THE BLANKET

Why did Jesus reappear after his death, if that is indeed a true story?

It is not well known that Jesus had a brother who was only a year younger, and they looked so much alike they were often mistaken for identical twins. Jesus' brother Jenua did not believe his brother's stories about his intimate conversations with god, thinking him a little crazy, but he did believe in his brother's goodness, and he believed in love. Jenua loved Jesus as he loved himself.

This unknown brother of Jesus had a speech impediment, a disorder believed by most people to be a curse from god, though his family loved him and protected him from the shame of appearing in the village, where he would be shunned and spat on. Jenua did not venture out in public. He spent his days away from the rest of society, working quietly inside his family's home, where they had set up for him a loom. He had diligently applied himself to his work and had become quite an accomplished weaver.

Jenua felt that Jesus was truly special, and inspired, though not by a god, since Jenua was a non-believer. Like Jesus, Jenua believed that, over the course of modern history, the ideology and practice of religion had followed an intolerable decline, and was now corrupt beyond repair. Unlike Jesus, Jenua believed the solution was to abandon altogether the primitive ideas of religion and instead celebrate the newest ideas on reason, to explore the practical solutions afforded by the exercise of the mind. Jenua's mind led him to the belief that love was the answer to all of life's human dilemmas.

Jenua and Jesus spent many hours in cooperative debate, defending their individual points of view, though Jesus was the only one of the two who spent time discussing his ideas with others. Jenua always avoided speaking with anyone other than his family, who knew and loved him and understood him despite his problems with pronunciation. Jenua felt lucky it had been his fate to have become a weaver by trade, as he truly enjoyed the creative expression afforded his profession. He often wove abstract and multi-colored designs. It was his own non-verbal way of speaking out about his ideas, that the world was not as organized and predictable as those who believed in the current order of religious expression might have liked to think.

Jenua knew Jesus was in trouble for his teachings. On the night before Jesus was betrayed, Jenua had dared to travel from home to deliver to the Garden of Gethsemane a woven blanket of all the colors of the rainbow. Jesus was there praying, as he was very worried, and was glad to have his brother's ear to discuss the situation while the others slept. Jenua had also brought him news. Their youngest sister had just heard, from a reliable source, confirmation of the rumor—Jesus would definitely be arrested in the morning, just before sunrise. Their mother, Mary, had been frantic, insisting that Jenua go immediately to find Jesus and do whatever necessary to save the life of his brother. Jenua had brought with him the beautiful blanket.

Jesus was moved, touched that sensitive Jenua had found the courage to venture forth from the comfort of his family home to come and find him, out of concern for his mother's heart. Jesus took the blanket, which Jenua told him would protect him from the cold of the desert's night airs, and left the garden, armed with directions to find the desert retreat their sister's young son had prepared for him. Jenua kissed Jesus goodbye, and promised to stay awake to let the apostles know where he was when they awoke.

But when the apostles arose the next morning, Jenua did not speak, but could only listen. The stress of the task at hand had aggravated his anxiety and worsened his speech impairment to the point where it silenced him altogether. By the time the first man woke, Jenua was entirely speechless. The apostles, their fear for Jesus' safety mounting by the minute, did not even pay much attention to him, the man anxious and fearful before them. They did not examine him closely in the pre-dawn light. They were busy looking over their own shoulders and at the horizon, watching for advancing soldiers who might show up at any moment to arrest the lot of them. At any rate, no one noticed that it was Jenua, and not Jesus himself, who stood with them in the garden.

No one even knew Jesus had a brother, since he had always been kept hidden by the family because of the shame of his verbal disability. Jenua had not ever before made himself available to become known as the brother of this famous man, Jesus. He had, his whole life, preferred always to stay at home, finding peace and comfort in his loom.

This fateful morning, Jenua seemed a man moody and quiet, very much more so than Jesus himself might have been on any other morning, but all the apostles expected nothing different. Today they all expected Jesus to be glooming over his impending death at the hands of his political enemies.

Jenua did not smile. Jenua did not talk. Jenua did not eat, but simply stood there, among the apostles. He stood alone in the center of the circle of Jesus' friends, a stranger in the midst of those who admired and loved his brother and would do anything on earth for him. As each of the men woke and joined the circle, Jenua became aware of the uniting force of their love of Jesus. He acknowledged they shared a special pain, the depths of their despair for Jesus' safety. Jenua's belief in love as the ultimate solution for all of humanity was strengthened more than ever.

He felt compassion for these people who were helpless in their misery to change their desperate situation. He loved these people who loved his brother, and he wanted to do for them the one impossible thing they could not do for themselves, to save their beloved leader and friend from the fate of his looming death.

Jenua silently stood among them and listened to the disciples. They talked of the inevitability of the expected imminent murder; how, even if Jesus ran, he would not be able to hide, as the authorities were determined to seek him out and destroy him before the people following his ideology followed through on their threatened political revolt.

Jenua closed his eyes and appeared to be involved in deep prayer, but in fact, he was thinking of a plan to save his brother's life. For the moment, Jesus was safe. Jenua knew that the only way for Jesus to avoid death was to somehow convince the authorities that they had already accomplished the deed, that they had caught and killed him.

No one but Jenua and his sister's son knew where Jesus was, that he was hiding safely in the desert. No one but Jenua knew that it was not Jesus who stood here surrounded by his followers. At least until the light of day, they would all continue to believe that this man appearing before them was Jesus, that their brother in love was the centerpiece in this gathering of close companions. Brothers Jenua and Jesus looked so much alike that, unless they were speaking, the only way even their family could tell them apart was by the braids in the weaver's hair. But this morning, in his hurry to find his brother, Jenua had not yet tied up his hair, and it was flowing smoothly in the style Jesus always wore. In the darkness of the wee hours of the early day, no one could see clearly enough to be able to tell that Jenua was not his brother Jesus. As long as he did not speak, no one would know Jesus was missing.

Jenua determined to keep up the charade for as long as possible. As long as Jesus' persecutors continued to think they they knew where Jesus was, Jenua could buy him enough time to escape to the safety of the desert refuge.

Jenua knew the only way to save his brother was to allow all the people around him to continue to believe that it was Jesus they were speaking with, and not alert them to the fact that he was merely his mirrored twin. Since no one but his family even knew Jesus had a lookalike, his ruse, a simple plan, was not discovered.

Dawn's light had still not broken when the soldiers arrived to take him away. Jenua did not offer protest. He silently allowed himself to be arrested..., tried..., convicted..., tortured..., and, finally, executed—knowing that his brother would be saved, at least temporarily, from suffering that same terrible fate.

The thought that Jesus might survive gave Jenua the grit to release himself from his anxiety. He knew that he must concentrate—in order to appear to be his brother, in order for the plan to work. He accepted the course of events gracefully. Finding himself swept along the gruesome path, he found a serenity in its finality. He believed that his own death really did not matter in the end, but knew that he would not have been able to live with himself if his brother Jesus was murdered and he Jenua survived where he might have been able to save him.

Jenua did not want to have to continue to live in a world where a gentle and kind man, pure and innocent as his brother Jesus, could be murdered for his beliefs. Jenua himself had been persecuted his entire life due to his speech impediment, and dared not speak of his atheistic beliefs outside his family, for fear of a certain death, the punishment for apostasy. This world, if it could not contain much loved Jesus, would not be allowed to hold onto Jesus' brother after claiming the life of his sibling.

By the time Jenua came to be paraded through the streets during broad daylight, he had already been badly beaten while in custody. His face and body were swollen with bruises and his body streamed with bloody cuts. He was unrecognizable as a different person from his brother, indistinguishable from what Jesus would have looked like, had he been similarly scathed.

When the court magistrate, Pontius Pilate, asked, "Are you the Son of God?" he finally ventured a few words, through bloodied lips and broken teeth. The true meaning of his answer was literally "I am, whatever there is." This was in keeping with his own beliefs, and he knew it would also satisfy those in whose power he was being held, in their belief that he was in fact Jesus, his brother.

His last hope was that his brother would escape this same sort of death, and come to fully understand Jenua's credo of love. Love needs no god. Love is salvation. The greatest love a man can express is to lay down his life for his brother.

As Jenua hung on the cross, he felt great compassion for the others suffering as he was, the thieves and murderers crucified for their crimes. In great love, he attempted to comfort them. Realizing that belief in a greater good can afford relief from personal agonies, he told the prisoner dying by his side, "Yes, you will join me in my father's house this very day." He knew it would not hurt to say such a thing. Though he did not believe that they were going to a place called heaven, it would give the condemned man some degree of salve for his feelings as he approached a death he had earned by behaving as he did in the rigid world, a world intolerable of difference and unforgiving of trespass. Jenua knew enough of Barabbas' story to agree with the crowd who begged to free him, and he thought, of capital punishment, that it was just one more of the many awful ways in which people could and did mistreat one another, and just one more reason why he could not bear to live among such people.

Jenua knew that his own death was inevitable, and that death could occur at any moment or could happen a hundred years hence, and the manner of it would not matter, since it would be over, whenever it would be over; and it would not be over, neither sooner nor later, not a moment before it was his time to die. Suffering was part of life, a part which Jenua admitted to himself, accepted for himself, and chose for himself to simply ignore as irrelevant until he himself was personally affected. At that time, he would then choose to focus on the fact that his own personal suffering would absolutely and inevitably pass. He found solace in the thought that death would, eventually, finally calm his soul.

As he kept up the appearance of playing Jesus, right up to his death, Jenua's wry sense of humor led him to his final words on the cross, "Why, oh God, have you abandoned me?" and "Into your hands, I commend my spirit." He knew if his words did get back to Jesus, Jesus would believe that Jenua had finally experienced a conversion to Jesus's way of thinking. He hoped it would serve as a small comfort to Jesus in the loss of his brother.

When, on the cross, Jenua spoke, with his lisp, the listeners simply agreed that it was Jesus's split lip and extreme stress that had caused his strange demeanor and odd pronunciation.

Only Mary, at the foot of the cross, recognized her son for who he was, though she had no idea how he had inexplicably come to take his brother's place. She was struck speechless. She spoke not a single word, but cried, in pure agony, at her younger son's torturous death. No one looking at her doubted for a moment that it was a mother crying for her son on the cross. And no one knew she had two sons. All witnesses truly believed that it was Jesus who had died of crucifixion.

When things had quieted down after a few days, Mary sent her daughter's son to fetch Jesus from the desert. The family concocted a plan to retrieve Jenua's body. With the help of his nephew, Jesus was able to pierce his own palms with nails, rend his clothes, and smear blood over his face and body.

Then, while Jesus remained hidden, his nephew ran up and confronted the guards, telling them he had just been chased by the dead man, the one who was supposed to be in the tomb. They did not believe him, thinking him crazy, but they could not resist when he made them a sizable bet that the tomb would be empty. To collect their winnings, they rolled away the stone in front of the tomb and checked on the corpse, which was still in place. When they exited the tomb, richer for their efforts, Jesus suddenly appeared before them. He was walking straight toward them, dripping blood, silently smiling. As he raised his arms, reaching out to them, they saw he looked exactly like the corpse, which so frightened them that they ran away and always afterwards refused to speak about the incident.

The tomb now opened, Jesus and his nephew seized their chance to snatch the body, stealing away quickly just before two sobbing women arrived to pray for Jesus and made their discovery that he was nowhere to be found.

The family members never spoke of it again, even in private.

Jesus knew there was a price on his head, and realized his family could not stand the further grief that loss of their only other son would bring. After a few carefully arranged secret visits with his apostles, Jesus agreed to stay home and accept that his public life was over. All knew that such a miracle, though it had saved him from a certain death, did not spare both sons of Mary, and could not happen twice.

Jesus maintained his anonymity by assuming the position previously held by his brother, and no one outside the family was the wiser. He wore braids like Jenua's, in the fashion of the weavers, who needed to keep their hair out of the path of their yarns. Jesus took up his brother's loom, and wove rainbows into blankets.