Peter had the idea at first but it was Thomas who really ran with it. Peter was sort of daydreaming and said “What if we bribed the Roman guards?” And Thomas snapped out of his morose mood and was into a military planning mood in about two seconds flat.
“Holy One, God of the angels, look after your children in the here and now and please, please bless this endeavor” Thomas said, with a quick and sincere Inward turned invocation to the Divine. You know, first things first.
Then he turned to Peter, and said, “Good idea, brother. We are absolutely going to pull this off. God willing.”
The mood in the room changed pretty fast after that. We’d been a morose bunch since the Garden of Gesemany when the Romans had yanked Our Brother, with dogs barking and people crying. The religious elites and the Romans and the Banksters had conspired to put on that shady show trial. He was jail right then and set to be executed tomorrow. We had been feeling more than a little blue. But in an instant all that changed. A disciplined energy came over the team. We had been through some tight scenes before, and had pulled through, and that spirit had returned suddenly.
Everyone pulled up to the table, and started talking at once for about five seconds until Thomas yelled “shut up!”
Then we made the plan, and debated tactics and strategy as swift and orderly as we could.
“My sister grows the herbs that we can us to stop the bleeding on his hands. Comfrey, calendula flowers, rosemary. She probably knows a few others” I said.
“Good, Simon” said Thomas, “Get the herbs, but be cool about it. Don’t let her know what they are for. We can’t have the whole town knowing that this is going down, or the Romans will get tipped off.”
“How am I supposed to ask her which herbs to give us without telling her, Thomas? ‘Ah sis, so just hypothetically speakin, if I wanted to stop the bleeding gushing out of big holes in the center of somebodies hands, what herbs might be good for that?’” I said.
“Is she trustworthy?” asked Thomas.
“Yes” I said.
“OK, tell her but swear her to secrecy and she’s not to come tomorrow. The less people who know what we’re up to at the event, the better” said Thomas. He continued, “Bribing the Romans. Not an impossible task” hands in prayer position, beneath his lips, but eyes far-off in thought, thinking aloud, “A lot of those guys got stolen from their families by the Emperor’s army, and don’t give a damn about anything but wine and women, and maybe going home someday.”
“But, the officers, not so much” said John. “They can be a disciplined bunch. They have stuff to lose. Mostly they’re literate.”
We debated it for a while. In the end, we decided to bribe the soldiers and work around the officers. It seemed a better plan. The officers might not go for it or might demand more money than we could pull together. Besides, the trial was big news all over Judea, the elite were watching close. The money swine were still grumbling about the way Jesus turned over the tables at the temple. But we figured the soldiers would be more pliant. (As a backup plan, we decided to keep a big bag of gold in case we need to bribe the officer.)
We decided to offer them all gold coins worth 3 months of their pay upfront, to be followed by 20 gallons of wine and another 3 months pay if it went off. It was Peter, the fisherman, who had bribed a few Romans before, he worked up the deal. He was a hard-living guy before he got spiritualized. But you know how it is, the Lord turns your talents towards His purposes as He sees fit.
Luckily Our Brother had made some rich friends as he walked around healing everybody. Lazarus’s uncle had offered him a 10 acre fig plantation, but he had said just laughed and said “Thanks, but I’m into different fruit.” He made poor friends too, he just was a sort of a charming walking love factory. One of his main disciplines was a rich merchant, and he also had a cave outside of Jerusalem, that we agreed would be the perfect place to get Him well again afterwards.
We were a psyched and happy bunch that night. It seemed possible that we could get away with it. The Romans were notoriously easy to bribe. We could just get them to turn the other way at the last minute, and then boom, whisk him down, off we go, let him rest up for a few days, and then disappear back to India, where he could live out his days until he was a happy, old man with a big grey beard and some wrinkles but that same big smile. Maybe a few children running around, who knows?
A lot of it fell into place pretty quickly and with general agreement. Who to get the loot from, where to get the herbs, where to get the opium to knock him out with.
There was only disagreement about whether to tell Mary or not. Peter said “we just can’t tell her. She’s sweet. She won’t be able to fake it.
“It will break her heart if we don’t. We have to tell her.
“No! She’ll blow it. She’s an innocent, she’s not actor, she won’t put it off.
The debate got fierce.
Peter won in the debate in the end. Mary shouldn’t know, if she got super emotional at the event, it would help the show. Besides, she’d understand later.
We also decided to keep it under raps even from some of the other disciples. We were not the most trusting bunch after what happened with Judas. It’s true, he’d always been a bit of an outsider. Yashua had let him hang around because he wanted us to stretch our hearts. He said that if God wanted to redeem this guy, then who were we to say no.
Peter had never liked Judas and had given a lengthy discourse on how he was going to gut him like a fish and disembowel him. But by then, it wasn’t necessary. Sad, that whole thing. Betrayal. A backbiter. Bad ally etiquette. You gotta be a good ally to your friends. Stick with ‘em. Stick together. It’ s hard enough to get things done in this world, without the egomaniacs who don’t know how to work together.
So we decided to try and tell as few people as possible. The people who were at the first meeting were the one’s who know. It was about half. The others we’d let act as decoys.
There was debate about whether to tell Yeshua himself. We all knew the story of Socrates. That great teacher was condemned to death by hemlock and for the sake of truthfulness had taken it!
We decide to tell him. We figured that if he thought he was really dying he might hold out, but if he knew he was faking, he could just go into deep prayer and meditation and make the body like a corpse. He had learned some really super tricks in India. He could make his heartbeat slow way down. He could turn inward so deeply that you could poke him with a stick and he’d gaze at you with peaceful eyes. He’d be soon entranced in union with the Divine that the body was like toy boat on the surface of a deep, deep ocean, and he was identified with the ocean.
When to tell him, though? We decided to try and get him the message as soon as possible. We didn’t want to risk passing
information along through the jail. We’d figured we’d try to get him the message when he was carrying the cross through Jerusalem. If not, we’d say something at the hill when we fed him the opium drink.
Peter agreed to arrange from a doctor friend for a hefty dose of opium, a big pain killer, mixed with some kava kava root from the spice traders. That should keep him peaced out hopefully stop the trauma and shock from settling into his flesh. But also hopefully conscious enough so that he could meditate and do his super-samadhi trick.
We ended our meeting with one of the most intense prayer sessions of my life. Everybody was filled with sincerity, in part because we wanted it so bad and perhaps in part because we remembered Yashua telling us “A Sufi teacher named Ibrahim once told me ‘God hears all sincere prayers.’ And in my experience that has been true.”
The next day everybody reconvened over a working lunch of bread, olives, oil.
Peter said “It’s funny, when I first got the idea to spring him, it came in a sort of daydream. The idea was fully formed, complete and perfect, all filled in, nothing missing. I feel it was a kind of Divinely guided dream. In this vision, Yashua came to me and said, ‘what about pulling a sly one on the day? I’ll do my deep meditation yogic sleep technique and appear dead. You can convince the guards to pull me down early. The bigwig rabbis will race off for shabbat because of sunset, and then you’ll have a reason to pull me down. We can drag out the walk though town, making it a late arrival so sunset is closer. Down I go, and back to India. We have gotta win our victories.”
“But what if it’s God’s will?” said John.
“What do you mean?” said Thomas.
“What if it’s God’s will that he be sacrificed? You know, like say, as some kind of sacrificial lamb, a perfect sacrifice to atone for the sins of all mankind” said John.
“Our Brother is not a sacrifice animal. Besides, if God’s will that he dies, then we won’t get away with it tomorrow. And anyway, “I and the Father are One”, right?” said Thomas. “ Humanity and Divinity can reach union where they are of united will. Thy Will be done. We are surrendered fully, fully in service to God, and we want this, so why wouldn’t Our Father want it for us?”
The next day, John had gotten the herbs from his sister. The rich disciple with the cave had come up with the loot.
The Romans had Him walk through town with his cross. Peter approached him, slipped him the medicine, whispered “it’s all set up, just drag out the walk, deep meditate on the cross, and we’ll pull you down.” Yashua said “A fine plan. Thanks for listening” and winked.
When the first nail went in, He said “oh, that’s going to leave a mark!”
By the time he was on the cross the sun was setting. The crooked rabbis were there to see their dirty work was done, but as soon as the first nail went in, they turned and left for the shabbat meals and rituals. Perfect.
The Roman guards happily took our money. We pulled him down shortly after.
Putting the limp body into the wagon, and rolling away, when we were out of site of the Romans, Thomas whispered, “Are you with us brother?” Yashua smiled a little opened one eye and said “Is God good?” We shared a moment of intense happiness that was contained in a tight box of our acting sad still.
We took him up to the cave. He rested and got feed great food for 2 days. His hands were as big as melons, wrapped in bandages made of comfrey leaves.
Then Mary cut his hair and beard and we took him north to Galilee semi-hidden in the back of a wagon.
The funny thing was, the other disciples saw him on his way out of town, it was a dusty road, twilight, but they didn’t recognize him until afterwards. And then the tomb was empty, and there was a little bit of a stir about that. But nobody really thought much about it.
He was around for a few weeks, making a pass to say goodbye to a few beloveds.
He left town in a horse drawn cart, partying in the back with couple of us. I was playing the drum, Thomas the lute, He was chanting the holy names. When we got to the last knoll where you could see Jerusalem, He stood up on the back of the rolling cart and said “Goodbye Jerusalem, I love you. And you Romans and religious phonies, I got one word for you... Suckerfish!” We all laughed.
Some of the disciples followed him to India, to beautiful mountains and lakes of Kashmir, where He lived a long and happy life.
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