[ p. 271 ]
JESUS had determined the nature of his entry into Jerusalem. “Behold your king cometh meek, and riding upon an ass,” ran the prophecy; and he had determined to fulfill it.
When they were approaching Jerusalem towards the Mount of Olives and had come as far as the village of Bethany, which lay off the road, Jesus said to two of his disciples :
“Go into the village yonder, and just as you enter it you will find an ass’s colt tethered, on which no man has ever sat. Untie him and bring him here. And if anyone ask you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Master needs it, and he will straightway send it back to you again.’ ”
They went away and found a colt tethered outside a door opening on the by-road, and they untied him. Some men standing by said to them: are you doing, untying that colt? They [ p. 272 ] said what Jesus told them to say, and the men let them go.
It is clear from Mark’s subsequent story that Jesus had at least one friend in Bethany Simon the Leper at whose house he dined on the night before the Last Supper. Moreover, Bethany was his headquarters during his days in Jerusalem. From Bethany he set out in the morning, to Bethany he returned in the evening.
Probably it was at Simon the Leper’s house that he lodged. Probably, too, it was Simon who had provided for him the unbroken colt. It was not necessary to suppose that Jesus’ acquaintance with Bethany was of long standing. Simon may have been one of those in Judaea who heard of Jesus’ fame and came to follow him. Jesus must have had many such scattered disciples on whose loyal assistance he could call.
We may suppose that when his decision to come to Jerusalem had been taken, Jesus sent word to Simon in Bethany, telling him the day when he would reach Jerusalem, and bidding him have ready an unbroken colt for his entry. Nothing was more evidently prearranged in Jesus’ life than [ p. 273 ] his journey to Jerusalem: the day of his entry was fixed long beforehand, as was the day of his death.
Jesus had determined to enter Jerusalem as the Messiah, but as the Messiah of his own conception. It was no part of his purpose, indeed it was a sheer impossibility, that he should be recognized by others than his own close disciples as Messiah ; and his own near disciples could not understand the conception of the Messiah which he had created. It may be doubted whether they even understood the meaning of his chosen entry, for Jesus was fulfilling prophecies that he alone had connected and understood. He had fashioned the Messiah that he was to be from the compulsion of his own consciousness and circumstance : where the prophets helped him he availed himself of their help ; where they could be obeyed, he obeyed them.
In the late afternoon the ass was brought to Jesus. His disciples put their cloaks upon it for a saddle-cloth; and Jesus seated himself. Some spread their cloaks on the road before him ; others strewed branches and leaves. Jesus rode in the midst of the company. Before and behind him they cried out “Hosannal” as they went along.
What were the actual words of the acclamation [ p. 274 ] we cannot say. Those given by the evangelists have, unfortunately, been reshaped to accord with their belief that Jesus entered Jerusalem openly as the Messiah, which is impossible. Jesus entered Jerusalem to the outward eye as a prophet alone, “When he entered Jerusalem,” says Matthew, ‘the whole city was agog, saying, Who is this?’ And people said, ‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.’ "
But there was that in the acclamation which offended the eager ears of Pharisees in the crowd. That Jesus should be acclaimed even as a prophet was intolerable to them : their minds had no place for another prophet. The revelation had been, and it was not to be added to. They bade Jesus rebuke his disciples. He replied :
“I tell you if they were silent, the very stones would cry out!” And Luke, who tells us this, tells us also that when Jesus came in sight of the city he wept and cried :
“If only thou knewest this day the secret of peace! But now it is hidden from thine eyes!”
At the first moment of his encounter with Jerusalem, the spiritual tension of Jesus was extreme. His lonely and bitter journey at the head of his uncomprehending [ p. 275 ] followers, his superhuman resolution, his acceptance of his created destiny, had worked a kind of sublime intoxication on his soul. He had lifted himself by the sheer intensity of his insight, his courage, and his love, above the ways of mortal men. Jerusalem had become for him a city of the spirit, a symbol, the bowl for the blood of prophets, the sacrificial altar of God’s only son. That it was : that he made it to all time.
But it was a place of earth, earthy. Its mighty temple to the ineffable God, gleaming with silver and gold, built mountain-high on pillared stones over the valleys of Jerusalem, was a second Babylon. Like Babylon, it was one of the wonders of the world; like Babylon, its seething population uttered the everlasting materiality of creation. Seething, huckstering, chaffering crowds filled its courts, with a babel of chattering voices and the steam of rank humanity. What had those crowds scrambling for profit out of piety to do with the Ineffable One? Sons of what Father were they?
Jesus seems for a moment to have recoiled. He looked round the Temple Courts in the evening of his entry, and returned to Bethany, “because it was already late,” says Mark. But there is that in [ p. 276 ] his immediately following narrative which tells a different story. There was a moment of recoil. On his grim journey to Jerusalem Jesus, who knew so well the things that are, had forgotten them. He had needed to forget them and to remember only himself and God.
The sight of the seething Temple recalled him with a shock to reality, yet recalled him only halfway. He was poised midway between two worlds, distraught between two certainties, as a ship will shiver in the meeting place of wind and tide.
With an effort of will he asserted his inward certainty against the outward. God and himself were real: Jerusalem and the Temple a dream. “Destroy this Temple,” he said, as he looked round its crowded courts, “and I will raise it again in three days.” The curious crowd that had followed the Galilean prophet from the gates of the city marked his words.
What did he mean? Nothing at that moment of sudden tension but what he said. He was possessed by a sense of omnipotence. Now or never God must be with him, filling him with power. But what he meant was nothing but the extreme assertion of the truth to which we who so passionately [ p. 277 ] scrutinize his history are the unconscious witnesses—that the spirit is mightier than the world of things. At that moment, we doubt not, Jesus meant that a more glorious Temple would arise at his creative word. Whether with great stones and roofs of gold, or simply in the consummation of that unity of man and God which he knew who can say? Could Jesus himself at that moment have said?
He had but uttered his exultant sense that the things of earth and the great city of Jerusalem were as a dream compared with God’s power that worked in him and had borne him to this encounter. He had reasserted his inward certainty against the outward fact: it had triumphed, at a price. The effort of the tense will was to betray itself.
He returned to Bethany and passed a night of wakeful and tremendous expectation: the very thought of food was forgotten. As he journeyed in the morning back to Jerusalem a sudden hunger possessed him. In the distance he saw a fig tree in leaf. He went to it: it had no fruit. Among the forgotten things of earth he had forgotten that he was not now in gentler Galilee, where figs were [ p. 278 ] early. Near Jerusalem “it was not the season of figs.” And he turned on the fig tree:
“May no one ever eat fruit from thee forever!”
The disciples heard him. Peter surely did, and told the queer and vivid story to Mark years after. It tells us something precious for the understanding of Jesus’ state of soul as he went to the doing of the most outwardly striking act of his life—the cleansing of the Temple. For that was—to use the word precisely—the most deliberate act of his life. Here for a moment he seems not to be obeying some inward and inevitable compulsion, but as it were imposing an act upon himself by force of will. This thing stands out from among the certain actions of his life as one that he might not have done. It is not inevitably his own : neither is the cursing of the fig tree. They belong together, and belong together to one particular moment of his destiny—the last final clash of spiritual certainty and material fact.
In his lonely concentration on the things that are not yet he had forgotten the things that are and the sudden awareness of them created in his tense soul a strange exasperation. He was omnipotent, and he was not; things were, and they were not. [ p. 279 ] For a moment by an act of will he would make them other than they were. He came to the Temple and imperiously drove out before him the buyers and sellers from the Court of the Gentiles ; he overturned the money-changers’ tables and the stools of -the dove-sellers; he stopped and turned back the carriers who made the Temple Courts their thoroughfare ; and he cried :
“Is it not written: ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the Gentiles?’ And you have made it a den of thieves.”
For an instant he had succeeded. He had flung himself alone against the vast materiality of the Temple, and it had yielded. The eager crowd be-, hind him, avid to see the doings of the Galilean prophet, his own faithful and enthusiast company from Galilee, had frightened the market-keepers for a day: but only for a day.
But it was not that which awakened him. Rather a sense of his own exasperation; a knowledge that his own anger, being anger, was wrong. He had been caught unawares where wind and tide meet, and the tiller had trembled in his hands. Such, it seems, is the thought behind the visibly [ p. 280 ] authentic words he spoke on the next day as they came out again from Bethany.
Peter saw that the fig tree was withered. I do not pretend to know how it happened : a cold wind, a frost, anything. It was a poor fig tree and a solitary one. But it was withered. Jesus had forgotten all about it: it was the last thing he would have remembered at that moment. Peter reminded him.
“Look, Master, the fig tree you cursed is withered !”
Peter was surprised. The disciples, like the modern historian and probably for the same reason, could not get used to miracles.
Perhaps Jesus also was surprised ; but he was not in a mood to be surprised at anything. His words belong to a different order of thought
“Have faith in God,” he said. “Amen, I say to you that whoever shall say to this mountain: 'Be lifted up and cast into the sea/ and shall not doubt in his heart, but believe that what he says shall be, it shall be done for him. Therefore, I say to you all that you pray for and ask for, believe that you have already received it, and it shall be done unto you. And when you stand praying, if you have [ p. 281 ] anything against anyone forgive him, that your Father in heaven may forgive you your failings.”
Why should Jesus speak now of forgiveness as the essential to prayer? Surely because the memory of his own exasperation pressed hard upon him. When he had most greatly needed to be one with God, the perfect instrument of God’s purpose, he had been warped by anger. Anger for God, no doubt : but if God could not be angry, how could his son be? By anger God’s son ceased to be his son.
“Love your enemies, and pray for them that do you harm. That thus ye may become sons of your Father : for he makes his sun to rise upon good men and bad, and his rain to fall upon the just and the unjust.”
This was the secret. And prayer consisted in man’s knowledge of his union with God, of the son’s identity with his Father. Such prayer, which alone Jesus taught, is not a petition but a condition, a condition of which anger was the negation a vision of all things with the serene eye of the Creator-God. To such prayer all things were possible, for the son was one with God : yet by such prayer nothing could be demanded, for it was a [ p. 282 ] complete and open-eyed submission to God’s will. In such a condition, to believe that you have received a thing is indeed to have it, for you can believe that you have received only that which it is God’s will that you should receive.
So Jesus’ anger ebbed away. Henceforward, he appears as perfectly calm.