Chapter Nine
E
maciated, Jesus feinted. The terrible hour of torment had come and gone. He desperately needed food. Angels came — finally. Hovering around him, they strengthened him, comforted him.
Dawn broke yet again. He awoke, the smell of desert rich in his nostrils. The Judean sun climbing toward its zenith. Weak with hunger, his steps unpracticed and faltering as he made his way down the mountain. The morning cool warmed. Every few paces, he stopped, leaned against a rock and rested. It seemed forever before the slope of the path leveled. Ahead, along the way, Jesus saw a group of men gathered around another, listening to him speak. In a moment, he recognized his cousin John, holding court with anyone who would listen. Good John! Perhaps he would spare a locust. At this point, Jesus would gladly have eaten several locusts.
At that moment, John looked up and saw Jesus coming toward him. The two of them had known each other all of their lives. They had played infrequently as children while their mothers visited and spoke in extravagant terms of their sons. Jesus and John, both thought to be a little peculiar by the rest of the family, survived the adolescent years of hormone surges, wondering what to do with developing bodies and this strange feeling toward the other gender. Yet, what John saw on this morning was different than anything he had seen before. Different than when they were children. Different than the baptism. What did this young prophet see? What was it about Jesus that only John could recognize, indeed had made him leap in his mother’s womb; what could John see and feel that others could not? We only know that he whispered slowly as if paralyzed by the spectacle, “Look,” he said for the second time in his life, “Look, and behold the Lamb of God!” Two disciples, especially, were compelled by these words.
As it turned out, John was almost as hungry as Jesus. He had no food. He too, looked gaunt and bizarre in his camel’s hair wrappings. The two of them made a pathetic spectacle. Two immense spiritual leaders with every appearance of rejection, homeless in the world in which they lived. Jesus was too feint, too preoccupied with his own weakness to be sociable. After learning there was no food to be had, he turned to leave. The two that had been listening to John speak were fishermen, Simon and John. These two began to follow along after Jesus. This curiously continued for a moment and then, turning around, Jesus saw them and asked, “What do you want?”
These two had heard the prophet speak of Jesus. Times past counting they had heard of the coming Messiah, the Lamb of God. Now he had been identified by the Baptist himself.
They didn’t know how to answer his question. They hadn’t thought they would be asked. All they knew was that they wanted to follow this man. Nonplussed, they said, “Teacher, where are you staying?”
