After this instruction Jairus came to Me again and said, ‘Dearest Master! By bringing my daughter back to life, you have now given me more than if you had possibly given me myself a hundredfold life! What thanks should I now offer you for this, how should I reward you for it!? What should I now do for you!?’
I say, ‘Nothing except that in future you should no longer take offense at Me when you hear this or that of Me. Until now you were against Me; from now on, therefore, be for Me! For the whole world cannot give you and do for you what I have given you and done for you. But one day you will understand how and why I was able to do this for you. Remember Me in your heart!’
Jairus wept for joy, and his wife and daughter sobbed when I set out again with My disciples on the road back to Nazareth. They accompanied Me as far as the place where the other disciples and a great crowd were waiting for Me.
When we arrived there, there were curious questioners in great numbers, who had nothing more urgent to do than ask headlong how matters stood with the dead daughter of the school ruler.
But Peter took the floor and said, ‘You blind people! Look here, this little girl is the one who was dead and now lives! Do you want anything more!?’ Then many turned to the ruler and asked him whether this was true.
And the ruler spoke in a fairly strong voice, ‘Yes!!! You blind and unbelieving fools! An hour ago I was weeping over the loss of this, my dearest and only daughter, and now you see me joyful beyond all measure because I have my daughter again! Is this most palpable proof still not enough for you!?’
At these words all began to marvel greatly, and when I began to move on with the disciples, the whole great crowd, about three thousand in number, followed Me and accompanied Me all the way to Nazareth.
It was already rather late at night when we arrived home; but Mary and the brothers and sisters were still up. A very well-prepared evening meal awaited us, which was very welcome to several of us; for since we had eaten nothing since morning, considerable hunger was a very understandable and excusable matter.
But Judas was also in the house and was already asleep on a bed of straw. When he was awakened by our talking, questions and answers, he immediately got up and asked us nothing except how the fishing had turned out.
Then Peter said to him, ‘Go outside and see!’ And Judas went outside and saw nothing but the great crowd that had gathered around My house. But soon he comes back into the room and again asks Peter where the fish are, for he has been around the whole house and has not noticed a fish anywhere!?
Then Peter says, ‘Have you never heard that the blind can see nothing, the deaf hear nothing and the mute understand nothing except the need of their stomach?! See, you blind profiteer, the people gathered outside in their thousands are the splendidly good fish I meant!’
Judas says, ‘Oh, I see! That is indeed no bad catch for a certain purpose either; but in our ordinary life I prefer a catfish weighing a hundred pounds to all the people outside, for I get four groschen everywhere for such a fish; but for those outside no one gives me a stater.’
Peter says, ‘With your craving for profit you will surely yet go so far as to become entirely Satan’s! Are you more than a human being, as any one of us is a human being!? We all live without craving for profit, and you live with us and eat from our dish, which costs you nothing but the little effort of eating. But if you live here without your foolish money, what is the money for!?’
Judas says, ‘Have I not a wife and children? Who maintains them for me if I should earn nothing!? Do you really think they will be able to live on some kind of air!?’
Peter says, ‘Look, I can bear everything very well; but an impudent lie I cannot bear! In Jerusalem, where they know nothing of you except that you are a Galilean, you may boast of being a father concerned for your family; but here before me that will not do under any circumstances. For I and all of us who were and still are your neighbors know you and your domestic arrangements only too well to believe even one word of yours. Your wife and children have always had to suffer want and earn their scant daily bread through hard hired-out labor. They have enjoyed little of the fish you caught; they have their clothing from me. And how long has it been since, while you were going around the markets, we had your family’s completely collapsed house rebuilt almost anew out of compassion? How much did you give us for that!? And that you call caring for your wife and children!? Go and be ashamed for ten years for daring to lie so brazenly before us, to whom you are only too well known!?’
Here Judas makes a thoroughly bewildered face and says not another word, for Peter had now struck him too deeply. He went outside and thought the matter over, came back after a while and asked us all for forgiveness. He also promised that from now on he would change completely and now wished in all earnestness to be My disciple; only we should not forcibly drive him away from us. Then Nathanael, who usually spoke little and very seldom, says, ‘The spirit of Cain dwells in you; do you understand me? And this spirit does not improve on this earth, for the spirit of Cain is the world, and no improvement is to be expected from it!’
Judas says, ‘Yes, yes, yes, what is it with you and your old spirit of Cain!? Where is Cain and where are we!? Cain’s lineage perished; Noah alone remained, and in his descendants there is no longer a drop of Cain’s blood, but the pure blood of the children of God rolls in our veins. But where the blood is pure, the spirit is pure too; for the spirit of a person always springs from the blood equally pure.’
Nathanael says, ‘That is your old nonsense, already only too familiar to me, and it counts for nothing with me! Go to the Sadducees; there you can create a stir with your nonsense. But for us blood is rotten matter, and the spirit is and remains spirit forever! But what use is your blood of God’s children if a most unclean spirit dwells in it, as is the case in you? Do you understand me?’
Judas says, ‘Yes, yes, you too may well be right, and I shall certainly make every effort to penetrate to the ground of your teachings. But if your teaching is indeed built on the ground of humanity and meets everyone with all patience and gentleness, then I think it is not really necessary on your part to keep trying to drive me away from you with all manner of quarrels! For what is any teaching without disciples? An empty sound in the air that no one heeds! Every teaching therefore needs disciples just as much as disciples need a good teaching, and so I also think that every disciple has just as definite a value in relation to a teaching as the purest and best teaching has in and of itself!? And likewise that it would not be amiss on your part to have a little more patience with me as your fellow disciple.
‘That I am still caught in my old principles you will hopefully understand, now that you yourselves are already wise. But that is precisely why I wish to know your teaching, in order to rid myself in it of my old teaching, in which I no longer have much belief. If I sometimes say a little against this new teaching of yours, since I am not an initiate, you will surely find that quite natural too!?
‘Once I, like you, have been initiated into your Master’s new teaching and, like you, find its principles irrefutably good and true, I shall certainly be ten times more zealous for this teaching of yours than all of you together; for I possess courage and can defy anyone, since I fear no human being at all. And if I had any fear, I would surely have stopped coming to you long ago, since you and your Master have already made it only too clear to me several times that I should avoid your company. But once and for all I have no fear, and so I come again. You are indeed always thoroughly annoyed about it, but that makes no difference to me, and I remain, like you, a disciple of this new teaching. What can you set against that!?’
Nathanael says, ‘Much and nothing, as you wish. That you have no fear at all within you is not yet a particularly praiseworthy virtue; for Satan too must be fearless, otherwise he would not remain disobedient to God the Lord for one eternity after another!? We also see this already on this earth among the animals, some of which plainly have more courage than others. Look at a lion, a tiger, a panther, a wolf, a hyena or a bear, and set against these a lamb, a goat, a roe deer, a hare and other such timid animals. Tell me, with which of the two groups of animals will you place yourself?’
Judas says, ‘It is obvious that, like everyone else, I shall turn to the gentle animals and never to the ravening wild beasts; for the lion’s courage is everyone’s death!’
Nathanael says, ‘And yet you praise courage and think that through precisely this you will become a capable disciple!? I tell you, courage in the proper sense of the word is a great vice; for it is the fruit of pride, which is contempt for everything that does not constitute a person’s very own self. Therefore in our teaching a person’s fearless courage will never be praised as a virtue, since it is the very opposite of what our teaching requires of a person.
‘Who wages war!? See, nothing but so-called heroes who do not fear even death. Let the whole earth be full of heroes, and eternal war will incessantly spread over the fields of the earth; for every hero wishes not merely to be a fellow hero among heroes, but a hero for himself, and will not rest until he has made all the other heroes subject to himself or, if possible, removed them from the world one after another.
‘But imagine instead nothing but gentle people, meek as lambs, and the earth will become a paradise!
‘If the hero has a timid person before him, he will not pursue him, for the timid person does not dispute his fame. But when one hero stands opposite another hero, the two heroes will immediately challenge one another to combat, and neither will rest until one or the other has struck his opponent to the ground. And see, that is the blessing of the courageous, set out clearly and plainly!
‘Therefore, if you wish to be our fellow disciple, put aside your very superfluous courage and instead be full of love, patience and gentleness; then you will be as it befits a true disciple of the Lord to be.’
Judas says, ‘Well, yes, you are not exactly wrong. I shall consider the matter more closely and then let you all know tomorrow what I shall do—whether I shall stay with you or leave you!?’
With these words Judas goes outside, seeks out several acquaintances among the great crowd and talks with them almost all night about what he has heard from Nathanael. But all side with Nathanael and say, ‘Nathanael is a true sage, and they knew well that no falseness lay in his soul!’ We in the house retire to rest.