The Lost Disciples Find Their Way

Jesus is dead. Two disciples are walking when a third man joins the leaderless travellers on the road. He asks for their news, hears a word about Jesus, perorates upon the one they have lost, spirits them through an exegesis of scripture, granting his footfalls of light to their history, recounting long stories that loop through each other, patterns and fractals that hum in their skulls, buffing dull texts so they gleam in his hands, excavating the fossils secreted in the prophets, stringing them together into some scintillating, life-turning tale.

The stranger has found Jesus in all the blind history that preceded him; zoomed out from the frame, set sidereal order on the events of their lives.

He’s wandered among their unordered scriptures with a magnet, elicited there what had been invisible, faceted and polished passages to shine with new dream-tones of light. The disciples are enlisted in a narrative they thought they’d outlived, and they find salvation in this stitching of sacred antecedents like a lining to their lives, their own placement at the forward edge of history, this turning toward a freshly sown future.

This man has disturbed none of the facts they knew but braided them into a sudden new story.

The disciples are swept up with his stirring speech, enchanted by the mythic world he’s unearthed.

They hunger to extend their time in his telling, to inhabit this narrative as if it were their lives.

They press him to linger, share their simple dinner, and his words blessing bread are unmistakable in cadence, in timbre and tone, in some sensuous coursing of welcome, forgiveness, love.

Jesus? they stammer. With the name he is gone. They grasp at the fabric of an afternoon’s memory, recall how their hearts were ablaze with his words. They are again bereft of their beloved; but now they are endowed with a lineage, the rippling fabric of inheritance.

They are dumbfoundingly bequeathed with a commission: they are the keepers and continuers of this story.