November 25, 2024

I saw him. He lay by my side, and there was a glow around him that lifted him from the sand, flat on his back, as he slept calmly. I turned to him, and a heat fell to the surrounding dust, not the blaze of the morning desert sun, but a warmth that pulsed.

When I laid the back of my hand against his bare shoulder, it burned me, although it left no mark on me. He breathed easily, eyes moving left and right under his wrinkled lids, smiling as he slept, maybe having a joyful dream, dreaming of his place in heaven.

We both knew now – I had always known. Even as a boy, some of the things he did, like healing sick birds and animals, astounded us. His words about God had no precedent in any of the Synagogue schools we attended, and he confounded even the rabbis. Once, on our families’ first excursion to the Temple, we found him competing with some learned priests. Mary, our true mother knew too, yet she always protected her son with secrets.

I was unruly, alone as a child most of the time. Mary and Jesus, and my other step-siblings visited twice a year, less often after Joseph died. Elizabeth said I was like night and day with J, that I opened up and became boisterous around him. We finished each others’ sentences, and spent hours engaging in God; my interest was as deep as his, yet his more philosophical, mine fundamental.

We became men together in the synagogue. I struggled to remember the Torah, J blew through it easily, even embellished some parts, much to the consternation of the Rabbis. But even at 12, the Rabbis were grooming J for the priesthood. I had learned enough to understand our History in the Prophets Elijah and Isaiah, and my Stepfather Zachariah conversed with me hours into the deep night. But he thought I could never be flexible enough to be a Rabbi – I was hard-headed and questioned all authority. As I got older I became an embarrassment to Zachariah’s priesthood, and at 16 was sent from town to town to stay with different families, all who could tie no reign to me.

I punished myself, because I knew God wanted it for me. It’s something no one could understand, but I knew it was right, to the horror of all the families. I began with throwing myself into stone walls, not eating or drinking for days, laying in the desert deep in meditation while my body burned. In rare instances I felt the hand of God on my forehead and in my heart, and I knew it was right. I’m sure many times I was at the point of death, but what is death to a man who knows Yhwh as Moses must have? In the decade that followed I wandered further, deeper, into the desert, and communed only with my heart, filling it with God.

I know it’s all blasphemy, and that is why I never had a use for the priests and their temple. YHWH wants personal sacrifice, not the hypocritical slicing lambs or the hours with eyes raised, nor the coins. You can’t be forgiven if you’re poor? How ridiculous. You cannot be cleansed without a lamb to slaughter?

I know, it’s all blasphemy. But am I a sinner if I am called to cleanse sins, to forgive sins, by YHWH God himself? If I am wrong I’ll burn in the lowest depths of Hell, in Gehenna where the human garbage will be heaped burning on top of me, burning and suffocating me, a pile the size of Sinai. Or I’ll hang from their cross while the dogs tear at my thighs and the vultures feast on the softness of my eyes while I watch, while God keeps my heart pumping so I can feel it all, suffer it all – all there is to being a true man, and when they see me crucified – when they trudge pass the row of crosses as they leave Jerusalem, they’ll stop, and wonder why I smile in such a filthy condition.

I smile because at the moment of my own death, the Kingdom of God will fill the earth. The skies will tear open and armies of angels will fall to the earth and each a sword shall hunt out the unrighteous, the unjust, the true sinners who cannot ask forgiveness, and they shall hack through the Temple, and the priests there will beg mercy as they watch their brothers dismembered so there is nothing left even to bury.

And Gabriel and Michael shall pull the iron from my body, and ease me to the earth, and Gabriel shall touch the hilt of his sword to me, and I shall be purified, and my new eyes will see the strange new world, where all the righteous walk in God’s sun, each children of God. The gentiles and Jews, no more. Just men and women all sons and daughters of the most high, walking among the angels, and the sky, still torn, becomes the true heaven, and looking up past the sun, past the (coming and going) angels in flight, we see a throne, and there is Adonai, the Most High God, God the Father for all the world.

Then there will be no death, no sin, no illness. We shall eat of the earth when hungry, the fruit shall be bountiful, and the fish shall leap from the sea, and men will embrace each other for no more reason than I embrace my own brother.

And there will be no more graves – all who were righteous believers will walk from their tombs, whole and glorious. What is left of graves will fall deep into the earth, and fruit trees shalsprout from those roots.

And there, walking in this eternal garden beside the one God of Adam and Moses and Abram and Noah, there as tall as the Lord, shall be my brother Joshua. It is he I must suffer for, he I must turn the world to. He walks as easy as a Lamb in the eternal sun. Look, even the animals gather at his feet to greet him as he and Yahweh go to the desert.

Yes, there will always be a desert to remind us of what we were before the Kingdom of God came to earth. It shall be barren, like our souls were, but deep, deep in the desolation there grows a single tree which sprouts good fruit, and that fruit is eaten daily by all his children, to remind us of what we have become, and what we were.

Yet none of this will be, while I live. God has told me in the desert.