King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (57 page)

They began reckoning the value of the ointment and how much money it would have fetched, if sold, as alms for the poor.

The disciples hotly defended Jesus. Judas said : “The poor are always at your gates. Why do you grudge this honour to one who has renounced all worldly possessions? Were you serious in your solicitude for the poor you would do as he has done. To be a proud Sadducee is one thing, to be a humble Ebionite is another ; each has his reward. But to be a Free Essene is to dally on the bridge over the waters of destruction.”

Jesus then said : “That was Mary the Hairdresser. She came to anoint me for burial. Let her deed not be forgotten, for she came as a peacemaker. Love was her ruin, leading her into witchcraft by the road of jealousy.”

When they heard Mary’s name, the Essenes rose hastily and went out to purify themselves, crying in astonishment to one another : “We have been wonderfully deceived! How can this madman be the Holy One
whom John the Baptist and the venerable Watchman of Horeb promised us?

Deserted except by his disciples, Jesus sat brooding at the table. Galilee had rejected him. The hill country of Judaea had not made him welcome, nor had Transjordania. The Samaritans, the Edomites, the Jews of Leontopolis had temporized with him. Jerusalem had rejected him with the right hand of the Jebusites and the left hand of the Levites. The Female had plotted against his life. The Ebionites had deserted him, and now the Essenes. Yet still he was King of Israel, the last of an ancient line, a King though unacclaimed, and still he trusted in the goodness of Jehovah and in the truthfulness of the prophets. Though he were fated to tread the path of Adam, he would tread it with a difference.

Presently he began to recite the beautiful though dark poem of Isaiah :

Who has believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground : he has no form nor comeliness ; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

He is despised and rejected of men ; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief : and we hid as it were our faces from him ; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows : yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

But he was tormented for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities : the chastisement of our peace was upon him ; and with his scourgings we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray ; we have turned everyone to his own way ; and the Lord has made the iniquity of us all to meet in him.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth : he was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before the shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.

He was taken away by distress and judgement : and who shall declare his generation? For he was cut off out of the land of the living : for the transgression of my people was the stroke laid upon him.

And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death ; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him ; he has put him to grief : when his soul shall make an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied : by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many ; for he shall bear their iniquities.

Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong ; because he has poured out his soul unto death : and he was numbered with the sinners ; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the sinners.

When he had done, he gazed around him at the disconsolate faces of his twelve disciples, drew a deep breath and fell silent again. None of them dared move ; even to have shifted an elbow would have seemed an offence against him, so deep and lamentable was his grief. Then they
were aware that his breast was heaving and his face working ; he seemed to increase in size and majesty, and they knew that he was about to prophesy.

They waited in a daze, until suddenly the words burst from his mouth with frightful force. “Amen, Amen : I will not feed the flock !” he roared, and seizing his stout pastoral staff, the one carved with flowers, he exerted all his strength and snapped it in two across his right knee.

They stared aghast.

“Amen, Amen : My sons, why do what is unprofitable? Why offend the clean for the sake of the unclean? Leave the ewe struggling in the thorn thicket, leave the lost lamb bleating in the marsh ; leave the broken limb unbound ; leave all ; forget your duty to me! Return to the fold, become masters of the fold, pipe merrily there, dance, sing, and eat the flesh with the fat !”

Peter picked up the pieces of almond-wood and gazed ruefully at them, as a child might gaze at a broken toy, piecing them together. For answer, Jesus took up his other staff, the one carved with bands, and broke that also, flinging the pieces out of the open window.

“What will you do now for a staff, Lord ?” Peter asked reproachfully.

“To-morrow morning go early to the slaughterhouse and fetch me back a butcher’s crook and a length of butcher’s cord.”

Then the prophetic spirit left him. He sank back into his seat and began to laugh softly at them. He seemed altogether changed in person and manner, jovial now and light-hearted. They were frightened at the change, but smiled timidly back at him.

He clapped Peter on the shoulder, and said : “Be of good courage, Peter! The End is not yet !” Eyeing the newly filled cups of wine which the Essenes had abandoned, he asked : “Comrades, what hinders us from drinking and making merry to-night? I will grant you a dispensation from your vows if you will drink with me like honest men.” He seized the nearest cup, which he emptied at a draught, and clattering it on the table, began singing the verses of a merry Galilean marriage song. The disciples, now drinking too, clapped their hands in time to the music and joined in the chorus. Then some of them began to dance on the table, cracking their fingers, while Thaddaeus and Simon of Cana shouted obscene jests unrebuked. Jesus said : “The tear of grief, the tear of rage, the tear of merriment—ah, but the tear of merriment was ever the best! Cease awhile from prophecy, Children, and laugh at the follies of this world.”

A great load was lifted from their hearts. They no longer needed to pretend to themselves that they were more pious men at heart than they were. They had been loyal to Jesus through good times and bad, but now that he had resolved the doubt which had been torturing them for months, and for entertaining which they had secretly reproached themselves as traitors to him, they loved him more than ever before. No, the End was not yet! Israel was as yet unprepared for salvation. They might relax the taut strings of the heart.

Only Judas abstained from wine, on a plea of sickness, and by midnight was the only disciple who could still stand upright on his feet. He reassured himself : “It cannot be ; I know the Master well. He is not one to yield, as he seems to have yielded, to a sudden despondency. He is a King, he is true-born, he is of those who endure to the very end. He is playing a part, that is all. He is playing a part to try us. To-morrow he will make everything clear.”

Yet the next morning Jesus was still in the same strange mood. He reminded Peter of his commission at the slaughterhouse and drank unmixed wine, which he pressed on the other disciples. Judas remembered the words of Isaiah : “Woe to those who rise up in the morning to follow strong drink !” When Peter returned with the crook and cord, all went outside into the garden. Jesus said to Judas : “I am hungry. Climb up into this fig-tree and fetch me a handful of figs.”

“There is none on it.”

“What, none ?”

“No, Master, it is not the season.”

Jesus flew into a passion and, stretching out his fingers, solemnly invoked the Worm that had gnawed at the roots of Jonah’s gourd to destroy the fig-tree in the same manner. Its tender leaves began to wilt before their eyes, and by the next day it was dead.

Judas said : “Master, your parable of the wise farmer and the fig-tree —the tree which is an emblem of Israel. He refrained from felling it though it had not fruited for three years ; yet you are destroying this tree without even waiting to see what it will yield in the fig-season !”

Jesus laughed scornfully. “What? Do you not see my new staff, splashed with the blood of the flock? Come with me, children of the slaughterhouse! Let us perform a great deed to-day, an honourable deed, a deed to fire the hearts of simple pilgrims. Let us cleanse the Outer Courts of the Temple, beginning at the Basilica of King Herod.” He led them off towards the Temple. Wine made their hearts bold and their feet unsteady. They stopped to drink again at an inn near the City gates.

Judas said nothing, but wondered to himself : “What is this? If the Temple is an idol, what need to cleanse it? Especially the outer parts? The other day he spoke a parable of a man who carefully cleansed the outside of a covered dish without lifting the lid to disclose the unclean food inside ; and he spoke it against the Temple priesthood.”

The strict Pharisaic rule against entering the Temple Mount with money or merchandise, or even with shoes on one’s feet, was scorned by the Levite priesthood, who considered that only the Sanctuary and the Inner Courts were holy in any true sense ; that nobody need tread with much awe in the Court of Israel or the Court of Women, and that the Court of the Gentiles was no holier than any other part of the Old City of Jerusalem. As for the Basilica built by Herod to the south of the Court of the Gentiles, they regarded it as a mere lobby and allowed stalls
to be set up there for pilgrims who found it inconvenient to climb up the Mount of Olives to buy pigeons, doves, lambs and other beasts of sacrifice in the regular market under the cedars there. This trade in livestock brought another with it : that of money-changing. A great inconvenience of the Roman occupation was that the Romans reserved the sole right to mint gold and silver, and that because of the Commandment against the worship of false gods, the head of the Emperor on the more recent coins, with the inscription : “
Tiberius Caesar Augustus, High Priest, Son of the God Augustus
”, prevented them from being carried into the Temple. Thus any Jew who came to the Basilica to buy a dove or pigeon and had only unclean money with him must change it first into clean at the money-changers’. Certain types of foreign money were tolerated as clean, and Herod’s copper coins stamped with Jewish emblems were still current.

On his arrival at the Basilica, Jesus took up his station just inside the gate, clapped his hands for silence and instructed the disciples to do the same. An inquisitive crowd gathered. Then, pitching his voice high and clear, he recited part of a prophecy from the Book of Jeremiah as follows :

The word of our God came to Jeremiah : ‘Stand in the Gate of the Temple and there proclaim these things which I put into your mouth. Say : Listen to the words of the God of Israel, the Lord of Hosts, all you Jews who enter by these gates to worship him. He says : Amend your ways and your deeds and I will establish you securely in this city. Do not deceive yourselves in lying repetitions : “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, all is well with the Temple of the Lord, all will be well with the Temple of the Lord !” Has this house which is called by my name become a robber’s den in your eyes?’

And he also says : ‘I have observed and seen all. But go to my former shrine at Shiloh in Ephraim, which was once called by my name, and see what I have done to it to punish the wickedness of my people Israel.’

And he also says : ‘Because you have done all this’—and I myself delivered his words to you at cock-crow, I called to you and you neither answered nor listened—‘because you have done all this I will do a thing to this Temple which is now called by my name, and in which you trust, and to the city and land which I gave to your fathers and to yourselves : I will do the very same thing that I did to Shiloh and cast you out of sight as I cast out your kinsmen the Ephraimites.’

And he says : ‘Offer no prayers for this people, no prayers and no supplications, no supplications and no intercessions. For I will shut my ears to them.’

This passage he recited three times, and his disciples stood about him and compelled the people to listen ; the crowd increased and the market-stalls were deserted of customers. Then he said : “The Jews of Jeremiah’s day would not listen, or repent, but the words of the Lord were proved true, for the Temple was destroyed. On the ninth day of the month Ab it was destroyed by fire. But the people repented by the waters of Babylon, and the Temple rose again, and is now rebuilt more
gloriously than ever ; yet the ancient abominations are revived. Men of Israel, our God is dishonoured in his own house! Whose is the sin? The Sons of Levi are the sinners. They take too much upon themselves, reserving holiness for their own tribe at the expense of all other Israelites. Is it not written in the fifteenth Psalm that no man shall dwell on this Holy Hill who traffics in money? And is not this place where we stand a part of the Holy Hill? Yet the Sons of Levi care nothing for its desecration so long only as their own enclosure remains inviolate. They shut their eyes to wickedness, and say : ‘We know nothing,’ though porters with profane burdens make the outer Courts a short-cut between one quarter of the City and another. How long is this to be borne? Look about you at these great buildings! Unless you amend your ways there will presently not be left one stone on another, but all will be cast down.” So saying, he took his length of butcher’s cord and plaited it into a scourge as they watched. When he had done, he cried : “Who is on my side, who? With this plaited cord I will purge these Courts of their filth !”

All the disciples, except Judas alone, shouted : “Lord, we are with you !” The crowd took up the cry exultantly : “We are with you !” and Jesus advanced to the traders and money-changers. “Go, go, be off I say, lest this plaited cord leave its mark on you for the rest of your days !”