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 I 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 doubt, 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.

And 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 the 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 that 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 of 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 is 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 the 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 for 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 Father, 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 presented 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 of 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 a 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 religious 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 began 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?”

But 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, and 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 with 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, portly, 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 that
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, he 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 snarling 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 and 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 drops 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. But 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.

                             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 occurred 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, who 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.

                             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 religion 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 living 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 delivered 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 having 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 had 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, Claudia 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 and 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.

This happened while John the Baptist was beginning to be talked about
among the people. The prophet let slip some words of condemnation
against these two incestuous adulterers, and this was enough for
Herodias to persuade her new husband to have him taken and shut up in
the fortress of Machærus. Every one knows how the foul Tetrarch,
inflamed by cruel Salome’s lascivious arts, and perhaps meditating a new
incest, was forced to offer her the bearded head of the Prophet of Fire
on a golden platter.

But even after his decapitation John’s shade disturbed Herod, and when
he began to hear talk of Jesus and of His miracles he said to his
courtiers, “This is John the Baptist; he is risen from the dead.”

It seems that he kept his eye on the new prophet, and that at one time
he thought of serving Him as he had his precursor; but either for
political or superstitious reasons, deciding that he would have no more
to do with prophets, he saw that the best way was to force Jesus to
leave his Tetrarchy. One day some Pharisees, very probably acting on
Herod’s instructions, went to say to Jesus: “Get thee out, and depart
hence: for Herod will kill thee.”

“And he said unto them, Go ye and tell that fox ... nevertheless I must
walk to-day, and to-morrow, and the day following; for it cannot be that
a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.”

And now at Jerusalem near His death, He appeared before that fox. That
traitor and spy, incestuous adulterer, assassin of John and enemy of the
prophets was the most fitting person to condemn innocence. But Jesus had
named him well: he was more fox than tiger, and he shrank from being a
substitute for Pilate. Luke tells us, “When Herod saw Jesus he was
exceeding glad: for he was desirous to see him of a long season, because
he had heard many things of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle
done by him.”

The son of the Idumean and the Samaritan woman had scorched himself in
John’s fire, and he received Jesus as an old tamer of animals, with the
marks of the lion’s teeth still on his arm, looks at a new wild animal
brought for him to see. But, like all Oriental barbarians, his mind was
obsessed by prodigies, and he imagined Jesus to be a wandering wizard
who could, whenever He wished, repeat some of His sorcery. Herod hated
Him as he had hated John, but he hated Him partly because he feared Him;
the prophets had a power which Herod did not understand and which
intimidated him: perhaps the beheading of John had brought him bad luck.
He too wished Jesus to be killed, but he had no mind to be in any way
responsible for His death.

Seeing that there were no miracles to be expected, he began to put many
questions, to which Jesus made no answer. He had broken His silence for
Annas, for Caiaphas, for Pilate, but He would not for this crowned
rascal! Annas and Caiaphas were His declared enemies, Pilate was a blind
man groping along, thinking that he was saving Him, but this Herod was a
cowardly fox and did not deserve even an insult. The High Priests and
the Scribes, fearing that John’s assassin would be too cowardly to kill
Jesus, as in fact he was, had followed their victim there and vehemently
accused him. These furious accusations and the silence of the accused
man deepened the hidden rancor of Antipas, who, together with his
soldiers, abused the Man of divine silences, threw over his shoulders a
gorgeous robe, and sent Him again to Pilate.

Like Pilate, but for other reasons, he was not willing to condemn the
man baptized by John, and who perhaps was John himself returned from the
dead to avenge himself. But when he sent Him away he made Him a gift
which bears unconscious witness to the rank of the man about to die. The
mantle, shining with whiteness, was, so Josephus says, the garment of
the Jewish Kings, and Jesus was accused of wishing to make Himself King
of the Jews. Antipas, the astute, wished to ridicule the pretensions of
Jesus by ironically making him a present of the regal robe; but when he
covered Him with that whiteness, which is the symbol of innocence and of
sovereignty, the ignoble fox sent to Pilate a symbolical message which
involuntarily confirmed the message of Claudia Procula, the accusation
of Caiaphas, and what Christ Himself had said.

                              CRUCIFY HIM!

Pilate had thought that he had succeeded in extracting himself from the
troublesome position in which his adversaries had tried to place him.
But when he saw Jesus return wrapped in that regal white garment he
understood that he must at any cost get the matter settled.

The bitter fury of those who for so many reasons were objects of
suspicion to him, his wife’s compassion, the answers of Christ, the fact
that Antipas had refrained from action, all inclined him to refuse to
give the Jews the life for which they were asking. Perhaps while Jesus
was with the Tetrarch, Pilate had asked some one of his followers about
the pretended King, and the information confirmed him in his decision.
Jesus had never said anything that would be offensive to Pilate: rather
there was much in what He said calculated to please the Roman, or at
least that would seem advantageous to the authority of Rome.

Jesus taught love for enemies, and in Judea the Romans were considered
enemies; He called the poor blessed, hence He exhorted them to
resignation and not to revolt; He advised men to render unto Cæsar that
which was Cæsar’s, that is, to pay tribute to the Emperor; He was
opposed to the Pharisaical formalism which made the relations of the
Romans with their subjects so difficult; He did not respect the Sabbath;
He ate with publicans and with Gentiles; and finally He announced that
His Kingdom was not of this world, but of a world so metaphysical and
remote that it could never endanger Tiberius or his successors. If
Pilate knew these things, he must have said to himself with the
superficiality of all skeptics, especially when they think themselves
expert politicians, that it would be a good thing for him and for Rome
if many Jews followed Jesus, rather than fomented rebellion in the
councils of the Zealots.

He had therefore decided to save Jesus, but in this indulgence he wanted
to put a sarcastic note, something that would be offensive to the High
Priests, who three times had set themselves against him and now were
importuning him to be their hangman. Up to the last he would pretend to
treat Jesus like the King of the Jews. Here is your King, the King that
you deserve, wretched and perfidious people! A village carpenter, a
vagabond, a beggar, who vapored of reigning beyond earthly life, and who
as a matter of fact had as followers only a few fishermen and peasants
and a few silly women. See how wretched He is, how miserable! Why do you
want to kill Him? Keep Him; you deserve no better King than He. I will
follow your example, will amuse myself a little by tormenting Him, and
then I will let Him go.

And causing Jesus to be led out, Pilate went to the door and said to the
High Priests and the others who crowded about, their faces thrust
forward to hear the sentence given at last, “Ye have brought this man
unto me, as one that perverteth the people: and, behold, I, having
examined him before you, have found no fault in this man touching those
things whereof ye accuse him: No, nor yet Herod: for I sent you to him;
and lo, nothing worthy of death is done unto him. I will therefore
chastise him and release him.”

This was not the answer awaited by the ravening hounds, yelling in the
square before the Procurator’s house. A bestial cry burst out from those
gaping mouths, “Kill Him!”

A flogging would be too light a punishment for this dangerous enemy of
the God of Armies and the God of Business. Something quite different
from that was necessary to satisfy these butchers of the Temple. They
had come to ask for blood and not for pardon.

“Kill Him!” yelled Annas and Caiaphas, and with them the Pharisaical
vipers hissed, the sellers of the holy animals shrieked, the
money-changers, the men who rented beasts of burden, the porters of the
caravans. “Kill Him!” howled the Scribes, wrapped in their theological
cloaks, the vendors of the Passover fair, the tavern-keepers of the
upper city, the Levites, the servants of the Temple, the hired helpers
of the usurers, the errand boys of the priests, all the servile horde
assembled before the Procurator’s house.

As soon as this uproar was a little quieted, Pilate asked, “What will ye
then that I shall do unto him whom ye call King of the Jews?”

And they all answered, “Crucify him!”

But the Procurator resisted, “Why, what evil hath he done?”

And they cried out the more exceedingly, “Crucify him!”

Jesus, pale and calm in the whiteness of the mocking cloak, looked
quietly at the crowd, which desired to give Him what in His heart He had
been seeking. He was dying for them, with the divine hope of saving even
them by His death, and they were assailing Him, howling as if He had
wished to escape His accepted fate. His friends were not there, were
hidden; all His people wished to pierce His flesh with nails, and only a
foreigner, an idolater, defended His life. Why was Pilate not moved to
compassion? Why did He not give Him at once to the crucifiers? Did he
not realize that his false pity only lengthened and embittered the
anguish? He loved and it was fitting that He should be hated; He brought
men back from death and it was fitting that He should be killed; He
wished to save others and it was fitting that all men should wish to
destroy Him; He was innocent and it was fitting that He should be
sacrificed.

But obstinate Pilate did not surrender to the howls of the Jews nor to
Jesus’ silent prayer. At any cost he wanted to win his point. He would
not give in once more to that fierce, filthy mob. He had not succeeded
in transferring to Antipas the disagreeable responsibility of a
death-sentence; he had not succeeded in persuading this tigerish and
mulish people of the innocence of their wretched king. What they wanted
was to see a little blood; on these festival days they wanted to enjoy
the spectacle of a crucifixion. He would satisfy them with a bargain,
giving them the carcass of a murderer in exchange for the body of an
innocent man.

                                BARABBAS

“I find in him no fault at all. But ye have a custom, that I should
release unto you one at the passover. Whom will ye that I release unto
you? Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?”

Taken by surprise, the people did not know what to answer. Until then
there had been but one name, one victim, one punishment asked for;
everything was as clear as the sky on that mid-April morning. But now,
in order to save that scandal-maker, this impertinent pagan brought into
question another name which confused the whole matter. Pilate wanted to
flog Him only, instead of crucifying Him: and now he wanted to crucify
another delinquent in His place. By good fortune the Elders, Scribes and
Priests were still there and they had no intention of letting Jesus
escape. In a flash they suggested the right reply. So that when Pilate
asked them a second time which of the two they wished him to free, they
answered with one voice, “Away with this man, and release unto us
Barabbas!”

He was not an ordinary delinquent, the man whom the Procurator offered
as blood-ransom to those men with such a morbid relish for crucifixions.
The common tradition has preserved his memory as a street ruffian, a
criminal by profession. But his surname—Bar Rabban, which means Son of
Rab, or rather disciple of the Master, since the scholars of the Rabbis
were called their sons—shows us that through birth or through study he
belonged to the caste of Doctors of Law. Mark and Luke say expressly
that he was accused of having committed murder during a sedition, hence
a political assassin. Jesus Barabbas, a student in the school of the
Scribes, lamenting over the loss of the Jewish Kingdom, and hating
Judea’s pagan masters, was probably a Zealot and had been captured in
one of the unsuccessful revolts, so common at that time. Was it likely
that such an absurd bargain would satisfy the Sadducee and Pharisee
assembly which shared the sentiments of the Zealots, even if for reasons
of state they hid them, or out of weakness of soul forgot them?

Barabbas, although an assassin, and indeed precisely because he was an
assassin—was a patriot, a martyr, persecuted by the foreigners. Jesus,
on the other hand, although He had never killed any one, had wished to
overturn the law of Moses, and to ruin the Temple. The first, in short,
was a sort of national hero, the other an enemy of the nation: there
could be no doubt about their choice. “Free Barabbas! Let this man die!”
Once more Pontius Pilate had failed to save Christ or himself. He ought
to have realized before this, that the leaders of the Jews would not
loose their hold on the flesh into which they had already set their
teeth, the only flesh which could stay their hunger. Their need for it
that day was like their need for bread and air. They would not have left
that spot, not even to eat, until they had seen that Bastard Messiah
fastened with four nails upon two beams.

Pontius Pilate was cowardly. He was afraid that he was committing an
injustice; he was afraid of displeasing his wife; he was afraid of
giving satisfaction to his enemies; but at the same time he was afraid
to put Jesus in a place of safety; he was afraid to have his soldiers
disperse that sullen, arrogant crowd; he was afraid to decide with a
clear-cut act of authority that Jesus, the innocent man, should be
released, and not Barabbas, the assassin. A real Roman, a Roman of
antiquity, of the true Roman stock, would either at once have satisfied
the demands of that turbulent crowd and would not have wasted a moment
in defending an obscure visionary; or would at once have decreed, from
the beginning, that this man was innocent and was under the august
protection of the Empire.

By his stratagems, half-measures, indolent questionings, hesitations and
partially executed maneuvers Pilate found himself slowly pushed towards
a decision he did not wish to make. The fact that he had not at once
decided the question with a yes or no had increased the insolence of the
High Priests and the excitement of the people. Now there were only two
alternatives: either to give in shamefully after resisting so long, or
to risk starting a tumult which on those days, when Jerusalem included
almost a third of the population of Judea, might become a perilous
uprising.

Undone by his cowardly wavering, deafened by the yells, the only thing
that came into his mind was to ask once more the advice of men to whom
he should have issued orders.

“What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?”

“Crucify him, let him be crucified!”

“Why, what evil hath he done?”

“Crucify him! Crucify him!”

What affair is it of this odious foreigner if Jesus had done evil or
not? According to our faith He is an impostor, a blasphemer, an enemy of
the people and deserves death. Even if He has done no evil He deserves
death because His words are more dangerous than any wicked actions.

“Crucify him! Crucify him!”

“Take ye him and crucify him,” cried Pilate, “for I find no fault in
him.”

“We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself
the Son of God.”

The silence of Jesus was more potent than this bestial outcry. They were
fighting for the possession of His body, and He seemed scarcely to be
aware of it. He knew that from the beginning of time His destiny was
sealed and that this was His day. The battle was so uneven! On one side
a Gentile, who knew nothing and understood nothing of Him, who did not
defend Him through love but through Hate, who did not defend Him openly
but with tricks and quibbles, who was more afraid of a revolt than of an
injustice, who was stubborn through punctilio and not because of his
certainty of Christ’s innocence. On the other hand, a threatened clergy,
a vindictive bourgeoisie, a crowd, like all crowds, easily incited to
evil deeds. It was easy enough to foresee the outcome.

But Pontius Pilate would not yield the point. He would restore Barabbas
to his accomplices, but he would not give up Jesus. His first idea came
into his head again: to have Him scourged; perhaps when they saw the
bruises and the blood dripping from His back they would be satisfied
with that punishment and would leave in peace the innocent man who
looked with equal pity on the cowardly shepherd and the unruly wolves.

The Procurator had said that he found no fault with Him, and yet he was
to have Him scourged with rods. This contradiction, this half-injustice,
this compromise, is characteristic of Pilate. But it was to be of no
avail; like his other efforts, it was merely to add one more shame to
his final defeat.

The Jews were still shrieking, “Let him be crucified!” But Pilate went
back into his house and gave Jesus over to the Roman soldiers to be
flogged.

                             A CROWNED KING

The mercenaries, who (in the provinces) were the majority in the
legions, had been waiting for this decision. Throughout the long dispute
the soldiers of the Procurator’s guard had been obliged to look on,
silent and motionless, at this mysterious colonial uproar, of which only
one thing seemed clear to them, that their commanding officer was not
cutting the best figure. For a while they had been amused by watching
the sinister faces, the excitability and the gesticulation of that
Jewish swarm; and they had become aware that the Procurator, somber and
perplexed, was vainly trying to unravel the tangled threads of this
early-morning quarrel. They kept their eyes on him, as dogs watch an
unskillful hunter, circling about without making up his mind to fire,
although the quarry is close at hand.

Now at last something to their taste happened. They were to have their
turn at amusing themselves. To flog a Jew, hated by the Jews themselves,
was an amusement neither dangerous nor very tiring,—just enough to
exercise their arms, to stretch the muscles contracted by the morning
chill, and to start the blood circulating.

All the company was ordered into the court-yard of the palace, and the
white cloak given by Antipas was taken from Jesus’ back—the first spoils
of the enterprise—together with part of His other clothes. The lictors
chose the rods, and the strongest among the soldiers snatched at them.
They were practical people who knew how to flog energetically and
according to the rules.

Jesus, half of His body bared, tied to a pillar, that He might not
lessen the force of the blows by bending forward, silently prayed to the
Father for the soldiers about to scourge Him. Had He not said: “Love
those who hate you, do good to those who persecute you, offer the left
cheek to him who has struck the right”? At that moment He could reward
his scourgers only by interceding with God for their forgiveness. These
soldiers were prisoners as much as He, and they knew not whom they were
flogging with such innocent heartiness. They themselves had been flogged
sometimes for small breaches of discipline, and they saw nothing out of
the way in the fact that the Procurator, a Roman officer, had them
scourge a delinquent belonging to a subject and inferior race.

Strike hard, O legionaries, for of this blood which now begins to flow,
some drops are shed for you. This was the first blood drawn by men from
the Son of Man. At the Last Supper His blood had been symbolized by the
wine, on the Mount of Olives the blood which mixed with the sweat, stood
in drops on His face, came from a suffering altogether spiritual and
inner. But now, at last, men’s hands shed blood from the veins of
Christ; knotty hands of soldiers in the service of the rich and the
powerful, hands which wield the scourge before taking up the nails. That
livid back, swollen and bloody, was ready for the cross; torn and raw as
it was, it would add to the suffering of crucifixion when they stretched
it out on the rough wood of the cross. Now they could stop, the
courtyard of the cowardly stranger was stained with blood. Servants that
very day might wash away those spots, but they would start out again on
the well-washed white hands of Pontius Pilate.

The number of blows prescribed had been duly administered, but now,
after their taste of amusement, the legionaries did not wish to let
their plaything escape at once. All they had done so far was to execute
an order; now they wished to have some entertainment of their own. This
man, so said the Jews howling out there in the public square, pretended
to be a king. Let us give Him His wish, this madman, and thus we will
enrage those who refuse Him His royal dignity.

A soldier took off his scarlet cloak, the red chlamys of the
legionaries, and threw it over those shoulders, red with blood; another
took up a handful of dry thorns, kindling for the brazier of the
night-watch, twisted a couple of them together like a crown and put it
on His head; a third had a slave give Him a reed and forced it into the
fingers of His right hand; then, roaring with laughter, they pushed Him
upon a seat. One by one, passing before Him, they bent their knees
awkwardly, crying: “Hail, King of the Jews!”

But some were not satisfied with this burlesque homage, and one of them
struck a blow at the cheek, still showing the marks of the fingers of
Caiaphas’ servants; one, snatching the reed out of His hand, gave Him a
blow on the head, so that the thorns of His crown pierced the skin and
made about His forehead a border of drops red as His cloak.

They would perhaps have thought of some other amusing diversion if the
Procurator, coming up when they were making merry, had not ordered them
to lead the scourged King outside. The jocose disguise invented by the
legionaries fitted in with the sarcastic intention of Pilate. He smiled,
and taking Jesus by the hand, led Him to the crowd of wild animals
there, and cried: “Behold the man!”

                        THE WASHING OF THE HANDS

“Behold the man!”

And he turned Christ’s shoulders towards that expanse of yelling muzzles
that they might see the welts left by the rods, red with oozing blood.
It was as if he said: Look at Him, your King, the only King that you
deserve, in His true majesty, tricked out as befits such a King. His
crown is of sharp thorns; His purple cloak is the chlamys of a
mercenary; His scepter is a dry reed. These are the ornaments merited by
your degraded King, unjustly rejected by a degraded people like
yourselves. Was it His blood you desired? Here is His blood; see how it
drops from the thorns of His crown. There is not much of it, but it
ought to be enough for you, since it is innocent blood. It is shed as a
great favor to you—to satisfy you. And now be off from here, for you
have troubled me long enough!

But the Jews were quieted neither by these words nor by that spectacle.
They demanded something quite other than a flogging and a masquerade
before they would go their ways. Pilate thought that he could make mock
of them, but he would realize that this was no time for feeble jokes.
They had had the best of him twice already and they would again. A few
bruises and a practical joke played by the soldiery were not enough to
punish this enemy of God as He deserved; there were trees in Judea and
nails to nail Him to them. And their hoarse voices shouted all together,
“Let him be crucified! Let him be crucified!”

Too late Pilate realized that they had driven him into a tangle from
which he could not disengage himself. All his decisions were combated
with a pertinacity he had not foreseen. By a flash of inspiration he had
pronounced the great words, “Behold the man!” But he himself did not
understand that proclamation which transcended his base soul. He did not
realize that he had found the truth he was seeking: a half-truth, but
deeper than all the teachings of the philosophers of Rome and Greece. He
did not understand how Jesus was really Man, the symbol of all humanity,
sorrowing and humiliated, betrayed by its rulers, deceived by its
masters, crucified every day by the Kings who oppress their subjects, by
the rich who cause the poor to weep, by priests who think of their
bellies rather than of God. Jesus is the Man of Sorrows announced by
Isaiah, the man without form or comeliness, despised and rejected of
men, who was to be killed for all men; He is God’s only son who had
taken on man’s flesh, and who would ascend in the glory of power and of
the new sun, in the midst of the blaring of the trumpets calling the
dead to life. But now to the eyes of Pilate, to the eyes of Pilate’s
enemies, He was only a wretched, insignificant man, flesh for rods and
for nails, a man and not Man, a mortal and not a God. Why did Pilate
lose time with those sibylline remarks before delivering Him to the
executioner?

And yet Pilate still did not yield. Standing beside that silent man, the
Roman felt his heart heavy with an oppression he had never known before.
Who could this man be whom all the people wished to kill, and whom he
could neither save nor sacrifice? He turned once more to Jesus, “Whence
art thou?”

But Jesus gave him no answer.

“Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to
crucify thee, and have power to release thee?”

Then the insulted King raised His head, “Thou couldest have no power at
all against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he that
delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin.”

Caiaphas and his associates were the guilty ones; the others were dogs
incited by Caiaphas, mere tools of Caiaphas. Even Pilate was only an
indocile instrument of priestly hatred and of the Divine will.

But the Procurator in his perplexity found no new expedient to free
himself from the net about him, and returned to his fixed idea, “Behold
your King!”

The Jews, infuriated by this repeated insult, burst out, enraged, “If
thou let this man go, thou art not Cæsar’s friend; whosoever maketh
himself a king speaketh against Cæsar.”

At last they had hit on the right words to bring pressure on weak,
cowardly Pilate. Every Roman magistrate, no matter how high his rank,
depended on Cæsar’s favor. Pilate’s reputation might be ruined by an
accusation of this sort, presented with ability, by malicious
advocates—and there were plenty of those among the Hebrews, as was shown
later by the memorial of Philo. But in spite of the threat, Pilate cried
out his last and weakest question, “Shall I crucify your king?”

The High Priests, feeling that they were on the point of winning,
answered with their last lie, “We have no king but Cæsar.”

Pilate surrendered. He was forced to yield unless he wished to start an
uproar which might set all Judea on fire. His conscience did not disturb
him: had he not tried everything possible to save this man who did not
wish to save Himself?

He had tried to save Him by referring the matter to the Sanhedrin, which
could not pronounce a death sentence; he had tried to save Him by
sending Him to Herod; he had tried to save Him by affirming that he
found no fault in Him; he had tried to save Him by offering to free Him
in the place of Barabbas; he had tried to save Him by having Him
scourged in the hope that this ignominious punishment would pacify them;
he had tried to save Him by seeking to arouse a little pity in those
hardened hearts. But all his maneuvers had failed, and he certainly did
not wish the whole province to rise on account of that unfortunate
Prophet; and even less was he willing that on His account they should
accuse him before Tiberius and have him deposed.

Pilate thought himself innocent of the blood of this innocent man. And
in order that they might all have a visible representation of that
innocence which they would not forget, he had a basin of water brought
to him and washed his hands there before them all, saying, “I am
innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.”

Then answered all the people and said, “His blood be on us, and on our
children.”

“Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus he
delivered him to be crucified.”

But the water which flowed over his hands was not enough to cleanse
them. His hands are still blood-stained, and will be to all eternity. He
might have saved Christ if he had really wished. Jesus was sent to
Golgotha by Pilate’s subterfuges, by the multiple forms taken by the
cowardice of Pilate’s soul, poisoned by the irony of skeptics. He would
have been less base if he had really believed Christ guilty and had
given his consent to the assassination. But he knew that there was no
fault in Jesus, that Jesus was a just man as Claudia Procula had said,
as he himself had repeated after her. There is no excuse for a man in
authority who, fearing for himself, allows a just man to be killed: he
holds office in order to protect the just against assassins. But Pilate
said, “I have done everything that I could to save Him from the hands of
the unjust.” That was not true; he had tried many ways, but not the only
way which could have succeeded. He had not offered himself, had not
sacrificed himself, had not been willing to risk his dignity and his
fortune. The Jews hated Jesus, but they also hated Pilate, who had
harassed and derided them so many times. Instead of proposing the
seditious Barabbas in exchange for Jesus, he ought to have proposed
himself, Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judea, and perhaps the people
might have accepted the bargain. No other victim except himself would
have satisfied the rage of the Jews. It would not have been necessary
for him to die. It would have been enough to let them denounce him to
Cæsar as Cæsar’s enemy. Tiberius would have deposed him and perhaps have
banished him, but he would have taken into exile and into disgrace a
comforting certainty of innocence. Little did his shifts avail him; for
the fate he now sought to avert by giving Jesus over into the hands of
his adversaries fell upon him a few years later. The Jews and the
Samaritans accused him; the Governor of Syria deposed him, and Caligula
banished him to the frontiers of Gaul. But he was followed into his
exile by the shade of that great, silent man, assassinated with his
consent. In vain had he constructed in Jerusalem the great reservoir
full of water, in vain had he washed himself with that water before the
multitude. That water was Jewish water, turbid and ill-omened water that
did not cleanse. No washing will ever cleanse his hands from the stains
left on them by the divine blood of Christ.

                              GOOD FRIDAY

The sun rose higher in the clear April sky and now it was near to noon.
The contest between the flaccid defender and the furious assailants had
wasted most of the morning, and there was no time to lose. According to
Mosaic law, the bodies of executed criminals could not remain after
sunset on the place of punishment, and April days are not as long as
June days.

Moreover, Caiaphas, reënforced though he was by so many furiously
enraged partisans, could not draw a tranquil breath until the Vagabond’s
feet were forever halted, fastened with iron nails on the cross. He
remembered how, a few days before, Jesus had entered the city surrounded
with waving branches and joyful hymns. He was sure of the city itself,
but at this period it was full of provincials come from everywhere, who
had not the same interests and the same passions as the clientele
dependent on the Temple. Those Galileans especially, who had followed
Him until now, who loved Him, might make some effort at resistance and
put off, even if they did not actually prevent, the real votive offering
of that day.

Pilate, too, was in haste to have that troublesome, innocent man taken
away. He did not wish to think of Him again. He hoped that he would
forget after His death that look, those words and, above all, his own
corroding uneasiness, so painfully like remorse. Although he had washed
and dried his hands, that man in His silence, it seemed to him, was
sentencing him to a penalty worse than death itself. Before that
scourged man, at the point of death, he felt himself the guilty one. To
vent his uneasiness on those who really caused it, he dictated the
wording of the titulus or superscription, which the condemned man was to
wear about His neck until it was fastened above His head at the top of
the cross, as follows: “Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews.” The
Scribe wrote these words three times in three languages in clear, red
letters on the white wood.

The leaders of the Jews, who had remained there, craning their necks, to
hasten the preparations, read this sarcastic inscription and protested.
They said to Pilate, “Write not, The King of the Jews; but that he said,
I am King of the Jews.”

But the Procurator cut them short with a dry brevity: “What I have
written I have written.”

These are the last words recorded of him, and the most profound! I am
forced to make you a present of the life of this man, but I do not deny
what I have said. Jesus is a Nazarene, which means also, saint. And He
is your King, the wretched King who fits your wretchedness. I wish all
men to know how your ill-born race treats saints and kings. It is for
this I have written these words in Latin and Greek as well as in Hebrew.
And now be off, for I have endured you long enough, “Quod scripsi,
scripsi.”

In the meantime the soldiers had put back on the King His poor man’s
garments and had tied the notice about His neck. Others had brought out
from the storerooms three massive crosses of pine, the nails, the hammer
and the pincers. The escort was ready. Pilate pronounced the usual
formula: “I lictor, expedi crucem.” And the sinister procession moved
forward.

The Centurion rode at the head, he whom Tacitus calls with terrible
brevity, “exactor mortis.” Immediately after him came, in the midst of
the armed legionaries, Jesus and the two thieves who were to be
crucified with Him. Each of them carried a cross on his shoulders,
according to the Roman rule. And behind them, the shuffling steps and
the uproar of the excited crowd, increased at every step by accomplices
and idle sight-seers.

It was Parasceve, the day of preparations, the last night before the
Passover. Thousands of lambs’ skins were stretched out on the sunlit
roofs; and from every house rose a column of smoke, delicate as a
flower-bud, which opened out in the air and then was lost in the clear,
festal sky. Old women with malignant faces, mumbling anathemas, emerged
from the dark alley-ways; dirty-faced little children trotted along with
bundles under their arms; bearded men carried on their shoulders a kid
or a cask of wine; drovers were dragging along asses with hanging heads;
children stared with impudent and melancholy eyes at the foreigners who
were walking about circumspectly, impeded by this festal bustling. In
every home the house-mother was busy, preparing everything needful for
the next day, because with the setting of the sun every one was exempt
for twenty-four hours from the curse of Adam. The lambs, skinned and
quartered, were all ready for the fire; the loaves of unleavened bread
were piled up fresh from the oven; men were decanting the wine, and the
children to lend a hand somewhere were cleaning the bitter herbs.

There was no one idle, no one whose heart was not rejoicing at the
thought of that festal day of repose, when all families would be
gathered about the father, when they would eat in peace and drink the
wine of Thanksgiving from the same cup; and God would be witness of this
cheer because the psalms of the grateful would go up to Him from every
house. On that day even the poor felt themselves almost rich; and the
rich, because of their unusual profits, felt themselves almost generous;
and children whose hopes had not yet been dashed by experience of life
felt themselves more loving; and women more loved.

Everywhere there was that peaceful confusion, that good-natured tumult,
that joyous bustle which goes before a great, popular feast-day. An odor
of hope and of Spring purified the old filth of the Jewish ant-heap. And
the great eastern sun sent down a flood of light upon the four Hills.

                            SIMON OF CYRENE

Under that festal sky, through that festal crowd, slow as a funeral
procession, the sinister column of the bearers of the cross made its
way. About them everything spoke of joy and of life, and they were going
to burning thirst and to death. About them all men were waiting joyfully
to spend the evening with their loved ones, to sit down at the
well-garnished table, to drink the bright, genial wine served on
feast-days, to stretch themselves out on their beds to wait for the most
longed-for Sabbath morning of the year. And the three, cut off forever
from those who loved them, would be stretched upon the cross of infamy,
would drink only a sip of bitter wine, and, cold in death, would be
thrown into the cold earth.

At the sound of the Centurion’s horse, people stepped to one side and
stopped to look at the wretched men toiling and sweating under their
terrible burden. The two thieves seemed more sturdy and callous, but the
first, the Man of Sorrows, seemed scarcely able to take another step.
Worn out by the terrible night, by His four questionings, by the
buffetings, by the beatings, by the flogging, disfigured with blood,
sweat, saliva, and by the terrible effort of this last task set Him, He
did not seem like the fearless young man who a few days before had
scourged the vermin out of the Temple. His fair, shining face was drawn
and contracted by the convulsions of pain; His eyes, red with suppressed
tears, were sunken in their sockets; on His shoulders, torn by the rods,
His clothes clung to the wounds, increasing His sufferings; His legs,
more than His other members, felt this terrible weakness, and they bent
under His weight and under that of the cross. “The spirit is willing but
the flesh is weak.” After the vigil, which had been the beginning of His
agony, how many blows had been struck upon that flesh! Judas’ kiss, the
flight of His friends, the rope on His wrists, the threats of the
judges, the blows of the guard, the cowardice of Pilate, the howling
demands for His death, the insults of the legionaries, and now this
weight of the cross, carried along amid the sneers and scoffing of those
whom He loved!

Those who saw Him pass took no notice of Him, or at the most, those who
knew how to read tried to make out the inscription which hung down on
His chest. Many, however, knew Him by sight and by name, and pointed Him
out to their neighbors with learned and complacent airs. Some of them
mingled with the crowd, following behind to enjoy to the end the
spectacle, always new, of a man’s death; and more would have followed if
it had not been a day when there was much to do at home. Those who had
begun to hope in Him now despised Him because He had not been stronger,
because He had let Himself be taken like any sneak-thief; and to
ingratiate themselves with the Priests and Elders mingled with the
crowd, they cast out at the false Messiah as He went by some neatly
phrased insult. Very few were those who felt any movement of pity to see
Him in that situation and among those few were some who did not know who
He was, who were moved merely by the natural pity which any crowd feels
for condemned men. Some few there were who still felt a little love in
their hearts for the Master who had loved the poor, who had healed the
sick, who had announced the Kingdom so much more righteous and holy than
the kingdoms then in existence and ruining the earth. But these were
few, and they were almost ashamed of that secret tenderness for one whom
they had believed to be less hated or more powerful. The greater part
laughed, satisfied and contented, as if this funeral procession had been
a part of the feast-day.

Only some women, their heads wrapped in their cloaks, came behind all
the rest, weeping, but trying to hide this seditious grief.

They had not yet come to the Gate of Gardens, but they were almost there
when Jesus, His strength utterly exhausted, fell to the ground and lay
there stretched under His cross. His face had suddenly gone white as
snow; the reddened eyelids were dropped over His eyes; He would have
seemed dead if it had not been for the painful breath coming and going
through His half-open mouth.

They all stopped, and a dense circle of jeering men stretched out their
faces and hands towards the fallen man. The Jews, who had followed Him
from Caiaphas’ house, would not listen to reason.

“He is only pretending,” they cried. “Lift Him up! He is a hypocrite! He
ought to carry the cross to the last! That is the law! Give Him a kick,
as you would to an ass, and let Him get along!”

Others said, “Look at the great King who was to conquer Kingdoms. He
cannot manage even two sticks of wood, and yet He wanted to wear armor.
He said that He was more than a man, and see, He is a womanish creature
who faints away at the first work given Him. He made paralytics walk and
He Himself cannot stand up. Give Him a cup of wine to bring back His
strength.”

But the Centurion who, like Pilate, was in great haste to finish his
distasteful task, was experienced in the handling of men, and saw
clearly that the unfortunate Jesus would never be able to drag the cross
along all the way to Golgotha. He cast his eyes about to find some one
to carry that weight. Just at that moment there came in from the country
a Cyrenian called Simon, who, at the sight of so many people, had
stepped into the crowd and was looking with an astonished and pitying
expression at the body prostrate and panting under the two beams. The
Centurion saw that he had a kindly look, and furthermore that he was
strongly built, and called to him, saying, “Take this cross and come
after us.”

Without a word the Cyrenian obeyed, perhaps out of goodness of heart,
but in any case from necessity, because the Roman soldiers in the
countries which they occupied had the right to force any one to help
them. “If a soldier gives you some task to do,” wrote Arrian, “be
careful not to resist him and not to murmur, otherwise you will be
beaten.”

We know nothing more of the merciful-hearted man who lent his broad
countryman’s shoulders to lighten Jesus’ load, but we know that his
sons, Alexander and Rufus, were Christians, and it is extremely probable
that they were converted by their father’s telling them of the death of
which he was an enforced witness.

Two soldiers helped the fallen man up on His feet, and urged Him
forward. The procession took up its way again under the noon-day sun,
but the two thieves muttered between their teeth that no one thought of
them, and that it was not right that that other man by pretending to
fall should be freed of His burden while they still were forced to carry
theirs. It was favoritism, nothing less, especially as that fellow, to
hear what the priests said about Him, was much more guilty than they.
From that moment His two companions in punishment, jealous of Him, began
to hate Him, and were to insult Him even when they were nailed at His
side on the crosses which they were then carrying on their backs.

                              FORGIVE THEM

The Centurion halted outside the old walled city, in the midst of the
young verdure of the suburban gardens. The city of Caiaphas did not
allow capital punishment within its walls; the air perfumed with the
virtue of the Pharisees would be polluted; and the soft hearts of the
Sadducees would be distressed; hence, condemned prisoners were expelled
from the city before their death.

They had stopped on the summit of a rounded mound of limestone
resembling a skull. This resemblance might seem to be the reason for
choosing this place for executions, but the real reason was rather
because the two great roads from Jaffa and Damascus crossed each other
close at hand, and it was well that the cross should show its terrible
warning to the traveling multitude of pilgrims, merchants and
provincials.

The sun, the benign sun of the solstice, the high noon-day sun, shone on
the white mound and on the mattocks ringing sonorously in the rock. In
the nearby gardens the spring flowers expanded in the mild air; singing
birds, hidden in the trees, rent the sky with the silver arrows of their
warblings; doves flew about in pairs in the warm, pastoral peace. It
would be sweet to live there in some well-watered garden beside a well,
in the perfume of the earth awakening and clothing itself, awaiting the
harvest moon, in company with loving friends! Days of Galilee, days of
peace, days of sunshine and friendship among the vineyards, beside the
lake, days of light and liberty, wandering with friends who listened
understandingly, days drawing to a close with the well-earned
cheerfulness of supper, days which seemed eternal, although they were so
short!

Now Thou hast no one with Thee, Jesus, called the Christ. These soldiers
preparing that appalling bed, these thieves insulting Thee, those hounds
awaiting Thy blood, are only shadows, cast by the great shadow of God.
Thou art alone as Thou wert alone at night; the sun that warms Thy
assassins is not for Thee. Before Thee lies no other day, no other
journey; ended are Thy wanderings and now at last Thou canst rest; this
skull of rock is Thy goal. A few hours hence, Thine imprisoned spirit
shall be torn from its dungeon.

God’s human face is wet with cold sweat. The blows of the mattocks ring
in His head, as if they struck at Him; the sun which He loved so much,
symbol of the Father, just even to the unjust, now falls harshly on His
aching eyes and swollen eyelids. His whole body aches with weariness,
trembles in a yearning for rest which He resists with all His soul. Has
He not promised to suffer as much as is needful up to the very last? At
the same time it seems to Him that He loves with a more intimate
tenderness those whom He is leaving, even those who are working for His
death. And from the depths of His soul, like a song of victory over the
torn and weary flesh, rise up the words, never to be forgotten by men,
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

No more divine prayer was ever raised to Heaven since men have lived and
prayed; it is not the prayer of a man, but of a God to a God. Men, who
cannot pardon even the innocence of an innocent man, had never before
that day dreamed that a man might pray for the forgiveness of those who
were putting him to death.

For they know not what they do! Wrongs consciously wrought cannot be
absolved without assurance of repentance. But the ignorance of men is so
appallingly great that only a few really know what they do.

Jesus had taught what men should know; but how many knew it? Even His
own Disciples, the only ones to know that Jesus was Christ, had been
overcome by the fear of losing this last remnant of their lives; even as
they fled away, they had shown that they did not know what they did. And
even more ignorant of what they really did were the Pharisees, fearful
of losing their preëminence; the Doctors, fearful of losing their
privileges; the rich, fearful of losing their money; Pilate, fearful of
losing his office; and most ignorant of all were the Jews, misled by
their leaders, and the soldiers obedient to orders. None of them knew
who Christ was and what He came to do, and why He was killed. Some of
them were to know it, but afterwards, and they came to know it only
through the intercession of the Man whom they were killing.

Now, at the point of death, He had confirmed His most difficult and
divine teaching, “Love for enemies,” and He could now hold out His hands
to the hammer. The crosses had been raised; now they were piling stones
about them to steady them under the weight, and were filling the holes
with earth, stamping it down with their feet.

The women of Jerusalem approached the condemned Man with a pitcher. It
contained a mixture of wine, incense and myrrh, which the executioners,
out of the goodness of their hearts, imagined would dull consciousness.
Those very people who were making Him suffer pretended as a last insult
that they had mercy on that suffering, and by reducing it by the merest
trifle they thought they had the greater right to demand that the rest
of the cup of suffering be drained. But Jesus, as soon as He had tasted
this mixture, bitter as gall, pushed it away. He would have accepted a
single word in place of the wine, but the only one on that day who could
find the word to say was one of the thieves whom they had dragged up to
the place of the skull with Him.

The incense and the myrrh which they offered Him on that day were not
perfumed like that incense and myrrh brought to Him in the stable by the
Wise Men from the distant Orient. And in place of the gold which had
lighted the dingy darkness of the stable, there was the iron of the
nails, gray now, waiting to be reddened. And that wine which seemed
poisoned so bitter was it, was not the genial nuptial wine of Cana, nor
that which He had drunk the evening before, warm and dark as blood
dripping from a wound.

                               FOUR NAILS

On the top of the hill of the Skull the three crosses, tall, dark, with
outspread beams like giants with outstretched arms, stood out against
the great sweep of the sweet spring sky. They threw no shadow, but they
were outlined by brilliant reflections from the sun. The beauty of the
world on that day in that hour was so great that tortures were
unthinkable; could they not, those wooden branches, blossom out with
field flowers, and be wreathed with garlands of tender green, hiding the
scaffold with verdure, in the shade of which reconciled and friendly
brothers might sit down?

But the Priests, the Scribes, the Pharisees, those who gloated over
suffering and over revenge, who had come there to satisfy their morbid
appetites with the spectacle of three deaths, were stamping with
impatience, and jeeringly hastening on the Romans.

The Centurion gave an order. Two soldiers approached Jesus and with
rapid, rough gestures removed all His clothes. The criminal condemned to
crucifixion must be entirely naked.

As soon as He was stripped, they passed two ropes under His armpits, and
hoisted Him up on the cross. Half-way up on the upright was a rough
wooden peg like a seat where the body was to find a precarious and
painful support. Another soldier leaned the ladder against one of the
arms of the cross, climbed up on it, hammer in hand, seized the hand
which had cured lepers and caressed little children’s hair, spread it
out on the wood and drove a nail into the middle of the palm. The nails
were long, and with a wide head so that they could be easily hammered.
The soldier struck a vigorous blow, which pierced the flesh at once, and
then another and a third so that the nail would hold firmly and so that
only the head would remain outside. A little blood spurted out from the
pierced hand upon the hammering hand, but the diligent workman paid no
attention to it, and continued to hammer away vigorously until his work
was properly done. Then he came down the ladder and did the same to the
other hand.

All the spectators had fallen silent, hoping to hear screams from the
condemned man. But Jesus was silent before His executioners as He had
been silent before His judges.

Now they turned their attention to the feet. This was work which could
be done standing on the ground, for the Roman crosses were set so low
that, if the bodies of the executed criminals were left on them too
long, prowling dogs and jackals could tear out their bowels and eat
them.

The soldier who was nailing Christ on the cross now lifted up His knees
so that the soles of His feet should be flat against the wood, and
taking the measure so that the iron nail should be long enough to go
through the instep, he pierced the first foot, and drove the nail home.
He did the same to the other foot, and at the end glanced up, still with
his hammer in his hand, to see if he had finished his work, and if
anything was lacking. He remembered the scroll which they had taken from
Jesus’ neck and flung down on the ground. He picked it up, climbed again
up the ladder, and with two nails fastened it on the upright of the
cross, above the thorn-crowned head.

Then he came down the ladder for the last time, threw away his hammer,
and looked to see if his companions had finished their work. The
thieves, too, were now in place and all three crosses had their
flesh-offerings. The soldiers could rest and divide the garments which
henceforth the men up there on the crosses needed no more. This was the
perquisite of the executioners and came to them by law. Four soldiers
had a right to Jesus’ clothes and they divided them into four parts.
This left the tunic, which was without seam, woven all in one piece. It
would be a sin to cut it, for after that it would be of no use to any
one; but one of them, an old gambler, took out his dice, threw them, and