Conversation With Jesus

I was a Roman Historian, a skeptic and an unbeliever when I came to meet Jesus of Nazareth one day after he had preached to a multitude of people.  I stood under an immense shade tree at the top of a high hill watching the young, gaunt, itinerant preacher as he kept the crowd mesmerized for more than two hours.  The wind swirled around him as he paced back and forth in the center of the five thousand people who sat and stood all the way down the hill enraptured, and I thought the wind was like the controversy that swept around this man; full of wild gusts

one moment with rumors of fiery sedition, then gentle breezes of mysterious holiness, fathomless in its aims, but desirable in its intimacy. 

He was a man of mercurial messages; I had heard that about him.  One moment, shouting to the crowd to be heard, pleading with them earnestly to repent of their sins, the next promising fearful punishments for those who dared to ignore his warnings. 

The prophets of old had threatened imminent danger to the people in just this way with spirited pleadings, and in the end exile had been their fate. I remembered that, too.

What fate had this zealot in mind this time?  Certainly not exile, but something more otherworldly, as he spoke of an intimate heaven with an intimate Father that he seemed well acquainted with.  I could almost believe him that such a place as this heaven existed as I almost believed him when he spoke of another place that was not so clearly expressed; he called it hell, a fearsome destiny quite at the opposite poll from his heaven.

But there was something different about this latest evangelizer and I had come to see for myself what it was.

I had heard he kept exhorting the name of the God of Israel as his Father and was so deep in his relationship to

the humanity that crowded him on all sides he had come to refer to himself as the Son of Man.

Well, I took a good look at this self-proclaimed Son of Man as his deep, melodious voice rose and fell, and I noted my first impressions of him for a place in a small book I was contemplating as a Roman historian.

He was a tall man a little over six feet, but spare, quite thin, almost looking undernourished.  He wore a robe of fine red wool; that surprised me for I had heard he was a poor Nazarene, and could anything worth anything come out of that pitiful town?  His gown under the robe was pristine white.  Good, I thought, at least he was not like most aesthetics, caring nothing for cleanliness other than for the soul. 

The face was Semitic, no doubt about that, with the slightly humped nose and the elongated face yet pleasing in its symmetry.  The cheekbones were high, tempering the severity of the nose, the lips well shaped, with a strong chin, the whole an unmistakable definition of heritage, yet a softness and comeliness about it that gave vulnerability to the overall striking appearance.