The Road From Aleppo

I don't know how, but Jesus survived Aleppo. Quite by accident, I found him lying face up in a roadside ditch half buried beneath several corpses. At first I thought he was as dead as the rest of the poor souls who had been piled into the trench. But then I saw his eyelids flutter, so I pulled his emaciated frame from the mound of decaying bodies and carried him to a hill where the stench of human rot was not so overwhelming.

"How is it you are alive?" I asked him when his eyes briefly focused on mine.
"By the grace of the father," he weakly replied.

And then I went to find water, for after speaking, Jesus's head listed to one side and he lost consciousness. When I returned sometime later, I had to shoo away a large carrion-eating bird standing next to his head before I could share what little water I had been given by a girl who was offering to clean feet in exchange for food. Although the water I brought back to Jesus was tainted with dirt and sewage, I had no choice but to give it to him if he was to survive. And even though I was certain he could not hear me, I asked his forgiveness before I dripped the foul liquid into his mouth. It took a few minutes for the water to revive him, but when he regained awareness, his eyes were as clear and bright as I ever remembered seeing them before.

"Can you travel?" I asked him.
"Where is it that you go?" he replied.
"To the coast, to find a way across the Mediterranean to a better life."

I wasn't quite sure what to make of his response, for he looked away from me, down toward the ditch where I found him, and said, "Is there a place where you are going where those who have been sacrificed can be reborn?"

Certainly Jesus was suffering from a fever, I thought, for how could he possibly think that those who had experienced death could find life again? While I shook my head in a moment of reflection, I felt a hand touch my shoulder.

"Would you abandon your brothers and sisters in their time of need?"
"But they are all dead," I said to him, though it felt wrong to tell him so.
"You saved me," he told me quite calmly.
"But you were alive."
"Was I?" he asked. "Come," he said, and he took my hand. "Perhaps there are more like me."

And so we spent the next several days searching the death-pits and the many bombed-out buildings for survivors and burying the dead. Twelve we found—equal numbers of men, women, and children—twelve wounded, starving, frail lives that would have suffered a slow and lonely death were it not for the faith of a man I had crossed paths with weeks before when Aleppo was under siege. By begging, and bartering, and through acts of charity, we were able to nurse the twelve back to a state of health where they would be able to travel. It was at this juncture that Jesus informed me that he would be heading back to where he was needed.

"And where are you needed more then where you are right now?" I asked, somewhat perturbed.
"Where they are lost," he replied. And then he looked eastward, back toward Aleppo, back to where war raged. "Where those who kill, and those who are dying in the name of some false ideology are trapped." And then he said something that made me think he was seriously touched. "Forgiveness is hard to offer when you are covered in blood. Perhaps there is a way I can cleanse the stain from their flesh."
"You are mad," I said to him. "There are only lunatics and barbarians there. They do not seek forgiveness."
"As the twelve we found did not seek to be saved." Nodding to to the twelve survivors, he offered me a brief smile. "Yet they live."
"That is different," I argued.
He said nothing in response.

"Will you be happy there, where you go?" Jesus quietly asked me after a few minutes had passed.
My reply was on the tip of my tongue when I suddenly felt at a loss as to what to say.
"Perhaps this will all be over tomorrow," I offered instead. "Perhaps someone with a lot of money will buy this country and end our suffering."
As soon as I said this to him, I knew how stupid I sounded.
"People with money don't spend it on the likes of us, do they?" I sheepishly asked.
Jesus hesitated before he answered.
"The fate of the forgotten has been placed upon the shoulders of the poor," he said. "And I am the road that runs beneath their feet."