After that, everything was more of a mess than before. Joseph and Nikodemos to enter the murder of black robed crows which had leapt on Jesus, kicking and spitting, and Gamaliel shouted: “Lord Caiaphas, I insist, do something. Say something!” while others cried out, “Stop, leave him alone. Let im alone.”
Mark and John held back Mary and Magdalene who wished to run down into the hall, and Judas had run out of the hall and was running down the main steps of the house pursued by his brother.
Judas had made it barely the length of the house and into the darkness of the morning when Thomas caught him.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve ruined it. I’ve ruined it. I’ve ruined everything!” he wept, struggling out of his brother’s arms, but Thomas was as strong as his twin.
“Well, maybe you have, but it’s for you to see it through, now, isn’t it?”
“Let me go! Let me go!”
“Why should I let you go, eh? Why should you get away? Stand here like a man. Face this. Face it. See!”
Behind a troop of guards and followed by pious looking black and white robed men who had just spent the last half hour kicking and hitting Jesus, and then by others, far more indignant at the whole situation came Jesus.
“Look at it. See it,” Thomas said. “Remain with us. Feel what you have done. What we all have done.”
“I betrayed him. I killed him.”
“He is not dead yet.”
“He will be.”
“Then face it like the rest of us. Face it like the women.”
Jesus had been loaded into a wagon, like any criminal, surrounded by guards, and men were mounting their ponies or horses. They were tramping down the street, and some of the members of the Sanhedrin, presumably the friends of Jesus’s family were taking the women with them, and none of the women was weeping, and with them were Mark and John. The sun was rising over a desolate day, and the demonic all night party was dispersing from the lavish home, the pillared courtyards and lovely lawns, and the high stair cases leading to the arched passages of the High Priest Caiaphas.
“Why would Judas…?” John began.
“Who cares?” Magdalene was weary. “He has done it, and here we are, and where are all the others?”
“Peter, gone. Thomas, chasing Judas. Everyone else probably holed up in Mariah’s house.”
He and Magdalene were traveling in the back of a cart, glad to not be walking through the winding streets that led to the Temple Mount. Now they decended from the picturesque hills of lavish courtyards houses and the old palaces of the priests and the Herods who had ruled Jerusalem for so long, and descending into the waking city, they saw, in the distance, the high walls of the Temple compound, a city with in a city, approaching.
But Jesus would not be going to the Temple. The leading me mbers of the Sanhedrin were taking him through more and more exhalted settings, palaces of higher walls and greater towers, and now they arrived at the hilltop main palace complex of Herod the Great, the palace with high and lovely towers named for the Hasmoneans who had usurped the throne of David only to be hung, drowned and poisoned by the Herods who usurped them. Here, both Pilate and the Herods stayed when they were in the city, and from here they could make their way to the great praetorium courtyard where Mary and the others were, and where some people were gathering to learn what they could of Jesus.
The sky was clearly blue now, and though John offered to find food for Magdalene, she refused. She’d rather have news. She’d rather be back in the house with Susanna and Joanna. She’d rather be back in Galilee with Photine or Binah, on the cool water that day when they had discovered the secret of walking on waves.
So far, what she had learned was that there had allegedly been some back and forth between Pilate and Jesus, and then Pilate, feeling most un-Roman, had not wanted to make any sort of decision. A household servant said this was because Pilate’s wife was a believer even, and she’d had dreams telling Pilate to do nothing with this man. At any road, Magdalene had barely sat herself down in the great courtyard when she heard that Jesus was being moved around to the apartments of Herod Antipas and Herodias. Oh, how her heart dreaded this, those killers of the Baptist! She had not been there for Yochanon’s funeral, but his son was her nephew, and she had seen the box which held his head. By the time the sun was fully up and Mary, veiled in white against the heat of the day, was half alive half dozing between her sisters and Mariah, John Mark came to say that Jesus was being led back to Pilate.
All of this was conducted outside the hosue of Pilate, for the Pesach was about to begin, and they could not enter his house for defilement.
“Defilement,” he had murmured, and laughed to himself, though not entirely with humor.
“And where is Caiaphas?” he’d asked his lieutinent, Faustinus.
“In his house, as it would not befit the high priest to travel on this day, and he conducted this trial all through the night—“
“Through the night? How strange.”
“How illegal,” Quintellus tapped his forehead. “But, he has sent Alexander.”
“His own son, well,” Pilate blinked.
Pilate in his toga, and Quintellus in his boiled leather armor arrived in the courtyard to receive the men in black surrounding a very tired man in red with a disturbingly bruised face. These Jews would be the death of him. Did they ever bring a marauder or a murderer to him? No. But this man. Who was he? Someone they were in some nonsense dispute with, and here he was.
“What charges are you bringing against this man, Alexander?”
The handsome and officious man, taller than his father or grandfather and destined to be another high priest Pilate was not looking forward to dealing with replied:
“If he were not a malefactor, we would not have brought him to you.”
“Which is not an answer,” Pilate returned.
“Apparently, not even Herod found this an answer. Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.”
“But we have no right to execute anyone!” Alexander cried, as if this were obvous and around him Bathan, Joktan and Josiah loudly agreed.
“Bloodthirsty….” Pilate was about to say, “Jews,” but he had lived through the foolishness of Sejanus, and was only too glad to be far from the rabble of Rome. What was it about weak men? They could never wait to kill, and yet you had to be the one to let them, because they couldn’t do it themselves. He resented them, would have had more respect if they’d simply stoned this silent man, standing like a red pillar before him.
Pilate grunted, went back into the shade of the palace where these Jews could not follow, but motioned for Jesus. Surely he could not have cared for his ritual impurity. And then the things Claudia had said… And Claudia was never wrong. Strange, but never wrong..
“You had nothing to say for yourself before? You have nothing to say for yourself now?”
And Jesus had nothing to say.
“Who are you?” Pilate demanded, sitting down in the great throne like chair and taking an pomegranate for himself, which he began to peel.
“What are you?”
He thought a man as hungry as Jesus must now be might look on the fruit, but he did not.
“Are you the King of the Jews?”
And now, Jesus looked at him directly—directly—and amused.
“Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”
“Am I a Jew?” Pilate fired back stomping his foot.
“Your own people and chief priests handed you over to me! What is it you have done?”
“My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
Pilate’s eyes lit as he leaned out of his seat, looking up at the red robed man.
“You are a king, then!”
“So you say. Truly,” he spoke slow and steady, as if even now he were teaching, and teaching a very slow person at that, “the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone who loves truth listens to me.”
What a claim! And mouth open in shock and something close to laughter, Pilate said, “What is truth?”
Before Jesus could answer, Pilate leapt up and left him staring at his empty seat while he went out to those crows on the porch waiting for a hanging.
“I find no basis for a charge against him.”
Now, here matters become confused. Years later, when Mary the Magdalene was a much older woman, she would hear someone telling her just the very tell recorded. In that tale, Pilate would be far kinder than the governor of Judea anyone, including her, remembered. After all, Pontius Pilate was a cruel man and loved to kill Jews. He had come from a cruel city and a cruef and conquering people. By the time she heard the story of a reluctant governor, Rome would have rotted under three other emperors, and the new one would be a man who had burned Jerusalem to the ground and fulfilled every prophecy Jesus ever made. In those stories Pilate had a custom:
“—To release to you one prisoner at the time of the Passover. Do you want me to release ‘the King of the Jews’?”
And the people shouted back, “No, not him! Give us Barabbas!”
In that story, Pilate thought, how horrible! He went back and kept talking to Jesus, whom he had previously flogged. The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in a purple robe and went up to him again and again, saying, “Hail, king of the Jews!” And they slapped him in the face.
This Magdalene saw clearly enough. She did not see the beating, but she heard his screams, and every time he screamed, John leapt into the air, and Mary quaked in her sister’s arms until finally the strongest woman Magdalene had ever seen was openly, and Magdalene thought, oh thank God, oh thank God Lazaros and Marta and Benjamin were on their way to Gaul, sailing away from all of this horror.
Here now came Joanna and Binah, and Susanna and here was James even, and the praetorium was filling with people. All around Jerusalem was news of Jesus’ arrest, and now came Nikodemos and see, here was Joseph too. Cleophas and Rachel. Comfort in numbers and yet no comfort, because here was Jesus, half naked, beaten, bloodied with a black eye, exhausted, only a little able to stand.
In the stories, Pilate said: “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him.”
When Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, “Ecce Homo!”
At the sight of him, Mary fell to her knees, overcome by something more than sorrow, and no one lifted her up, and no one understood that she was in worship.
But in contrast to her worship, when the shrill voices of the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!”
Tone deaf, they shrieked: “Crucify him!”
There was some argument. It went past Magdalene’s ears, but when she was old and on her way out of this world, a visitor to her home, one who called her Saint and Mother, told her.
Pilate said, “You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against him.”
The murder of crows squawked, “We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God.”
And when Pilate heard this, he was even more afraid, and he went back inside the palace. “Where do you come from?” he asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer.
“Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate said. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?”
Jesus was strangely calm for one beaten so badly.
“You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.”
He took a deep breath, for he was weary, his lips swollen, and he had been up all this night. Pilate thought him done, but he continued:
“Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”
In the story Mary heard, from one who had never been anything like a Jew, it was from that moment that Pilate tried to set Jesus free, but the members of the Sanhedrin kept shouting, “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.”
When Pilate heard this, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judge’s seat at a place known as the Stone Pavement, the Gabbatha.
“Here is your king,” Pilate said to the Jews.
But the whole crowd shouted, “Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!”
“Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate baited them.
Alexander stepped forward and said, loudly, bowing before Pilate:
“We have no king but Caesar,”
And this was how Pilate handed Jesus over.
Some of this happened. Much of it happened. Mary was not there for the conversations between Jesus and Pilate and only overheard later what some said the priests had said. And in the end, there were shouts of “Crucify him! Crucify him! For by now the praetorium was filled with people on the side of the priests. Jerusalem had never been Jesus’s city, but the home of his enemies. Even so, there were many crying, “No! No, he is innocent!” But this would never have mattered.
Pilate had once threatened to murder a courtyard full of Jews and only reluctantly stopped himself now. He was famous for his violence when he lived, and it was only because men had forgotten how awful he was that this tale could have ever been told. Later they would add to the story a man named Bar Abbas, son of the Father, a reflection of Jesus, an insurrectionist and a murderer, and Pilate would have a custom by which he freed one prisoner a year, and he would wring his hands as he released a murderer and had Jesus crucified. But this would have been bad governance, No Roman would ever do this, and neither did Pilate. The truth, Jesus was Bar abbas. There were those shouting “Crufify him” and there were those shouting, “Give us the Son of the Father!” and neither mattered to Pilate.
“It was a day of lies,” John Mark would note when he was older. A boy and a handsome one at that, he had been able to see most of it.
“The lengthy back and forth between Jesus and Pilate occurred before his beating, not after,” he said, and Mary trusted him. “Pilate would never have him crowned in thorns and beaten halfway to death if he hadn’t planned to kill Jesus all along.”
There would come a day when Mary, the daughter of Yoakim and Chana would almost regret ever opening her mouth to tell the things she had kept silent a lifetime, when she would hear stories with herself at the center and not recognize them, when she would hear things important to some and not bother to say, no, no, that did not happen this way or no, this never happened at all.
This much was true, coming into the Temple with the child in her arms and Joseph at her side. Some people lived their whole lives within Temple walls, like that old man Symeon, who seized upon her child and lifted him up. And that woman, Anna, named like her mother, and so very old then that she was surely dead by now, dead long ago.
Symoen had declared:
“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word:
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.
She had told none of this? How could she? And the man and woman had said:
“Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against. Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
It was later the kings had come. People got that story so wrong Mary assumed they had gotten it wrong on purpose. Her eyes had barely been able to focus on those glittering crowns fastened about turbans and then taken off and lain on the ground before her. And she had been embarrassed, grateful they’d come in the night because they were so very close to Sepphoris, the king’s new city. Jesus had been a little child and fascinating by their offerings. They had come from the East, following star charts and prophecies and come to Nazareth, not Bethlehem. These were wise men from Parthia. They knew the lay of things and what it meant to prophecy the birth of a king. The Herods had killed many children, mostly their own, and there had been a blood bath in Sepphoris and around it. Times were dangerous, and after the wise men left, Joseph took Mary and Jesus abroad and they were gone some time. What she had left of their mighty offerings was the myrrh in her robes.
And now, sharp as the points of those crowns, or the enterlacing branches of trees, she blinked to see the barbs of a crown fashioned from thorns. Who would make such a thing? Who would endure the pain of creating it only to wrap it about the bleeding head and once black hair of her son as he stumbled from the gate of the palace onto the road, like some great, shaking newborn bird, arms outstretched for the patibulum stretched on his back as he was marched, wobbling, to his death?
