John had put farmers, soldiers, and a tax collector under the Jordan that morning. Then a man came down through the crowd, and the baptizer's hand stopped above the water. The quiet years are over. Yeshua comes out of the desert and the news travels faster than he does. He splints a boy's broken leg at the river camp and carries him the whole road home to Pella. He calls fishermen off their nets in the middle of a working day. At a village wedding he is only a guest, until the wine runs out. He does not talk about God the way the teachers do.

He talks about a Father the way a son does, and people carry the sentences home and repeat them at the well the next morning. The gate is narrow, he says, and the road is hard, and most people go looking for an easier one. Nobody who hears him walks away undecided. By the time he reaches Jerusalem, the council is taking notes. A beggar born blind washes in the pool of Siloam and comes home seeing for the first time in his life. The teachers call it Sabbath-breaking. The man climbs onto their witness stool and looks down at them.