King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (67 page)

Still dressed in his regal finery, he was taken to Herod’s citadel, the Tower of Phasael, which was now the Roman barracks. There he was stripped naked and underwent the preliminary scourging which is an inseparable part of crucifixion. The captain on duty laid on unmercifully with his supple vine-rod until weariness obliged him to desist. Then he handed Jesus over, bruised and bleeding, to the common soldiers, who dressed him up again and tried to make him play “Guess who struck you”, and the cruel May Day game of “King and Courtiers”, for which they plaited him a diadem of thorny acacia ; but he provided them with poor sport and after half an hour or so they let him go and settled down to dice.

There was a deep poetic irony in their choice of diadem, for at Ain-Kadesh a divine voice had spoken to Moses from an acacia-bush ; and it was from acacia-timber that the ark of Noah, the ark of Moses, the ark of Armenian Xisuthrus and the ark of Egyptian Osiris were all built. Throughout the Near East the tree is sacred to the many-named Divine Mother of the many-named Divine Son ; its flowers are white and pure, its thorns sharp, and its wood impervious to corruptive waters.

The provost-captain detailed to command the crucifixion party was a humane man. He told the soldiers : “Your orders are to mock and ridicule the prisoners on their way out of the City. This is merely a precaution against trouble ; however great a prisoner’s popularity, the laughter-loving City crowd will always refrain from attempting a rescue if his plight is absurd enough. However, though you may play whatever fantastic tricks you please on the two Zealots, from all accounts the cripple is a harmless enough fellow, and if you knock him about any more, by the Body of Bacchus I will so knock you about when we get back to barracks that you will wish yourselves in the Navy. And once we are well out in the open country, see that you keep your mouths shut and preserve good march discipline.”

He paraded them in column outside the barracks, where a large subdued crowd gathered, consisting mostly of women ; then sent a sergeant’s party to draw three crosses from the provost stores and bring them back in a transport cart. Meanwhile Dysmas and Gestas were fetched from the cells and placed with Jesus at the head of the column. Both of them had been shockingly ill-used : Dysmas had lost several teeth and Gestas the sight of an eye.

The captain hung the statements of crime about the necks of the three
prisoners and gave them their cross-beams to carry. The cross-beam is a six-foot baulk of timber which fits horizontally into a socket of the heavy upright, close to the top ; the upright is carried to the place of crucifixion in a cart, but by ancient custom the criminal must shoulder his own cross-beam. Jesus recognized the wood : it was terebinth, which no Galilean carpenter would work, since it was held to be unlucky, just as black poplar-wood is in Italy because of its connexion with the Death-goddess.

The order to march was shouted. The procession moved off, and passed without incident through the near-by Joppa Gate. Jesus was walking with a staff, but needed both hands to balance the cross-beam on his shoulder and could not keep the pace. When a sergeant tried to hurry him he was thrown off his balance and fell heavily ; the soldiers roared with laughter. The flogging had left him short of breath, and he had difficulty in rising. After a second fall the captain intervened and, stopping a sturdy pilgrim who was about to enter the City, compelled him to carry the cross-beam for Jesus.

This Libyan Jew, who had heard Jesus preach at Capernaum in the previous year, made a virtue of necessity. He cried out to the people : “Men of Jerusalem, gladly I shoulder the burden of this true prophet. May it wipe out the reproach that Nahum spoke against my native land. For when he prophesied against Nineveh as a well-favoured harlot and queen of witchcrafts, he said : ‘The Land of Put and the Libyans were thy helpers.’ Though Put be my mother and the Libyans my brothers, I am no wretch : I will not praise a newer Nineveh that gives her prophets to be crucified by the filthy unbeliever.” The captain, knowing no Aramaic, let this go by.

The procession skirted the City walls and turned north-eastward along a level road towards the Grotto of Jeremiah, which lies about three-quarters of a mile away. The day was sultry, the road thick with dust. A contingent of the Passover Eve crowd of pilgrims, known as the Lazy Ones because the main body always arrived two or three days before, marched in from the north ; they were singing for joy at the sight of the walls and towers of Jerusalem, but the psalm died on their lips as the ill-omened procession approached. All stood still, averting their faces while it trudged silently by.

When the Grotto and the tall, spreading Palm of Jeremiah came into clear view, a sudden wailing of women arose from the rear. The news of Jesus’s arrest had spread rapidly through the City, and though few of his male supporters dared join the procession, Joanna and Susanna were there, and Mary, Jesus’s mother, leaning on the arm of Shelom the midwife ; and Mary his queen, with her sister Martha, and their grandmother Mary wife of Cleopas ; and Mary the Hairdresser, with a party of Rechabite women.

Jesus turned and said, panting for breath : “Weep for yourselves, not for me. The Day of Wrath is at hand when she will be considered blessed who has borne and suckled no children to perish under the wrath
of Heaven ; when with one voice the Daughters of Jerusalem will cry to the hills to fall and bury them. For if the green tree is stripped, what will be done to the dry ?”

The proverb refers to the religious awe in which certain ancient trees —usually palms and terebinths—are held in Palestine, as being those under which patriarchs or prophets once rested. Though from all other trees branches are torn for firewood, the people fear to touch them. They grow tall and green, even in the desert beside well-frequented tracks, while other trees are stripped and dry. Jesus meant : “If even prophets are crucified, what fate is in store for the common people ?”

Beyond the Grotto rose the small skull-shaped hill called Golgotha, where in ancient times sentences of stoning were carried out and where the Romans now crucified political prisoners on a platform at the summit. It overlooked the main road into Jerusalem from the north and derived its name “Skull Hill” not from its configuration only, but from the legend that when King David had moved his capital from Hebron to Jerusalem he took Adam’s skull from the cave of Machpelah and buried it at Golgotha as a charm to protect the City. This legend must not be lightly dismissed, for the head of King Eurystheus, task-master to Hercules, was buried in a pass near Athens to protect Attica from invasion ; and several other ancient instances of the same custom occur in Greek and Latin history. Jesus had prophesied truly when he told Thomas that his journey would end where Adam’s had ended.

At the Grotto the captain gave the order to halt, while two old women came forward : they belonged to the pious Guild of Frankincense, licensed by the Pharisaic High Court, and their self-imposed task was to provide a grain of frankincense for every condemned Jewish felon to swallow as an anaesthetic. Dysmas and Gestas gratefully accepted the gift, but Jesus said : “Burn it, rather, as a sweet sacrifice to the Lord. For this Son of Adam must endure to the end.”

At Golgotha he was stripped of his clothes, and the soldiers seized them as perquisites, though in Jewish Law they were the property of his next-of-kin. The sergeant-executioner slit open the seams of the robe and allotted a length of the material to each of his four assistants, but lots were cast for the seamless undergarment bequeathed him by Simon son of Boethus.

They fixed the uprights into the cement sockets prepared to receive them, then made each prisoner in turn lie down on his back close to his upright. The cross-beam was thrust under his head, his outstretched arms were fastened to it with osiers and his hands secured to the wood with a long copper nail hammered through each palm to prevent him from struggling free. Then with ropes and a pulley he was hauled to the top of the upright until the cross-beam engaged in the slot cut for it, after which the two pieces of timber were bolted together. In each upright, about three feet below the cross-piece, were a row of peg-holes, into the most convenient of which the peg which helped to support his
weight was thrust under the crutch. His legs were bound fast to the upright with osiers, and his feet secured to the sides with two more nails driven through the flesh behind the sacred tendon—which some call “the tendon of Achilles” because Achilles, the son of the sea-goddess Thetis, was mortally wounded by an arrow in the same sacred spot. The statement of crime was fastened to the top of the upright, protruding over the victim’s head.

Jesus was given the central place, with Dysmas hanging on his right and Gestas on his left. As he was hauled up to the cross he uttered a last prayer : but not for himself. It was borne upon him at last that his sacrifice had been in vain and that he had incurred Jehovah’s inexorable wrath. The sins that he had committed in his impersonation of the Worthless Shepherd were proved to have been sins of presumption, and by leading his disciples into the same error he had earned his own prophetic reproach : “Whoever deceives the childish-hearted deserves to be thrown into the corruptive sea, a mill-stone about his neck.” His prayer was for them alone : “Father in Heaven, forgive them! Theirs is the sin of ignorance.”

He recognized his mother in the crowd and his disciple John, no longer wearing his prophetic mantle, standing close to her ; pitying her desolate look, he commended her to John’s care.

As the sun rose high in the sky, his pain grew so great that his whole body was shaken with spasms ; yet he choked back every cry. The flies were black upon the broken flesh of his back and sides ; sweat poured from his face. Gestas shouted and raved, cursing Jesus as the cause of his ruin, for the frankincense had not taken effect on him ; but Dysmas, oblivious of his approaching death, said drowsily to Jesus : “My Lord, remember me in your Kingdom. Give me office in your new Kingdom.”

Jesus comforted him, concealing the bitter irony of his words : “When to-night I enter the Other Kingdom, you will be at my right hand.”

Frightened, heavy-hearted and utterly bewildered, most of the other disciples had by now struggled out to Golgotha ; but not James, Peter or Andrew. James could not come because of his wound, which had festered. Peter had been beaten by the Romans until he was senseless, and thrown out naked into the street ; Andrew found him there and carried him off to his lodgings, but he did not recover his senses until nightfall.

Mary the Hairdresser came up to Shelom and said : “You brought this Son of Adam into the light of day, Sister ; but it is my task to return him to the darkness.”

“Who are you, woman ?” Shelom asked.

“I will confide a secret to you. The Fourth Beast, the Beast of the southern quarter of the circle in which he sat on Horeb, was the Bull of Haste. His fault was this : that he tried to force the hour of doom by declaring war upon the Female. But the Female abides and cannot be hastened.”

Shelom looked despairingly at Jesus. His calm fortified her, and she
answered as if with his mouth : “Peace, woman! Is it not written of the Kingdom of God : ‘I, the Lord, will hasten it in his time’ ?”

About noon, when the soldiers had begun to prepare their dinner, a hot wind blew from the east and the sky darkened. It was not the wholesome darkness that heralds rain with the distant growl of thunder and flicker of lightning, but a smoky darkness such as terrifies those who live in the neighbourhood of active volcanoes ; and as the cloud spread across the sky as far as the western horizon, blotting out the sun, the earth began to heave sickeningly and a distant rumble and crash was heard as an enormous piece of masonry fell from the Temple into the valley below. A scream of terror went up and many of the women fell on their knees and gazed upwards, believing that the Day of Wrath had come at last. But the Son of Man did not manifest himself and no company of angels rode to the rescue.

The captain reassured his men : “The darkness is caused by desert sand, carried high up into the air by a whirlwind in Elam. To-morrow the whole City will be powdered with it. There is nothing to fear.”

Jesus felt the royal virtue slipping away from him, leaving his body common flesh and his heart drained of courage. He cried hoarsely : “My God, my God, why have you deserted me ?”

The executioners thought that he was complaining of thirst. With obscene laughter they offered him a sponge soaked in myrrh-wine to suck, sticking it on the point of a javelin.

He declined to drink. “The end has come,” he muttered, his lips continuing to move, though almost soundlessly. Those who watched felt their lips moving with his through the verses of that terrible psalm : the ancient Lament of the Crucified Man.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I roar to you like the child who is far from help, crying unceasingly day and night ; but you do not hear me.

Holy One, secure in the praises of Israel, my fathers trusted in you and you delivered them : they cried to you and were not lost.

But I am a naked worm, a man no longer, reproached and despised by all. The onlookers laugh me to scorn, shooting out their lips and shaking their heads.

They say : “He trusted in his God to deliver him ; O, let him be delivered by the God in whom he delighted.”

But you are he that took me from my mother’s womb and taught me hope while I lay on her breast.

You are my God from the day of my birth. Be not far from me, for great trouble is upon me and I have no helpers.

Many bulls ring me in, the wild oxen of Basan, wide-mouthed, roaring like lions.

My life drips away like water, my bones are out of joint, my heart melts like wax and drops into my bowels.

I am as dry as a pot in the kiln, my tongue cleaves to my jaws. You have brought me to the dust of death.

Evil bull-men ring me in, they have pierced my hands and feet ; my naked frame is exposed to their stare.

They part my robes among them and cast lots for my shift.

But be not far from me, Lord, in whom is my strength. Hasten to help me : deliver my life from the blade, my dear life from the Power of the Dog.

Save me from the Lion’s mouth, from the horns of the wild oxen ; for you have heard me.

I will declare your name to my brothers, I will praise you to the crowd gathered about me.

Crying : “Praise God, all you who fear him ; fear and glorify him, all you sons of Jacob. For he has not despised or contemned the plight of this afflicted one, who calls upon him and is heard.”