22.
Sometimes we relished watching Him put others in their place; other times, we were the ones being corrected. The feast was getting ready and many were called, but who would be wearing the right clothes to join? I can see it now like I couldn’t then. The right clothes were His: the humility of accepting that, without Him, you were naked. No mocking laughter, no delight in another’s failure, could ever fit beneath the robe of His humility.

23.
“Finish what you’ve started,” he called out one day to the Pharisees. What could He mean? Decrying the blood of the prophets, shed in Jerusalem. What was He after? How could our new David expect death? Scorned though the rabbis had made me feel day upon day, it seemed dangerous now to be heaping such insults upon them. And what did he mean, quoting the psalms like that? Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord. The crowds had already hailed Him the new King. What kind of crown did He expect to be given?

24.
When He said, “People will hate you,” it felt unsurprising. In truth, these years walking with Him had been a reprieve from the hate I had known only too well. What surprised me was that people would hate me because of Him. It was then that I began to wonder if His victory might look different to what we hoped for. I looked to the fig tree. I did not see fruit yet. He promised summer. How far away was the summer? How many abominations would we flee before then?

25.
More and more He was saying to us, “Be ready.” Not, as the Pharisees might have expected, “Be righteous.” Not, as the Zealots might have thought, “Be armed.” Simply, “Be ready.” And how did we show readiness? Not by ensuring we had met every jot and tittle, every iota, of the law. No, by loving, and using what He had given us. The grace we had received, we were to share like the extraordinary miracle that it was.

19.
Why did we send away those children, forgetting what He had told us, forgetting how little we ourselves were? Perhaps it was the feeling of largeness, of value, that we felt when He sparred against the Pharisees, the sense that we were part of something new, something great breaking in. And we were. But the way was humiliation, leaving everything for the kingdom. The way to the throne was only by surrendering all need of a throne.

20.
We were quick to scoff at James and John for their mother’s gall in asking, could they sit at his right and left side when he came as king? The impudence. How dare they put their mother up to it. But weren’t we all scuffling for our place in the line, comparing pedigrees, numbers of miracles performed, hours labouring in the vineyard. He never let those things matter. Even Judas, least of us, had no less of his love than the rest. Even those two blind men causing all that fuss by the roadside the day of Zebedee’s wife’s request. They knew they had no right but they called out at all the same. We knew, in some way then, that we wouldn’t keep Him, and yet somehow He was also ours forever at the very same time.

21.
And He knew what He was doing. Surely He knew, when He told me and James to fetch the donkey, what it meant. He carried prophets’ words inside Him more than any of us, and He would know, would have to know, how Zechariah would be echoing in the streets of Jerusalem when He rode into town on that donkey. Yet He knew also what lay in the hearts that hailed Him king, knew how false the signs of fruit were on the tree. Look, He said, the tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom ahead of you! Hosanna cried the desperate ones while the desperate teachers wrung their hands and inwardly I wept.

16.
then we were so slow to understand – afraid even when we forgot bread, as though the last two miracle feasts weren’t enough. Were we really any better than the Pharisees with their demands for a sign? We had all the signs we needed, yet didn’t quite get it. He had come to serve, not to trample. He had come to die, the bread of life, filled with the new yeast of heaven, ready, waiting to be broken.

17.
Simon, James and John only vaguely understood that day on the mountain, still thinking they could contain and harness all that glory, reeling at the thought that He whom they had seen in all His splendor should hand Himself over to the Romans and die. Those of us left behind that day didn’t get it either, struggling with demons that didn’t submit to us, caught up in theological doubts and political questions. Even a curly question about tax couldn’t defeat Him. “Just go to the sea,” He told Peter, “and catch a fish with your tax and mine in his mouth.” It made no sense that power and surrender should go hand in hand with Him. Yet who could deny that power? And no-one could deny His face set like flint for death.

18.
Old rivalries died hard. Just like Judah, Benjamin and Levi used to vie for greatness (the other tribes already dead to us), now we also vied for top spot. And though we were no longer what we once were, we all still carried something of the strain. Did I catch something in His eye the time He said, “If your brother continues to sin, treat him like you would a Gentile or a tax collector”? But I knew only too well how He treated tax collectors. He had sat at table with me to eat only moments after I had left my counting tables. And if that was how He treated tax collectors, then what about Gentiles? Where was all our greatness then? No greatness but to come to Him needy, like a like child.

14.
Something I never understood about him in those days was how he could give when he was empty. Like the time his cousin died, killed by that fox Herod, and he took the news quietly, went to be by himself in his grief, and yet, when the crowds followed and invaded his silence he could still turn around with compassion and teach them, and when the crowds growled with hunger he could turn to us with that all-knowing look and say – as though it were the easiest thing to do – “You give them something to eat.” And out of the emptiness – fullness!

15.
And then, when our fingers were still greasy from that feast and the Pharisees’ fingers pointed at our unclean hands, what did he do but turn the finger back on them. Everyone was welcome to his feast, even the dog licking up crumbs, but not the self-righteous who thought they’d earned their place with the cleanness of their hands. His feast was moving on swiftly and you had to be following him to catch the next one, hearts being washed by your every moment with him.

16.
Even then we were so slow to understand – afraid even when we forgot bread, as though the last two miracle feasts weren’t enough. Were we really any better than the Pharisees with their demands for a sign? We had all the signs we needed, yet didn’t quite get it. He had come to serve, not to trample. He had come to die, the bread of life, filled with the new yeast of heaven, ready, waiting to be broken.

12.
And what was this about David’s mighty men? What was he doing comparing us to them when all we were was hungry? And what was that about all of us being his true brothers and sisters? I who until moments ago had been disowned by my own brother. (James caught my eye, it’s true, when Jesus said that, and my heart pounded.) Perhaps, in these early heady days we were walking with him more for the elation of being on his team, not yet knowing what it meant to be his brothers and sisters, not knowing the cost of being among his mighty men.

13.
But our rebuke would come. Too many were concerned with who was in, who was out. Everyone was certain that they were in, and desperate to see God destroy those who were out. Only the kingdom didn’t work like that, as we would slowly learn. Weeds grew up alongside crops, tares were indistinguishable from wheat until the harvest. But the kingdom would grow all the same, like yeast working invisibly through the dough, a mustard seed slowly germinating, breaking and sprouting beneath the surface. Our task, he made clear, was not to judge who was out. It was to listen, to see. To know that the kingdom was at hand.

10.
And there I was, one of the new twelve, eleven new brothers including my own, James, the brother I could hardly even dare claim. From a family that could scarcely look me in the eye, here I was: restored not only to my own brother, but given another ten. And away we were sent, compelled my the grace that had called us, taking up the cross we had barely begun to understand.

11.
Did he come to unite brothers and sisters, or to divide? My brother and I walked together for the first time in decades, but his own brothers seldom spoke to him except on the days when they tried to keep him quiet. And his cousin, from prison, sent him a letter while were on the road: “Are you really the one we should be expecting?” It was costly, following him. To those like me with nothing to lose, it sometimes seemed pure gain. But many sneered at us, and with time the sneers would turn more bloody, more brutal. But the babies within us cooed at the goodness he sung over us. Goodness, as John and I were learning, seldom took the expected path. Yet Sodom could rise up and be saved by it. I – even I – could rise up and be saved.

7.
This also intrigued me: that he should tell everyone not to judge, yet also tell them not to give pearls to pigs. Hadn’t I been tainted with that brush, accused of working with pigs, cuddling up to the gentile swine? Did the command not to judge apply in all cases except mine? And yet – there was also a yet – there was a picture he gave, of those who had never questioned that they were his children, standing at the gate to the kingdom and being turned away, and those who called out with the tenacity of a child, receiving bread, receiving life.

8.
I who had feared and so appeased the pigs, I who had taken the suffering of my people and turned it to my profit: could I bear the cost that he warned of? Following him with no place to rest my head. Letting the dead bury their own dead. It was a strange, radical life he was beckoning me into. And he was sending the demons and the swine hurtling down the cliff, bidding me to hurl my old life and fears down with them.

9.
Now I ask you, which is more remarkable? That the son of man should say to the paralysed man, “Take up your mat and walk”, or that he should say to the tax collector, “Come follow me”? Or even this: that he should sit at my table – mine – and eat with me?