Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

The Kidron valley is so thick with growth that it is hard to picture it as charcoal and cinder, as it was that blackest night. The emerald grass has dried to amber in the sun’s heat, bleached almost to hay while it still grows, but poppies survive amid it, even if a little bowed. A sparrow balances on the stalk of one, which cannot possibly hold its weight. And yet it does. A small miracle for Jerusalem.

Jochanan picks a blade of the grass and sniffs it, as if it might be new. Feels the texture of it in his fingers. It’s all a miracle. God created all of it. Maybe that’s all that matters. But Jochanan knows that isn’t all: God told them what they must do and what they must not do and how they must worship Him and He was extremely precise about it. And Yeshua agreed: Do not think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish the Torah but to complete. I tell you the truth: until Heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter, nor the least stroke will pass from the Torah until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks the least of the six hundred and thirteen Torah commands and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the Kingdom. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses even the Pharisees and the teachers of the Torah, you will certainly not enter the Kingdom .

That was what Yeshua said, and Jochanan can’t see how that left a single strand of doubt, not even sufficient to perch a sparrow.

Unlike Judaeans, the legionaries are beardless, shaven, their faces rough and blotched like stored fruit. Most have teeth missing; gaps like the battlements of the fifty-feet-high walls that surround this palace courtyard, where the foreplay of the death warrant will take place.

Every man sentenced to crucifixion is first scourged. So the prisoner is stripped of his fine white-linen robe, which by now is grubbied and torn from a night of manhandling. Then he is tied by his shackled hands to one of the stone pillars of the colonnade. Every second pillar around the courtyard has a metal ring set in it. They are too high for tying horses, but perfect for holding a man’s hands above his head and preventing him collapsing to the ground. They must, therefore, have been fabricated and fixed in the pillars specifically to expedite the scourging process. The logistical difficulties of flogging and then crucifying, often tens, sometimes hundreds, occasionally thousands, of men at a single session, should not be underestimated.

The soldiers assigned to the duty are doubtless pleased to discover that there is so far only one man to be flogged today. A full shift spent at the whip will leave your shoulder muscles aching.

Unknown languages sound strangulated and devilish. The legionaries do not speak the tongue of the prisoner. Neither does he understand theirs. But, then, there is nothing they need to say to each other.

The Roman flagellum is not like the lash of the Jews. Though the prisoner has doubtless seen the torn and tortured bodies of crucified men, he has probably never before seen the device that inflicted such rending: three plaited leather ropes, the length of grown wheat, attached to a wooden handle and on each strand, shards of lamb pelvis, bored and knotted in place at intervals. The prisoner is a brave man, but Nature does not equip men to suffer such things as this: he trembles like a river willow and the cloth about his loins blooms warm.

The two legionaries designated as lictors alternate blows. The pieces of lamb-bone, chipped and cracked from much use, bite into the condemned’s skin and splatter blood up the arms of the Romans. Occasionally they stop their work to wash themselves, or to have a drink of diluted sour-wine.

The prisoner is lacerated, head to foot, rended and torn. Slick with blood and sweat and urine. He hangs — all but totally suspended now — from his wrists, pressed onto the front of his feet, soles visible, as though he would collapse but for the pillar supporting him, which undoubtedly he would.

Some call the pre-crucifixion scourging the ‘half-death’. There is no limit to the number of blows the lictors can deliver; it is left to their conscience and the necessity that the condemned must not be killed, not yet. Though accidents can and do arise. No one is perfect.

But during the everyday happening of the scourging, an unusual thing occurs: from over the high walls there comes shouting. Even at this early hour, word must have spread that this prisoner has been condemned and is held here. The crowd — for by their voices they must be many — begin to call for his release.

‘Free Yahushua bar Josef.’

‘Free Yeshua of Nazareth.’

‘Free the Galilean.’

‘Free the Rabban.’

‘Free the Messiah.’

The crowd yells its demands. Pleadings near certain to be in vain, for, even by the standards of Roman prefects, Pontius Pilate is renowned as insolent and grievously inhumane. And it is not as if Rome is in the habit of releasing prisoners on the whim of a conquered people.

But what else can those who love the prisoner do, what else is there? If they could choose, they would never start from here. But since they cannot choose, the crowd continues shouting.

‘Free Yahushua.’

‘Free Yeshua.’

‘Free the King.’

‘Free the Nazarene.’

The clamour grows as more join the throng. The people who cheered Yeshua into Jerusalem as a saviour-hero mere days ago could not forget him so soon. And in the way that crowds will, the demonstrators soon begin to slide into rhythm, begin to slip into shouting the same thing, the name by which many know the prisoner best: as the son of the Father.

‘Free Yeshua bar Abba,’ they cry, many also crying tears, which streak dusty cheeks and tumble to the pale Jerusalem stone.

‘Free Yeshua bar Abba.’

‘Free Yeshua bar Abba.’

‘Free Bar Abba.’

‘Free Bar Abba.’

‘Free BarAbba.’

‘Free Barabba.’

‘Free Barabbas.’

The memory of this cry will linger. It will echo down the ages, but distorted, just as wails of distress can sound in the desert night like the cruel howls of wolves. It will reverberate, this shout, words twisted by time and purpose. It will echo until the people who yelled for the release of their hope and king, Jesus bar Abba, will be painted as fiends who shrieked for his death and the freedom of another man: Jesus Barabbas. A confusion, at its kindest, or an obfuscation, or a deliberate libel, but which will curse their descendants for ever.

Not the cruellest critic could say that they deserve that curse, the people here today; even so, they do not keep up their protest for as long as they should. They do not continue once the legionaries of Pilate troop outside the palace. The crowds remember the protesting multitudes — many times more numerous than they — slaughtered on these same pavements by soldiers not many months back. They remember and they disperse. That world is lost, which might have been born, had Zion arisen at this moment. The Jerusalemites yearn to erupt. But they do not. Not yet.

Inside, the prisoner is cut down, to collapse like a sack of bloody skin. Gasping for breath like a shored fish; gashes in his flesh as open as gills.

A legionary comes back from an errand with something held cautiously in his hands: it is a ring, plaited from long thorns.

‘I’ve got a diadem for the King of the Jews,’ he says, and the others cheer.

The soldier was cursing as he pricked his fingers while cutting the fronds from a spiny jujube shrub, then weaving them into shape, but the laughter of his comrades makes it all worthwhile. What is life if we can’t bring a bit of joy to our friends?