Sudden, loud murmuring from the crowd.

Away from where Jesus was standing and off to one side, a disturbance emerged. Bodies began to mill about excitedly; then the cry, "Unclean! Unclean!" And as the parting of the Jordan waters when Elisha struck them with the mantle of Elijah, the crowd fell away, revealing a lonely figure of a girl-child.

She stood there, unmoving. There was no notion of where she had come from. It was quite unanticipated. It seemed as if she had precipitously just "materialized."

She appeared to be eight or nine years of age, dressed in aged rags and leaning for support on a wooden crutch. Her hair was stringy and matted with the brown dust of the leper colony. Her facial skin toughened with what appeared to be scar tissue and the other visible parts of her body, arms and legs, blotched with white surrounded by rashes of red. She gazed with one sad eye at Jesus, for the other was swollen shut with rotting flesh. She stood twenty paces distant. One leg, barefoot on the ground, the other ending in a stump at the place where her ankle would have been. The crutch steadied her on her lame side.

She simply stood there in silence, while the crowd withdrew in horror around her. This disease takes several years to incubate, and it was highly unusual to see a child in these advanced stages of leprosy. She gazed at Jesus in her perplexed silence. The poignant confrontation between the one called the Son of God and this child of creeping death stilled the crowd as they silently watched to see what, if anything, would ensue. Several moments passed in the absence of sound, not so much as a whisper, not so much as a cicada, not so much as the hush of an eddy against the trees.

Standing on her good foot, the child thrust the crutch toward Jesus and lurched a step in his direction. Then another, closing by two paces the distance between them. She whimpered in pain. Not many realize how deeply blazing is the pain of leprosy. It seeps into the joints and bones and makes the sufferer burn white with diseased heat. The staggering physical pain always carrying with it, terrible, disfiguring emotional pain. Such was the daily experience of this sweet, helpless child. While Jesus stood, the girl lurched several steps more. It looked as if she would fall as her weight shifted clumsily from foot to crutch and back to foot.

All eyes were on the child, held transfixed by her struggle to ambulate and crazed with fear for the proximity of such a deadly, repugnant disease. All were paralyzed by the pathos of her plight. No one noticed, but had they examined the face of Jesus, they would have seen eyes filling with tears. The terrible agony of the human condition forever clenched at his heart. The inhumanity of man upon man, the horror of "natural" disaster, the ravages of disease saddened the soul of the Son of Man as much, perhaps more so, as the rejection of non-belief. The child faltered on, closing the gap, one small lurch at a time, between herself and the man from Nazareth.

At last, she stood before him. She opened her mouth to speak, but words would not come. Finally, after a few embarrassed swallows, clear, unmistakable Hebrew language issued from her mouth, "Rab Y'shua, I hear that you know of Yach'weh!" Faces in the crowd turned to each other in surprise; surprise that she could even speak, and to do so in Hebrew instead of Aramaic, surprise that she would say such a thing and surprise that she would so easily speak the name of God. "My father, Othniel ben Ro'bin, is dead. I have prayed for him. I wish for him to be in heaven. Tell me Rab Y'shua, is he is in heaven or is he in hell?"

Except for the sound of the girl-child's voice, the crowd, the universe, remained silent. Nor did Jesus respond at first. He lifted his hand to gently touch her head. Murmured whispers of concern. And then, "Child, your prayers have been heard. Your father in his lifetime walked in faith and love with my Father. Together, they are with you until this day." For the first time, the child smiled as if a burden too great to bear was lifted from her small shoulders.

Then Jesus stooped and pulling the child into his arms, embraced her, enveloping her in his cloak. Sounds of shock and surprise from the crowd. He then stood, holding her still, immobilized. He took the crutch from her and striking it against a rock, broke it. He hugged her tightly and the girl, delighted, threw both arms into the air. Jesus cried to the crowd, "Look, you! See for yourselves the love and compassion of God your Father." When he set her down, from the top of her crown, to the bottom of both feet, the child was completely whole. Instead of hair caked together with filth, she stood with lovely tresses flowing about her shoulders. Instead of rags, she wore fine linen. Instead of whitened and reddened skin, her complexion was a velvet olive; and she saw. She saw with two beautiful almond eyes. Such an event caused the crowd to fall to their knees. Not a solitary soul of several hundred stood. All were on their knees, as were the disciples of John, Markus and Jannai.

"He is of God!" exclaimed Jannai. His friend merely wept.