“Reach out your hand, Jesus the Powerful, and have mercy, for the hand of the despot is strong upon us. Or send death to lead us to graves where we can sleep peacefully, sheltered in the shadow of your cross until the day of your second coming. For life is no life as far as we are concerned, but a jet-black night in which evil phantoms strive to out-do one another, or a ravine crawling with horrifying snakes. Days are not days for us, but keen sword blades that the night hides in the covers on our beds and the morning unsheathes above our heads when our love of survival drags us to the fields. Show compassion, Jesus, on these masses gathered in your name on the day of your resurrection from the dead, and have mercy on their degradation and frailty.”

Yuhanna stood there conversing confidentially with the heavens, while the crowd around him ran the gamut from pleased appreciation to angry condemnation.

One shouted, “He only spoke the truth, and he’s talking about us before heaven because we are oppressed.”

The one next to him said, “He is possessed, speaking with the tongue of an evil spirit.”

“We never heard anything like this raving from our fathers and grandfathers, and we don’t want to hear it now!”

Yet another whispered into the ear of his friend, “I felt a magical tremor jolt my heart when I heard his voice. He is speaking with a strange power.”

His friend replied, “Yes, but our leaders know best what our needs are, and it is an error to doubt them.”

The voices ascended from every side, gathering like the surging of a wave, and then they dissipated in the air. Meanwhile, one of the priests came and seized Yuhanna, surrendering him to the police, who took him to the mansion of the governor. When they tried to interrogate him, he said not a word in reply, remembering that Jesus had remained silent before his persecutors. They took him down into an unlit dungeon, where he slept in peace, propped against a stone wall.

The next morning, Yuhanna’s father came and bore witness before the governor to the lunacy of his only child, saying, “How many times I have heard him ranting by himself, my lord, speaking about strange things with no truth to them. How many are the nights that he stayed up, talking to the silence with unknown words, calling out to imaginary beings in the dark with frightening sounds like the incantations of magicians and diviners. Ask the youth of the quarter, my lord, for they have sat with him and know that his reason is attracted to some distant world. They used to address him, but he would not reply, and should he speak, his words were ambiguous and unrelated to what they had said. Ask his mother, for she of all people knows best how his soul has been stripped of sense perception. She has seen him time and again gazing toward the horizon with a glassy-eyed, frozen stare, and heard him speaking passionately of trees, streams, flowers, and stars, just as infants speak about little things. Ask the monks of the monastery, for only yesterday he quarreled with them, scorning their devotions and worship, blaspheming against the holiness of their life.