As Juliana and Jesus were conversing, several of the elders of the synagogue approached Jesus.

One of them, the leader and most senior, said loud enough for us all to hear, "There are six days for work. Why did not this woman come and be healed on one of those days, and not on the Sabbath?"

Jesus shook his head and looked dumbfounded. He could not fathom their apparent need for ritual and liturgy. Why were they driven by these things? What was it about religious form that attracted them? What was it about religious law that made it easy for people to disregard human pain?

Yet it has always been so. Since Adam, like a moth to a flame, men have been attracted to the knowledge of good and evil, the regulation, the order and the rubric from which it naturally flows. The believers and followers of Jesus, after he was gone, were no different. After Jesus left us, the first thing the disciples did was to form a cadre, an exclusive group of apostles, who represented the collective repository of truth about Jesus and the Father. Paul spoke of the church being built on the foundation of these apostles, Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone. This is a bit difficult to understand, let alone accept, in that earlier he taught that, "No man can lay a foundation other than that which is already laid, which is Jesus Christ." How Paul evolved Jesus from the foundation to a "cornerstone," is inexplicable.

I was almost one of those apostles. Had I been selected instead of Matthias, I might today be writing from an entirely different perspective. At the time, I was hurt that Matthias was chosen instead of me. I felt rejected by God himself. But now I am grateful. I am not the church leader that James, the Lord's brother, became or that Paul became. I had wanted to be, but God had other ideas. I had thought that I was not chosen because of the enormity of my sin, because my character flaws were so preemptive. But I no longer cling to these destructive notions. Each of these men, the apostles, were flawed as well. Paul, himself, was honest enough to admit his flaws, that he considered greater than any of us. Perhaps that is the very reason God chose him.

When a reader examines these pages, if one thing does not stand out, then I have failed to communicate this thing most obvious; it is that Jesus despised this adherence to religious law. He despised it because it limits and curtails the highest principle conceived in the mind of God. It is the principle of loving and being loved. Jesus came to release us from the terrible curse brought on by Eden. It wasn't pride that attracted Adam to partake of the forbidden fruit, it was the need to get at the essence of the tree, to know right from wrong, to know the rules, and hence, to implement them in his own life and in the lives of others. Of course, there were no others at that time, but they existed in his loins, and in his mind. He knew his calling was to replenish the earth, he knew there would be plenty of others. From the beginning, control has been the passion of the worst in human nature. One cannot do that without sacred law, hence something called the authority of the church developed. Paul, for all of his great awareness of God and his truth, became the chief progenitor of church authority and officialdom. This should not have been. Jesus never meant for it to be and he taught forcibly against it. Other than the Damascus road encounter, Paul was never with Jesus. He never saw such things as Jesus did with Juliana nor heard the insult and invective of the Savior against the mindless adherence to religious law.

And so, typically, his response to these synagogue officials was to treat them roughly, "You hypocrites!," he cried, "Each of you on the Sabbath will not hesitate to untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water! You know that you do that. Should not this woman, who has been bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day?" Jesus may as well have struck the poor Pharisee with a stone. He and his cohorts were humiliated and insulted, but the people were delighted. One by one, people with illness and disease came to him to be healed as he sat there next to beautiful Juliana on the wall. He healed each one who came. Sabbath, or no.