INTRODUCTION (continued 8)

But this action, with its deep meaning hidden under the appearance of menial service, signifies purification as well as love. “He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.”

The eleven, although not of lofty character, had some right to this cleansing service from Jesus. For many months those feet had trodden the dusty, muddy, filthy roads of Judea to follow Him who brought life; and after His death, year by year, they were to tread longer and harder roads in countries the very names of which they then did not know; and foreign clay would soil the sandaled feet of those who were to go as pilgrims and strangers to repeat the call of the Crucified One.

TAKE—EAT

These thirteen men had apparently come together to perform the old social rite in memory of the liberation of their people from Egyptian slavery. They seemed to be thirteen devout men of the people, waiting about a white table redolent of roasted lamb and wine, for the signal to begin an intimate and festal supper.

But this was only in appearance. In reality it was a vigil of leave-taking and separation. Two of these thirteen, He into whom God had entered and he into whom Satan had entered, were to die terrible deaths before the next nightfall. The very next day the others were to be dispersed, like reapers at the first downfall of hail.

295But this supper which was the viaticum of an ending, was also a wonderful beginning. In the midst of these thirteen Jews the observance of the Jewish Passover was about to be transfigured into something incomparably higher and more universal, into something unequaled and ineffable; into the great Christian mystery. The simple eating of bread was to become actual communion with God.

For the Jews, Easter is only the feast in memory of their flight from Egypt. They never forgot their victorious escape from their slavery, accompanied by so many prodigies, so manifestly under God’s protection, although they were to bear on their necks the yokes of other captivities, and to undergo the shame of other deportations. Exodus prescribed an annual festivity which took the name of the Passover; Pasch, the paschal feast. It was a sort of banquet intended to bring to mind the hastily prepared food of the fugitives. A lamb or a goat should be roasted over the fire, that is, cooked in the simplest and quickest way; bread without leaven, because there was no time to let yeast rise. And they were to eat of it with their loins girded, their staves in their hands, eating in haste, like people about to set out upon a journey. The bitter herbs were the poor wild grasses snatched up as they went along by the fugitives, to dull the hunger of their interminable wanderings. The red sauce, where the bread was dipped, was in memory of the bricks which the Jewish slaves were obliged to bake for the Pharaohs. The wine was something added: the joy of escape, the hope of the land of promise, the exaltation of thanksgiving to the Eternal.

Jesus changed nothing in the order of this ancient feast. After the prayer He had them pass from hand to hand the cup of wine, calling on God’s name. Then He gave the bitter herbs to each one and filled a second time the cup which was to be passed around the table for each to sip.

What taste did that wine have in the mouth of the traitor, when Jesus in that deep silence pronounced those words of longing and hope which were not for Judas, but only for those who could ascend to the eternal banquet of the Father: Take this and divide it among yourselves, “but I say unto you I 296will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

A sad farewell; but nevertheless the confirming of a solemn promise. Perhaps they felt only the promise, and perhaps there flashed before their poor men’s eyes a vision of the great Heavenly feast. They did not believe that they would have a long time to mourn: after that other vintage-time, after the fruit of the vine had fermented, and the sweet wine had been poured into the flasks, the Master would return, as He had promised, to summon them to the great wedding of Heaven and Earth, to the everlasting banquet. They must have thought, “We are men growing old, elderly men, more than mature, within sight of old age; if the Bridegroom tarries too long He will not find us among the living, and those who have believed Him will be mocked at.”

Comforted by the certainty of an early and glorious reunion, they chanted together, as the custom was, the Psalm of the first Thanksgiving, a chant of praise to the Father from Him who served Him. “Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob; which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters.—He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dung-hill; that he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people.”

These old words, colored at that moment with a new meaning, were sung with a joyful conviction of their truth. They, too, the Disciples, were poor men and they would be raised out of the dust of poverty by the intercession of the Son of God: they too were poor men and He would soon raise them out of the misery of their beggary, to make them masters of inconsumable wealth.

Then Jesus, who saw how insufficiently they understood, took the loaves, blessed them, broke them and, as He gave them each a piece, set the dreadful truth before their eyes. “Take, eat; This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”

So He was not to return as quickly as they thought! After His brief stay during the Resurrection, His second coming was 297to be delayed, so long that it might be possible to forget Him and His death.

“This do in remembrance of me.” The breaking of bread at the common table among those who await Him shall be the signal of a new brotherhood. Every time that you break bread, I will not only be present among you, but by that means you will be intimately united with me. Because, as this bread is broken in my hands, my body will be broken by my enemies. As this bread eaten to-night will be your food until to-morrow, my body which I will offer in death to all men shall satisfy the hunger of those who believe in me, until the day when the great granaries of the Kingdom shall be open to all, when you shall be angels in the presence of your Father whom you shall have found again. I will leave you therefore not merely a memory; I will be present with a mystic but real presence in every particle of bread consecrated to me and this bread shall be a living necessary food for souls, and my promise to be with you shall be fulfilled till time shall be no more.

In the meantime, this evening, eat this unleavened bread, this bread made by the hand of man, made of water and grain, these loaves which have felt the heat of the oven and which my hands, not yet cold in death, have divided amongst you—and which my love has changed into my flesh so that it may be your everlasting food. It is sweet to the heart of a friend to see his friends eating bread at his table, bread born of the earth, bread which was green blades with flowering lilies among them, and then the ripe ear bending down the tall stalk with its golden weight. You know how many efforts, how much anxiety, how much trouble, are contained in a piece of bread; how the great oxen cultivated the earth, how the countrymen threw great handfuls of the grain into the fallow land in winter, how the first blade softly penetrated the damp darkness of the earth, how the reapers all day long cut down the ripened stalks, and then the sheaves were bound, and carried to the threshing floor and beaten so that the ears let fall the grain. The workers must wait for a little wind, neither too gentle nor too violent, to winnow out the good grain from the chaff. 298Then they grind it, sift out the bran from it, make a dough with warm water, heat the oven with dry grass or twigs. All this must be done with love and patience before the father may break a piece with his children, the friend with his friends, the host with strangers. Plowers, sowers, reapers, winnowers, millers and bakers sweat in the heat of the sun, in the heat of the oven, before the golden wheat can be transformed into well-baked golden bread for our table.

Truly it is sweet to eat good wholesome bread with friends: the soft white crumb, covered with the crisp crust. So many times with me you have begged bread in poor men’s houses; and all your lives you are to beg it in my name: you will have the moldy hard crusts which dogs refuse, the dry bits left at the bottom of the dish, the crusts gnawed by children and old people which they have let fall upon the hearth. But you know want, and nights of fasting and the pale face of poverty. But you are strong; you have the powerful jaws of those who eat hard bread. You will not lose courage, if no place is made for you at the tables of the well-to-do.

But verily it is infinitely sweeter for Him who loves you to transform the bread which comes from the hard earth and from hard labor into the Body which will be eternally offered for you, into the Body which every day will come down from Heaven as the visible means of grace.

Remember the prayer which I taught you: “Give us this day our daily bread—” For to-day and for always your bread is this bread, my Body. He shall never know hunger who shall eat my Body, which every morning throughout endless centuries shall be changed into endless morsels of transubstantiated bread. But whosoever shall refuse it, shall be anhungered to all eternity.

WINE AND BLOOD

As soon as they had eaten the lamb with the bread and the bitter herb, Jesus filled the common cup for the third time and gave it to the Apostle nearest Him, “Drink ye all of 299it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.”

His blood, mixed with sweat, had not yet fallen on the ground, under the olives, and had not yet dropped from the nails upon Golgotha. But His desire to give life with His life, to redeem with His suffering all the sorrows of the world, to transmit at least a part of His substance to His immediate heirs; this desire to give Himself up wholly for those whom He loves is so great that from this moment on, He feels the immolation complete and the gift possible. If bread is the body, blood is in a certain sense the soul. The Lord said to Noah: “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.” With blood as visibly representing life, the God of Abraham and of Jacob had established the covenant with His own people. When Moses had received the law, he had sacrificed oxen, took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar: “And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words.”

But after a trial of many centuries, God had announced by the voice of the prophets that the Old Covenant was obliterated and abrogated, and that another was henceforth necessary. The blood of animals sprinkled upon stubborn heads and upon blaspheming faces had lost its virtue; another Blood, purer and more precious, was needed for the New Covenant, for the Last Covenant of the Father with His perjured children. In many ways He had already tried to lead His first-born towards the narrow door of salvation; the rain of fire on Sodom, the washings of the waters of the flood, the Egyptian slavery, hunger in the desert, had terrified them without reforming them.

And now there had come a Liberator at once more divine and more human than the old Captain of Exodus. Moses also saved a people, spoke upon a mountain, announced a promised land. But Jesus saves not only His people, but all peoples; writes His laws not upon stone, but upon human 300hearts; and His promised land is not a country of rich grazing-land and vineyards, with great clusters of grapes, but a Kingdom of holiness and eternal joy. Moses had killed a man, and Jesus brought the dead to life; Moses changed water into blood and Jesus, after having changed water into wine at the wedding banquet, changed wine into blood, into His own blood, at the melancholy last supper of His marriage with death. Moses died full of years and honors on a solitary mountain top, glorified by his people; and Jesus was to die among the insults of those whom He loved.

The blood of oxen, the impure blood of earthly animals, involuntary and inferior victims, is no longer sufficient. The New Covenant was established that night with the words of Christ, who under the appearance of wine shed His own blood and His own soul: “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”

It was shed not merely for the Twelve who were there; they represent in His eyes all of humanity alive at that time and all those to be born thereafter. The blood which was to be shed the next day, on Golgotha, was real blood, actual, warm blood congealing on the cross in clots which all the tears shed by Christians can never wash away. But the blood of the Last Supper symbolizes a soul which gave itself up to make over into His own likeness, the souls shut up in the bodies of men: which was given to those who asked for it and to those who fled away from it, which had suffered for the sake of those who had received it and for those who had blasphemed it. This baptism of blood which came after the baptism of water by John, after the baptism of tears by the women of Bethany, after the baptism of spitting by the Jews and by the Romans, this baptism of blood, red as the baptism of fire announced by the prophet of fire, and mixed with the tears shed by women over His blood-stained body, this is the greatest sacrament, revealed to His betrayers, by Him who was betrayed.

I have broken bread for you, daily bread for which you pray every day to the Father, as my body will be broken to-morrow, and I offer you now my blood in this wine which 301I drink for the last time on earth. If you always do this in memory of me, you will feel no hunger, no thirst. There is no food better than wheat-bread, and no drink better than wine, but the bread and wine which I have given you to-night will feed you and quench your thirst for all your lives, by virtue of my sacrifice and of that love which makes me seek for death and which reigns beyond death.

Ulysses advised Achilles to give the Achaians, before they went into battle, “bread and wine that they should have strength and courage.” For the Greek the strength of his members came from bread and homicidal courage from wine. Wine was to intoxicate men so that they should destroy each other and bread was to strengthen their arms so that they could battle without weakness. The bread given by Christ does not strengthen the flesh, but the soul, and His wine gives that divine intoxication which is Love, that Love which the Apostle, scandalizing the descendants of Ulysses, was to call in his Epistle to the Corinthians, “the foolishness of God.”

Judas also ate that bread and swallowed that wine, partook of that body, in which he had trafficked, drank that blood which he was to help shed, but he had not the courage to confess his infamy, to throw himself down weeping at the feet of Him who would have wept with him. Then the only friend remaining to Judas warned him, “Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.”

The eleven were capable of leaving Him alone in the midst of Caiaphas’ guards, but they never could have brought themselves to sell Him for money, and at this they shuddered. Every one looked in his neighbor’s face, almost dreading to see in his companion the livid look of guilt, and all, one after the other, said, “Lord, is it I?”

Even Judas, hiding his increasing confusion under the appearance of offended astonishment, was able to force his voice to say, “Lord, is it I?” But Jesus, who the next day would not defend Himself, would not even bring an accusation and only repeated the sad prophecy in more definite words, “He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me.” And while they all still gazed at Him in painful 302doubt, for the third time He insisted, ... “The hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table.” He added no more, but to follow the old customs up to the last, He filled the cup for the fourth time and gave it to them to drink. And once more the thirteen voices rang out in the old hymn, the “great hallel” which ended the liturgy of the Passover. Jesus repeated the vigorous words of the Psalmist which were like a prophetic funeral oration for Him, pronounced before His death. “The Lord is on my side; I will not fear; what can man do unto me?... They compassed me about like bees: they are quenched as the fire of thorns.... I shall not die, but live.... The Lord hath chastened me sore: but he hath not given me over unto death. Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and I will praise the Lord:... The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.... Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.”

The victim was ready and the next day the inhabitants of Jerusalem were to see a new altar of wood and iron. But perhaps the Disciples, sleepy and confused, did not understand the new meaning both melancholy and triumphant of the old canticles.

When the hymn was ended they left the room and the house, at once. As soon as they had emerged from the house Judas disappeared into the night. The remaining eleven silently followed Jesus, who, as was His wont, made His way to the Mount of Olives.

ABBA FATHER

On the Mount there was a garden, and a place where olives were crushed, which gave it its name, Gethsemane. Jesus and His friends had been spending the nights there, either to avoid the odors and noise of the great city, distasteful to them, country-bred as they were, or because they were afraid of being treacherously captured in the midst of their enemies’ houses.

303And when He was at the place, He said to His disciples, “Sit ye here while I go and pray yonder.”

But He was so heavy-hearted that He dreaded being alone. He took with Him the three whom He loved the best, Simon Peter, James and John. And when they had gone a little way from the others, He began to be sorrowful and very heavy. “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here, and watch with me.”

If they answered Him no one knows what they said. But we know that they did not comfort Him with the words which come from the heart when it shares the suffering of a loved one, for He withdrew Himself from them alone, and went further on, to pray. He fell on the ground on His face and prayed, saying, “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”

He was alone now, alone in the night, alone in the midst of men, alone before God, and He could show His weakness without shame. After all, he was a Man, too, a man of flesh and blood, a living, breathing man, who knew that His destruction was at hand, that His body would be destroyed, that His flesh would be pierced, that His blood would be poured out on the ground.

This was the second temptation. After the defeat of Satan in the desert, the Evangelist says: “he departed from him for a season.” He had left Him till this moment. Now He was in a new desert, terribly alone in the darkness, more alone than in the desert where the wild beasts served Him. Cloaked and learned wild beasts were at hand now, but only to tear Him to pieces. In that terrible nocturnal desert, Satan returned to tempt his enemy; at first he had promised Christ, kingdoms, victories, and prodigies, he had tried to draw Him by the bait of power. Now, on the contrary, he counted on His weakness. At the beginning of His life, Christ burning with confident love had not fallen into his trap, but Christ near His end, abandoned by those nearest to Him, encompassed by His enemies, might be conquered by fear, even though He had risen above cupidity. The prayer to the Father was at 304the instigation of Satan, was a beginning of cowardice. Jesus knew He must die, that His death was necessary, that He had come to give life by His death, to confirm by His death that greater life which He announced. He had made no effort to avoid death, He had been willing to die for His friends, for all men, for those who did not know Him, for those who hated Him, for those not yet born. He had predicted His death to His friends, had already given them the rewards of His death, the bread of His body, the blood of His soul; and He had no right to ask the Father that the cup might pass from His lips or that His death might be delayed. He had written His words on the dust of the public place, and the wind had quickly obliterated them. He had written them on the hearts of a few men, but He knew how easily effaced are words written on the hearts of men. If His truth were to remain forever on the earth so that no one could ever forget it He must write it with His blood. Only with the blood in our veins can truth be written permanently on the pages of earth so that it will not fade under men’s footsteps or under the rainfall of centuries. The Cross is the rigorously necessary consequence of the Sermon on the Mount. He who brings love is given over to hatred, and He can only conquer hatred by accepting condemnation. Everything must be paid for, the good at a higher price than evil; and the greatest good, which is love, must be paid for by the greatest evil in men’s power, assassination.

But all that faith and revelation tell us of His divinity rises up against the idea that He can ever have been subjected to temptation. If the torture and the end of His body had really terrified Him, was there not yet time to save Himself? For many days He had known that they were trying to take Him captive, and even on that night there were ways of escaping the pack of hounds ready to fall upon Him. He would have been safe if, either alone or with His most faithful friends, He had taken the road back to the Jordan, and thence by hidden paths have passed across Perea into the Tetrarchy of Philip, where He had already taken refuge to escape the ill-will of Antipas. The Jewish police were so few and primitive 305that they could scarcely have found Him. The fact that He did not do this, did not flee, shows that He did not try to escape death and the horrors that were to accompany it. From the point of view of our coarse human logic His death was a suicide—a divine suicide by the hand of others, not unlike that of the heroes of antiquity who fell upon the sword of a friend or a slave. What sort of a life would He have had after such a flight? To grow old obscurely, the timorous master of a hidden sect, to die at the last, worn out, the death-rattle in His throat like any other man! Better, infinitely better to finish the sowing of the Gospel on the Cross and to water it with His blood. He had spoken out His truths and now, that those truths should be everlastingly remembered He must needs link with them the horror of His unforgettable death. Perhaps this blood, like a stinging drink, would arouse His disciples forever.

But if the cup that Jesus wished to pass from Him was not fear of death, what else could it have been? Betrayal by him whom He had chosen and loved, by the disciple whose hunger He had fed that very evening with His body, whose thirst He had quenched with His soul? Or the denial close at hand of the other disciple in whom after his cry at Cæsarea He had the greatest hope? Or the desertion of all the others who would flee like scattered lambs when the wolf sets his fangs into their mother’s body? Or was it grief for that greater denial, the refusal of His own people, the Jews, of the people from whom He was born and who now despised Him like one born out of His time, and suppressed Him like a child of shame, and did not know that the blood of Him who came to save them would never be wiped from their foreheads? Perhaps in the darkness of this last vigil He had a glimpse of the fate which would befall His children later on, the bewilderment of the first saints, the dissensions between them, the desertions, the martyrdoms, the massacres, and after the hour of triumph the weakness of those who should have guided the multitude, the irrepressible schisms, the dismemberment of the Church, the wild dreaming of heretical pride, the growth of innumerable sects, the confusion of false prophets, the boldness 306of rebellious reformers, the simony and dissoluteness of those who deny Him in their actions while glorifying Him in word and gesture: the persecutions of Christians by Christians, the neglect of the lukewarm and the arrogant, the dominion of new Pharisees and new Scribes, distorting and betraying His teachings, the misunderstanding of His words, when they fall into the hands of the hair-splitters, weighers of the immaterial, separators of the inseparable, who, with learned vanity, eviscerate and cut to pieces the living things they pretend to bring to life.

The cup that Jesus wished to pass from Him might therefore have been not at all any wrong done to Him, but wrongs committed by others, those alive then and close to Him, or those not yet born and far-distant. What He was asking from His Father might have been not His own safety from death, but safety from the evils, which, then and later, were to overwhelm those who claim to believe in Him. The origin of His sadness would have been thus not fear for Himself, but love for others.

But no one will ever know the true meaning of the words cried out by the Son to the Father, in the black loneliness of the Olives. A great French Christian called the story of this night the “Mystery of Jesus.” The “Mystery of Judas” is the only human mystery in the Gospels; the prayer of Gethsemane is the most inscrutable, divine mystery of the story of Christ.

BLOOD AND SWEAT

And when He had prayed, He turned back to find the Disciples, who were perhaps waiting for Him to return. But the three had gone to sleep. Crouching on the ground, wrapped as best they could in their cloaks, Peter, James and John, the faithful, the specially chosen, had allowed themselves to be overcome with sleep. The obscure apprehensions, the repeated agitations of those last few days, the oppressive melancholy of the Supper, accompanied by words so grave, by presentiments so sad, had plunged them into that prostration which 307is more like torpor than sleep. The voice of the Master—who of us has the spiritual acuteness to realize that the accent of that voice in the sinister black silence is speaking also to our own hearts now?—called them: “What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak.” Did they hear these words in their sleep? Did they answer, shamefaced, putting their hands to their confused eyes which could not bear even the dim light of the night? What could they answer, startled, only half awake, to the Sleepless One who was to sleep no more?

Jesus went away again, more heavy-hearted than ever. Was the temptation against which He had put them on guard in them alone or also in Him? Was it the temptation to escape? To deny Himself as others were to deny Him? To oppose violence to violence? To pay with the lives of others for His own life, or to beg once more with a more despairing supplication that the peril might be averted from His head?

Jesus was once more alone, more alone than ever, in a solitude complete as infinite desolation. Until that hour He might have thought that there, close at hand, His loved friends were keeping vigil with Him. Now they had reached the limit of their endurance and had deserted Him spiritually before deserting Him bodily.

They had left Him alone; they were not men enough to grant Him the last favor which He asked, they who had received so many. In return for His blood, and His soul, for all His promises, for all His love, He had asked one thing only, that they should not fall asleep. And this small favor had not been granted Him. And yet He was suffering and struggling at that moment for the sake of those who slept. He who gave all was to receive nothing. During that night of refusals His every prayer was denied; both His Father and His fellow-men refused Him.

Satan also had disappeared into the darkness which is his own kingdom, and Christ was alone, utterly alone, alone as men are alone who raise themselves above other men, who suffer in the darkness to bring light to all. Every hero is always 308the only one awake in a world of sleepers, like the pilot watching over his ship in the solitude of the ocean and of the night, while his companions rest.

Jesus was the most solitary of all these eternally solitary souls. Everything slept about Him. The city slept, its white, shadow-checkered mass sprawling beyond the Kedron; and in all the houses, in all the cities in the world, the blind race of ephemeral men were sleeping. The only ones awake at that hour were perhaps some woman waiting for the call of her lover; perhaps a thief in ambush in the dark, his hand on the hilt of his knife; perhaps a philosopher pondering the problem, “Does God exist?”

But the leaders of the Jews and their guards were not asleep that night. Those who should have defended Jesus, who might at least have consoled Him, those who claimed to love Him and who in their way at times did really love Him, were stretched in sleep. But those who hated Him, who wished to kill Him, did not sleep. Caiaphas was not asleep and the only Disciple awake at that moment was Judas.

Until the arrival of Judas His Master was alone with His death-like sadness. That He might feel less alone He began to pray to His Father, and once more those imploring words rushed to His lips. The effort to keep them back, the conflict which convulsed His whole being—because the divinity which was in Him accepted joyfully what it had willed, while the ruddy clay which clothed it shuddered—this human and superhuman effort brought to Him at last the victory. He was racked with suffering, but He was triumphant; He was utterly spent, but He had conquered.

The spirit had once more overcome the flesh; but from now on His body was merely a trunk which bled and died. The tension of the terrible struggle had done so great a violence to all that was earthly in Him that the sweat stood out on Him, as though He had achieved an impossible task, had endured the unendurable. The sweat poured from all His person; but not merely the natural sweat which runs down the face of the man walking in the sun, or working in the fields or raving in fever. The blood which He had promised to shed 309for men was shed first on the grass of the garden of Gethsemane. Great drops of blood mixed with sweat fell on the earth as a first offering of His conquered flesh. It was the beginning of liberation, almost a relief to that humanity which was the greatest burden of His expiation.

Then from His lips wet with tears, wet with sweat, wet with blood, arose a new prayer: “O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done. Not my will, but thine, be done.”

Gone now was any trace of cowardly shrinking; the will, that is the individual, abdicated in the obedience which alone can assure the freedom of the universal. He is no longer a man, but Man; the Man one with God, “I wish that which Thou wisheth.” From that moment His victory over death is assured, because he who gives himself wholly to the Eternal cannot die. “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”

He stood up calmed, and turned back towards His Disciples. His sad reproof had been vain; worn out and exhausted, the three were again sleeping. But this time Jesus did not call them. He had found a consolation greater than any which they could give Him—and He kneeled down once more to repeat to the Father those great words of abnegation, “Not my will, but thine, be done.”

God was no longer to be asked to be the servant of man. Up to that time men had asked Him to satisfy their particular wishes in exchange for canticles and offerings. I wish for prosperity, said the man who prayed, for safety, for strength, for flowering fields, for the ruin of my enemies. But now Christ, the Over-turner, has come to transpose the common prayer, “Not what is pleasing to me, but what is pleasing to Thee. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” Blessedness can only come as a result of perfect harmony between the sovereign will of the Father and the subordinate will of man, as a result of the convergence and identity of those two wills. What if the will of God give me into the hands of the torturers and fastens me like an evil and malignant beast upon two crossed beams of wood? If I believe in the Father as a 310Father, I know that He loves me more than I could love myself, and that He knows more than I could know, therefore He can wish only for what is best for me even if that best to human eyes seems the most dreadful evil; and I wish for what the Father wills. If His foolishness is unimaginably more wise than our wisdom, martyrdom given by Him will be incomparably better than any earthly pleasures.

What if the Disciples slept? What if all men slept? Christ was no longer alone. He was content to suffer, content to die. He had found His peace under the hammer-stroke of anguish.

Now He can listen almost longingly for the footsteps of Judas.

For a time He hears only the beating of His own heart, so much calmer than at first, now that the horror is nearer. But after some moments, He hears approaching the sound of cautious shuffling, and there among the bushes which border the road red flickerings of light appear and disappear in the darkness. They are the servants of the assassins who are following Iscariot along the path.

Jesus turns to the Disciples, still asleep, “Behold the hour is come; rise, let us go. Lo, he that betrayeth me is at hand.”

The eight other Disciples, sleeping farther away, are already aroused by the noise, but have no time to answer the Master because while He is still speaking the crowd comes up and stops.

THE HOUR OF DARKNESS

It was the rabble who swarmed around the Temple, paid by the Sanhedrin; bunglingly made over for the time being into warriors; sweepers, and door-keepers, the lower parasites of the sanctuary, who had taken up swords in place of brooms and keys. There were many of them, a great multitude, so the Evangelists say, although they knew they were going out against only twelve men, who had only two swords. It is not credible that there were Roman soldiers among them and certainly not “a captain,” as John says, an officer over a thousand men. Caiaphas wished to make Christ a prisoner before he 311presented Him to the procurator, and the few forces at his disposition (the last vestiges of David’s army) with the addition of some clients and relatives were enough to carry out the far-from-dangerous capture.

This haphazard mob had come with torches and lanterns almost as if out for an evening celebration. The pallid faces of the disciples, the livid face of Judas seemed to flicker in the red lights. Christ offered His face, stained with blood but more luminous than the lights, to Judas’ kiss. “Friend, wherefore art thou come? Betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?” He knew what Judas came to do, and He knew that this kiss was the first of His tortures and the most unendurable. This kiss was the signal for the guards who did not know the delinquent by sight. “Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is He: take Him and lead Him away safely,” the merchant of blood had told the rough crowd who followed him as they came along the road. But that kiss was at once the first and the most horrible sullying of those lips which had pronounced the most heavenly words ever spoken here in the inferno of our earth. The spitting, the buffeting, the blows of the Jewish rabble and of the Roman soldiers, and the sponge dipped in vinegar, were to be less intolerable than that kiss, the kiss of a mouth which had called Him friend and Master, which had drunk from His cup, which had eaten from His dish.

As soon as the sign was given the boldest came up to their enemy.

“Whom seek ye?”

“Jesus of Nazareth.”

“I am he.” He had scarcely said “I am he” when the curs fell backward, either at the sound of His tranquil voice or at the light of those divine eyes. But even at such a moment Jesus took thought for His friends “I have told you that I am He, if therefore ye seek me, let these go their way.”

At the moment, profiting by the confusion of the guards, Simon, coming suddenly to himself from his sleep and from his panic, laid his hand to a sword and cut off the ear of Malchus, a servant of Caiaphas. Peter on that night was full 312of contradictory impulses; after the supper he had sworn that no matter what happened he would never leave Jesus; then in the garden he fell asleep and could not keep himself awake; after that, tardily he set himself up as a militant defender; and a little later he was to deny that he had ever known his Master. Simon’s untimely and futile action was at once repudiated by Christ: “Put up thy sword into the sheath, for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword. The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” And He offered His hands to the nearest rogues who made all haste to tie them with the rope which they had brought. While they were busy tying Him, the prisoner accused them of cowardice. “Are ye come out, as against a thief, with swords and staves to take me? When I was daily with you in the temple ye stretched forth no hands against me: but this is your hour and the power of darkness.”

He is the Light of the world, and the powers of darkness seek to extinguish it; but they can obscure it only for a short time, as on a July noon when the sun is suddenly covered by a dark storm-cloud but an hour afterwards shines out again, higher and more majestic than ever. The guards, eager to return triumphantly and to receive their fees, did not trouble to answer; they dragged Him by the rope towards the road to Jerusalem as butchers drag the ox to the slaughter-house. Then, confesses Matthew, “... all the disciples forsook him, and fled.” Their Master forbade them to defend Him; instead of blasting His enemies the Messiah offered His hands to be bound; the Saviour was powerless to save Himself. What could they do but disappear so that they might not also be brought before those powers which yesterday they had boasted of overthrowing, but which now, in the flickering of the lanterns and the swords, seemed suddenly very formidable to their distracted minds? And only two followed the infamous procession, and they from a safe distance. We shall see them later in the court-yard of Caiaphas’ house.

All this bustle awakened a young man who had been sleeping in the house in the grove of olives. Inquisitive like all young men, he did not take the time to dress, but wrapping 313a sheet about him, stepped out to see what was happening. The guards thought him a disciple who had not had time to escape, and laid hands on him, but the young man, casting off the sheet, left it in their hands and fled from them naked.

No one has ever known the identity of this mysterious man awakened from his sleep, who appeared suddenly in the night, and as suddenly disappeared. Perhaps he was the youthful Mark, the only one of the Evangelists who tells this story. If it were Mark, it is possible that on that night the involuntary witness of the beginning of the Passion first conceived the impulse to become, as Mark did, its first historian.

ANNAS

In a short time the criminal was taken to the house which Annas shared with his son-in-law, the High Priest Caiaphas. Although the night was now well advanced, and although the assembly had been warned the day before, that Caiaphas hoped to capture the blasphemer early in the morning, many of the Jews were still in bed and the prosecution could not begin at once. In order that the common people might not have time to rise in rebellion, nor Pilate to take thought, the leaders were in haste to finish the affair that very morning. Some of the guards who returned from the Mount of Olives were sent to awake the more important Scribes and Elders, and in the meantime old Annas, who had not slept all that night, set himself on his own account to question this false Prophet.

Annas, son of Seth, had been for seven years High Priest, and though deposed in the year 14 under Tiberius, he was still the real primate of the Jewish Church. A Sadducee, head of one of the most aggressive and wealthy families of the ecclesiastical patriarchate, he was still, through his son-in-law, leader of his caste. Five of his sons were afterwards High Priests, and one of them, also called Annas, caused James, the brother of the Lord, to be stoned to death.

Jesus was led before him. It was the first time that the wood-worker of Nazareth found Himself face to face with the 314religious head of His people, with His greatest enemy. Up to that time He had met only the subalterns in the Temple, the common soldiers, the Scribes and Pharisees; now He was before the head, and He was no longer the accuser but the accused. This was the first questioning of that day. In the space of a few hours, four authorities examined Him; two rulers from the Temple, Annas and Caiaphas; and two temporal rulers, Antipas and Pilate.

The first question Annas put to Jesus was to ask Him who His disciples were. The old political priest who like all the other Sadducees gave no credence to the foolish stories about the coming of a Messiah, wished to know first of all who were the followers of the new Prophet, and from what rank of society He had picked them up, so that he might determine how far the seditious ulcer had progressed. But Jesus looked at Him without answering. How could that dove-huckster have thought that Jesus could betray those who had betrayed Him?

Then Annas asked about His doctrine. Jesus answered that it was not for Him to explain: “I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said nothing. Why askest thou me? ask them which heard me, what I have said unto them: behold, they know what I said.”

This was the truth. Jesus was not esoteric. Even if He sometimes said to His Disciples words that He did not repeat in the open places of the city, He exhorted them to cry out on the housetops what He told them in the house. But Annas must have made a wry face at an answer which pre-supposed an honest trial, for one of the officers standing by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, “Answerest thou the high priest so?”

This blow from the quick-tempered attendant was the beginning of the insults which were henceforth rained upon Christ up to the cross. But He who had been struck, with His cheek reddened by the boor, turned towards the man who had struck Him, “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil: but if well, why smitest thou me?”

The rogue, abashed by such calm, found no answer. Annas 315began to see that this Galilean was no common adventurer, and he was all the more eager to get Him out of the way. Seeing, however, that he was not succeeding in extracting anything from Him, he sent Him bound to Caiaphas, the High Priest, so that the fiction of a legal prosecution might begin at once.

THE COCK CROWS

Only two of the fleeing Disciples repented of their cowardice, and trembling in the shadow of the walls, followed from afar the swaying lanterns which accompanied Christ to the den of fratricides: Simon, son of Jonas, and John, son of Zebedee.

John, who was known in the household of Caiaphas, went into the courtyard of the building with Jesus, but Simon, more shamefaced, or not so bold, did not enter and stood at the door without: then after a few moments John, not seeing his companion, and wishing to have him at hand for sympathy or defense, went out and persuaded the suspicious doorkeeper to let Peter also come in. But as he stepped through the door, the woman recognized him: “Art not thou also one of his disciples?”

But Peter took on an offended air, “I know not, neither understand I what thou sayest. I know him not.”

And he sat down with John near the brazier which the servants had kindled in the courtyard because, although it was in April, the night was cold. But the woman would not give up her idea, and coming to the fire and looking at him earnestly, said, “Thou also wast with Jesus of Nazareth,” and he denied again with curses, “Woman, I know him not!”

The gate-keeper, shaking her head, turned back to her gate, but the men aroused by these heated denials looked at him more closely and said, “Surely thou art one of them: for thou art a Galilean, and thy speech agreeth thereto.”

Then Simon began to curse and to swear, but another, a kinsman of Malchus whose ear Peter had cut off, cut short his testimony: “Did I not see thee in the garden with him?”

316But Peter, now hopelessly involved in lies, began again to protest that they had mistaken him for another and that he was not one of the friends of the Man.

At this very moment Jesus, bound among the guards, crossed the courtyard after His colloquy with Annas, passing to the other part of the palace, where Caiaphas lived: and He heard the words of Simon and looked at Him. For just one moment He turned His eyes upon Simon, those eyes where Simon, denying Him now, had once recognized the gleam of divinity. For an instant only He looked at him with eyes whose gentleness was more unendurable than any contempt. And this look pierced for all time the pitiable, distracted heart of the fisherman. To the day of his death he could never forget those sad, mild eyes fixed on him in that terrible night; those eyes which in one flash expressed more and moved him more than a thousand words.

“Thou also who wast the first, of whom I hoped most, the hardest but the most zealous, the most ignorant but the most fervent, thou also, Simon, the same who cried out my true name near Cæsarea, thou also who knowest all my words and hast slept with thy head on my cloak and hast kissed me so many times with those lips which now deny me, thou also, Simon Peter, son of Jonas, deny me before those who are about to kill me! I was right that day when I called thee a stumbling block and reproached thee with thinking not like God but like men. Thou mightest at least have fled away as the others did if thou hadst not the strength to drink with me the cup of infamy which I had foretold to thee. Flee away now that I may see thee no more until the day when I shall be truly free and thou shalt be truly made over by faith. If thou fearest for thy life why art thou here? If thou fearest not, why dost thou deny me? Even Judas at the last has been more faithful than thou: he came with my enemies, but he did not deny that he knew me. Simon, Simon, I foretold that thou wouldst leave me like the others, but now thou art more cruel than the others. I have pardoned thee from my heart. I am about to die, and I pardon him who brings me to death, 317and thee also; and I love thee as I have always loved thee, but canst thou forgive thyself?”

Under the weight of this look, Simon hung his head and his heart beat furiously in his breast. Not for his very life could he have brought out another “No.” His face burned with an intolerable heat as if the brazier before him had been the mouth of Hell. He was torn by an unbearable tumult of passion and of remorse; in one breath he seemed frozen, in the next all his body flamed. A moment before he had said that he had never known Jesus, and now it seemed to him that he had spoken truly, that at this moment he knew Him for the first time: that he finally understood who He was, as if those eyes full of loving grief had pierced him with a flash like an archangel’s sword.

He was scarcely able to drag himself to his feet and to stumble out to the door. As he went out into the street in the silent, solitary darkness a distant cock crew. This gay, bold note was for Peter like the cry which awakens a sleeper from his nightmare. Then in the dim light of dawn the last stars saw a man staggering along like a drunkard, his head hidden in his cloak, his shoulders shaken by the sobs of a despairing lament.

Weep, Peter, now that God mercifully grants you the grace of tears, weep for yourself and for Him, weep for Judas, your traitor brother; weep for your fleeing brothers, weep for the death of Him who is dying to save your poor soul, for all those who will come after you and who will do as you have done, deny their Saviour, and who will not pay for their redemption by repentance. Weep for all the apostates, for all the others who will deny Him, all those who will say as you have said, “I am not one of His disciples!” Who of us has not done at least once what Simon Peter did? Who of us, born in the Church of Christ, having prayed to Him with our childish lips, having knelt before His blood-stained face, has not said, fearing a mocking smile, “I never knew Him.”

Thou at least, unfortunate Simon, although thou wast Peter the rock, wept bitterly and hid in thy cloak thy face convulsed 318with remorse. And before many days Christ risen from the dead will kiss thee once more because thy perjured mouth has been washed clean forever by thy tears.

THEN THE HIGH PRIEST RENT HIS CLOTHES

Caiaphas’ real name was Joseph. Caiaphas is a surname and is the same word as Cephas, Simon’s surname, that is to say, Rock. On that Friday morning’s dawn, the Son of Man was caught between those two rocks like a grain of wheat between two millstones. Simon Peter is the type of the timid friends who knew not how to save Him: Joseph Peter, of His enemies, determined at any cost to destroy Him. Between the denial of Simon and the hatred of Joseph, between the head of the church about to disappear and the head of the Church just coming into existence, between those two rocks Jesus was like wheat between the mill-stones.

The Sanhedrin had already come together and was awaiting Him. Together with Annas and Caiaphas who presided, there were John, Alexander, and all the reeking scum of the upper classes. As a rule the Sanhedrin was composed of twenty-three priests, twenty-three Scribes, twenty-three Elders, and two Presidents, in all, seventy-one. But on this occasion some were absent, those who had more fear of an uprising of the people than hatred for the blasphemer, and those few who would not lift a finger to condemn Him, but would not defend Him openly: among these last were certainly Nicodemus, the nocturnal disciple, and Joseph of Arimathea, who was devoutly to lay Jesus in His tomb.

They had come together to ratify with a cloak of legality the decree of murder already written on their hearts. These delegates from the Temple, from the School and the Bank, burned with impatience to confirm, each for his own reasons, their revengeful sentence. The great room of the council already full of people was like a den of werewolves. The new day showed itself hesitatingly: the orange-colored tongues of the torches were scarcely visible in the dim light of dawn. In this sinister half-shadow the Jews were waiting: aged, 319portly, hook-nosed, harsh, beetle-browed, wrapped in their white cloaks, their heads covered, stroking their venerable beards, with choleric eyes, seated in a half circle, they seemed a council of sorcerers awaiting a living offering. The rest of the hall was occupied by the clients of the seated assembly, by guards with staves in their hands, by the domestic servants of the house. The air was heavy and dense as in a charnel house.

Jesus, His wrists still tied with ropes, was thrust into the midst of this kennel like a condemned man thrown to the beasts of the Imperial amphitheater. Annas had gathered together in all haste from among the rabble some false witnesses to make an end of any discussion or defense. The pretense of a trial began with calling these perjurers. Two of them came forward and swore that they had heard these words: “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands.”

At the time and for those hearers this accusation was a very grave one, meaning nothing less than sacrilege and blasphemy. For in the minds of its upholders the Temple of Jerusalem was the one intangible home of the Lord. And to threaten the Temple was to threaten their real Master, the Master of all the Jews. But Jesus had never said these words or at least not in this form, nor with this meaning. It is true that He had announced that of the Temple not one stone would remain upon another, but not through any action of His. And the reference to the Temple not made with hands, built up in three days, was part of another discourse in which He had spoken figuratively of His resurrection. The false witnesses could not even agree about these words confusedly and maliciously repeated, and one statement from Jesus would have been enough to confound them utterly. But Jesus held His peace.

The High Priest could not endure this silence, and standing up, cried out, “Answerest thou nothing? What is it which these witness against thee?”

But Jesus answered nothing.

These silences of Jesus were so weighty with magnetic eloquence 320that they enraged His judges. He held His peace at the first questioning of Annas. He was silent now at the outcry of Caiaphas and He was to be silent with Antipas and Pilate.

He had made already, a thousand times, the statements He might have made now, and any other answers He might have made would either have been misunderstood by His judges, or have been used by them as new pretexts for attacking Him. Superhuman truths are in their very nature ineffable, and only a shadow of them can be grasped, through a loving effort by those who already have a faint divination of that shadow; and even to them this comes more through the heart than through faulty and defective words.

Jesus did not speak, but looked about Him with His great calm eyes, at the troubled and convulsed faces of His assassins, and for all eternity judged these phantom judges. In a flash every one of them was weighed and condemned by that look which went straight to the soul. Were they worthy to hear His words, those flawed, self-seeking souls, empty and inane, those of them that are not ulcerous and moribund? How could He ever, by the most unthinkable prodigy, stoop to justify Himself before them?

Such self-justification was attempted by the son of the midwife, the flat-nosed student and rival of the Sophists! The seventy-year-old arguer, who for so many years had bored the artisans and the idlers on the market-place, was capable of reciting to the judges of Athens an eloquent and carefully arranged oration of excuses, which, from the limits of dialectics, descended little by little to the sophistries of law courts. It is true that the ironical old man who had set himself to reform the art of thinking rather than the art of living, who had not been above usury, who, not having his fill with Xantippe, had had two children by his concubine Myra, and who amused himself with caressing handsome young men more than was becoming for the father of a family, was ready to die, and knew how to die with noble firmness; but at the bottom of his heart he would have preferred to descend into Hades by the more natural road. Towards the end of his specious defense, 321he tried to placate his judges by recalling his old age to them. “It is useless to kill me because I will die very soon anyhow”—and offered to pay thirty greater minæ if they would let him go in peace.

But Christ was neither a sophist nor a lawyer, Christ whom so many posthumous Pilates have tried to belittle by comparing Him to Socrates, so inferior to Him. Like Dante’s angel, He disdained human discussions. He answered with silence, or if He was forced to speak, spoke candidly and briefly. Caiaphas, exasperated by this disrespectful taciturnity, finally hit on a way to make him speak. “I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God.”

As long as they conducted His trial with the usual insidious procedure, adducing falsities or asking Him about perfectly well-known truths, Jesus said no word; but even in the infamous mouth of the High Priest, the invocation to the living God was irresistible. Jesus could not deny Himself to the living God, to the God who will live eternally, and who lives in all of us, and who was present there even in that lair of demons. And yet He hesitated a moment before dazzling those bleared eyes with the splendor of His formidable secret.

“If I tell you, ye will not believe: And if I also ask you, ye will not answer me.”

Now Caiaphas was not alone in putting the question; all of them, excited, sprang to their feet and cried out, their clawing fingers stretched towards Him, “Art thou then the Son of God?”

Jesus could not, like Peter, deny the irrefutable certainty which was the reason for His life and for His death. He was responsible towards His own people and towards all men. But, as at Cæsarea, He wished others to be the ones to pronounce His real name, and when they had said it He did not refuse it, even though death were the penalty.

“Ye say that I am. I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.”

He had condemned Himself out of His own mouth. The 322snarling pack about Him was frothing at the mouth with delight and anger. In the presence of His assassins He had proclaimed what He had secretly admitted to His most loving friends. Although they might betray Him, He had not betrayed Himself or His father. Now He was ready for the last degradation. He had said what He had to say.

Caiaphas was triumphant. Pretending a shocked horror which he did not feel—because like all the Sadducees he had no faith whatever in the apocalyptic writers and cared about nothing but the fees and honors of the Temple—he rent his priestly garments, crying out, “He hath spoken blasphemy! What further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy. What think ye?”

And all the noisy kennel bayed out their answer, “He is guilty of death.”

And without any further examination, without a single protest, they all condemned Him to death as a blasphemer and false prophet.

The comedy of legal pretense was played to an end, and the cloaked ghosts felt themselves relieved of an immense weight. It had cost the High Priest a garment and he let the torn pieces hang like glorious symbols of victorious battle. He did not know that on that very day a garment more precious than any of his was to be torn, and he did not dream that his gesture was a symbolic recognition of another death-sentence. The priesthood of which he was the head was henceforth disqualified and abolished forever. His successors were to be mere semblances of priests, spurious and illegitimate, and in a few years the sumptuous garment of marble and masonry of the Jewish sanctuary was to be rent by the Roman rabble.

AND WHEN THEY HAD BLINDFOLDED HIM

When the tragi-comedy acted by the masters had ended in a death-sentence, the devils’ band of subalterns had their turn. While the high officials went apart to take counsel on the manner of securing the ratification from the Procurator 323and executing the death sentence with all speed, Jesus was thrown as prey to the rabble in the Palace, as the offal of the slain animal is thrown to the pack which has taken part in the hunt. The ruffians who lived upon the leavings of the Temple felt that they had as their perquisite the right to some amusement. Man, the beast, when he is certain of impunity, knows no more pleasing recreation than to wreak himself upon the defenseless, especially if the defenseless is innocent. Our bestial nature, crouching untamed at the bottom of every human heart, rushes out bold and snarling; the face becomes a muzzle, teeth are tusks, hands appear what they really are, claws, the articulate sounds of human speech vanish in snarlings and growlings. If a drop of blood reddens to the view, they jostle each other to lick it up: there is no more intoxicating liquor than blood: it is far more stimulating than wine, and far fairer to see, red as it is, than the water of Pilate.

But tigerishness breaking loose readily takes the form of play; even tigers are sportive, even children, as soon as they begin to grow strong at all, are tigerish. The captors of Christ, waiting for foreign authority to confirm the death sentence of the most innocent of their brothers, meant to give Christ a humorous foretaste of His sufferings. They had permission to jest with their King, to divert themselves with their God. And they felt that they really deserved some amusement; they had been awake all night long, and the night had been cold: and then the march up to the Mount of Olives, fearing resistance, a well-grounded fear, since one of them had had his ear stricken off; and then the long wait, till dawn, a very tiring business especially on those festal days when the city and the Temple were full of foreigners and there was so much more for every one to do.

But they did not know how to begin. He was tied and his friends had disappeared. But this man who looked at them with an expression they had never seen till then, with a steady look which seemed beyond all earthly things and yet searched them out within like a ray of troublesome sunshine—this man, bound, exhausted, the fresh sweat on His face softening the 324drops of dried blood on His cheeks, this insignificant man, this defenseless provincial with no protecting patrons, condemned to death by the highest and holiest tribunal of the Jewish people, this human rubbish destined to the cross of slaves and thieves, this laughingstock whom the authorities had given over to their abuse like a puppet at the saturnalia, this man who did not speak nor complain nor weep, but who looked on them as if He had compassion on them, as a father might look at his sick child, as a friend might look at a delirious friend, this man, mocked by all, inspired in their worthless souls a mysterious reverence.

But one of the Scribes or the Elders gave the example, and spat at Jesus as he passed by Him. He was too careful of His ritual cleanliness to contaminate His newly washed hands, ready for the Passover, by touching an enemy of God, who, near to death, was already impure like a corpse. But saliva: what is saliva? Refuse of the body, contempt materialized in a liquid.

And on that face illumined by the early morning sun and by imprisoned divinity, on that face transfigured by the light of the sun and by love’s light, on the golden face of Christ, the spittle of the Jews covered the first blood of the Passion. But for the rabble of the servants and the guards spitting was not enough, nor were they afraid of sullying their hands. The example of the leaders had overcome the impression made on them by the condemned man’s sad and brotherly look. The guards who were nearest Him struck Him in the face; those who could not strike His face rained down blows and threats, and the words which came from the mouths of those insensate men wounded Him more cruelly than blows.

That face, which had been white as a hawthorn blossom and shining like sunlight, darkened into the livid purple of beaten flesh. The fair, gracious body, reeling with blows, staggered in the midst of the heaving crowd. Christ said no word to those who vomited out on Him the appalling contents of their souls. He had answered the guard who had struck Him in the presence of Annas, asking him to correct Him if He had spoken ill; for this ribald mob let loose He had no answer. 325But one of them more quick-witted or more childish than the others had an idea: he took a dirty cloth and with it covered the bleeding, buffeted face, tying the corners behind. And he said: “Let us play blind man’s buff. This man boasts of being a prophet; let us see if he can guess which of us is striking him.”

Christ’s face was covered. Was there, in the action of the ruffians, an unconsciously compassionate desire to spare Him, at least, the sight of His brothers become like beasts? Or was that look of suffering love really unendurable to them? With childish cruelty, they arranged themselves in a circle about Him and first one and then another twitched a fold of His garment, gave Him a blow on the shoulder, thrust Him in the back, struck Him with a staff over the head: “Prophesy! Who is it that smote thee?”

Why did He not answer? Had He not predicted the ruin of the Temple, wars and earthquakes, the coming of the Son of Man on clouds and many other idle stories? How was it that now He could not make such an easy guess, give the name of a person so close at hand? What sort of a prophet was this? Had he lost His power all at once, or had He never had it? He might be able to make those poor countrified Galileans believe His stories, but here we are in Jerusalem, the city which understands prophets and kills them when they do not show a proper spirit. Luke adds, “And many other things blasphemously spake they against him.”

But Caiaphas and the others were in haste and thought that the servile pack had amused itself long enough. The false king must be taken to Pilate that his sentence be confirmed: the Sanhedrin could pronounce judgment, but since Judea was under Roman rule, it had no longer, unfortunately, the Jus Gladii. And the High Priests, Scribes and Elders, set out for the Palace of the Procurator, followed by the guards leading Jesus with ropes, and by the yelling horde which grew larger as they went along the street.

326

PONTIUS PILATE

Since A. D. 26, Pontius Pilate had been Procurator in the name of Tiberius Cæsar. Historians know nothing of him before his arrival in Judea. If the name comes from Pileatus it may be supposed that he was a freedman or descendant of freedmen, since the Pileo, or skull cap, was the head gear of freed slaves.

He had been in Judea only a few years, but long enough to draw upon himself the bitterest hate of those over whom he ruled. It is true that all our information about him comes from Jews and Christians, who were, of course, his declared enemies; but it appears that he finally lost favor even with his masters, since in A. D. 36 the Governor of Syria, Lucius Vitellius, sent him to Rome to justify himself before Tiberius. The Emperor died before Pilate arrived in the metropolis, but according to tradition, he was exiled by Caligula, exiled into Gaul, where he killed himself.

In the first place the hatred of the Jews came from the profound scorn which he showed from the start for this stiff-necked, indocile people, who must have seemed to him, brought up in Roman ideas, like a snake pit of venomous serpents—a low, dirty crowd, scarcely worthy to be tamed by the cudgels of the mercenaries. To have an idea of Pilate’s personality, make a mental picture of an English Viceroy of India, a subscriber to the Times, a reader of John Stuart Mill and Shaw—with Byron and Swinburne on his bookshelves—destined to administer the government over a ragged, captious, hungry and turbulent people, wrangling among themselves over a confusion of castes and mythologies and superstitions for which their ruler feels in his heart the profoundest aversion, looking down on them from the height of his dignity as a white man, a European, a Briton and a Liberal. Pilate, as shown by his questions put to Jesus, was one of those skeptics of the Roman decadence corrupted with Pyrrhonism, a devotee of Epicurus, an encyclopedist of Hellenism without any belief in the gods of his country, nor any belief that any real God existed at all. The idea certainly can never have 327occurred to Pilate that the true God could be found in this vermin-ridden, superstitious mob, in the midst of this factious and jealous clergy, in this religion which must have seemed to him like a barbarous mixture of Syrian and Chaldean oracles. The only faith remaining to him, or which he needed to pretend to hold because of his office, was the new Roman religion, civic and political, concentrated on the cult of the Emperor. The first conflict with the Jews arose in fact from this religion. When he had changed the guard of Jerusalem, he ordered the soldiers to enter the city by night, without taking off from their ensigns the silver images of Cæsar. In the morning, as soon as the Jews were aware of this, great was the horror and the uproar. It was the first time that the Romans had lacked in external respect for the religion of their subjects in Palestine. These figures of the deified Cæsar planted near the Temple were for them an idolatrous provocation, the beginning of the abomination of desolation. All the country was in an uproar; a deputation was sent to Cæsarea to have Pilate take them away. Pilate refused; for five days and nights they stormed about him day and night. Finally the Procurator, to get himself out of the trouble, convoked them in the amphitheater and treacherously had them surrounded with soldiers with naked swords, assuring them that no one would escape if they did not make an end of their clamor. But the Jews, instead of asking for mercy, offered their throats to the swords, and Pilate, conquered by this heroic stubbornness, ordered that the insignia be carried back to Cæsarea.

But if this clemency did not diminish the hatred of the Jews for the new Procurator, neither did it lessen Pilate’s distaste nor his desire to do them an ill turn. A little while after this, he introduced into Herod’s palace, where he lived when he stayed at Jerusalem, votive tablets dedicated to the Emperor. But the priests heard of it and once more the people were aroused to outraged and furious anger. He was asked to take away the idolatrous objects at once. An appeal to Cæsar was threatened, an appeal supported by evidence of the impositions and cruelties committed by Pilate. Pilate this time also did not yield. The Jews then made the appeal to Tiberius, 328who decreed that the tablets should be sent back to Cæsarea.

Twice Pilate had had the worst of a dispute. But the third time he was triumphant. Coming from the city of public baths and aqueducts, a friend, as is well known, of ablutions, he noticed that Jerusalem lacked water and he planned to have a fine large reservoir constructed and an aqueduct several miles long. But the undertaking was expensive and to pay for it he used a goodly sum taken from the treasury of the Temple. The treasury was rich, for all the Jews scattered about in the Empire came there to bring offerings, and when they could not come in person sent them from a distance—but the priests cried out on the sacrilege, and the people incited by them made such a commotion that when Pilate came for the Feast of the Passover to Jerusalem, thousands of men gathered in a tumultuous crowd in front of his Palace. But this time he sent among the multitude a large number of disguised soldiers who at a given signal began to lay about them so vigorously, among the most furious of the crowd, that in a short time they all fled away, and Pilate could enjoy in peace the water of the reservoir paid for with the Jews’ money, and make use of it for his various ablutions.

Only a short time had passed since this last encounter and now these very priests who three times had risen against his authority, the very ones who had tried to obtain his deposition, the very ones who hated him heartily, hated him as a Roman, as a symbol of the foreign dominion and of their slavery, and hated him still more personally as Pontius Pilate, as plotter against their religion and thief of their money—these very High Priests were forced to have recourse to him in order to vent another hatred, which for the moment was more bitter in their wicked hearts. Only hard necessity drove them to it, because death sentences could not be carried out if they were not confirmed by Cæsar’s representative.

That Friday, at dawn, Pontius Pilate, wrapped in his toga, still sleepy and yawning, was waiting for them in Herod’s palace, very ill-disposed towards those tiresome trouble-makers, whose contentions had forced him to rise earlier than usual.

329

WHAT IS TRUTH?

The crowd of the accusers and of the rough populace finally came out into the open place which was before Herod’s palace, but they stopped outside, because if they went into a house where there was leaven and bread baked with leaven, they would be contaminated all day long and could not eat the Passover. Innocent blood does not pollute, but leaven does.

Pilate, warned of their coming, went out on the door-sill and asked abruptly: “What accusation bring ye against this man?”

Those who were before him were his enemies. It appeared that this man was their enemy and Pilate instinctively took his part. Not that he had any pity for him—was he not a Jew like the others, and poor into the bargain? But if he were by any chance innocent, Pilate had no mind to lend himself to a whim of those detestable vermin.

Caiaphas answered at once as if offended: “If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him up unto you.”

Then Pilate who wished to lose no time with ecclesiastical squabbles, and did not think that there was any question of a capital crime, answered dryly: “Take ye him, and judge him according to your law.”

Already in these words appears his wish to save the man without being forced to take sides openly. But the concession of the Procurator, which in any other case would have delighted Caiaphas and his party, this time did not suit them, because the Sanhedrin could inflict only light sentences and now they desired the most extreme sentence of all and could not dispense with the Roman arm. They answered: “It is not lawful for us to put any man to death.”

Pilate suddenly understood what sentence they wished passed on the wretched man who stood before him, and he wished to find out what crime He had committed. What might seem worthy of a death sentence to those bigoted rabbis might seem a venial fault in the eyes of a Roman.

The foxes of the Temple had thought of this difficulty before taking action. They knew very well that Pilate would not be satisfied if they told him that this man attacked the 330religion of their fathers and announced the Kingdom of God. They were prepared therefore to lie. For a man about to commit a base action, one more accessory and subordinate infamy seems of little consequence. Pilate could be conquered only with his own weapons, by appealing to his loyalty to Rome and to the Emperor and to the basis of his office-holding. It was already agreed that they would give a political color to the accusation. If they told him that Jesus was a false Messiah, Pilate would smile. But if they said that He was a seditious inciter of revolt, that He was trying to rouse the common people against Rome, Pilate could not do less than put Him to death.

“We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Cæsar, saying that he himself is Christ, a King.... He stirreth up all the people, teaching throughout all Jewry, beginning from Galilee to this place.”

Every word was a lie. Jesus had commanded men to render unto Cæsar that which was Cæsar’s. He paid no attention whatever to the Romans. He said that He was Christ but not in the coarse, political meaning of a King of the Jews: and He did not stir up the people but wished to make of an unhappy and degraded people a blessed kingdom of saints. However grave these accusations might have seemed to Pilate if they had been true, they only increased his suspicions of the priests. Was it probable that those treacherous vipers who detested him and Rome, and who had tried to overturn him so many times and whose one dream was to sweep away the governing pagans and foreigners, should suddenly be kindled with so much zeal to denounce a rebel of their own nation?

Pilate was not convinced and he wished to find out for himself, by questioning the accused man in private. He went back into the palace and commanded that Jesus be brought to him. Disregarding the less important accusations, he went at once to the essential: “Art thou the King of the Jews?”

But Jesus did not answer. How could He ever make this Roman understand! This Roman who knew nothing of God’s promises, misinformed by His assassins, a Pyrrhonic atheist, whose only religion was the artificial and diabolical cult of a 331living man—and of what a man—Tiberius!—how could He ever explain to this freedman, a pupil of the lawyers and rhetoricians of Rome in the most decadent of all the degenerate foulness of that time; how could He explain that He was the King of a Kingdom not yet founded, of a spiritual Kingdom which would abolish all human kingdoms?

Jesus read the depths of Pilate’s soul and made no answer, as He had kept silent at first before Annas and before Caiaphas. The Procurator could not understand this silence on the part of a man over whom hung the threat of death. “Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee?”

But Jesus answered him never a word. Pilate, who at all costs wished to triumph over those who hated him as much as they hated this man, insisted, hoping to extract a denial which would permit him to set Him at liberty: “Art thou the King of the Jews?”

If Jesus denied this He would betray Himself. He had said to His disciples and to the Jews that He was Christ. He had no wish to lie and save Himself. The better to sound the Roman’s mind He answered Him, as was his wont, with another question: “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?”

Pilate answered, as if offended, “Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee unto me. Art thou the King of the Jews?”

With the exception of this contemptuous beginning, this answer of Pilate was conciliatory. “For whom do you take me? Do you not know that I am a Roman, that I do not believe what your enemies believe? Your accusers are priests, not I; but they are obliged to give you into my hands: your safety rests with me: tell me that what they say is not true and you shall be free.”

Jesus had no wish to escape death, but still He determined to try to shed more light on this pagan. Everything is possible to the Father: was it not possible that Pilate might be the last convert of the dying man?

“My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be 332delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.”

The servant of Tiberius did not understand. The difference between “of this world” and “my kingdom is not from hence” was obscure to him. Pilate thought that what is the phrase “not of this world” meant the gods above if there were really any, gods favorable or malignant to men, and below in Hades the shadows of the dead if really there was anything remaining of us when the body had been consumed by fire or worms: the only reality for such a man as Pilate was “this world,” the great world with all its kingdoms. And once more he asked: “Art thou a king then?”

There was no longer any reason to deny. He would say to this blinded man what He had proclaimed to the others: “Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”

Then Pilate, annoyed by what seemed to him truculent mystification, answered with the celebrated question: “What is truth?”

And without waiting for an answer, he rose to go out. The skeptical Roman had many times been present at the endless disputes of philosophers, and because he had heard so many contradictory metaphysical contentions and so many sophistical quibblings, had become convinced that truth did not exist, or if it did exist, could never be known by men. He did not dream for a moment that this obscure Jew who stood before him as a malefactor could tell him the truth. It was Pilate’s destiny on that one day of his life to contemplate the face of truth, supreme truth made man, and he could not see it. Living truth, the truth which could have made him a new man, was before him clothed with human flesh and rough garments, with buffeted face, and hands tied. But in his arrogance he did not guess what prodigious good fortune was his, a good fortune which millions of men have envied him after his death. If any one had told him that because of this one encounter, because to him was vouchsafed the overwhelming honor of 333having spoken to Jesus and having sent Him to the cross, his name would be known, although in infamy and malediction, through all the centuries and by all the human race, such a prophecy would have seemed to him like the frenzied ravings of a madman. Pilate was blind with an appalling and incurable blindness, but Christ on that very day was to pardon even him because the blind, even less than others, know what they do.

CLAUDIA PROCULA

Just as Pilate was preparing to go out and give his answer to the Jews, who were muttering restlessly and impatiently before the door, a servant sent by his wife came up to him, giving him this message: “Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.”

No one in the four Gospels tells us what impression was made on the Procurator by this unexpected intercession from his wife. We know nothing of her except her name. According to the Gospel of Nicodemus her name was Claudia Procula, and if this name was really hers she may have belonged to the Gente Claudia, distinguished and powerful at Rome. We may thus suppose that she was by birth and connections of a higher social rank than her husband, and that Pilate, a mere freedman, may have owed to her and her influence in Rome his post in Judea.

If all this was true, certainly the request of Claudia Procula must have made some impression on Pilate, especially if he loved her; and that he loved her, at least as a man of his nature could love, seems proved by the fact that he had asked to take her with him into Asia. The Lex Oppia, although mitigated by a decree of the Senate in the consulship of Cethegus and Varro, forbade the pro-consuls to take their wives with them, and Pontius Pilate had a special permit from Tiberius allowing Claudia Procula to accompany him to Palestine.

The motives for this intercession, so briefly stated, are mysterious. The words of Matthew refer to a dream in which she 334had suffered because of Jesus: it is probable that she had heard people talking for some time of the new Prophet; perhaps she had seen Him, and found Him very different from the other Jews. The fact that He was neither a vulgar demagogue nor a hypocritical Pharisee must have been pleasing to the imagination of a fanciful Roman woman. She did not understand the language spoken in Jerusalem, but some interpreter of the law courts might have repeated to her some of Jesus’ words, words which would have convinced her that He was not, as they said, a dangerous criminal.

In those days the Romans, especially Roman women, were beginning to feel the attraction of Oriental myths and cults, which gave more satisfaction to the longing for personal immortality than the old Latin religion, a cold, legal, businesslike exchange of sacrifices to obtain utilitarian and political ends. Many patrician women, even in Rome, had been initiated into the mysteries of Mithra, Osiris and of Isis, the Great Mother, and some showed a certain leaning towards Judaism. In that very reign of Tiberius many Jews living in Rome were exiled from the Capital because, according to Josephus, some of them had deceived a matron Fulvia—converted to Judaism—and Fulvia, as we see from a reference of Suetonius, was not the only one.

It is not impossible that Claudia Procula, living in Judea, had been curious to know more in detail about the religion of the people governed by her husband, and that, curious like all women about new things, she had tried to find out what new doctrines were being preached by the Galilean prophet of whom every one in Jerusalem was talking. It is certain that she had become convinced that Jesus was a “just man” and hence innocent. The dream of that night, the terrible dream—for she had “suffered many things” in it—had confirmed her in this conviction, and it is not surprising that relying on the influence which women have with their husbands, even if their husbands love them no longer, she sent this imploring message to Pilate.

It is enough for us that she called Him “That just man”—the man whom the Jews wished to assassinate. Together with the Centurion of Capernaum and with the Canaanite woman, 335Claudia Procula is the first pagan who believed in Christ, and the Greek Church has good reason to revere her as a Saint.

This message from his wife strengthened Pilate’s reluctance, inclined as he already was to neutrality, if not to clemency, through his animosity to Caiaphas, and perhaps through the words of the Accused. Claudia Procula had not said, “Save Him”—but: “Have thou nothing to do with that just man.” This was Pilate’s idea, also; as if he had a confused divination of the importance of this mysterious beggar who called Himself King. At the very first he had ordered the Jews to judge Him, themselves, but they had not been willing to do this. Then another way to evade the responsibility occurred to him. He went back to Jesus and asked whether He were a Galilean.

This evasion seemed to promise success. Jesus did not belong to his jurisdiction, but to that of Herod Antipas. By good luck Herod was there at Jerusalem at that very time, come as was his wont for the Passover. The Procurator had found a legitimate subterfuge to satisfy his wife—and to free himself from this troublesome perplexity. With one stroke he would ingratiate himself with the Jews, leaving to one of their own race the decisive judgment, and at the same time he would do a bad turn to the patriarch whom he hated with all his heart because he suspected him with good reason of spying on him and tale-bearing to Tiberius. So, losing no time, he ordered the soldiers to take Jesus before Herod.

THE WHITE CLOAK

The third judge before whom Jesus was led was a son of that bloody-minded hog, Herod the Great, by one of his five wives. He was the true son of his father because he wronged his brothers as his father had wronged his sons. When his brother Archelaus, his own half-brother, was accused by his subjects, he managed to have him exiled. He robbed his other brother Herod of his wife. When he was seventeen years old he began to reign as Tetrarch over Galilee and over Berea, and to ingratiate himself with Tiberius, offered himself as a secret tale-bearer of the sayings and doings of his brothers 336and of the Roman officials in Judea. On a voyage to Rome he fell in love with Herodias, who was both his niece and his sister-in-law, since she was the daughter of his brother Aristobulus, and wife of his brother Herod, and not shrinking from the double incest, he persuaded her to follow him, together with Salome, the daughter of the adulteress. His first wife, daughter of Aretas, king of the Nabatei, went back to her father, who declared war on Antipas and defeated him.