Chapter Twenty-Five
Sabachthani
Between the women, led by John, Mary followed her son in the red robe stained redder, and about her the women of the city whooped and screamed. Coming through a narrow arch, he crashed to the ground while the whips of soldiers fell on his back, and veiled women with water rushed to wash his face while the soldiers roughly stood him up again. Mary heard men and women, distressed, demanding, “He saved others. Why can’t he save himself?”
And some cried out, “But what is Israel now when things like this are done.”
But others muttered, “He was a blasphemer. See what is done when men defy God.”
And then they were face to face, and Mary stared full on him. She reached for him, but guards crossed their spears, His eyes were on her and his mouth opened. He was trembling with exhaustion and abuse, the color gone from him, and before he could say a word he was gone, driven away.
But when he fell again, and a whip rose, another Roman’s hand caught it, and Mary blinked at the blond man. Should she know this soldier? John’s lips whispered, “Sebastian?”
And there was another soldier, darker, like a Numidian, and he pushed aside another soldier and, helping Jesus up, looked into his face. They lifted the patibulum together, and together they moved through the narrow streets. And it was then that a woman from nowhere came and wiped the blood and sweat and slime from Jesus’s face with her veil, and when she pulled back and looked upon the veil, she exclaimed in fear or wonder, but Mary, slowly following her son, and now allowed a path by these new arrivals, had no time to ask what this woman had seen even as she showed her veil to the people around her and they wept.
There was noise, confusion and misery on that whole busy journey out of the city gates and up to the gruesome row of crosses that was always there, and there was one poll at the top of a small rocky rise, just waiting, and here in blooded red, in his bloody crown was Jesus, worn out and on his way up, surrounded as he always was, by women
Magdalene remembered Palmyra, remembered Sidon and thought, This is it. This was it. This is what he came to make real. Here they are, out of myth and in truth, thr women weeping for Eshmun, weeping for Tammuz, wailing at the time of spring. This is is his message, not the wars, not empires, not even a peaceful teacher preaching, but this path of blood and death that goes to the grave before it can ever rise to any kind of lasting life.
Tammuz, Adonis… Adonai… The ancient word for Lord. And Christ was the Lord. The Lord of Israel was a mighty man of storms, He delivered from Egypt. He delivered from Babylon. He judged the nations, but he had never married, never lain down with lovers, never come into the world and been judged by it, never loved or made love, never faced injustice, never suffered, never been wept for or mourned or sacrificed…. Not until this moment.
Not until now.
Before he was stripped, weary and beaten, he was lain down in front of Sebastian and Rufus and Simon, men who had known him and who had know crucifixion and had no power to stop what they hated. Before all this, he managed to speak over thick lips and trembling body to the women who wept.
“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then they will say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’ For… if people do these things when the tree is green… what will happen when it is dry?’”
And now the black crows who had followed this far, to make sure the job was done, were pushed back by Romans in red cloaks, and there came the steady thud of hammers and the pop of spikes piercing flesh, pushing into limbs, and John’s eyes went back in his head at the sound of his love’s agonized screams, and then there was a lurching, and they saw, swinging up from the midst of the soldiers, Jesus stretched like a bird and hammered to the wood, and just as swiftly with as many screams, they nailed down his feet and then, downbelow, they wanted to faint, they wanted to pass out. They wanted to look away as they saw the naked and dirtied form of Jesus, bleeding and beaten, stretched out, rising and falling, compelled by the body to attempt breath, now crucified.
There are enough stories about that day to make an epic and a very strange one at that. But past noon, the sky began to darken and the air swirl. It was then the soldiers paid more attention to the blackening sky than to the people below, and John and John Mark slithered through the blockade and Mary and Magdalene and the other women came to stand beneath that cross.
It was an awful place and Magdalene thought it resembled a skull and there were criminals—one on his right, the other on his left.
Even then the black crows were not finished, for in mockery Pilate had written in Latin, then Greek and Aramaic for good measure, as the charge against the suffering Jesus:
JESUS OF NAZARETH
KING OF THE JEWS
“He’s not the King of the Jews! He’s not!” Nathan railed, attempting to run at the guards.
“Let the sign say instead, ‘He says he is King of the Jews.’”
But Sebastian and another guard bore the old Jews away screaming as the guard in charge declared, “What is written is written.”
Some cried again, “He saved others, why can’t he save himself?” But others laughed and called out, “If you are still the Son of God, come down from that cross and show us!”
And even as the sky greyed, they hooted up their scorn until they were exhausted by their own evil.
“Son of God!” Some of the soldiers laughed at him as he struggled to breathe, raising himself up for air, and falling down into a deep shrug, bubbles of blood coming from his lips as he gazed up into the dark sky.
“You ain’t no Hercules are you? A fine Dionysus you make!”
Below his cross, careless, or not daring to care, bored soldiers played dice, and John heard them betting for the red and bloodied robe.
“It’s a good one when it’s washed, and he won’t be using it again!”
They threw back their heads and chuckled and drank the bitter wine.
“Bastards,” Mark whispered through gritted teeth, and John said to him, “Have a care, boy. Have a care.”
One soldier, who could not decide if he was good or evil, unloosed his helmet strap, and he attached a sponge to his spear and soaked it in the vinegary wine before lifting it to the mouths of those crucified. He came to Jesus second and said, “If you are a God, save your fucking self. How’s that?”
“F-f-f Father,” Jesus said, too weary to look down, “forgive them—” but he lost his breath and had to sink, rise again, to finish quickly, “for they know not what they do.”
And the soldier pulled the spear away quickly and plunged it back into the wine, no longer enjoying himself.
One of the criminals who had been hanging there longer than Jesus, but had far more vigor, hurled insults at him that Jesus did not listen to and which culminated in: “Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself.”
And then he added, “And us!”
It is told that the other criminal said, “Don’t you fear God since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”
Even dying, that man said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
And then Jesus, despite his agony, replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
But if that happened, none below heard, and when Jesus was finally able to look down and he saw Mary and John beside her, and Magdalene and Mariah. If he saw that James and Peter had arrived and were hiding beyond the parameters, no one knew, but he took a long breath to rasp to his mother:
“Woman, behold thy son,” and while she shuddered, he turned to John and said, “Behold thy mother.”
And then, still a king, and here so crowned, he made an imperious gesture of the head and John led Mary, weeping, away.
Jesus threw back his head and shouted:
“Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”
‘Forsaken of God!” one of the last of the Sanhedrin called out, but another one said, “He is calling on Elijah.:
“Well, let us see if Elijah comes!” another said
And Joseph, tired and angry, exhausted said, “Oh, what fools you are! He is praying.”
“He is praying,” John, back to them all as he lead Mary away, thought, “as on the day when we passed those crosses. He and Mary stood by those men until they died.”
And John prayed with him.
“My God, my God!
Why hast thou forsaken me?
O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not;
and in the night season, and am not silent.
But thou art holy,
O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.
Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted,
and thou didst deliver them.
They cried unto thee,
and were delivered: they trusted in thee,
and were not confounded.
But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men,
and despised of the people.
All they 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.”
John left Mary at the bottom of the hill, but had to return, and even as he stood, watching the life leave Jesus and the wind shift the crosses so that their wood moaned, he heard Nikodemos beside him murmuring:
“Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.”
At the base of the cross, Magdalene, her white veil and gown stained with dark or faded blood, sat deep in prayer or contemplation, no logner willing to show the sorrow on her face, not daring to leave. Let Mary leave, she should. But this right now was her stable, and her birth.
Nikodemos was coming up the weary hill, and John chanted with him:
“Surely he has taken our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.”
Even Joseph joined them:
“We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.”
Jesus cawwed: “I thirst!”
He cried it like a king crow, expecting to be attended, and a jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips.
He drank deep, and then his body seized, and John looked up and at him, hoping to meet his eyes, but Jesus rose up, body twisting in something that was the opposite of pleasure, eyes bulging. A small scream escaped his agonized mouth and he declared:
“Father…. Into your hands… I… I…
“It is done.”
And then, for a long time, they stood there and John felt Mark’s fingernails in his bicep, and Jesus, still perched in the air, eyes wide, collapsed, hanging from the wood.
Dead.
Almost as soon as he died, the sky heaved, and rain fell in slashing torrents. Later, other people would say other things, that there was a great earthquake, that at this moment the tombs of the dead came open and many came out of them, but that they did not come into Jerusalem until three days later, that the curtain which Mary herself had helped weave to veil the very Holy of Holies in the Mikdash was split in two to the horror of Caiaphas.
It is noted that a centurion watching, said, “Surely, this was the Son of God,” a strange thing for a Roman to say though others said he said, “Surely this was a righteous man.” But there were many Romans that day, and any off them could have said both. Simon of Cyrene was there, still feeling the weight of the patibulum on his shoulders, and Sebastian and his friends were there, ready to be released from service, to find quiet farms and forget they were ever soldiers.
If that story of the rending of the veil was true, Joseph Caiaphas kept it to himself, and doubtless many strange things happened both when Jesus of Nazareth came into the world and when he left it, but John was only aware of his helplessness, of how he heard a cry coming from his own body, a howl like his heart had been torn out of him. All of his strength was gone and the rain, cold and warm at once, flooded over his weary, unwashed and wailing self.
The sky lightened enough and the rain slowed enough for them to approach the hill where Jesus hung. The others were still alive, and their legs would be broken so that they would collapse into death before the day ended. Joseph, in his grim wisdom, had gone to Pilate almost immediately after the trial and asked to have Jesus’s body when he was dead, and Pilate, who was already on his way back to Caesarea, had granted the warrant and signed it. He had died so quickly, and almost to spite him, John thought, one of the soldiers took a lance and plunged it right into the dead body. Yes, no half living, revived men would be carted off today. Blood and water flowed down from the wound, but the dead man did nothing at this final violation.
So now they came forward, and the soldiers, almost in shame, climbed the cross and began to detach the dead man. So seldom was a family present to take the corpse, and never so many, never so many weeping women, so many heartbroken young men and old men shaking their heads. Slack jawed, eyes half opened and filmed over, wrists pierced, feet pierced, wounded body somewhat cleaned by the rain, Jesus was lowered to those waiting.
Broken sobs cracking from her mouth, Magdalene knelt in the mud and she held open her hands. Later, they would confuse her and her wonderous alabaster cup. They would say ridiculously that she held that cup up under Jesus, but just as ridiculous perhaps, she held her cupped hands up in prayer and weeping and when it rained his blood and sweat poured into them and she splashed them over her face in an ecstasy of grief.
And when all of him lay on the ground, rained upon, stabbed, beaten, abused, his mother gathered him up and held the heavy corpse to her, wailing and shaking and as Mary’s sobs became screams, and her ragged voice filled the air, John, Mark, James, Joanna, all of those coming forward wept into their hands and trembled with the unbelievable loss. While they all wept, Magdalene, kneeling at his precious feet, lifted them, looking at how long and noble they were, how calloused, and look at that toenail! And how wounded they were! Who could wound him? Who could wound anyone? Who could invent such a thing, to pierce through one’s feet as they pierced through his chest. She bowed so low, and tears running down her inconsolable face, as she held his feet, she kissed them, bestowing her final anointing.
Are they satisfied? John wondered, thinking of those black robed crows who had tried him in the night? Are they satisfied? Does seeing this make them happy? This is what they wanted.
But this was what Jesus wanted. Or at least what he had chosen and walked into. And Judas… Where was Judas? Judas, seeking to ameliorate it had brought it all about. No, no, it was too much to think of right now.
And in the midst of it all, no longer able to hold his great dead naked body, Mary, shrieking, face and composure ruined, lay sprawled across her firstborn son, the same way Jesus had sprawled across Jairus’s daughter, except this time, no one came to life.
