Heartsick
And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, "He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!" The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, "If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!" Luke 23:35-37
Nathan wished he were anywhere but here. He wished he had stayed in bed that morning. He wished he hadn’t even come to Jerusalem for Passover this year at all. He caught himself at that thought and muttered a brief prayer for forgiveness. But every year, it seemed, the crowds were thicker and the mood was uglier. Was that any way to celebrate the Passover? Curiosity had brought him to the scene outside the Procurator’s palace, and the press of the crowd had prevented him from escaping. Now, it seemed, they were following today’s quota of criminals up to the execution grounds.
He stumbled over a cobblestone - again - and lurched into the man in front of him. A stranger to his left grabbed his arm and steadied his step; grateful, Nathan hissed, "What’s going on here, anyway? Why is everybody so all-fired up?" "Where have you been all week?" The man responded sharply. "Haven’t you noticed how that Galilean Rabbi Yeshua has been baiting the Temple bigwigs? It was only a matter of time before they got the Romans to shut him up for them."
Nathan thought back. "Wasn’t he the one they were hailing as the Messiah at the beginning of the week? He’s been going around the countryside preaching? They say he’s the most powerful healing rabbi in generations. What did he do to get up the priests’ noses like that? And how could they talk the Romans into doing their dirty work for them? Where I come from, we Jews stay as far away from the Roman governor as we can. That’s just asking for trouble!" He tripped again.
"Shut up and watch your step! You can get trampled to death in a crowd like this, they won’t even notice you underfoot. Wait till we get to Golgotha."
Nathan hitched his robe up and tucked it more firmly into his belt. None of this made any sense to him at all. He began to notice something else strange, too. There were women in the crowd, far more than was usual. Jewish women didn’t flock to executions as a rule; they didn’t like blood sports, not like the Greek and Asian women who formed the majority on his home island of Cyprus. But there they were, weeping and wailing as if it were their own children that had been sentenced to death; it almost drowned out the hoots and catcalls from the rest of the mob.
When finally they came to a halt at the top of the hill Nathan and his new-found companion had been pushed to the front, over to one side of the - well, he supposed you could call it an arena, but it was really just a barren circle scratched out on the ground. Two men had already been nailed and tied to their crosses, and the uprights shoved firmly into the ground. There was an eerie silence, broken only by an occasional muffled sob and the harsh creak of one of the crows that lived off the bodies of the executed. The soldiers were just finishing up with the third man. Matter-of-factly they heaved the cross upright and seated it into its hole. It fell with an audible thud, and the man’s gasp of pain was echoed by the crowd’s sudden intake of breath.
A loud voice broke into the silence. "You saved others; save yourself!" Another, then another chimed in. "That’s what happens to people who threaten the temple!" "If you’re the Anointed of God, prove it!" "If you’re really the Son of God, come down from that cross!"
Nathan’s companion turned abruptly to him. "Most of us really believed he might be the Messiah," he said. "You didn’t see him, did you."
"I didn’t hear him preach, no," said Nathan. "But I think I did see him. Didn’t he throw all the money-lenders out of the temple? Kicking over their tables and lashing them down the steps into the street, calling them robbers if not worse? I caught the tail end of the brawl; everything was all in an uproar and I had to come back the next day to buy my thank offering."
"That was him, all right," said the other man. "Nobody expected it, either; he’d been all sweetness and light up to then, talking about forgiveness and God’s love and how you don’t really have to follow all the picky rules and regulations the scribes are so hot on." He paused for a moment. "That’s why the Pharisees were up in arms, of course. Yeshua called ‘em vipers, which I’ll grant you some of them are. The priests didn’t care so much about that; half of them don’t live up to the Pharisees’ standards themselves. But when he started threatening the temple they all got together. Look at them over there, thick as thieves, making sure they’ve gotten rid of him for good!"
There was a knot of them on the other side of the circle, mostly men in priestly robes, straight from the Council meeting. Nathan could still hear them, this time directing their words to the watching crowd. "You’re all fools, following another charlatan, another would-be Messiah." "Listen to your true leaders, the ones God has put in authority over you." "Look at him, do you think he’s going to save you from the Romans? He can’t even save himself!"
A few scattered boos came up from the crowd, they shifted uneasily and a couple of men toward the front picked up clods of dirt to throw. One of the soldiers pushed them back with the side of his spear, saying roughly, "Order, here!" "Keep away, now!" A centurion stabbed stuck a bit of sponge on the end of his spear, poured some of the sour wine from his canteen on it, and held it up to the cracked and bleeding lips of the man on the cross, saying mockingly to the crowd, "you don’t get to share your wine with a king every day, do you?" And mockingly to Jesus, "Here, King of the Jews, save yourself from this!" He turned to the crowd and said, "So much for your pathetic excuse for a king! When will you ever learn that Rome can’t be defeated? Be glad Rome has taken you under her protection! Be proud that Rome gives you peace, and trade, and civilization." He struck himself on the chest and said, "Take a lesson from me! I serve the Roman army and worship Roman gods, and no-one can touch me! But you reject what Rome brings you. You pathetic losers subvert Roman law and spit on Roman gods, you run after pretenders like him, and for what? You’ll all end up just like that one day. Where’s your god now?" He gestured up at Jesus and shouted again, "Save yourself, King of the Jews," shrugged, and strode back to the game of dice going on at the foot of the cross.
"That’s the reason for all this, of course," said Nathan’s companion, flicking a contemptuous thumb at the soldier’s back. "We’re tired of being sneered at by people who were still living in caves when God called us out of Egypt and gave us the land of Israel. We’re tired of being taxed to pay for soldiers who push us around and insult our women. We’re tired of having our sons hero-worship brainless oafs in armor who can’t speak a word of Hebrew and who think that you can buy God’s favor by throwing him a denarius on feast days."
"But when the Messiah comes..." Nathan began, and was interrupted "... when the Messiah comes we’ll all be King of the Mountain and we can spit on the Romans instead of the other way around. Every romantic girl in Palestine dreams about giving birth to the Messiah. Every hot-headed youth dreams of enlisting in Messiah’s army. Every senile graybeard searches through his Torah mumbling texts and parsing promises of Messiah. And even yours truly who knows better was actually taken in by this one!"
He shook his head angrily. "It’s time for me to emigrate. All of us who live here in Judea are poisoned by the Messiah disease. It’s our local plague. Other people come down with the wasting sickness or ague or lung fever. We Jews - we get Messiahs. You - where did you say you come from? Cyprus? I’ll bet you don’t get Messiahs there, do you? I thought not. Got any room for a good sandal-maker in your town?"
"I see what you mean," said Nathan. "It’s almost better not to believe in anything than to find out your hero can’t do anything for you after all. Actually, I think most of the people on Cyprus don’t believe in anything. In the last 100 years we’ve had Greeks and Egyptians and Parthians and now Romans ruling us, and nobody’s any better or any worse than the last. None of them understand why we Jews keep our own laws no matter who runs the government." He held out his hand. "I’m Nathan BarZedi, by the way." "Lev BenAsher, at your service." They grasped hands, nodded, and turned back to the spectacle that was still holding the crowd. The man on the cross was motionless. The noise of the crowd had died down.
"Sometimes I wonder myself, what it is we’re waiting for," said Lev. "We had our own kingdom not so long ago, if anyone could have pulled it off it would have been the Maccabees. But God wasn’t with them. Sometimes I don’t think God has been with us since we left Babylon. But we Jerusalem Jews, we’re like donkeys with a carrot dangling out in front of us on a string, we just keep hoping. You exiles are better off, you just live your lives and read Torah once a week at the synagogue and dream about next year in Jerusalem. Let me tell you, next year in Jerusalem is a whole lot better than this year in Jerusalem! The farther away you get from religious fanatics the better off you are! We’ve had 5 so-called Messiahs in the last dozen years alone, and every one of them with a ragtag following of hopeless losers. So Yeshua healed the sick and drove out demons! I can show you half a dozen quacks in Judea alone who can do as much, and as far as that business with Lazarus goes, I’ll bet he cooked the whole thing up with Mary and Martha."
Lev picked up a stone from the ground next to his foot and stood motionless for a minute, tossing it up and down in his hand. Nathan said uneasily, glancing back at the soldiers, "You’re not going to throw that, are you?" Lev hesitated for a moment and let the stone fall. He said, "No, you’re right. I may be a fool, but I’m not a damn fool. The only thing Messiah wannabees and Messiah worshippers get is the whipping post or the cross. It’s my own fault for letting myself expect too much." He turned suddenly, and shouted at the cross, "I trusted you! I’m done with Messiahs, do you hear me? I’m done with you and your promises, see where they’ve gotten you! You trusted God! Let God deliver you!"
Stunned at the outburst, Nathan stood for a minute before he turned, but Lev had disappeared into the crowd.
The people hurling insults at the man on the cross, were all different, Nathan thought. The priests and scribes weren’t so much angry themselves as trying to make sure the crowd stayed angry, because he had threatened their positions. The axe they were grinding was to make sure he was discredited, as well as killed. The soldiers... well, he’d been avoiding their like all his life. They didn’t care one way or another; the casual brutality they indulged in was just a routine part of displaying their power and making sure the locals were kept in line. But Lev - that was something different. There was real pain there, he reflected. Solomon was certainly right when he wrote, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick." [Pr 13:12] As a matter of fact, he rather thought Lev was more angry at God than he was at that poor rabbi Yeshua, he just didn’t have the nerve to yell at God. But really, if he gave up believing in Messiahs, he was really giving up believing in God’s promises altogether. Nathan shook his head. He didn’t understand, but he was still sure that God was here. Even here.
