THE ANSWER FOR

    

  QUESTION

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  SEVENTEEN

 

 

RETURN TO

  
 

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  THE QUESTION:  What all took place after your return to Judea and had you as yet formed any ideas that might have eventually resulted in what was to become your ministry to your own people?  

 

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Question Thirty-three

  

 

  THE ANSWER:  Even though I was rather prepared to get on with some undefined mission upon my return, I felt it necessary to spend a bit of time reacquainting myself with my own people and trying to get a better grasp on just why so many of them appeared so perpetually unhappy.  Of course, just the daily routine of living and the added struggles of life in my homeland were often enough to justify any amount of grief, but it seemed that there was some underlying sense of doom that permeated so much of life.  I realized that I possessed no power to change the reality of the daily hardships, but I felt that there must have been some way to touch these people’s spirits in such a way that they might at the very least discover the courage needed to endure their lives with a bit more hope and even have the occasional experience of joy.  There was, nearly everywhere I went in Judea, this foreboding look of dome on so many faces of the people and I was particularly disturbed that our own spiritual leaders appeared to do so little to actually inspire anyone unless they were able to somehow fatten the coffers of the Temple.  I came to increasingly resent the ‘superior’ status and accompanying behavior of these pious priests and found myself ever so increasingly separating myself further and further form the old worn-out self-serving tenets of my own religion.  I couldn’t understand why my own people remained so doggedly faithful to a religion that seemed to have given them more grief than joy.  Added to all of this was the presence of a foreign power that appeared to have crawled into bed with our Hebrew leadership, and there was no wonder that there existed so much disbelief or lack of hope for any brighter future.  I wanted to be sure that what I was experiencing wasn’t just some narrow perception that I had developed only because I had learned in another land to enjoy this life with far more optimism.  I began to seek out a handful of congenial friends with whom I could share and try out my acquired ideas without the usual condemnation that came with so many of my other negative neighbors; it often appeared that most felt that they possibly deserved their life of rigid servitude whether it was to their work or even to their religion.  In any case, I had developed a particularly close relationship with another young man, Matthew.  He and I began to spent more and more time together, and it wasn’t too long before Matthew had found himself completely turned around to my own view of the rather gruesome state of affairs; we were even able to find a bit of joy in our own lives and even found laughter on a number of occasions.   I believe that this period of my life was some three or four years in the development, and Matthew had certainly made the greatest contribution in that he so easily concurred with so much of what we both mutually observed and experienced.  It was sometime in that third year of my return that I had somehow finally gotten the attention of my older brother, James and he joined in with some of our more lively conversations about the spiritual and emotional status of our people.  James always had a closer relationship with our father and it was James’ observation of our own father’s increasingly harder look to his overall continence that gave him cause to eventually reach many of the same conclusions.  I think James had joined in our search for a better approach to life, if for no other reason, than to possible put a smile back on our father’s face.  Our mother, on the other hand, always seemed to find the good and joy in all things that she had accomplished.  Neither James nor I were quite sure just what my mother’s secret was, and on those occasions when asked, she usually responded that it was her two sons that had given her so much joy in life; surely it had to be more than just that.  Matthew and I were soon joined by a couple of other friends and one in particular was this rather quite man named John, who was such an incredibly deep thinker, and we often called him the philosopher.  John was so quite most of the time, but the look on his face always gave us a clear indication that he was totally present in mind and spirit anytime that he was in our company.  He always sat the farthest away from the rest of us and only on rare occasions would he contribute to the conversation.  I must add that when John did speak, it was always with some profoundly deep thought that would always caused a bit of silence and deep contemplation before the conversation would continue; anyone that ever met John was always respectful of the compassion that John sort of expressed just in the manner in which he approached anything in his life.  There were rarely ever any objections to what John had to contribute except possibly to his sometimes too eloquent use of words in sharing and expressing those deeper thoughts.  John often served as that deeper spiritual rooting to what we were often taking with such light note thereof.  Lamah has noted that even in John’s own Gospel, if it were indeed all of his own words, he continues to speak as though he had some deeper spiritual grasp of the whole situation.  He was an idealist in the truest sense and if anyone could have actually believed in a god that really never existed, it would have been John that most often held fast to some of the old traditions and beliefs.  John often expressed that he thought me to being a divine messenger of God and that my mission was to somehow deliver my people from whatever bondage that oppressed their otherwise free spirits; perhaps even that often expected Messiah.   John was also the most literate of our small group outside myself, but of course, his education was entirely at that hands of the Hebrew clergy and thus steeped in god-like perceptions of the entire world.  There were times that I wondered just why John had joined in with us and with such enthusiasm at time.  Even thought he maintained a slight distance from the group itself, we often had some rather intimate exchanges when it was just the two of us.  Even though I feel that I probably loved Matthew more than any of the others, it was often John that touched my own heart in such a profound manner as to often bring tears to my eyes at some of his profound insights and his sharing my love and desire for all of those around us.  I wish that I could have been all that John thought me to be, but I was just a simply man with an incredible desire to bring a bit of joy to those that I had come to love.