Professor Peabody and Sherman meet Jesus.

 He inhaled deeply, then with one swift motion, sat upright and began gulping air like a man dying of thirst.  Dying or dead.   Jesus stood by the doorway, mouth agape, hands trembling.  The once “dead” Lazarus stood and frantically tore at the shroud covering his body and head. The air was still and Jesus could hear his own heart beating, the blood whistling through his veins.  A hand gently touched his shoulder.

Jesus slowly turned like a rusty screw, sweat beading on his brow, and noticed a smallish, bespectacled white dog and a comparably smallish pale boy with fiery hair apologetically standing inside the slight entranceway leading into Lazarus’ tomb. 

“Hello there, I’m Professor Peabody and this is my young cohort Sherman. We’ve just arrived in town from our moment in time, the 21^st century, and were wondering if you could tell us where and possibly when we are?” His voice bounced off the grotto’s walls and all over Jesus’s head. He stood slack jawed and silent. His eyes crossed then found focus, but his mind ebbed back to Lazarus.   “Huh?”

“Terribly sorry sir, have we caught you at an inconvenient time?” such a polite professor. 

“Uh, no, no, um you’re not bothering me.” Jesus’ voice tailed off then rebounded.   “I was told to help ‘save’ this guy,” Jesus said waiving his hands excitedly in the air making faux quotation marks for emphasis.  “When I got here, all I did was touch him, and the dude started breathing and sat straight up. DUDE! He was dead. Holy cow!  Scared the hell out of me.”  He bent at the waist resting his hands on his knees lest he lose strength and fall flat on his face. He was pale, yet welcomed the their arrival.

Lazarus stood naked and panting, his beard and hair mashed down from sweat and his long journey back.  Professor Sherman moved his glance around Jesus’s back to gain a better look-see. “Sir, there’s a naked, sweaty man staring at us. Have we interrupted…”

“Of course he’s naked!” said Jesus, “he’s supposed to be dead.”

“I see.” Responded the good professor.  Sherman, for his part, stood respectfully silent, eyes canvassing the caves environs. He was a good observer.

“Yeah, dead, gone, deceased, outta here, pushing up daisies, whatever other euphemisms there are, he was it.  Lazarus is supposed to be dead but no, they wanted him back for some reason, and now look! I really need to start saying NO more often.  Give em all an analogy or something for them to ponder, and then change the subject. That’s what I’m going to do for now on.” Jesus spoke into his chest, hands still a trembling, sweat still a beading on his brow.

“LAZARUS!” Both Professor Peabody and Sherman barked out the name and for an instant all four stood silent.  The quietness exposed everything.  The three turned their collective gazes onto Lazarus who upon noticing their stares, instantly held his breath to soften the noise of his breathing. He was very self-conscious about causing a scene.

“Lazarus you say, (ahem) excuse me, but that would make you, Jesus, right? Jesus of Nazareth, or Judea or…where exactly are you from, sir?”  Always the seeker, Professor Peabody began rubbing the small of Jesus’ back.  Was this actually the man? Was this the savior of billions across the centuries?  The good professor once more cleared his throat, an audible cue for all to listen.

“Excuse me sir, you are Jesus, correct?”

“Yeah, who the hell else? Man if this guy walks out of here and his family sees him…they’re gonna think…I’m in big trouble fellas.” Jesus quaked.  “I really done it this time.”  But this was no simple slight of hand or curing a blind person, no, not that simple.  Physics aside, this resurrection was a leap into a quantum quagmire.  Raising the dead just elevated Jesus from simple preacher and sidewalk magician into the very one-and-only-Messiah. His thoughts raced back to his father and mother, his childhood home. For an instant he recalled the aroma of freshly baked bread and tasted the coolness of sweet spring water on his lips. He yearned. 

“Maybe, maybe if you two help, we could kill him again…he wouldn’t be able to walk out there I’d be off the hook, I could go home.  I could learn a trade, something different, like masonry this time. I told pops that carpentry was good but you need a lot of tress for that. You see? So, maybe if I go home now, start all over, settle down, get married, maybe go to school, get a degree, maybe join the army…” Jesus’ free association in regards to his future did nothing for poor Lazarus still holding his breath.  He exploded with a gasp. 

“Whoa, whoa, just a minute. You raised me, I’m alive again…but I just made peace with…I was minding my own.…” his voice tailing off like a bird’s song as it flies away.

“Shut up Lazarus, just please!  Just a minute, just one, let me think...I need to think.” Jesus paced while rubbing his whiskered chin.  His beard was coming in well, very thick and even. He had great whisker integrity.  His strides were fluid and moved smoothly almost frictionless. 

Whispering to Sherman, the Professor Peabody said, “Clearly he’s the Son of Man, and clearly the Way Back Machine took us wayyyyyyy the hell back to the year (licking a pencil tip and scribbling some notes in his pocket note pad) of our Lord 33 AD…and we might be or clearly we are, in way over our heads. What say you Sherman?”

“Yep, and clearly Jesus is loosing it,” Sherman replied and pointed at Jesus who had a firm grip, with both hands, around Lazarus’ neck and banging the poor man’s newly resurrected head against the stony wall of this-once tomb. 

“Quick Sherman, grab our Savior!”

“But he’s bigger than me…”

“Then pull his hair!”

Within a matter of seconds, Professor Peabody and Sherman wrapped themselves around Jesus and managed to pull him off of Lazarus, just before he consciousness.  The cave permeated with the smells of heated bodies, a dog, and the Messiah’s fear; which was all too tactile.

“Lord Jesus Christ, Oh Lord almighty, oh God and Baby Jesus…. control yourself sir! Sit thee down.”

“Sit thee down, Professor?”

“I’ll admit it’s a bit papal, but we need him, you sir, to remain calm.” As Peabody pleaded, Lazarus slumped to the ground, again having to gasp for air. This time; however, he was fully aware and teetered on the edge of panic, but something worse overtook him.  Lazarus stood and wrapped the death shroud around his waste. Disillusionment: much too heavy and deep for even his comprehension, fell upon him.  “The hell, man? What I ever do to you?”

Jesus slid his back down the damp, dirt wall and landed his bottom with a thud.  He sighed. “These people take and take from me, and once they find out about Laz, they’ll take till there’s nothing left of me.  I’m not even sure what happened here. Once, in India where I ventured to learn, a small shepherd boy died in a swollen stream.  His mother wept so sorrowfully that I could not contain my anger.  Why this boy, I screamed. Why?!  But there were no words to comfort.  Nothing.  I just stood there, crying with the mother, holding the dead boy’s body in my arms.  My guru, the man who bore me on his intellect, taught me a valued lesson that day.  Dead is always dead.  Dead and life, the two, the breathing and the not breathing are what we do, if not by thought, but by consequence. You must leave the dead to themselves and allow them to return to the source, our father. If not, everyone will want their loved ones back and what then?  No death? No room at the inn, right?”

“Lord…”

“You keep calling me that. You know something I don’t?”

“Lord, you, unfortunately for you it seems, are the savior of man, the healer of sickness the restorer of sight.”

“Who told you all that?  Was it Peter? Paul? Mary?”

“No, it’s uh,” the good professor shot a look at Sherman for any interjection of support or censure, but received none. “I read it some where.”

“Read…who wrote it? And don’t tell me any of the 12 guys following me around. Those guys wouldn’t cover their heads in the rain unless I beseeched them. God they’re sooo needy!”

Professor Peabody and Sherman were befuddled at Jesus’ seeming antipathy. He was a man in desperate straights; a man trying to avoid the inevitable—his destiny.  But as Professor Peabody and Sherman assured him of his soon historic role in the world, and how people only take from him that which is freely given of him, Jesus noticed Lazarus crying. It was a woeful mourning, a mourning of loss. Being in the midst of salvation and the bounties of the celestial, only to ripped away and forced back to Earth was too much for the man.  He wailed and wiped his runny nose in his palm.  “I didn’t do nothing wrong. Why you do this to me? Why?” 

“I’m sorry.” Jesus said. 

“You should be,” said Lazarus. 

The good professor and Sherman helped Lazarus to his feet, clothed him in the burial shroud once more, and pushed him out the cave and into his new old world. Now he would be forced to reconcile the afterlife with a bunch of people who were searching for meaning without fully knowing the questions they wanted to ask aside from the pedestrian, “So what’s god like?” Or, “Did you get hungry up there?”  Lazarus wanted no parts of redoing his life; he just got used to being dead. 

Jesus remained in the shadows of the tomb, his destiny not his own.  “Should we tell him about his eventual capture beatings, humiliations, the trial, and excruciatingly, blood curdling, painful, scourging and crucifixion?” Sherman asked. 

“No Sherman, no.  We need to go home and never speak of this again.  You see, a man has doubts and fears. That’s what makes having faith so powerful. You fear and you doubt but you remain steadfast.  Jesus needs to find this out for himself.” The good professor once more began rubbing the small of Jesus’ back.  “Lord?”

“Yes dog.”

“I think you need time to yourself.”

“I was thinking just that.”

“Take a month or so to yourself, tell the fellas that you’ll be off on a walk-about of sorts, into the ‘wilderness’ so to speak.”

“So to speak, Professor?” echoed Sherman. 

“Yes,” said Jesus.  “Yes. My wilderness.” He petted the good professor’s head and produced a doggy treat from the very air itself.   “Good idea dog.  Great idea.”