Part 34

As ancient writers admitted, crucifixion was the cruelest and blackest of punishments. It gave the greatest torture for the longest time. If tetanus set in, a merciful torpor hastened death; but there were men who held out, suffering always more and more, until the second day after crucifixion, and even longer. The thirst of their fever, the congestion of their hearts, the rigidity of their veins, their cramped muscles, the dizziness and terrible pains in the head, the ever-greater agony—all these were not enough to make an end of them. But most men died at the end of twelve hours.

The blood from the four wounds of Jesus had clotted about the nail-heads, but every movement made fresh blood gush out, which fell slowly along the cross and dripped upon the ground. His head drooped on His weary neck; His eyes, those mortal eyes, whence God had looked out upon the earth, were glazing over in the death stupor; and His livid lips, parched with suffering and thirst, drawn by His painful breathing, were withered by that last kiss, the poisonous kiss of Judas.

Thus died a God, who had cooled the blood of the feverish, had given the water of life to the thirsty, who had raised up the dead from their tombs, who had quickened the paralyzed, cast out demons from obsessed souls, who had wept with the weeping, who, instead of punishing the wicked, had made them to be born again into a new life, who had taught with poetic words and proved by miracles that glorious aspiration—the life of perfect love—which raging beasts sunk in stupor and in blood would never have been capable of discovering for themselves. He had healed wounds and they wounded all His perfect body; He had pardoned evildoers, and evildoers nailed Him, an innocent man, between two criminals; He had infinitely loved all men, even those unworthy of His love, and hatred had nailed Him there where hatred punished and was punished; He had been more righteous than righteousness and they had wreaked upon Him the most iniquitous unrighteousness; He had called mean souls to holiness and He had fallen into the hands of vilifiers and demons. He had brought life, and in return they gave Him the most ignominious death.

All this was necessary that men should learn again the road to the earthly Paradise; that they should mount above drunken bestiality and attain the exaltation of the saints; that they should be resurrected from their sluggish folly which seems life and is death, to the magnificence of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The mind may bow before the dreadful mystery of this necessity, but the heart of men can never forget the price exacted as payment of our debts. For nineteen hundred years, men born again in Christ, worthy to know Christ, to love Christ, and to be loved by Him, have wept, at least once in their lives, at the memory of that day and of that suffering. But all our tears gathered together like a bitter sea do not compensate for one of the drops which fell, red and heavy, on Golgotha.

A barbarous king of barbarians pronounced the most vigorous words ever spoken by Christian lips about that blood. They were reading to Clovis the story of the Passion, and the fierce King was sighing and weeping when suddenly, no longer able to contain himself, clapping his hand to the hilt of his sword, he cried out, “Oh, that I had been there with my Franks!” Ingenuous words, words of a soldier and of a violent man, opposed to Christ’s words, spoken to Peter among the olives, but words beautiful with all the naïve beauty of a candid and virile love. For it is not enough to weep over Christ who gave more than tears; we must fight, fight in us everything that divides us from Christ, fight in our midst all of Christ’s enemies.

For, although millions of men have since wept when thinking of that day, on that Friday around the cross, all except the women were laughing, and those men who laughed have left sons and grandsons, many of them baptized, and they still laugh and their descendants will continue to laugh until the day when One alone will be able to laugh. If weeping cannot cancel that blood, what punishment can ever expiate that awful laughter?

Look at them therefore once more, those who are laughing about the cross where Jesus hangs pierced by the most agonizing pain. There they are, clustered on the slopes of Golgotha, dehumanized by hate! Look at them well, look them in the face, one by one; you will recognize them all, for they are immortal.

See how they thrust out their twitching muzzles, their scrawny necks, their noses humped and hooked, their rapacious eyes, gleaming under their bristling eyebrows. See how hideous they are, branded with the mark of Cain. Count them over well, for they are all there, just like the men whom we now know, brothers of the men whom we meet every day in our streets. Not one is missing.

In the front row there are the priests, with crammed paunches, with arid hearts, with great hairy ears, with thick-lipped, gaping mouths, craters of blasphemy. And elbow to elbow with them, the arrogant Scribes, blear-eyed and scrofulous, their faces of an excremental yellow, piecers-together of lies, belching out pus and ink. And the Epulones, thrusting out before them the obscene heaviness of their stuffed bellies, brutes who trade on hunger, who fatten on famines, who convert into money the patience of the poor, the beauty of virgins, the sweat of slaves. And the money-changers, expert in illicit traffic and in oppression, who live to wrest unlawfully from others; and the knotty lawyers skillful at turning the law against the innocent. And behind these high pillars of society, there is the mob of cheating scullions, of overbearing rascals, of foul-mouthed rogues, of whining beggars, of filthy knaves, the lower dregs of the population, famished hounds who eat under the tables and snarl between the legs of whoever does not give them either a mouthful or a kick.

They are the eternal enemies of Christ—they who celebrated on that day their infamous Saturnalia; and they have vomited out on Christ’s face their poisonous saliva, the muddy lees of their souls. This miry dross of humanity, foul and polluted, vomited out from their filthy hearts their hatred for Him who was saving them; they howled against Him who was forgiving them; they insulted Christ who was agonizing for them, Christ who was dying for them. The antithesis of good and evil, innocence and infamy, light and darkness, was never presented with such a dramatic and utter contrast as on that irreparable day.

Nature itself seemed to wish to hide the horror of that sight: the sky, which all the morning had been clear, suddenly grew dark. A thick cloud, dark as though it came from the marshes of hell, rose above the hills and little by little spread to every corner of the horizon. Black clouds gathered about the sun, that sweet, clear April sun, which had warmed the hands of the murderers, encircled it, laid siege to it, and finally covered it with a thick curtain of darkness ... “and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.”

LAMA SABACHTHANI

Many, alarmed by the falling of that mysterious darkness, fled away from the Hill of the Skull, and went home, silenced. But not all; the air was calm; no rain fell as yet, and in the obscurity, the three pallid bodies shone out whitely; many of the spectators wished to sate themselves to the very last on His agony; why go away from the theater until the tragedy is finished to the last scream?

And those who remained listened in the darkness to hear if the hated protagonist would break by some word His groaning death-rattle. Christ’s sufferings constantly became more intolerable. His body, sensitive and delicate by nature, exhausted by the tension of these last days, convulsed by the struggle of the last night, worn out by the tortures of the last hours, could endure no more. And His spirit suffered even more than the tortured body which still for a short time was its prison. It seemed to Him that His divinely youthful soul had become suddenly aged, and that He was old beyond memory. Everything seemed far-distant from Him, the companions of His happy days, the confidants of His tenderness, the poor who looked lovingly at Him, the children whose heads He had caressed, the healed men and women who could not bring themselves to leave Him, His Disciples for whom He had created a new soul—they were all far away. Close to Him there were only a gang of cannibals, possessed by the devil, eager for Him to die.

Only the women had not deserted Him. On one side at some distance from the cross, through fear of the howling men, Mary, His mother, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Cleofa, Salome, mother of James and John—and perhaps also Joanna of Cusa, and Martha—were present, terrified witnesses of His death. He still had the strength to confide to John, the dearest and most sacred inheritance which He left on earth—the Virgin of Sorrows. But after this, through the veil of His suffering, He saw no one and believed Himself alone with death, as He had ever been alone at the most solemn moments of His life. Even the Father seemed suddenly remote, inexplicably absent. Where was that loving Father to whom He was wont to speak, sure that He would be answered, would be helped? Why did the Father not help Him, give some sign of His presence, or at least show Jesus the mercy of calling Him to God without cruel delay?

And then there was heard in the thick air, in the silence of the darkness, these words, “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?” that is to say: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

This was the first verse of a psalm which He had repeated to Himself many times because He had found there so many presages of His life and of His death. He no longer had the strength to cry it all aloud as He had in the desert, but now into His troubled spirit those sorrowing invocations came back one by one, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?... Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted and thou didst deliver them. They cried unto thee, and were delivered: ... but I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. All that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him. But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts. Be not far from me: for trouble is near; for there is none to help. Many bulls have compassed me: ... they gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a roaring lion. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd: and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death. For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet ... they look and stare upon me. They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture. But be thou not far from me, O Lord: O my strength, haste thee to help me.”

The supplications of this prophetic psalm, which recall so closely the Man of Sorrows of Isaiah, rose from the wounded heart of the crucified Man as the last expression of His dying humanity. But certain of the brutes nearest to the cross thought that He was calling Elias, the immortal prophet, who in the popular imagination was to appear with Christ. “Behold, He calleth Elias.”

One of the soldiers now took a sponge, soaked it in vinegar, put it on a reed and held it to the lips of Christ. But the Jews said, “Let alone; let us see whether Elias will come to take him down.”

The legionary, not wishing to make trouble, laid down the reed. But after a little—and the time seemed infinitely long in that darkness, in that suspense, that painful tension—Christ’s voice came down as if from a great distance, “I thirst.”

The soldier took up the sponge again, dipped it once more in the vessel full of the mixture of water and vinegar and once more held it to the parched mouth which had prayed for his forgiveness. And Jesus when He had taken the vinegar said, “It is finished.”

Christ, who had satisfied so many times the thirst of others, and who left in the world an ever-springing fountain of life, where the weary find strength, the corrupt find their youth, and the restless find peace, Christ had always suffered with an unsatisfied thirst for love. And even now in the terrible burning of His fever, His thirst was not for water but for a pitying word which would break the oppression of His desolate solitude. Instead of the pure water of the Galilean brooks, instead of the heart-warming wine of the Last Supper, the Roman soldier gave Him a little of his acid drink, but the prompt and kindly act of that obscure slave quenched His thirst, because, although reeling in the darkness of death, He felt that a human heart had pitied His heart.

If a stranger who had never seen Him before that day had done this, although so small a thing, through compassion for Him, it was a sign that the Father had not abandoned Him. The cup was finished: all the bitterness was drunk. Eternity began. With His last strength He cried with a loud voice in the darkness: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit!”

I called Thee because it seemed to me in the darkness of my suffering that Thou hadst left me. But now Thou hast answered. Thou hast answered by means of this poor soldier; Thou hast answered with the peace which dulls the last pangs of my death, the death which brings me to my awakening with Thee. It is not true that Thou hadst abandoned me. When I called Thee it was not I who spoke but that human blood burning in my veins, and dropping from the nails. I know that Thou art present with me, one with me to all eternity: Thou art my Father and I Thy Son. Into what dearer and surer hands could I commend my soul?

And Jesus, after he had cried out with a loud voice, bowed His head and gave up the spirit. That loud cry, so powerful that it freed the soul from the flesh, rang out of the darkness and lost itself in the furthermost ends of the earth. Matthew tells us that “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and appeared unto many.” But the hearts of the spectators were harder than rocks; none of those dead souls who wore the outward aspect of life were reanimated at that supreme summons.

Nineteen hundred years have passed from the day when the earth echoed to that cry, and men have intensified the tumult of their lives that they may drown it out. But in the fog and smoke of our cities, in the darkness, ever more profound where men light the fires of their wretchedness, that despairing cry of joy and of liberation, that prodigious cry which eternally summons every one of us, still rings in the heart of every man who has not forced himself to forget.

Christ was dead. He had died on the cross in the manner which men had willed, which the Son had chosen, to which the Father had consented. The death-struggle was over and the Jews were satisfied. He had expiated all up to the last, and now He was dead. Now our own expiation begins—and it is not yet finished.

WATER AND BLOOD

Christ was dead, as the leaders of His people had wished, but not even His last cry had awakened them. Some of them, says Luke, went away smiting their breasts; but were there within those breasts hearts which truly felt for the great heart which had stopped beating? They did not speak, they hurried home to their supper,—perhaps it was more terror than love which they were feeling.

But a foreigner, the Centurion, Petronius, who had been the silent witness of the execution, was moved, and from his pagan mouth came the words of Claudia Procula, “Certainly this was a righteous man.”

He did not even know the true name of the man who was dead, but he was sure at least that He was no evildoer. He was the third Roman witness in favor of the innocence of Christ, who was to become, through the Apostles, eternally Roman.

The Jews had no thought of recantations. What was in their minds was the thought that the Passover would be spoiled if the bloody corpses were not carried away at once. Evening was close at hand and with the setting of the sun the great Sabbath began. Therefore they sent word to Pilate to have the condemned men’s legs broken at once and to have them buried. The breaking of the legs was one of the cruel discoveries of cruelty to shorten the sufferings of crucified men,—a sort of grace useful in cases of haste. The soldiers, when they had received the order, came up to the bad thief, who, more robust than his companions, was still alive, and they broke his legs with a club.

They had seen Jesus die, and they could save themselves the trouble of using the club, but John says that one of them, to make quite sure, pierced His side with a spear, and saw with astonishment that water and blood came out from the wound. The name of this soldier according to an old tradition was Longinus, and it is said that some drops of that blood fell upon his eyes which had been infected, and immediately cured them. The history of martyrs tells of him that Longinus believed in Christ from that day on, and was a monk for twenty-eight years at Cæsarea until he was murdered because of his faith. Claudia Procula, the pious legionary, who for the last time wet the lips of the dying man, the Centurion, Petronius, and Longinus were the first Gentiles who accepted Jesus on the very day when Jerusalem had cast Him out.

But not all the Jews had forgotten Him. Now that He was dead, really dead, now that He was cold like all dead men, and motionless like any other corpse, now that He was a silent, harmless, quiet corpse, a body with no soul, a silent mouth, a heart which beat no more, see how they come out from the houses where they had shut themselves in, the friends of the twenty-fifth hour, the tepid followers, the secret disciples, the anonymous admirers, who at night hide their light under a bushel, and when the sun shines, disappear. We have all known friends like these, cautious souls, trembling at the idea of what people will say, who follow you but from afar; receive you—but when no one can see you together; esteem you—but do not so much as admit this esteem to others; love you—but not so much as to lose a single hour of sleep or a single miserable penny to help you! But when death comes, even when it comes through the fault or the avarice, or the cowardice of such despicable men, then their celebration begins. They are the ones who weep more tears and more glittering tears than any one else. They are the ones who weave together with busy hands the flowers of the wreaths and the flowers of funereal rhetoric; and with enthusiasm and ardor become necrologists, epitaph writers, and memorialists. To see them you would think that the deceased had had no more faithful, no more loving companions than they, and good-hearted people are moved to compassion for those unfortunate survivors who seem to have lost a half, or at the very least, a quarter of their souls.

To His sorrow in life and in death Christ had many friends of this sort, and two of them stepped forward in that Good Friday twilight. They were two serious and worthy citizens, two notables of Jerusalem and of the Council, two rich lords, in short two members of the Sanhedrin; Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.

In order not to stain their hands with the blood of Jesus, they had kept away from the meeting of the Sanhedrin and had hidden themselves in their houses, heaving regretful sighs, perhaps, and thinking that they could thus save their reputation and their conscience. But they did not reflect that even passive complicity was active help to the assassins, and that to abstain from opposition, not even to voice their opposition, was equivalent to consenting. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had therefore taken part in the murder of Christ, although they had been absent and invisible, and their posthumous grief can diminish but by no means cancel their responsibility.

But in the evening when they ran no risk of offending their colleagues, when the Elders had received full satisfaction and had left Golgotha, when there was no danger of compromising themselves in the eyes of high clerical and middle-class society, since the dead man was dead and could harm no one, the two nocturnal disciples, hidden, “for fear of the Jews,” thought that they would diminish their remorse by providing for the burial of the executed man.

The bolder of the two, Joseph, “... went in boldly unto Pilate” (Mark noted the fact as remarkable for that toga-clad rabbit) and asked for the body of Jesus. Pilate was astonished that He should already be dead, since crucified men often lived for two days—and called in Petronius, who had been charged with the execution. After Pilate had heard his report, he “gave” the body to the Sanhedrist. The Procurator was generous on that day because as a rule the Roman officers forced the families of condemned men to pay for the corpses. He could not say no to a person so respectable, and rich into the bargain. Possibly, too, this free gift came as much from weariness as from generosity. They had annoyed him all the morning with that troublesome King, and now he had no peace even when He was dead!

When Joseph had received permission he took a fine white winding-sheet and linen bands, and went towards the Hill of the Skull. There, or on the way there, he met Nicodemus, who, having the same character, may have been his friend, and who had come with the same thought. Nicodemus also had not spared expense, and had brought with him on the shoulders of a servant a hundred pounds of a mixture of myrrh and aloes.

And when they came to the cross, while the soldiers were taking down the two thieves to throw them into the common grave of condemned men, they prepared themselves to take down the body of Jesus.

PERFUMES IN THE ROCK

What little light had penetrated the dark cloud disappeared with the setting of the sun. The darkness was thick and sinister. A black night was shutting down on the world which on that day had lost the only Being which could give it light. Against the scarcely visible whiteness of the Hill of the Skull, the naked corpses glimmered dimly. They were obliged to work by the red light of torches, flaming without smoke in that windless air, and by that blood-red light they could see clearly, even to the long streaks of blood which had run down the foot of the cross, to the newly stirred earth.

Joseph, aided by Nicodemus and by a third helper, was scarcely able to draw out the deep-driven nails which held the feet. The ladder was still there. One of them, climbing up on it, took out the nails from the hands, supporting the loosened body with his shoulder. The others helped him to lower down the corpse, and the body was placed on the knees of the Virgin of Sorrows who had borne Him. Then they all made their way towards a garden near by where there was a sepulcher destined for Jesus. The garden belonged to the rich Joseph, who had had the sepulcher hewn out of the stone for himself and his family, for in those days every well-to-do Jew had a family sepulcher far from all the others, and the dead were not condemned to the promiscuity of our administrative cemeteries; temporary, geometric, and democratic like all our modern magnificent barbarisms.