Himself the Son of whom He was speaking and, if He were the prophet many believed Him to be, the terms He used were lawful, for mystics were not expected to be bound by ordinary rules. “He who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life,” Jesus told them. “He shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life. For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself, and has given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man.”

He looked pityingly at those who sought to condemn Him for healing a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years. And unable to meet His gaze, they could only look away.

“You search the Scriptures,” He told them, “for in them you think you have eternal life; and they testify of Me. I do not receive honor from men. But I know you, that you do not have the love of God in you. I have come in My Father’s name, and you do not receive Me. How can you believe,” He added scathingly, “when you receive honor from one another, and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God?”

By now the scribes, who had been sure they had Him trapped, were embarrassed and humiliated under the lash of His words as He denounced them for their excessive searching for honor from each other, rather than seeking to deserve the blessings of God for what they were within themselves.

“Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father,” Jesus added. “There is one who accuses you—Moses, in whom you trust. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”

The Great Sanhedrin was largely dominated by the Sadducees, and the more intolerant Pharisees who, with the high priest Caiaphas as their leader, made up the majority of its members. The membership did include a small number of Pharisees who, in both religious and political life, were more tolerant than those who sought to punish severely every infraction of the Law, but who were stricter than the worldly Sadducees. One of the most prominent among these conservatives was a lawyer named Nicodemus. When he heard how Jesus had parried the attack of the scribes, he determined to find out for himself just what it was that distinguished the Nazarene from the self-styled prophets who were constantly turning up at the temple during the religious festivals.

Jesus was resting at the camp His disciples had made on the slope of the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem when Nicodemus came to Him. “Rabbi,” the Pharisee said respectfully, “we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do the miracles that You do unless God is with Him.”

Recognizing the sincerity of the visitor and his real desire to know the truth, Jesus wasted no words but went to the very heart of His own doctrine.

“Most assuredly, I say to you,” He told Nicodemus, “unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

“How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time?”

“Unless one is born of water and the Spirit of God,” Jesus explained, “he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

Nicodemus could see the difference now, the fact that a man could change in his soul with no actual change in his body.

“Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again,’” Jesus told him. “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

“How can these things be?” Nicodemus protested, for it went against all his training and previous belief to say that a man could enter the kingdom of God merely by a spiritual regeneration without rigidly following the Law which every pious Jew believed to be the only route to eternal life.

“Are you a teacher of Israel, and do not know these things?” Jesus reproved him gently. “We speak what We know and testify what We have seen, and you do not receive Our witness. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?”

Jesus knew Nicodemus had come to Him in a sincere desire to understand what His teachings were and what power He possessed, not, as had the scribes, with any desire to trap Him. So when He saw that the lawyer still did not understand, He used an example from the history of the Children of Israel. As they had journeyed from Egypt toward the Promised Land of Canaan, the Israelites had become discouraged and their faith had wavered, especially when they were troubled by a plague of venomous snakes. God had instructed Moses to place a serpent of brass on a pole in the center of the camp and to announce that if any who were bitten looked at the serpent they would be saved. The serpent of brass was not a cure in itself, but the act of looking was a test of faith in God’s willingness to help those who trusted Him.