Chapter 33: At Work on the Cross

               
5th Gospel--Told by Jesus' Beloved Apostle

               
A Novel by Richard Jewell

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Book II: The Rabbi
Part Five–Messiah
                                      

When Jesus stood up again, he noticed that a group of his friends were nearby. As his mother drew back, tears in her eyes, he saw Miriam watching him from behind the crowded road and silently crying. Several others were also there, especially women who need not fear the authorities as must the men. The only one of his envoys he could see was John, son of Zebedee, who also was crying.

Jesus tried to lift the short crossbeam again, but he felt his knees give away, and once more he fell. His whole body was covered with sweat-dampened dirt. He rested for a minute, panting and feeling a surging anger at Hero’s guards and at the Roman culture that could invent the cross of death, and torture its victims by making them carry it.

He wiped his brow with a shaking hand and tried to lift the beam again. He found, to his surprise and frustration, that he was too weak to do it.

He felt the sting of a corded whip across his back. The pain curled through him as white heat, but he was so tired he barely flinched. Grimacing, he began breathing deeply and slowly, and tried to calm himself.

“You there!” the squat Captain of Herod’s guards yelled, grabbing at an older man nearby. He caught the man’s graying beard and yanked him toward Jesus. “Carry it!” the Captain ordered, pointing at the crossbeam.

The man bent down with trembling fingers and picked up the short beam with little trouble. He glanced at Jesus fearfully.

Jesus recognized him. He had seen the man now and then among the friends, at a distance. He reached out and touched the man’s shoulders in thanks, and smiled to him to calm his fears.

The man nodded humbly, then turned and began slowly carrying the heavy pole along the road.

Jesus quietly limped after him.

As they turned a corner and moved off the road to a hard dirt path, shoving through the crowds, Jesus looked up the hill rising before him. The top of it resembled a smooth-headed skull. Jesus felt his skin crawl as he looked at the handful of tall, wide beams of wood loosely stuck there in the ground. Each was stained with mixtures of dirt and blood.

Naked men already were hanging from two of the tall beams. Ropes around their wrists tied them to their crossbeams, which had been lashed to the tall beams. A small crowd of relatives stood crying and helpless a short distance from their feet. The men were condemned criminals. They uttered groans and bitter comments as they slowly suffocated from the weight of their bodies pulling downward and compressing their lungs.

Jesus heard the women behind him begin wailing and crying louder as they saw the crowded hilltop.

“Jesus!” his mother cried out.

He turned and saw her long, grey-tinged dark hair falling out from beneath her head wrapping. Her face was streaked with tears and her eyes were puffy. She held out her arms and ran to him, falling on her knees before him and wrapping her arms around him.

He almost fell again, so weak was he from his beatings. He laid his hands on top of her head and held her tightly against him.

“Come on!” the squat Captain yelled, raising his whip and shaking it.

Jesus quickly turned his head around and impaled the man with a piercing stare.

The man stepped back a pace as if he had been slapped.

“All right, then,” he grumbled. “Make it fast!”

Jesus caressed his mother’s head as he held her, and looking up at the other women who stared at him from the grassy, weeping for his death, he caught the eyes of each of them in turn. When his glance fell on Miriam, a sharp pain went through his heart. She was pale and her face drawn and deathly. He feared for her suddenly, more than he did for himself.

“Do not weep for me, my loved ones,” he said, so that all of them could hear. “Rather weep for yourselves and the children. For very soon the days of this city are coming when you will be glad that some of you are childless and your breasts have never fed an infant. For if they do this to me now in good times, when we have all been together, how will it be for you in bad times that always come in turn?”

Jesus pulled his mother’s arms from around him and lifted her to her feet. “I will be back for a short time,” he told her softly, and kissed her.

She wiped her tears and looked deeply into his eyes. “If you can return,” she said, “do not delay long.”

Then he turned and with another quick but tired glance at Miriam, he signaled to Herod’s guards that he was ready.

Slowly they all walked up the hill while crowds of city dwellers behind them yelled out shouts of encouragement mixed with catcalls and jeering banter.

At the top of the hill, the guards took down a tall beam standing between the two crucified criminals and lashed Jesus’ cross beam to it. Then they stripped his clothes from him so that he was naked, laid him on the cross, and began lashing his wrists to the ends of the crossbeam.

One of Caiaphas’ dark-robed assistants stepped forward. His eyes darted quickly back and forth. He stroked his oiled beard. “Caiaphas wants him nailed,” he said. His breath hissed.

Herod’s guards glanced at each other, then grinned maliciously. Nailing usually was reserved for only the worst of criminals such as men who murdered coldly and regularly. They looked to their captain, who nodded.

The Romans who were in charge of the hill usually kept a hammer and spikes ready for fuse. Herod’s guards took these and, with the help of a Roman soldier who knew his business well, they placed the spikes on Jesus’ wrists, carefully avoiding the major blood vessels, and pounded them in.

Jesus winced and gritted his teeth as the spikes, stained and rusty from old blood, tore through his flesh. He felt dizzy and his arms became very weak and heavy. But this new pain also made him more alert. The soldiers and the Roman guards hoisted his cross into position. Through the haze of red pain covering his eyes like thin gauze, he saw huge, billowing dark clouds building through the sky and beginning to blot out the sun.

He closed his eyes and rested a few minutes, sinking back into the pain and feeling the tightness across his chest beginning, making his breathing become more labored.

He looked at the sun one more time before the dark clouds covered it entirely. It was noon. He felt someone laying something against his thighs. He looked down. His mother was tying a loincloth to him. No more than this small piece of clothing was permitted. He looked beyond her and saw Herod’s guards examining his robes and undergarments. They were quarreling over which of them should get the large outer robe, which was seamless and so could not be divided without ruining its weave. One of the guards, a thin and beak-nosed man with a Galilean farmer’s ruddy cheeks and rough accent, took out dice. They began to roll them to decide who would get the dirty but beautifully worked piece of cloth.

Time was standing still. As Jesus hung by his nailed hands on the cross, he was conscious of each of his breaths and of the deep tiredness that was overwhelming him again. The pain was just one part of this tiredness. He had not slept for more than thirty hours and had eaten nothing in over fifteen. So great was the mournful silence of those standing close by that he might have fallen asleep easily. But the slow suffocation of hanging on the cross was making his body too alert with panic. In spite of his tiredness, his heart was pounding excitedly and his fingers were twitching instinctively in response to danger. He tried to stop the twitching but couldn’t. He felt he had lost control of his own body.

A thin, clean man whom he recognized as a servant of Pilate suddenly appeared before him. The servant was carrying a small ladder and a board. To Jesus’ surprise, the servant placed the wooden ladder against the cross and climbed up. When the faces of the two men were only inches apart, the servant humbly bowed his head. He had curly, brown Roman hair.

“Excuse me, dear sir,” he said to Jesus. “My master has commanded me to attach this sign to the wood above your head. He asks also for your forgiveness, and he apologizes most humbly for his mistakes and lack of understanding.”

“Tell your master,” Jesus said, “that I forgive him; but for his sake he must also forgive himself.”

The servant bowed his head once more. Then, with a small, clean hammer and new nails, he attached the sign. It proclaimed in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the three-most-educated languages of the nation, these words:

JESUS THE ESSENE, KING OF THE JEWS

Hundreds of people were coming and going on the hill and on the road nearby. As this sign went up, many of them pressed closer to read it in the dim light of the heavily clouded day.

Dozens of them laughed and taunted Jesus. “Come down, come down!” they called. “If you are the Messiah as we have heard, then save yourself!” Then they would laugh uproariously.

In the darkness of the gloomy, overcast early afternoon, some people lit torches and would have shoved them under his face. But the Roman soldiers keeping watch prevented this.

“Look at him now!” yelled some of Caiaphas’ hired Pharisee priests. “You think you’re so smart with your ‘Look within!’ and your ‘God the Poppa!’ You better look around you instead and see that you’re dying!”

As they taunted him, pressing toward him eagerly on the hilltop with their faces lit by pleasurable anger, Jesus closed his eyes and felt his anger building up once more. He took as deep a breath as he could, against the constricting tightness of his lungs, and forced his anger out of himself. What was left in him was sadness, for these humans taunting him from below were sorry creatures, lost in their own deceits and selfishness.

“My Poppa, forgive them,” he said. “They don’t know what they are doing.”

He opened his eyes a few minutes later and was surprise to see a cloud-like human figure directly in front of him. With a skip of his heard, he realized it was his teacher Judy. She was resting before him, in the air, in her nonphysical body. She looked more youthful. Other than that, and a slight transparency so that he could see through her as through fog, she looked much the same as when he had seen her several months earlier.

He smiled to her. He noticed her nonphysical body was so much like her normal body that now he could even see tears falling down her cheeks. He remembered that she had been practicing out-of-body travel for several decades. He also had learned the art from her and had both taught it and used it. But now, in these hours of dying, he wished to remain within his own body to the last.

She saw him smile, and her own cheeks, furrowed by sorrow, twisted into a gentle answering smile.

It has happened, he said with his mind, sending the thought to her by imagining it was in her mind.

Was there nothing to prevent it? she asked.

No. It is the way long ago decided by fate. if I am to die, this must be the form of it, he answered.

I worry that no one will respect your teaching, if you die in this scandalous manner, she said. Her nonphysical body became more solid, then faded to its normal transparency again, as if worry could make it more earthly.

A sharp pain coursed through Jesus from his lungs to his feet. Though his face remained unmoving and his eyes only barely winced, psychically she felt the sharp twinge as if it were her own.

She cried out in a wordless exclamation.

Please, Jesus asked her, be at peace. Soon this will be over. Then, if our dreams all are correct, and the promises I have heard in my spirit are true, I will return.

Judy shuddered. You must return soon then, she told him, for if you wait too long, no one will believe it is really you.

Jesus felt another pain coursing through him. It will happen soon, he answered. But now my time is short. Wait here until I am through.

I will. She reached her hand out and stroked his face. It felt to Jesus like a warm, gentle breeze blowing against his cheek. Their mutual love and respect passed to each other through the touch like warm waves of water.

Then she drew further back and became so transparent that he could not see her. All he could feel was her wordless presence somewhere beyond him quietly watching.

He looked down at his friends and his mother, his envoy John whom he loved, and Miriam, his lady. They all were clustered on the ground beyond the Roman guards. His vision was beginning to play tricks on him. One moment they seemed very far away. The next, it was as if he could reach out and touch them with his foot.

“Come to me now,” he called to the three of them, “for the time is short.”

Slowly they walked forward over the hard, bare ground. They walked evenly so as not to alarm the Roman soldiers standing nearby.

Jesus looked down upon them, feeling a great and very human love filling his breast. He wanted to embrace them, to hold them strongly in his arms and hug them gently.

Tears were falling from all of their eyes.

“I love you three more than anyone alive,” Jesus said to them.

John, who had never heard such words from Jesus before, put his face in the crook of his robed arm and sobbed. Mary bent her head down. Her body trembled. Miriam continued to stare up into his battered, bloody face as huge tears formed in the corners of her blue eyes and kept falling.

“My dearest Mother,” Jesus said, watching her through the gloom, “Look up and behold John. He shall be your son, now. Beloved John, behold your mother.”

Mary and the youthful John looked at each other, united already by kinship and by sorrow and love for Jesus.

“Miriam,” Jesus said, even more softly than to the others, “you must go and live with my mother and John. I wish all three of you to stay together and make your home as my family. You shall be the fountain and resting place of my followers in Jerusalem; and my brother James must lead if he is willing. To the rest of my followers in Judea and Galilee I give Peter, who shall be everyone’s guide. Be well, and multiply the following with the teaching I have given you. I love you, and will return t you as soon as I may. For I am creating something new in the universe. In this I am happy. Listen, for it is just as the prophet Isaiah predicted.”

Then, to their amazement and that of everyone around him, Jesus began to sing. His song rose up and spread out over the startled crowds in his rich baritone voice, piercing the midafternoon darkness with strength and joy.

For look, I create a new universe,
and old ways will be forgotten
and not enter our Selves.
Be glad and have bliss forever
in that which I am creating;
for look, I created bliss in our Rock of Peace,
and bliss for the people of Peace.
And I will have bliss in our Rock of Peace,
and be glad in my friends;
and the sound of weeping shall be no more heard
in the Rock of Peace,
nor the cry of distress.

As Jesus finished singing, he looked around him and saw amazement and fear spread on almost everyone’s face. His mother and Miriam alone were looking up at him in awe and pleasure. Even those of the friends who weren’t frightened looked confused.

He suddenly felt cut off from almost all of them, and alone and lonely, understood by no one, as he hung on his cross. The love and joy of his song disappeared as his awareness of his pain and the struggle to breathe returned more strongly than before. His body seemed like an alien thing, completely under the control of earthly cruelties and fleshly bonds of death. He squirmed psychically within his stretched-out body, wishing suddenly for nothing more than to escape it and burst away to freedom.

He looked quickly around him at the dark hilltop covered with people and straggly trees, and the dark and ominous sky filled with an unbroken cover of purple thunderheads. A lightning bolt shot to the ground in the distance, and a rumble of thunder followed it. The air was still, so still that particles of dust seemed to hang and dance in it like tiny motes of dim light.

Suddenly a lightning bolt struck on a nearby hill, sending a terrible crackling noise through the air. A clap of echoing thunder followed it. Jesus saw everyone around him jump.

His own mind turned dark and cloudy. He drew a shuddering breath, but it didn’t help. His lungs were too compressed from hanging on the cross to take in enough of the vital breath he needed.

He looked down at Miriam to find a measure of peace in her eyes, but the sky was becoming so dark that her whole face was in a black shadow. The earth itself trembled as a loud rolling clap of thunder shook it.

He fearfully turned his eyes away from Miriam and concentrated within the center of his chest. He pierced layer after layer of pain and tiredness within him until he reached the very core of his own self and being.

Nothing was there.

It was like looking in the door that is supposed to lead to a vast hallway filled with the blissful presence of God’s body, and ranges upon ranges of brilliant-white spirits, and then finding nothing behind that door except a small, dusty, and empty closet. He felt totally deserted.

“My God, my God!” he cried out. “Why have you forsaken me/”

He opened his eyes and looked around him again. He found everyone on the dark hilltop staring up at him. He felt the need to speak, to say something to them, but the only things he could sense at that moment were his emptiness, and the passing feelings of his pain-wracked body.

“I am thirsty,” he said to the Roman soldier just below him.

The soldier was staring dumbly up at him with an open mouth. The Roman nodded quickly and fetched a bowl of soured wine. He soaked a sponge in it. Then he stuck a hyssop stem into the sponge and held the other end of the stem up to Jesus’ mouth.

Jesus drew on it gratefully.

He looked around him once more, and realized his body was growing numb and cold, and his breathing was almost stopped. He felt a great, black void of unconsciousness spreading from appoint in his mind, threatening to take over his whole awareness. He watched, with numbed panic and a strange, pleased excitement, as the blackness spread down to his lips, down his neck, and into his arms and chest. He lost all feeling wherever the blackness touched. Soon it had taken hold of his whole body. He could feel nothing, neither pleasure nor pain, happiness or sorrow.

As the dark void reached its empty tentacles out toward his consciousness, he lifted his head one more time and spoke to those around him.

“It is finished,” he said.

He saw dozens of people quaking with fear and staring at him. He heard a Roman soldier standing nearby speak hoarsely to another beside him. “He has called his god to come save him!” the soldier exclaimed. “What will we do if the god comes?”

Then Jesus hung his head. As the darkness closed in on him totally, he was barely aware of slowly lifting away from his boy, casting off from it as a swimmer leaves a boat. He sensed Judy somewhere beside him as he slipped away. She was trying to comfort him.

He began to leave even her behind. The last thing he was aware of, before the darkness closed on him entirely, was a great shaking of the earth beneath his cross–an earthquake–and the loud, piercing crack of rocks in the hills around him as they split apart under pressure.

Then there was nothing at all.

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Most recent revision of text: 1 Oct. 2020.