Part 23
Even up to our days it has been said that Jesus wished to ride on an ass as a sign of humble meekness, as if He wished to signify symbolically that He approached His people as the Prince of Peace. It has been forgotten that in the robust early periods of history asses were not the submissive beasts of burden of to-day, weary bones in flogged and ill-treated skin, brought low by many centuries of slavery, used only to carry baskets and bags over the stones of steep hills. The ass of antiquity was a fiery and warlike animal; handsome and bold as a horse, fit to be sacrificed to divinities. Homer, master of metaphors, intended no belittling of Ajax the robust, the proud Ajax, when he likened him to an ass. The Jews moreover used untamed asses for other comparisons: Zophar the Naamithite said to Job, “For vain man would be wise though man be born like a wild ass’ colt.” And Daniel tells how Nebuchadnezzar, as expiation of his tyrannies, was driven from the sons of men, and his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses.
Jesus asked expressly for an ass not yet broken, never before ridden, something like a wild ass, because on that day, the animal chosen by Him was not a symbol of the humility of his rider but was a symbol of the Jewish people, who were to be liberated and overcome by Christ; the animal, unruly and restive, stiff-necked, whom no prophet and no monarch had mastered and who to-day was tied to a post as Israel was tied with the Roman rope; vain and foolhardy as in the Book of Job; fitting companion for an evil king; slave to foreigners, but at the same time rebellious to the end of time, the Hebrew people had finally found its master. For one day only: it revolted against Him, its legitimate master in that same week; but its revolt succeeded only for a short time. The quarrelsome capitol was pulled down and the god-killing crowd dispersed like the husks of the eternal Winnower over all the face of the earth.
The ass’s back is hard, and Christ’s friends throw their cloaks over it. Stony is the slope which leads from the Mount of Olives and the triumphant crowds throw their mantles over the rough stones. This, too, is symbolical of self-consecration. To take off your mantle is the beginning of stripping yourself, the beginning of that bareness which is the desire for confession and the death of false shame; bareness of the body, promising naked truth for the soul. The loving charity of supreme alms-giving; to give what we have on our backs, “If any man ... shall take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.”
Then began the descent in the heat of the sun and of glory; in the midst of freshly cut branches and of songs of hope. It was at the beginning of breezy April and of the spring. The golden hour of noon lay about the city with its green vineyards, fields and orchards. The sky, immense, deep blue, miraculously calm, clear and joyful as the promise of divine eyes, stretched away into the infinite. The stars could not be seen, yet the light of our sun seemed augmented by the quiet brilliance of those other distant suns. A warm breeze, still scented with the freshness of heaven, gently swayed the tender tree-tops and set the young, growing leaves a-flutter. It was one of those days when blue seems bluer, green seems greener, light more brilliant and love more loving.
Those who accompanied Christ in that descent felt themselves swept away by the rapture of the world and of the moment. Never before that day had they felt themselves so bursting with hope and adoration. The cry of Peter became the cry of the fervent little army winding its way down the slope towards the queen-city. “Hosanna to the Son of David!” said the voices of the young men and of the women, in the midst of this impetuous exultation. Even the Disciples almost began to hope, although they had been warned that this would be the last sun, although they knew that they were accompanying a man about to die.
The procession approached the mysterious, hostile city with the roaring tumult of a torrent that has burst its banks. These countrymen, these people from the provinces, came forward flanked as by a moving forest, as if they had wished to carry a little country freshness inside the noisome walls, into the drab alleyways. The boldest had cut palm branches along the road, boughs of myrtle, clusters of olives, willow leaves, and they waved them on high, shouting out the impassioned words of the Psalmist towards the shining face of Him who came in the name of God.
Now the first Christian legion had arrived before the gates of Jerusalem and the voices did not still their homage: “Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the Lord: peace in heaven, and glory in the highest!” Their shouting reached the ears of the Pharisees, who arrived, haughty and severe, to investigate the seditious noise. The cries scandalized those learned ears and troubled those suspicious hearts, and some of them, well wrapped up in their doctoral cloaks, called from among the crowd to Jesus: “Master, rebuke thy disciples.” And then He, without halting, “I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out!”
The silent, motionless stones which, according to St. John, God could have transformed into sons of Abraham; the hot stones of the desert which Jesus was not willing to change into loaves of bread at the challenge of the Adversary; the hostile stones of the street which twice had been picked up to stone Him; the hard stones of Jerusalem would have been less hard, less icy, less insensitive than the souls of the Pharisees.
But with this answer, Jesus had asserted His right to be called “the Christ.” It was a declaration of war. At the very moment of His entrance into His city, the New King gave the signal for the attack.
THE DEN OF THIEVES
He went up to the Temple where all His enemies were assembled. On the hill-top the sacred fortress sunned its new whiteness in the magnificence of the day. The old Ark of the nomads, drawn by oxen through sweltering deserts and over battlefields, had halted on that height, petrified as a defense for the royal city. The moveable cart of the fugitives had become a heavy citadel of stone and marble, a pompous stronghold of palaces and stairways, shady with colonnades, lighted with courts, enclosed by walls, sheer above the valley, protected by bastions and by towers, a fortress rather than a place of worship. It was not only the precinct of the Holy of Holies, and the sacrificial altar, it was no longer only the Temple, the mystic sanctuary of the people. With its great old towers, its guardrooms, its warehouses for offerings, its strong-boxes for deposits, its open piazzas for trade and covered galleries for meetings and amusement, it was anything rather than a sanctuary for meditation and prayer. It was everything, a fortress in case of assault, a bank-vault, a market-place in time of pilgrimage and feast-days, a bazaar on all days, a forum for the disputes of politicians, the wranglings of doctors and the gossip of idlers; a thoroughfare, a rendezvous, a business center. Built by a faithless King to win over the favor of a captious and seditious people, to satisfy the pride and avarice of the priestly caste, an instrument of war and a market-place for trade, it must have seemed to the eyes of Jesus the natural focus for all the enemies of His truth.
Jesus goes up to the Temple to destroy the Temple. He will leave to the Romans of Titus the task of literally dismantling the walls, of scattering the masses of stone, of burning down the buildings, of stealing the bronze and gold, of reducing to a smoky and accursed ruin the great stronghold of Herod; but He will destroy the values which the proud Temple upheld with its piled-up blocks of ordered stone, its paved terraces and its golden doors. Jesus goes up towards the Temple: the Man transfigured on the mountain is set against the scribes parched and withered among their scrolls; the Messiah of the New Kingdom against the usurper of the kingdom defiled by compromises, corrupt with infamy; the Gospel against the Torah; the future against the past; the fire of love against the ashes of the Letter. The day of battle is at hand. Jesus, among the songs of His fervent band, goes up to the sumptuous lair of His enemies. Well does He know the street. How many times He had gone over it as a little child led along by the hand in the crowd of pilgrims, in the midst of noise and dust, in the band of Galileans! Later as an unknown boy, confused by the dust and heat of the sun, tired and bewildered, He used to look toward the walls desperately longing to arrive at the summit, hoping to find up there in the sacred precincts a little shade for His eyes, cool water for His mouth, a word of consolation for His heart.
But to-day everything is transformed. He is not led along. He leads along. He does not come to adore, but to punish. He knows that there inside, behind the beautiful façades of the sublime sepulcher, there are only ashes and corruption: His enemies selling ashes and feeding themselves on corruption. The first adversary who comes before Him is the demon of greed.
He enters into the Court of the Gentiles, the most spacious and most densely crowded of all. The great, sunny, well-paved terrace is not the atrium of a sanctuary, but a dirty market-place. An immense, roaring din rises up from the vermin-like crowd of bankers, of buyers and sellers, of money-changers who give and take money. There are herdsmen with their oxen and their flocks of sheep; vendors of pigeons and turtle doves, standing by the long lines of their coops; bird-sellers, with cages of chirping sparrows; benches for money-changers, with bowls overflowing with copper and silver. Merchants, their feet in the fresh-dropped dung, handle the flanks of the animals destined for sacrifice; or call with monotonous iteration women who have come there after child-birth, pilgrims who have come to offer a rich sacrifice, lepers who offer living birds for their cure, obtained or hoped for. Money-changers, with a coin hung at their ears as a mark of their trade, gloatingly plunge their greedy talons into gleaming piles; the go-betweens run about in the swarm of the gossiping groups; niggardly, wary provincials hold excited conferences before loosening the purse strings to change their cash for a votive offering, and from time to time a restless ox drowns out with his deep bellow the thin bleating of the lambs, the thrill voices of the women, the clinking of drachma and shekels.
Christ was familiar with the spectacle. He knew that the house of God had been turned into the house of Mammon, and that, instead of silently invoking the Spirit, material-minded men trafficked there in the filth of the Demon, with the priests as their accomplices. But this time He did not restrain His scorn and His repugnance. To destroy the Temple, He commenced with the destruction of the market-place. The Eternal Mendicant, the poor man, accompanied by his poor friends, flung Himself against the servitors of money. He had in His hand a length of rope, which He knotted together like a whip, and with it He opened a passage-way through the astonished people. The benches of the money-changers crashed down at the first shock. The coins were scattered on the ground amid yells of astonishment and wrath; the seats of the bird-sellers were overturned beside their scattered pigeons. The herdsmen began to urge towards the doors the oxen and the sheep. The sparrow-sellers took their cages under their arms and disappeared. Cries rose to Heaven, some scandalized, some approving; from the other court-yards other people came running towards the disturbance. Jesus, surrounded by the boldest of His friends, was brandishing His whip on high, and driving the money-changers towards the door. And He repeated in a loud voice, “My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves!”
And the last money-handlers disappeared from the courts like rubbish scattered by the wind.
BUSINESS THE GOD
This action of Jesus was not only the righteous purification of the sanctuary, but also the public manifestation of His detestation for Mammon and the servants of Mammon. Business, that modern god, was for Him a form of theft. A marketplace was therefore a cave of obsequious brigands, of tolerated thieves. Among all the elements of the legalized theft which is called commerce, none is more detestable and shameful than the use of money. If some one gives you a sheep in exchange for money, you can be sure that he has made you pay more money than the sheep really cost, but at least he gives you something which is not a hateful mineral symbol of wealth. He gives you a living being, which will furnish you wool in the spring time, which will bear you a lamb, and which you can eat if you like. But the exchange of money for money, of coined metal for coined metal, is something unnatural, paradoxical and demoniac. Everything that is known of banks, rates of exchange, discount and usury, is a shameful and repellent mystery which has always been the terror of simple souls, that is, of upright and deep souls. The peasant who sows his grain, the tailor who makes a garment, the weaver who weaves wool or linen, have up to a certain limit a real right that their wealth should increase, because they have added something which before was not in the world, in cloth, in wool. But that a mountain of money should bring forth other money without labor or effort, without production by man of any object to be seen, to be consumed, to be enjoyed, is a scandal which goes beyond, and confounds human imagination.
Money-changers, bankers, amassers of silver and gold, are slaves of the witchcraft of the Demon more than all others. And it is to those men, the men of banks and of finance, that the grateful Demon gives power on this earth: they are the ones even to-day who rule nations, instigate wars, who starve nations, and who, by an infernal system of their own, suck out the life of the poor, transformed into gold, dripping with sweat and blood.
Christ, who pitied the rich, but who hated and detested wealth, the great wall which cuts off from men the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven, had broken up the den of thieves and had purified the Temple where He was to teach the last truths which remained to Him to expound. But with that violent action, He had antagonized all the commercial middle-class of Jerusalem. The men He had driven away demanded that their patrons should punish the man who was ruining business on the Holy Hill. These men of money found ready hearing with the men of Law, already embittered for other reasons, so much the more because Jesus in disturbing the business of the Temple had condemned and harmed the priests themselves. The most successful bazars were the property of the sons of Annas, that is, close relations of the High-Priest Caiaphas. All the doves which were sold in the Court of the Gentiles were raised on the property of Annas, and the priests who did business in them made a good income every month out of turtle-doves alone. The money-changers, who should not have been allowed to stay in the Temple, paid the great Sadducee families of the priestly aristocracy a goodly tithe on the thousands of shekels brought in every year by the exchange of foreign money into Hebrew money. Had not the Temple itself perhaps become a great national bank with coffers and strong boxes in treasure chambers?
Jesus had wounded the twenty thousand priests of Jerusalem in their prestige and in their purses. He had overturned the values of the falsified and mutilated Letter, in the name of which they commanded and on which they fattened. More than this, He had driven out their associates, the traffickers and bankers. If He had His way, it would ruin them all. But the two threatened castes drew together still more closely, to make way with the dangerous intruder. It was perhaps that very evening that priests and merchants agreed on the purchase of a betrayer and a cross. The bourgeoisie were to give the small amount of money necessary; the clergy to find the religious pretext; the foreign government, naturally desiring to be on good terms with clergy and bourgeoisie, would lend its soldiers.
But Jesus, having left the Temple, went His way towards Bethany, passing by the Mount of Olives.
THE VIPERS OF THE TOMBS
The next morning when he went back, the herdsmen and merchants had squatted down outside, near the doors, but the courts were humming with crowds of excited people.
The sentence pronounced and executed by Jesus against the honest thieves had set gossiping Jerusalem all agog. Those blows of the whip, like so many stones thrown into the Jerusalem frog-pond, had awakened the poor to joyous hope and had set the lords quaking with fear.
And early in the morning, all had gone up there from the dark alleys and from the fine houses, from the work-shops and from the public squares, leaving all their affairs, with the restless anxiety of those who hope for miracles, or revenge. The day-laborers had come, the weavers, the dyers, the cobblers, the woodworkers, all those who detested the swindlers, the stranglers, the shearers of poverty, traders who enriched themselves at the expense of indigence. Among the first had come the lamentable scum of the city, the dirty vermin-ridden prisoners of eternal beggary, with leprous scabs, with their sores uncared for, with their bones protruding through the skin to testify to their hunger. There had also come pilgrims from outside, those of Galilee, who had accompanied Jesus in His festal entrance; and with them Jews from the Syrian and Egyptian colonies, dressed in their best, like distant relatives who reappear every once in so often at the family home for a family festival.
But there came up also, in groups of four or five, the Scribes and Pharisees. They were fraternal colleagues, fitting companions for each other. The Scribes were the Doctors of the Law; the Pharisees were the Puritans of the Law. Nearly all the Scribes were Pharisees, many Pharisees were Scribes. Imagine a professor adding religious pedantry to his doctoral pedantry; or a religious hypocrite provided also with the grave face of a casuistical pedagogue, and you will have the modern equivalent of a Pharisaical Scribe, or of a Pharisee who was also a Scribe. A Tartuffe with academic honors; an Academician, who is at the same time a religious hypocrite; a philosophizing Quaker, are other modern equivalents.
These men therefore went up that morning to the Temple with much show of pride without and many evil intentions within. They came up proudly wrapped in their long cloaks, with their fringes fluttering, their chests thrown out, their eyes clouded, their eyebrows raised, with sneering mouths and quivering nostrils, with a step which announced their importance and the indignation felt by them, God’s privileged sheriffs.
Jesus, in the midst of all these eyes turned on Him, waited for those men. It was not the first time that they had come about Him. How many discussions between Him and the provincial Pharisees had taken place here and there in the country! They were Pharisees who had demanded a sign from Heaven, a supernatural proof that He was the Messiah—because the Pharisees, unlike the skeptical Sadducees, sunk in legalized Epicureanism, believed in the imminent arrival of the Saviour.
But the Pharisees expected to see this Saviour as a Jew, strictly observing all laws as they did, and they held that to be worthy to receive Him it was enough to be clean on the outside and to avoid any transgression of any of the trivial rules of Leviticus. The Messiah, the son of David, would not deign to save those who had not avoided all contact, even remote, with foreigners and with heathens, who had not observed the smallest detail of legal purification, who had not paid all the tithes of the Temple, who did not respect at any cost the sanctity of the Sabbath day. In their eyes Jesus could not possibly be the Divine Redeemer. No spectacular and magic signs had been seen: He had contented Himself with healing the sick, with talking about love, and with loving. They had seen Him dining with publicans and sinners, and, worse than everything else, had heard with horror that His disciples did not always wash their hands before sitting down to the table. But the greatest horror, the unendurable scandal, had been His lack of respect for the Sabbath. Jesus had not hesitated to cure the sick, even on the Sabbath, and He held it no crime on that day to do good to His unfortunate brothers. He even shamelessly gloried in this, claiming blasphemously that the Sabbath was made for man, rather than man for the Sabbath.
In the minds of the Pharisees there was only one doubt about Jesus: was He a fool or an impostor? To put the matter to the test, they had tried many times to trap Him by theological tricks, or in dialectical subtleties, but to no avail. As long as He went about in the provinces drawing after Him a few dozen peasants, they had let Him alone, sure that some day or other the last beggar, disillusioned, would leave Him. But now the affair was becoming serious. Accompanied by a band of excitable countrymen, He had gone so far as to enter into the Temple as though it belonged to Him, and had seduced some ignorant unfortunates to call Him the Messiah. More than that, usurping the place of the priests, and almost giving Himself the airs of a king, He had roughly driven out the honest merchants, pious people who admired the Pharisees, even if they did not entirely imitate them. Up to that time the Pharisees had been too easy-going and merciful towards Him. But from now on the unequaled goodness of heart of those extremely mild and tolerant professors would be dangerous and inopportune. The intolerable scandal, the reiterated profanation, the public challenge, called for condemnation and punishment. The false Christ must be disposed of and at once. Scribes and Pharisees went up on the hill to see if He had had the impertinence to go back to the place contaminated by His boasting.
Jesus was waiting for just those men. He wanted to say to them publicly, with the open sky as witness, what He thought of them, what God thought of them, the definite truth about them. The day before, with His whip, He had condemned the animal-sellers and money-changers. Now He was dealing with the merchants of the Word, with the usurers of the Law, with the swindlers of Truth. The condemnation of that day did not exterminate them: with every generation such men spring up again, innumerable, with new names; but their faces are stamped forever with this condemnation wherever they are born and command.
THE DESCENDANTS OF CAIN