Chapter Twenty-Four
Justice
How could it have been that just less than a day ago the sun was coming through the curtains of their private room, and Jesus reached for him?
“We will not,” he said in a voice that was firm and sleepy at the same time, “Go into the Temple. We will not deal with Pharisees. We will not deal with priests. We will not deal with Sadducees. This day… This day is for us.
“But, Jonni, why so distant, why so… Jonni, come now.”
And John had been cold, like a bar of iron.
“I do not know what to do with you,” he said.
“Is that why you are cold to me?”
“It is because you are hot like fire, hot all over the place with your desire to burn everything down, with this mad desire to…”
“It is in me like… like a possession.”
“You are possessed?” John turned to him. “You who have gone up and down Galilee, through the Decapolis, through the south of Syria and Judea driving out demons, and now are you possessed?”
“How does one drive out God?”
John said nothing, and on his side, reclined on an elbow.
Jesus said, “There is the me that left to all of his devices would be here, right now, in this bed, with you, forever and ever and ever. And then there is the me that would make compromise with what must be and what I want, who would fly to Egypt or the north or take one of the travel routes into the East or up into the lands beyond the mountains and take all of you, and we would set out our nation… or people our… church. In peace. But then there is this me that is me, and that me must be in Jerusalem. Right here. Right now.”
“They’re afraid,” John told him, touching his shoulder. “I am afraid.”
“I am afraid too,” Jesus said.
They lay facing each other and then embracing, finally kissing, and at last, loving. No one disturbed them. They exhausted themselves in the heat of the morning until they were damp with sweat and worn from sex and now, in the cold night, cloak wrapped tight about him as they headed through the streets to the palaces of Annas and Caiaphas, those great, high walled and porticoed, structures, John was glad for the morning and that he had not turned Jesus away.
“What do we do when we get there?” Thomas wondered, very sensibly.
It was Mary and Magdalene, Salome and Mariah, John Mark traveling with his mother despite her protest. Thomas insisted on traveling with Peter, and John, miserable, but determined not to show it, led the way.
Torches lined the streets at night in prominent areas of town, and Jerusalem was a city of great shops, high neighborhoods and great houses unlike Nazareth or Bethsaida. But tonight, around the great houses of Annas and Caiaphas, John Mark thought there was more light and more activity than ever, and people were freely passing through the hell lit gates and collumns. As they arrived at a great pillared doorway leading to a courtyard, a fierce guard looked down at the approaching party But before they could say anything, out from the gate, robed in black, came one anxious familiar face and then another.
“Joseph!” Mary exclaimed.
“Nikodemos,” said John.
“They have called a trial in the darkness of night,” Joseph said. “And were we not in the city, were we not connected, we would have known nothing of it.”
“I have sent Nikanor to alert as many people as possible” Nikodemos said. “Annas sent men to arrest Jesus, and he has been before him being questioned, but now he is being sent to the home of Caiaphas for trial.”
“In the home, and not in the Sanhedrin!” Mariah was indignant.
“And not in the day,” Joseph said.
“And then what will they do?” Mariah asked.
John, hearing his own silence, was aware of his aunt’s silence, of Magdalene’s.
“If guilty they will send him to Pilate.”
Before they could fall into despair, Nikodemos said, “But come now. We will go to Caiaphas’s house. I will set you up in one of the courtyards where it is warm. Come. All we can do is all we can do.”
“Wait, here,” Judas said.
Years later, when the story was written down, his name would be left out and when John told the story, the follower who wrote it down would say only that a disciple known to the high priest had traveled with them, but there was no disciple known To Caiaphas but Judas. And in those later years, when those who followed Jesus learned to hate again, they would imagine themselves leaping on Judas, beating Judas, but that night Simon Peter was in shock, and John didn’t know what to say, and even Judas didn’t know completely what he had done. When they came to the house of the high priest, and Nikodemos and Joseph had situated the women, it was Judas who led John and Peter to the courtyard.
“I am going in to watch the trial.”
“I will go with you.”
“You cannot.”
“But I can,” John Mark said.
Mariah’s father had been a priest, and John Mark was of that class, also known to them, and Judas nodded and led him into the house.
“What in the world is going on?” Peter wondered while he found a place by the fire, and John and Magdalene walked about the courtyards learning what they could.
“I was in the house, right there with the guards, and Annas was questioning him, like really serious, really wanting to know a thing or two. Bold as anything, in his red robe, the Nazarean says: ‘I have spoken openly to the world. I have always taught in the synagogue and in the temple, where all the Jews gather, and I haven’t spoken anything in secret.’”
“Then he says,” another added, “‘Why do you question me? Question those who heard what I told them. Look, they know what I said.’”
“And straightway a guard slaps the shit out of him and says, ‘Is this the way you answer the high priest?’”
“But our man from Nazareth just says, ‘If I have spoken wrongly, tell me of the wrong; but if rightly, why do you hit me?’”
“And what did old Annas say?”
“He said nothing, just sent him on his way. And I tell you, I never heard that Jesus until now, but he seemed like the only real thing in that room. Annas all in shadow, those guards brutal as they could be, and all the time there stood that Jesus, pure like an angel.”
“You!” said a girl who was looking at Peter, “aren’t you one of that man’s disciples, just like those who went in?”
“I am not,” Peter heard himself say before he could think. Well, too late to take it back, and things were definitely in a bad place now. It was just enough to be here, and probably too much. This did not seem like a holiday, but a visit to hell. The servants and the officials had made a charcoal fire, because of the cold and were standing there warming themselves, and Peter only wanted to fall, unknown, into their company.
“What is the meaning of this… False trial?” Gamaliel began, “called under the cover of darkness without the knowledge of half the assembly.”
“I knew it,” Nathan said.
“Doubtless,” Gamaliel noted.
Some three or four were arriving in the great hall of Caiaphas’s house, and from the sconces in the walls, the torches made a swirling shadoy light, but hid the ceiling in darkness. “Why are we summoned in the middle of the night, and clearly not all of us, into a place that is not the Hall of of Hewn Stone to have the most illegal trial ever in the history of Israel over this man before us?”
“Because we could not catch him in the day.”
“Because you could not catch him in the day? And you aren’t even embarrassed to say that?”
“Rome would catch him day or night, and all of us with him,” Abihu noted.
“So now we are in the business of trying our own and delivering them up to Pilate before Pilate even asks,” Aristobulus said, clapping his hands, “Congratulations, we are well trained dogs!”
“We are not on trial,” Caiaphas’s bored voice cut across the room from his high seat, the seat which had once been Herod’s as this house had been Herod’s long ago, “he is.”
And he looked down on Jesus who stood silent, hands bound behind his back in the center of the room.
“Unbound him!” Joseph shuffled to Jesus, and untied his wrists. “He is a teacher, no murderer, no criminal. And you certainly never found a murderer aand dragged him to a trial in the night.”
There was a great fire against one wall, and the other was open to the courtyard below where Peter watched. In the hall beyond, the women and John and John Mark stood and watched men of ill intent drag the strangest people into the room to say what they could against Jesus.
“He said he was able to destroy the Temple of God and to rebuild it in three days!’”
“He said you were white walled supulchers and killers of prophets!”
“I heard him say that soldiers would come and destroy all of Jerusalem.”
“They bowed to him and called him the Son of David, and he accepted.”
“He cures on the Sabbath.”
“On the Sabbath day he sets out to work his mischief!”
“I saw him call on the Devil to cure a man whose limbs were twisted!”
“That’s a lie.”
“He told a man he had healed to go on sinning.”
“He said stop sinning.”
“He said that we were the children of the Devil, that the Devil was our father.”
“He said that the Kingdom of God would be made of Gentiles, not of us.”
“That’s not what he said.”
And as the night dragged on they pulled people out from even the courtyard, and Joseph stood up and said, “This is ridiculous. No one can agree on a single charge.”
“If these are even charges!” Nikodemos added.
“Oh, your were always so enchanted by this Galilean sorcerer.”
“All of our ills have come from Galilee. Remember Judah and his revolt twenty years ago!”
And through all of this, Mary never heard her son say a word, and down below, Peter looked up and saw that Jesus, hands behind his back, said no word and bore no expression. At moments, Jesus seemed to absorb all the light in that room so that he burned like a red flame, then again the light escaped him and there was no seeing him at all.
Downbelow, the girl who had spoken to him, said “Yeah, I thought this one was one of his followers. Look up there, he ain’t saying nothing tonight. In the temple he said so much.”
“Yeah he did,” one of the others said.
“You do look like that one big man who’s always with him,” said someone clapping Peter on his back.
“Maybe,” Peter said. “But I’m not.”
They stopped as they heard Caiaphas’s voice rising.
“Do you offer no answer for what these men are testifying against you?”
At last, Jesus spoke, and when he did he sounded like a lord.
“I say to you, as I said before, speak to those who have heard my words and can testify to them. Why do you question me when everything I say…” his eyes roved over the whole room, “is in the open.”
There was some laughter but much intake of breath. Some few applauded, and none saw the change in the color of the sky.
Caiaphas looked around the room, and at that time, Annas entered through the side. He whispered to one man, and then he reclined on a sofa while the one man whispered to another who whispered to another who, at last, whispered to Caiaphas whose eyes widened. When his eyes widened, Jesus looked at him, almost amused, and then Caiaphas frowned.
“I place you under oath by the living God,” Caiaphas said, “to tell us whether You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
There was such silence that even outside, no one spoke.
Mary felt as if she had been slapped when Jesus simply said:
“I am.”
Shrieks and shouts rose from all over the hall. Peter’s face went cold and Joseph and Nikodemos sank in their seats.
John felt strangely triumphant and doomed all at once, and Judas sank to the floor moaning.
But, raising his head and his voice, Jesus continued, “You have said it yourself. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
Then the High Priest tore his robes groaned, “Blasphemy. Blasphemy! What further need do we have of witnesses? See, you have now heard the blasphemy. What say you all?”
And the only ones prepared to answer, rose up shouting, “Death! Death! He is worthy of death!”
Nathan leapt up, slapping Jesus across the face and spitting fully in his eye.
Out in the courtyard, one of the high priest’s servants, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, said, “Didn’t I see you with him in the garden?”
“I don’t know what you’re about! I don’t know the man!” Peter cried.
As another blow struck him, Jesus’s face snapped to the side so that his eyes met Peter’s down below, and Peter’s mouth went dry.
Blindfolding him and binding him, they swirled about him, punching him, spitting on him and twirling him about, hooting with hatred, “Prophesy to us, Christ! Who is the one who hit You?”
And as the dark blue sky turned grey, a cock threw back his head and crowed them all into Friday morning.
