But Jesus had already begun His Passion, foreseeing those terrible last
days of His life and describing them. From now on the heirs of His work
knew all, and He could go on His way towards Jerusalem in order that His
words should be fulfilled to the very last.
MARANATHA
And yet for one day at least He was to be like that King awaited by the
poor every morning on the thresholds of the holy city.
Easter draws near. It was the beginning of the last week which even now
had not yet ended—since the new Sabbath has not yet dawned. But this
time Jesus does not come to Jerusalem as in other years, an obscure
wanderer mingled with the crowd of pilgrims, into the evil-smelling
metropolis huddled with its houses, white as sepulchers, under the
towering vainglory of the Temple destined to the flames. This time,
which is the last time, Jesus is accompanied by His faithful friends, by
His fellow-peasants, by the women who were later to weep, by the Twelve
who were to hide themselves, by the Galileans who come in memory of an
ancient miracle, but with the hope of seeing a new miracle. This time He
is not alone; the vanguard of the Kingdom is with Him, and He does not
come unknown: the cry of the Resurrection has preceded Him. Even in the
capital ruled by the iron of the Romans, the gold of the merchants, the
letter of the Pharisees, there are eyes which look towards the Mount of
Olives and hearts which beat faster.
This time He does not come on foot into the city which should have been
the throne of His kingdom, and which was to be His tomb. When He had
come to Bethpage, He sent two disciples to look for an ass, “Go into the
village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and
a colt with her; loose them, and bring them unto me. And if any man say
ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them.”
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.