Chapter 32: Pilate, Herod, and a Lashing

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

---

Book II: The Rabbi
Part Five–Messiah
                                      

The Temple court proceedings in the small stone building in the southwest corner of the Temple differed little from those in Caiaphas’ private home. As the great wooden beams arched over everyone’s head and the pillars of stone turned from gold to pale yellow in the rising sun’s light, the same witnesses stood forth again.

Tired now, their eyes reflecting the weary deceit in each other’s faces from staying up all night, they accused Jesus a second time. This time the whole Sanhedrin, spread out in rows of of tens and twenties on their stone benches, heard the proceedings. Earlier at the pre-trial at Caiaphas’ home, some Sanhedrin members had been missing. These were Sadducees and other priests whom Caiaphas found too liberal or too sympathetic to Jesus’ claims.

As the witnesses now finished their tales, one of these Sadducee members sympathetic to Jesus’ claims rose from his spot on the cold stone benches. He was tall, slender, and aristocratic with graying hair and a somber gaze. With an angry glow in his eyes, he gave Jesus a shared look of strength and comfort.

Jesus returned the look. It was Nicodemus, in whose house he had eaten his last supper with his envoys and friends. Nicodemus also had secretly helped the friends for many months with money and legal assistance.

As the tall, dignified man now proceeded to lash out with intelligent persistence at the witnesses’ inconsistencies and lies, tearing their testimony apart, Jesus felt a warmth steal through his shoulders and move down his boy. It steadied him and made him feel strong once again. He watched with amusement as scowls slowly spread across the bearded faces of Caiaphas and the chief Pharisee priests as Nicodemus’ attack continued.

Finally, as Jesus openly smiled at him, Caiaphas rose with a growl and, slapping his hand loudly on the stone railing before him, he barked out a command to halt. “What good will it do to ask these men questions when we have the accused here in person!” he exclaimed.

He turned and faced Jesus one more time, careful not to look him full in the eye and get caught in the strange, searching stare that made him feel so totally naked.

“You,” he said, pointing at Jesus across the dark stone floor. “Tell us in your own words. Are you the son of God?”

Jesus, still smiling looked confidently around the entire stone judgment hall at each of the Sanhedrin’s members in turn. He felt a quiet peace settling upon him. “It is just as you say,” he calmly told them. “I Am.”

Caiaphas stumbled back in shocked horror as gasps filled the stone courtroom from most of the other Sanhedrin members. Jesus had once again uttered the unspeakable name of God.

“You blasphemer!” Caiaphas shouted. He turned to the other priests in the room. “What more do you need to find him guilty?” He flung out his hand. “You have heard him yourself!”

The high priest then grabbed the hem of his robes and, pulling as hard as he could, he ripped the white garment apart. A jagged tear appeared from the bottom and disappeared upward beneath the beautiful, short tunic of his purple outer robe and his shiny breastplate.

As Jesus looked on, his heart pounding at what he had done before Israel’s high court, they found him guilty with only three dissenting votes.

Caiaphas, his eyes wild and his cheeks flushed an unhealthy dark red from triumph, sentenced Jesus to death.

They then sent him to Pilate.

As Caiaphas’ Temple guards roughly escorted Jesus out of the Temple grounds and through the main streets, men from the mob of Caiaphas’ supporters appeared and struck at him and called him names. This time, unlike the time when the hand of the guard hit him in Caiaphas’ home, Jesus saw the fists coming and was able to avoid the worst of the pain. He turned his head to the side when he could, to deflect the blows, and breathed deeply to quiet the mixed fear and anger that kept rushing up his spine and out to his trembling hands. By the time he reached Pilate’s home, he was trembling all over from anger and the effort of holding himself in. his eyes were flashing and he felt like shouting out at everyone around him that they were being fools.

Pilate came out to greet him. The grey-haired Roman stepped forth from the small inner courtyard of his home to the gates in the wall before it as the guards brought Jesus across the wide city courtyard in front of Pilate’s house. The house was across the way from the Hasmonean Palace towering over it. In the area between Pilate’s gates and the Palace, the street widened to form a city courtyard with palm trees planted in huge pots at the corners.

The city courtyard normally was silent and desolate because it was between government buildings of foreign powers. Few of Israel’s people went there.

But it was crowded now with surging, yelling people as Pilate strode out. Pilate was aware of his own servants looking out from the second floor of his villa behind him, and of his own Roman guards carefully watching from the high windows across the street in the Palace that he had turned to use as a fortress.

He dismissed Caiaphas’ less well-bred guards with a wave of his manicured hand. The scent of his minty breath stabbed out briefly at Jesus, then disappeared on the morning breeze.

Jesus stared at Pilate evenly, not sure if the man was still a friend or should be considered an enemy. Jesus raised a questioning eyebrow when he saw Pilate look at him fearfully.

“What are you doing here?” the Governor asked gruffly.

“You know,” Jesus answered.

Pilate looked away. “I cannot speak in front of all these people,” he said, glancing at the mob with contempt. “Come inside.”

They went to Pilate’s stateroom where he received visitors. It was a silent waiting place of white stucco walls, marble floors, and light-blue trim.

“Sit down,” he invited, pointing at a low wooden chair. “I would offer you a bowl of water with which to wash your hands, but you are manacled. I’m sorry; I have no way of freeing you.”

Jesus sat. He breathed with relief, for he had been standing for hours, yet he found himself unable to relax. He leaned forward, restless and in pain from his bruises. He wanted to get this interview finished.

“I have the charges here,” Pilate said, sitting across from Jesus. The older man held them up and shook them. “Did you know one of your own envoys accuses you of not paying taxes?”

Jesus’ face fell. “What?” he asked, leaning forward. “They said nothing of that at the trial.”

Pilate looked away quickly again. “It is a matter for Roman tax laws only, and not for your Jewish courts. But it is a serious charge, the only one that really concerns me as Governor. Your Judas Ischariot has signed a deposition saying you did not pay taxes to Rome on the lmonies you received as donations.”

Jesus grimaced. “Pilate, such donations have already been taxed before they reach me. The law says that the receiver of such donations, if he is an individual, does not need to pay taxes again”

Pilate nodded. “Yes, but according to this report, you have received many thousands of silver coins more than my officials knew about! Rome won’t look kindly on such large amounts going t one person. On this charge alone I should condemn you. That is the custom of Rome. I must sentence you at least to a whipping. Do you understand?”

Pilate leaned forward in his chair earnestly. “Do you realized if I don’t have you whipped, I could lose my job?” He threw his arm out in a wide circle. “Then where would all your Jewish countrymen be, without a sympathetic governor such as I?”

Jesus shifted uncomfortably. “All this isn’t necessary,” he told Pilate. “I am to die anyway.”

“Die!” Pilate exclaimed, aghast. “You think I will really let them kill you?”

“You must. If you don’t, they will do it anyway.”

“No.” Pilate lay his clean white hands flat on top of his knees. “I will appeal your case to Herod, your Judean king. Herod is very favorable toward you, he has told me, for he has decided you are the reincarnation of John the Cleanser and can give him spiritual counseling.”

Pilate chuckled. “The important thing, though,” he told Jesus, “is that the Sanhedrin has no power over Herod and his rulings.”

“It won’t work,” Jesus told him. “Herod’s pleasures and his displeasures change from day to day.”

Pilate stood up suddenly, his brow furrowing with frustration. “Then why did you have to endanger yourself? Why tell them you are their king? Are you?”

Jesus stood up, too. They faced each other in the morning sunlight of the blue-trim room. “I have not told them I am their king. But I am. My kingdom is not of Herod’s lands or your own. My kingdom is of the inner world, of the spirit world that is as real as the world we see here!’

“What is reality?” Pilate said, turning his eyes away from Jesus once more.

“You can see reality this very day,” Jesus softly told him, “if you will but look within.”

“Someday,” Pilate said, nodding quickly. He pointed to a design on the wall. It was an inlaid design of blue, green, and brown tiles showing the Roman homeland and the islands surrounding it. “Yes, someday I shall. When I am done with these silly intrigues of Rome and have retired to some lonely isle, I hope to follow my interests in philosophical subjects. Have you read Plato?”

Jesus just stared back at him, not wanting to discuss Plato at a time like this.

““No difference!” Pilate exclaimed, his eyes beginning to dart nervously back and forth. “We’ll talk about these things later! Right now we must get you off to Herod in a hurry so you can be freed right away. Guards!”

As Pilate’s Roman guards led Jesus away, Pilate called after him, “Good luck!”

As Jesus left the Governor’s home through the yelling mob, he felt a sense of relief. He liked Pilate, but the man’s nervousness had been unsettling and his hopes foolish.

Jesus began steeling himself as the guards led him quickly and efficiently through the streets to meet the king who had ordered his cousin and best friend, John, beheaded.

Jesus didn’t speak to Herod.

He had no chance, actually. Herod wanted miracles. Jesus felt a great sadness settle over his shoulders. Standing in his chains before the King, he saw a portly little man with gleaming, bloodshot eyes and the aura of an insane and power-hungry fool. A half-clad young Greek girl was feeding him grapes. Her beautiful face was a frozen mask of permanent fear. Herod stared wildly at Jesus, looking from the taller man’s dirty bare toes to his bloody face, and Jesus felt his skin automatically contracting as if it were cold.

Herod smile with his gleaming eyes. He asked Jesus if he was the reincarnation of John, or was he the Messiah, or what else could he possibly be, seeing that he was such a powerful and handsome man?

Jesus didn’t answer.

Herod’s aides slowly came and went, secret smiles lighting their faces as they darted quick glances at Jesus and bent over the King with food and drink. Herod threatened him.

Jesus still did not answer.

Herod began trembling, and the pupils of his eyes rolled upward out of sight in the fat flesh of his face. Then he screamed.

Quickly he took Jesus apart, piece by piece, verbally, screaming and laughing, whining and crying at him.

Jesus felt the powerful hatreds and tensions hit him time after time like the waves of a stormy sea pounding against his flesh.

Herod ordered his guards to torture Jesus so he would speak.

They took Jesus out of the hall and into a dusty corner of the great courtyard. There they spat upon him and slapped him and hit him on the shoulders and back with the broadsides of the swords.

Jesus had been well able to handle the hitting and slapping of the angry mob that had surrounded him between Caiaphas’ and Pilate’s houses. The blows had been carelessly aimed and irregular. But now the force of hatred coming from these soldiers was mixed with professional skill. They hit him with stunning blows. They mocked him by putting a crown of thorn-filled twigs on his head and then hitting him when he least expected it.

Jesus found himself automatically tensing for each blow and forced himself to relax. He bit his lip when one blow nearly knocked him off his feet, and he tasted his own salty blood. Ters spring to his eyes, which he blind away; hot sweat and blood from his cut eyebrows trickled down his face and into his eyes. He had to shake his head violently to clear the sweat and blood out of them.

Finally the guards shoved Jesus, dirty and drenched with sweat and spattered drops of blood, before Herod once again.

Jesus still wouldn’t talk.

Herod, trembling violently, returned him to Pilate with this note: “Though I would find him guilty, dear Governor, I leave such a sentence up to you; Rome’s judgment is greater and more farseeing than mine. I bow to your better judgment.”

As Jesus stood before Pilate once again, tired and dizzy, he slowly took deep breaths of the cool morning air. A pleasant breeze came through the open windows and brushed its fingertips gently against his dozens of scrapes and cuts.

Pilate looked him up and down fearfully. “What did Herod do?” he asked.

Jesus gave him a long, searching stare.

Pilate whirled away. “There are other ways to free you!” he exclaimed. “Look! I will have you punished for your tax offenses. Forty lashes! That ought to still the blood lust of your enemies.”

Jesus closed his eyes and held them tightly shut against the knowledge that now he was to be whipped, too. He felt faint and steadied himself. He sighed deeply once again. The sigh became a deep shudder, instead, which ran through his shoulders and across his chest, and spread down through his stomach and thighs. He stilled the trembling as Pilate’s Roman soldiers led him away and the Governor restlessly paced back and forth.

Jesus was aware of each smallest touch and sound as the soldiers led him out to the city courtyard with its potted palms, between the Hasmonean Palace and Pilate’s front gates. Jesus felt the cobbled stones pressing up against the soles of his torn, dirty feet. The midmorning air was still slightly chilly. The sun warmed his arms and face.

Jesus looked around. Dozens of passersby were watching him and the soldiers curiously. Some of them were from Caiaphas’ angry mobs, but others were strangers who had no idea what was going on. Some of them saw the whip in one soldier’s hand, and they shrank away in loathing; but others drew near. As the two soldiers gently but firmly tied Jesus to the smooth wood rail used for holding prisoners to be whipped, a crowd of avid watchers already was gathering. They shouted hoarse obscenities at the Roman soldiers. Some, assuming Jesus was a common criminal and also stupid for having been caught, shouted obscenities at him, too. Those who were part of Caiaphas’ mob took this opportunity grab clods of dirt from the potted palms and fling them at Jesus’ head, until the soldiers abruptly turned around and commanded them to stop.

the two soldiers, tall and brawny redheads from a northern Roman province whom Pilate had asked for because of their careful intelligence, now lifted Jesus’ robes and tied them against his neck so his back was bare. The two men then looked at each other–they were cousins–and decided in that one quick glance which of them would whip Jesus.

The chosen one, the taller and thinner of the two, offered Jesus a piece of hard wood to bite down on. “It will hurt less, sir,” he told the Galilean.

Jesus shook his head and let his jaw hang slack instead. He knew that tensing up would result in more of his skin and muscles being cut by the leather whipping cords, rather than less. He made himself relax all over. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the friends, a servant of Nicodemus, enter the courtyard. The servant stopped in horror when he recognized Jesus, then ran off quickly.

Then the searing bite of the leather cords ripped across Jesus’ awareness like lines of fire. He jerked tensely forward, then made himself relax again.

The second lash of the cords made him feel like screaming. Instead he threw his awareness as deeply as he could take it into the depths of a dark, yawning hole inside him. The scream he had felt like uttering came silently with him to that darkness and lost itself there.

The third lash of the many cords made him lose consciousness briefly. When he came to again, between lashings, he immediately started a breathing exercise he had learned in India years before but had rarely used. The exercise was designed to energize a mediator so much he would catapult out of his body and explode toward the stars in the sky if he used it for several minutes. The breathing exercise now, though, was barely enough to help him stay conscious under the repeated blows of the leather.

Blow after blow rained on his back. He saw nothing before him except a bright, imagined field of scarlet shot with yellow and purple streaks. It grew more intense with each fiery blow and then subsided slowly into darkness between blows. His back felt like it was ripped entirely to shreds and his bones and vital organs exposed.

Finally, after what seemed like a great age of time, he felt the last lashing. It was a soft laying of the tips of the leather cords across his left shoulder: a fortieth blow that satisfied the number required by Roman law, but did not exceed the thirty-nine painful blows that Hebrew Laws said whipping must be limited to, in order to avoid cruelty.

when the two Roman soldiers, the redheaded cousins, untied him, he slowly stood up and turned around. The soldiers gasped with surprise, for most men receiving such a whipping fainted or at the very least were unable to walk.

Jesus realized, as he looked out between his sweat and dust-caked eyelids, that hundreds of people were now standing here, watching him. Some he saw gloating. Others, friends he recognized, had tears in their eyes. He realized Nicodemus’ servant had told them what was happening, and many of them had hurried here. He saw Miriam with her face pushed into an older woman’s comforting shoulder. Many people suddenly cried out and stepped back as he looked at them. He couldn’t understand why at first. Then, seeing the hands of the soldiers also shake when he looked at them, he sensed for the first time that his face had become a rigid mask of fury.

He tried to relax it so he wouldn’t scare those around him. But he couldn’t. His eyebrows stayed locked in position as the fury he hadn’t even realized he was feeling now possessed him totally and blazed through his limbs in a heat greater even than the stinging fire of his torn back.

He took one step toward the two redheaded soldiers, who backed away in fear. Then he lost consciousness again.

This time when he came back to awareness, he found himself being taken by the two soldiers, one on either side supporting him, to Pilate, who stood at the top of his marble stairs with tears in his aristocratic grey eyes. Jesus suddenly became aware that hundreds of people, just out of his sight now, were roaring and yelling. In the general noise, he could, here and there, pick out his name.

“I am sorry,” Pilate said, kneeling before Jesus in the privacy of his small inner courtyard. He bent and kissed Jesus’ feet. “I would not do these things if I had my way.” He stood again. “But I have no choice. Come with me now, my friend. I think perhaps the people will let you go.”

He took Jesus gently by the elbow. Jesus stumbled, then found his strength and walked forward woodenly with Pilate’s help. Pilate led him out on a small balcony in his home that overlooked the street below. Hundreds of faces turned up in wave after wave to look at him high above. The crowd began to roar in one continuous rolling thunder of noise.

“Silence!” Pilate called, raising his arms high. “Silence!”

Slowly the roar subsided to an uneasy growl as armed Roman soldiers appeared bearing unsheathed swords, standing at every corner and gate.

“Look!” Pilate yelled, shoving Jesus forward beside him. “I have punished him and now he is free. Here is your King!”

The streets below exploded with noise. Men climbed the potted palms and other trees and waved their fists. Others spat upwards at Jesus, only to have their spittle fall back on their faces. Women jeered. In the background stood Caiaphas the high priest himself, a dark lord smiling crookedly and gloating wide-eyed as he stared at Jesus with amusement. It was obvious to Jesus, and those of his envoys and friends looking on, that Caiaphas had packed the courtyard with his own supporters and mobs in case Pilate tried to release the beaten man. Then they would tear him apart. Several Hebrew guards by Caiaphas’ side suddenly turned and ran down an open side street as soon as they heard Pilate call Jesus “King.” They wore the uniforms of King Herod’s Galilean guard. They were hurrying to report this back to Herod immediately.

Pilate stepped back inside, out of sight of the crowd, tugging at Jesus’ arm. “They don’t seem to want you very much,” he observed drily. “I thought you were more popular than this.”

Jesus felt the fury coming back to him now. He glared at Pilate, who faltered.

“Wait,” Pilate said. He was uneasy. “Let us think. Let me call my legal expert. If the crowds won’t accept this whipping as sufficient punishment, then there must be another way. Here, sit here, I will return immediately.”

Jesus stood, feeling every angry yell and cry of the crowd as the noise surged over him while Pilate scurried away.

The Governor returned a few minutes later. “I have it,” he said, smiling and then frowning at Jesus in nervous worry. “You Israelites have a strange custom, it seems, of releasing one condemned criminal at this festival week. You make him your scapegoat. You chase him out of the city and pretend he is bearing the whole city’s sins with him. No! No, don’t say a thing. I will ask that mob down there if they will choose you for their scapegoat. Surely this will make them change their minds!”

Jesus felt tears welling in his eyes as he listened to the crowd still shouting. He knew Pilate was being foolish. Yet Jesus felt sorrier for the angry people in the street, whom Caiaphas had fooled with money and deceitful words, than he did for the Governor, who stood trembling before him, eager to please him.

“Go ahead,” he told Pilate.
“Don’t worry,” Pilate answered. “Even if this fails, I have instructed some of your own followers to wait just outside the courtyard door. I will release you back to the Sanhedrin authorities, but it will be your own followers who will get to you first. They will steal you away. I have just now heard that they are waiting in a group outside, near the doors.”

Jesus felt a heavy weight of tiredness and despair creeping over him. He began to wonder if he ever would be given the chance to just die, as he was supposed to. Yet he felt a strange and welcome lightness of heart when he thought of his envoys waiting to hide him away.

He turned and stepped out on the balcony once more with Pilate, feeling less afraid to face the crowd this time.

Pilate again called for silence. This time his soldiers had to press forward menacingly to get the silence he wanted.

“I bring you this man!” he announced. “He has been tried and found guilty, punished and yet condemned to more. Death is the sentence your own Sanhedrin has given him. Yet by our word you may have him released. He is just a man. Would you make him suffer both whipping and a death for such small crimes? Let me release him to you as the scapegoat of your festival this week, so that you may chase him out of the city carrying our sins on his back!”

“Crucify him!” the people shouted. Caiaphas, standing in the background, grinned.

“Give us Barabbas! Free Barabbas the revolutionary for us!” the people shouted. Caiaphas, stroking his black beard, broke forth in a wide smile. It was obvious that, again, he had planned this.

“We want Barabbas! We want Barabbas!” the crowd chanted. “Crucify the Galilean!”

Pilate turned with tears in his eyes to Jesus. “What can I do?” he asked, shrugging and holding out his hands.

“Nothing,” Jesus told him, feeling his sorrow for the crowd wash over him like a wall of roaring sea, cleansing him with sadness and tears.

Pilate, seeing the tears in his eyes, tried to comfort him once more. “There are still your followers. They will rescue you. But now watch. I must release you from Roman laws.”

Pilate ordered a servant to bring him a bowl of water and hold it up on the balcony where the crowd could see it. Then taking a towel and dipping his hands in the water and washing them, he called out to the crowd. “This man is innocent!” he announced, into the suddenly thickening hush. Everyone watched him in surprise.

He nodded to Jesus, and a guard standing behind Jesus quickly drew him away down the stairs. As Jesus hurried to keep up with the guard’s pulling, he heard Pilate finish his speech. “I wash my hands of his blood!” the Governor announced, his voice ringing through the streets. “let those who condemn him kill him. I hereby release him from all vows and responsibilities to the Roman law!”

The guard thrust Jesus suddenly forward. Jesus found himself on a side street with several of his surprised and frightened envoys standing around him.

He reached out to grasp Peter’s hand. But just before the two men could touch, Jesus was knocked down.

“Here! Here he is!” a gravelly voice yelled. A woman nearby screamed.

Before Peter and Thomas and several of the other envoys could lift a hand to help him, the whole press of the great crowd was bearing down toward them while several of Caiaphas’ hired informers held Jesus down.

The envoys disappeared before they, too, were caught. Jesus felt the weight of many bodies suddenly slamming on top of his own. The pain of his freshly scabbing back wounds tore through him as the cuts stretched and ripped apart again. Through the intense, burning pain, he felt himself being dragged up by tens of angry, poking and pinching hands that prodded at him and hit him in his most sensitive parts of his boy.

“Stone him! Take him out to the walls outside the city and stone him!” The call was picked up and echoed by many. The crowd began dragging Jesus down the street. He tried to stand, but they tripped him. He tried again and was viciously hit across the back. He coughed and tasted blood and realized that someone had hit him so hard in the stomach that he was bleeding inside. He tried to look up at the faces around him, but they were all blurred and angry. The only face he saw clearly for an instant, through a break in the swirling mob about him, was Caiaphas. The high priest was staring at him with an exultant, fierce glare.

In a few short minutes, they were at the outer wall by the road to Emmaus. Jesus felt the crowd push him against the wall then back away from him. He heard the scraping sounds of dozens of people picking up large stones.

Suddenly, out of the lull of silence in which men and women were picking up their stones, a voice rang out. Jesus wearily looked up and saw a tall, dark stranger whose eyes were filled with pity for him, and with fear. “He will be bruised for our sins and by his bloody welts we all shall be healed!” the stranger called out.

Suddenly the crowd stopped, their hands bearing stones raised in mid-air, and looked at each other uneasily.

“That is a prediction of the life of the Messiah!” they whispered to each other. “It is in the Books of the Prophets. What are we doing?”

Jesus felt a wave of nausea come over him. He stood up straight and breathed deeply of the warming, noontime air.

Just then Herod’s guards in their Galilean dress came running up in close formation. The Captain, a short and squat man with a wide girth of belly, called out to them. “Have you killed him yet? We have orders from King Herod to be sure this man is crucified. The King does not agree with Pilate the governor, who calls this Galilean our true King!”

He pointed at Jesus, who was waving before the high city wall arching up and slightly outward above his head.

“Crucify him!” someone shouted. The crowd took up the cry again.

The captain of Herod’s guards hesitated, and looked at Caiaphas, who had followed in the wake of the crowd dragging Jesus.

Jesus stood there in the short, stubby grass, breathing deeply and waiting for their decision. He wiped the blood and sweat out of his eyes with the sleeve of his dusty robe, and tried to find his heart center, in the middle of his chest, to concentrate on it. But his concentration wavered, then broke. The pain and tiredness were just too strong.

All the people, with more of the crowd pushing toward the soldiers every second, waited to hear Caiaphas’ decision. The dark-eyed high priest slowly stroked his beard. He wondered how much he could get away with, for the Sanhedrin never sentenced men to crucifixion, and they did not even have Roman permission to stone him to death, let alone kill him by crucifying.

Caiaphas shrugged. He decided that the Romans would not object, especially considering the tax crime for which Jesus was whipped. Some Roman governors might have had him crucified for that alone.

Caiaphas looked again at Herod’s captain. Slowly he nodded to the captain.

The Galilean guard whipped around and pointed at Jesus. “Take him!” he shouted at his men.

Jesus let them grab his arms and shoulders, wincing from the pain their hands inflicted on his back, and tried to keep from stumbling as they led him forward.

A crossbeam lay nearby on two stones in the grass. It was the great wooden crossbeam meant for Barabbas. Sweat and bloodstains had blackened it.

The guards stopped and ordered him to pick it up as hundreds of people more began to line the dusty road, pushing each other out of the way and shouting.

Jesus lifted the heavy wooden crossbeam not yet nailed to its upright, struggling and almost falling twice under its weight. Amidst all the noise and babble and yells around him as people pressed closer and closer, he suddenly heard a woman weeping.

He looked up. There, through a haze of blood and pain, he saw his mother. She was sobbing out loud as she watched her son struggle forward.

Jesus looked deeply into her eyes. Then the pain became too great. He fell. He felt his mother’s brief touch on his brow, and her lips brushing him, before the soldiers cleared the crowd from around him.

---

---
Most recent revision of text: 1 Oct. 2020.