The Ones He Let Come Near

When he had finished saying all of that, he went down into Capernaum. And in Capernaum there was a Roman officer — a commander of a hundred men — who had a servant he thought the world of, and the servant was ill, and dying. Now the officer was a foreigner, and a soldier of the army that was sitting on the country, and he was not one of God’s people. But he had done something nobody expected of a man like that: he had come to love the people he had been sent to keep in order, and he had paid, out of his own money, to build them their meeting house. So when he heard that Jesus was in the town, he did not go himself. He sent some of the Jewish elders to ask for him, and they came and pressed Jesus hard. “He deserves to have you do this for him. He loves our nation. He built us our meeting house himself.” So Jesus went with them. But when he was still a little way from the house, the officer sent friends running out down the road to stop him, with a message: “Lord, do not put yourself to any trouble. I am not fit to have you come in under my roof. That is why I did not come out to you myself. But say the word — only say the word — and let my boy be healed. Because I am a man with officers over me, and soldiers under me. I say to one of them, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” The man had worked it out from his own job. An order travels. You do not have to be standing in the room for it to be obeyed. And when Jesus heard it he stopped in the road, and he was amazed. He turned round to the crowd trailing along behind him and said: “I tell you — I have not found faith like this anywhere. Not even in Israel.” And the men who had been sent went back to the house, and found the servant well.

Soon after that he walked up into the hills to a town called Nain, and his followers went with him, and a big crowd went with them. And as he came up to the gate of the town, another crowd was coming out of it. They were carrying a dead man. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow, so he was every single thing she had left in the world — and half the town was walking out with her. The two crowds met each other in the gateway. His, going in, full of talk. Hers, coming out, carrying a bier and crying. And when the Lord saw her, something turned over inside him. He did not ask her anything, and he did not ask her permission. He said: “Do not cry.” And then he walked up and put his hand on the bier, and the men carrying it stopped dead where they stood — because touching anything to do with a dead body made you unclean, and every person there knew it. And he spoke to the dead man. “Young man. I say to you. Get up.” And the dead man sat up, and started talking. And he gave him back to his mother. And fear came over all of them, and then they began praising God, and they were saying to each other: “A great prophet has been raised up among us.” “God has come to visit his people.” And this news about him went out through the whole of Judea and all the country round about.

And the news got into a prison. John the Immerser was shut up in one of Herod’s fortresses by then, for telling the king to his face that what he had done was wrong, and John’s own followers came and told him everything Jesus was doing. And John — the man who had immersed him in the Jordan, who had stood in the water and pointed at him in front of everybody — called two of his followers and sent them off with a question. “Are you the one who is coming? Or should we look for another?” He had said it out loud in the river, that this was the one. Now he was in the dark under a fortress, and he sent to ask. The two men found Jesus in the middle of a crowd, and said, “John the Immerser sent us to you, to ask: are you the one who is coming, or should we look for another?” And Jesus did not answer them straight away. In that hour, while the two of them stood and watched, he healed a great many people of diseases and of the things that tormented them, and gave their sight back to a great many who were blind. And then he turned to John’s two men and said: “Go back and tell John what you have seen and heard. Blind people are seeing. Lame people are walking. People with leprosy are being made clean. Deaf people are hearing. Dead people are being raised up. And poor people are having the good news told to them. And blessed is anybody who is not tripped up by me.” It was not a yes. It was a list of the things the prophets had said would happen when God came, handed to a man in a cell so that he could count them off on his fingers. And when John’s men had gone off back down the road, Jesus began to talk to the crowd about John — and he did not say one word against him for asking. “What did you all go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaking in the wind? Then what did you go out to see? A man in soft expensive clothes? People who dress like that and live like that are in palaces, not out in the desert. So what did you go out for? To see a prophet? Yes — and I tell you, far more than a prophet. He is the one it was written about: Look, I am sending my messenger on ahead of you, and he will get your road ready in front of you. I tell you this: of everybody who has ever been born of a woman, there is nobody greater than John. And the smallest person in the kingdom of God is greater than he is.” All the ordinary people listening, and even the tax collectors, said God had been right — because they were the ones who had gone out to the river and been immersed by John. The Pharisees and the lawyers had not gone, and so they pushed away what God wanted for them. And then he said something about the people of his own time that must have stung. “What shall I compare the people of this generation to? What are they like? They are like children sitting about in the marketplace shouting at the other children: ‘We played the flute for you and you would not dance! We sang a funeral song and you would not cry!’ Because John came, not eating bread and not drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ And the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him — a greedy man and a drinker, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is shown to be right by all her children.”

One of the Pharisees, a man named Simon, asked him to dinner, and he went. People did not sit up at a table then; they lay on their sides on low couches around it, propped on one elbow, with their feet stretched out behind them away from the food. And a woman in that town who was a sinner found out that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house. So she came in, carrying an alabaster jar of perfume. She stood behind him, down at his feet, and she began to cry — and her tears fell on his feet. She had nothing to dry them with. So she let down her hair, in a room full of men, which no respectable woman ever did, and wiped his feet with her own hair, and kissed them over and over, and poured out the perfume on them. The whole house filled up with the smell of it. Simon did not say anything. He only thought it, lying there watching: “If this man were a prophet, he would know who this is who is touching him, and what kind of woman she is. He would know she is a sinner.” And Jesus, who had not been told a word of it, said: “Simon. There is something I would like to say to you.” And Simon said, “Say it, Teacher.” “Two men owed money to the same moneylender. One of them owed him five hundred days’ wages. The other one owed him fifty. And neither of them had anything at all to pay him back with. So he let them both off. The whole thing, both debts, gone. Now — which of the two will love him more?” And Simon, who could see it coming and could not get out of the way, said, “I suppose the one he let off more.” And Jesus said, “You have judged rightly.” And then he turned round to look at the woman — but he went on talking to Simon. “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You gave me no water for my feet; she has washed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss when I came in; she has not stopped kissing my feet since I lay down. You did not put oil on my head; she has poured perfume on my feet. And so I tell you: her sins, and there are a great many of them, have been forgiven — and that is why she has loved so much. The one who is forgiven little, loves little.” And then he spoke to her, and it was the first thing he had said to her at all. “Your sins are forgiven.” And the other guests round the table started muttering among themselves: “Who is this man, who forgives sins as well?” He took no notice of them whatever. He said to the woman: “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

After that he went traveling again, town after town and village after village, telling people the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve went with him. And so did some women, which was not usual at all. There was Mary, the one called Magdalene, out of whom seven demons had gone. There was Joanna, whose husband Chuza was the manager of King Herod’s household — so one of the people traveling with Jesus was married to a man who worked in the palace of the king who had John locked up. There was Susanna. And there were a great many others. Every one of them had been healed of something, an illness or an evil spirit. And now they walked the roads with him, and they paid for it: the bread, the lodging, the whole journey, out of what belonged to them. So that is who was on the road with him by now. Twelve men he had prayed a whole night on a mountain to choose, a Roman officer’s thank-you somewhere behind him, and a group of women.