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.