[ p. 346 ]
WHEN Jesus and the eleven had come to the garden of Gethsemane, he took Peter and James and John apart from the others. He was in agony.
“ My soul is sorrowful,” he said, “sorrowful to death. Wait here and keep awake.” He went forward a little from them and fell upon the ground, and prayed that if it were possible the hour might pass away from him.
“Abba!” he prayed. “Father, all things are possible to Thee. Take this cup away from me. Yet not what I will, but what Thou wilt.”
The disciples heard no more. It was late, past midnight, and they were drowsy with the stress of Jesus’ great farewell. They could not keep awake. The long, long prayers of Jesus in the night, when the son of God communed with his Father and struggled from agony of spirit into peace, had overborne them before. They stood apart from the [ p. 347 ] mystery : no tension of soul maintained them : they were weary and they slept.
He came and woke them:
“Asleep, Simon? You could not keep awake one single hour? Keep awake and pray that you be not made to endure the trial. For the spirit is eager, but the flesh is weak.”
Again he went from them, and again they heard the same Abba! and again they heard no more.
And again he came, to them. They blinked at him with their heavy eyes and had no word to say.
Not one watcher with him ; not one to warn him of the approach of his enemies. He was lonely indeed. Perhaps he prayed once more that the cup might pass from him; perhaps he only sat watching for the light of the torches through the dark. He saw the lights and heard the voices; then he came to the three disciples for the last time,
“Still sleeping?” he said. “Still resting? The time is past. The moment is come. Now the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Awake! Up I My betrayer is here.”
Even while he spoke, Judas was there, at the head of a company armed with swords and staves. [ p. 348 ] He made straight for Jesus ; spoke the single word Rabbi! and kissed the Master. At the sign the men laid hands upon him.
Jesus said:
“So you have come to take me, like a robber, with swords and staves. I was among you, teaching in the Temple every day; yet you did not touch me.”
For a brief moment Jesus’ followers showed fight One of them, who held one of the two swords, struck a blow at a servant of the HighPriest, and inflicted some small wound. But not with Jesus’ will: his bitter word concerning the two swords had been misunderstood.
“Put up your sword,” he said. “For those that take the sword shall perish by the sword.”
Then all his disciples fled. Only one unnamed youth made the attempt to remain at Jesus’ side. This surely must have been John Mark himself, afterwards the author of the Gospel which alone records his presence. Perhaps it was in his mother’s house that the Last Supper was held ; certainly in the early years of the Church at Jerusalem his mother’s house was a stronghold of the new faith. We may suppose that John Mark, then a boy, was [ p. 349 ] wakened by the singing of the Passover Psalm. He saw Jesus leading the disciples to Gethsemane in the night. His boyish curiosity was aroused, and he snatched a sheet from the bed to cover himself, and followed. He watched and listened to the agony in the garden, saw the arrest of Jesus and the flight of his disciples. But when the guards seized him his courage failed, and he fled naked, leaving the sheet in their hands.
The guards took Jesus to the house of the HighPriest. There they held him prisoner in a room that opened on to the great courtyard, wherein a fire was lit. To amuse themselves while they waited for the day his captors blindfolded him and beat him about the head, and called upon the prophet from Nazareth to prophesy who it was that beat him.
Meanwhile Peter’s courage had returned. He followed from a distance and bravely made his way into the courtyard. He sat down among the crowd of servants gathered round the fire. From where he was he could see his Master in the lighted room and his Master could see his face in the light of the fire. Suddenly % maidservant caught sight of him and [ p. 350 ] stared : she remembered his face ; she had seen him in the Temple at Jesus’ side. She called out: “You too were with Jesus the Nazarene!”
In the hush Peter’s voice could be heard in the room where Jesus was.
“I do not know what you are talking about; I do not understand.”
He went out of the courtyard into the outer court. As he went, the maidservant watched him and again told the servants standing by: “That is one of them.” They challenged him again, and he again denied it.
After a while he came back into the courtyard. He felt safe again, and began to speak to the servants. His accent or his dialect made them suspicious. “You must be one of them,” they said, “for you are from Galilee.” Then Peter swore with an oath: “I do not know the man of whom you speak.”
The cock crew. Jesus, who had heard Peter’s denial, turned round and glanced at him. Peter went outside and burst into tears.
At dawn the Sanhedrin gathered together in the High-Priest’s house and Jesus was taken before it An attempt was made to convict him by witnesses [ p. 351 ] of blasphemy against the Temple. He was charged with having said that if the Temple were destroyed, he would raise it up again; but the witnesses contradicted one another. Whether this was a serious attempt to secure his formal condemnation for blasphemy, we cannot say. Too little is known of the procedure of the Sanhedrin in those days ; it is not even known whether there was what we should call procedure at all.
To all the witnesses, whatever they witnessed, to all the questions, whatever the questions, Jesus made no reply. The word of the prophet had entered his soul. “As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.”
Then the High-Priest asked the secret which Judas had betrayed to him:
“Are you Messiah the King, the son of the Blessed One?”
There was no silence now. Jesus answered :
“I am ; and you shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”
The High-Priest rent his robe.
“What further need have we of witness? You [ p. 352 ] have heard his blasphemy. What is your judgment?”
They all judged him worthy of death.
Then Jesus was bound and led to Pilate. The whole Sanhedrin went with him. They laid their accusations : he had seduced the Jewish nation, he had spoken against paying tribute to Caesar, and he had called himself Messiah-King.
The word King struck Pilate; perhaps only that it was pathetically incongruous. Those who can believe that an unearthly royalty of a mysterious King of men shone in Jesus’ face at that moment, for one not passion-blind, may find another cause for Pilate’s question and his strange judgment on the answer.
“Are you the King of the Jews?” he asked.
“You have said it,” Jesus answered.
Was it strange or not that Pilate should have declared he found no crime in that reply? Was Jesus just a harmless visionary to a Roman weary, like Gallio, of the tumults of Jewish fanaticism? Or did one who stood apart have a glimpse of some incomprehensible nobility, a fleeting insight that the silent captive before him was the first of a new [ p. 353 ] race of men that he was one whose kingdom was indeed not of the world the Roman knew?
But whether the reply seems strange or not, there is surely no reason to hold with certain scholars that Pilate’s reluctance was invented by the early Christians in order to throw the odium of Jesus’ condemnation wholly upon the Jews. Nothing is more probable than that Pilate was not only indifferent to the matter in itself, but repelled by the fanatic violence of Jesus’ captors : it is the attitude we should expect of a Roman governor in Jerusalem.
Why should we not believe that Pilate’s curiosity was roused by the behavior of the captive? His silence before a torrent of accusations alone might give Pilate pause. Was there not a majesty visible in the face of a man whose spirit was to change the history of the world?
Pilate wondered, and was reluctant to condemn.
But the Sanhedrin grew more vehement: he was sowing revolution among the people by his teaching: he had begun in Galilee, now he had reached Jerusalem.
The word Galilee gave Pilate a loophole. Was the man a Galilean? he asked. He was. Then [ p. 354 ] Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, now here in Jerusalem for the feast, must have his say. He would send Jesus to Herod. Moreover, he would take the chance of doing a courtesy to the tetrarch, from whom he had been estranged. To Herod Jesus was sent.
Herod had long been curious about him. He had wondered about Jesus when he first heard of him, after his unwilling execution of John the Baptist. The thought that he might be John the Baptist risen from the dead had troubled him. Now Jesus stood before him.
To Herod’s curious questions—concerning, as we may guess, the repute of his miraculous powers—Jesus made no reply. The chief-priests and the scribes stood by, making vehement accusation against him. But Herod and his courtiers made light of him, made a joke of him even, and dressed him in a splendid robe, and sent him back to Pilate.
The Graecized Antipas shared Pilate’s attitude. The King of the Jews was not to be taken seriously as a malefactor or a revolutionary. And probably Herod had no desire to have the blood of yet another prophet upon his head. There is nothing in the actual words of Luke to suggest that Antipas [ p. 355 ] behaved to Jesus with worse than a Hellenistic indifference—the counterpart of Pilate’s own.
Pilate called the Sanhedrin before him, and said:
“You brought this man before me as a revolutionary agitator. I examined him in your presence and found in him no evidence that he is guilty of what you accuse him. No, neither did Herod. For I referred the man to him. Nothing he has done is worthy of death. I will teach him a lesson and let him go.”
While Pilate was addressing the Sanhedrin the people came forward to ask for the customary release of a prisoner at the great feast. Pilate asked them if he should release the King of the Jews. We imagine that if he spoke a little in kindness, he spoke more with the desire to annoy the insistent members of the Sanhedrin, for the proposal to release Jesus utterly was nothing less than an insult to them. The Sanhedrin itself possessed large powers of punishment: only the death sentence was beyond their competence. Pilate was trying to outwit them.
They were now mingled with the people before Pilate’s judgment-seat, and they used their opportunity. [ p. 356 ] They urged the people to demand that one BarAbbas, who lay in prison for factious riot, should be released, and Jesus crucified. And the crowd cried accordingly:
“Take this man, and release Bar-Abbas!”
“What then,” asked Pilate, “shall I do to him you call the King of the Jews?”
“Crucify him!” roared the crowd.
“Why, what evil has he done?”
“Crucify him !”
Matthew tells that in the uproar Pilate had a basin of water brought to him, and washed his hands in the full sight of the crowd, to signify that he disclaimed all responsibility. If his voice could not be heard, his gesture could be seen. It may have been so ; as it may also have been that, as Matthew also tells, the wife of Pilate sent him a message, as he sat on the judgment-seat, bidding him have no part in the death of that just man, for she had suffered much in a dream concerning him.
One cannot pronounce for or against these things. The two stories hang together. The message from his wife supplies the motive for Pilate’s extreme demonstration of his own innocence. If on the one hand the final roar of the crowd, which [ p. 357 ] Matthew relates: “His blood be upon us and on our children,” has a suspicious ring, on the other hand the story of the dream and the message is persuasive. It was the early morning still. Pilate’s wife might well have been awakened from a dream and looked out from her window to find the figure she had dreamed of standing before her husband’s judgment-seat. It is not necessary even that, to have dreamed of Jesus or of one like him, Pilate’s wife need have seen him: but surely there is no reason why she should not have seen the prophet from Nazareth as he taught in the Temple or passed through the streets of Jerusalem. The story is one that we can neither refuse with certainty nor accept with conviction.
But why (it is sometimes asked) had the crowd which had heard Jesus gladly when he spoke in the Temple so quickly turned against him? There is surely no problem here. For the mob a prophet in chains is no longer a prophet; but a brigand in fetters, like BarAbbas, has, on the contrary, achieved his perfection. Between BarAbbas and Jesus, no longer standing his ground with the doctors in the Temple, but now silent and captive, the popular choice was certain.
[ p. 358 ]
But beyond this cogent reason is the cardinal fact that the people now knew that Jesus claimed to be King-Messiah. That Mighty One, whose coming John the Baptist had foretold, Jesus claimed to be. And the people learned of this claim at the moment that he appeared before them as a captive criminal. As he stood there silent, Jesus was to the common Jew the incarnation of a blasphemy.
Pilate bowed to the insistence of the Sanhedrin and the clamor of the mob. He released Barabbas, and ordered Jesus to be scourged and crucified.
He was taken by his guards into the soldiers’ quarters: and the whole cohort assembled round him. To the kingly robe in which Herod’s retinue had dressed him they added the adornment of a crown of thorns; and they made jeering obeisance to him, saying, “Haill King of the Jews.” After a little while they formed in order and marched out of the castle, with Jesus and two other criminals in their midst, each bearing the cross upon which he was to be crucified.
But Jesus was too weak for the burden. As the company reached the gate of the city, the centurion impressed into the service a man who was coming [ p. 359 ] in from the fields, and compelled him to carry Jesus’ cross. The man’s name has been saved from oblivion, because his two sons, Alexander and Rufus, evidently became members of the early Church: his name was Sirnon, and his place of origin Cyrene. Thus reordered, the company marched on to the place of execution. It was called Golgotha from its shape, as is probable it was a bare rounded hillock—and it lay somewhere to the north of the city.
What we know of the story of the Crucifixion would seem to rest upon the evidence of Simon. Not one of the disciples was there, and the women who had followed him remained far off from the actual execution. Executions were as much a spectacle for the Jewish mob as they were in later times for the Christian; and now it was angry as well as bloodthirsty, for Jesus had outraged their fanatical idealism. There was good reason for the women to stand remote, and for the disciples to hide themselves completely, if they valued their lives. But the presence of Simon of Cyrene gave the Christian Church a witness of the closing scenes. He was with Jesus on the march to Calvary; he was with Jesus at the Cross.
[ p. 360 ]
Therefore we need not doubt that the words ascribed by Luke to Jesus on the way were veritably spoken. Not everyone was hostile : in the accompanying crowd were weeping women, to whom Jesus turned and said :
“Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me! Weep for yourselves and your children ; for lo ! the days are coming wherein they shall say: ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that have not borne, and the breast which never gave suck.’ Then they shall say to the mountains: Tall upon usP and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’ If this is what they do in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?”
And again, just before he was fastened to the cross, he said :
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
He was offered a drink of wine mixed with myrrh, an anodyne, but he refused it. Whatever was to come to him, he would receive it with an unclouded mind.
He was stripped of his clothes, and his guards drew lots for them. The royal robe which Herod had put upon him would have been a treasure to a soldier. There is no reason to suppose that the [ p. 361 ] incident was invented in order to “fulfill” a prophecyIt was the most natural thing in the world. Simon of Cyrene, as he worked with the soldiers at erecting the cross, watched it all. Some were stripping Jesus, some working with him, another with rough kindliness trying to persuade him to drink the wine and myrrh, another spreading out his clothes upon the ground, another putting stones in a helmet for them to draw lots, another making ready the rough inscription to fix upon the cross : THE KING OF THE JEWS.
It was about nine o’clock when Jesus’ hands and feet were nailed, and the two robbers crucified on either side of him. Not one of his disciples was near; the faithful women stood watching and weeping from afar. Between them and the cross was a hideous crowd of angry and degraded men, jeering at the dying Master.
“Ha! you that would destroy the Temple and build it again in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross !”
The members of the Sanhedrin, who had come out to see their justice done, spoke more decorously to one another:
“He ‘saved’ others ; he cannot save himself. Let [ p. 362 ] the Messiah, the King of Israel, now descend from the cross that we may see and believe !”
Even the criminals at his side reviled him.
At about twelve o’clock a dark cloud obscured the sun and gloom settled on the desolate place. Jesus had been on the cross three hours; in three hours more the end was come. He had chosen to remain conscious. What were his thoughts? He was waiting, waiting, for the ineffable moment when he should be lifted up into the bosom of God the Father, whom he had found and whom he had served as a son to the bitter and glorious end.
He was waiting for the moment when his inevitable destiny should be accomplished and he be summoned to his seat on God’s right hand. He waited, while his mortal life narrowed to a tiny spark ; and nothing came. Then he uttered all he was into one great despairing cry: “ Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
They are the same as the opening words of the 22d Psalm. It may conceivably be that that despairing song had been throbbing through him while he hung there in pain and ignominy:
[ p. 363 ]
All they that see me laugh me to scorn:
They shoot out the Up: they toss the head:
“He trusted in the Lord! Let the Lord rescue him!
Let the Lord rescue him, if He careth for him.”
But the voice of utter despair is ever the same. The cry “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” has been wrung from human lips many times in human history: but never till then, and never again, from the lips of such a man.
With that cry, his living soul left his body. The bond which had held it there, in an agony of expectation, had snapped.
Some, hearing the words, Eloi, Eloi, believed he was calling on Elijah. One man ran and fetched a sponge soaked in vinegar, which he stretched out on a stick to Jesus’ lips. It was too late. There was another great cry, but it had no words. It was the cry of death itself.
The manner of Jesus’ death was strange. It had been swift: six hours was but a little time for a man to remain alive on the cross. He had grown weak in the tension of his last days: he could not carry his cross. But the end had come with a strange suddenness. For the soul of Jesus had [ p. 364 ] kept his body alive. When despair had gained his soul, death at that moment gained his body.
At one moment the very pinnacle of consciousness : at the next, darkness and death.
The captain of the guards was struck to the heart by the strange happenings and said : “Truly this man was a son of God !”