The Tongues of Men or Angels

One Day before the Crucifixion

Three days ago, as the disciples first approached Jerusalem, Yeshua told them a parable, about a rightful ruler coming to a city to inherit his kingdom. It ended with the words:

But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them — bring them here and kill them in front of me.

It was not one of Yeshua’s more cryptic metaphors.

Yeshua and the Twelve leave the upper room and the house of the man who collects water like a woman. The man checks that the crescent side-street is clear before he waves them out, flicking a wrist that is somehow more flexible, less joined, than a wrist could be. His head is covered with a scarf, in the manner of a maiden; he readjusts it self-consciously, pulling it low to his eyes, as if it controls his own looking as much as the way others look upon him.

Yeshua thanks the woman-man, taking her hand. And Jochanan pays her twice what was agreed. Perhaps he thinks the disciples will have little need of money henceforth.

The moon is full; its light is blue on the faces of the Twelve, as they make their way to the southern gate. Their clothes, damp with day-sweat, are cold. Some of the Twelve had to sell their cloaks to buy swords; all have a blade with them now.

Outside Jerusalem’s walls are the overflow camps of pilgrims and the bivouacs of the dispossessed. There are tethered camels, sleeping in their strange angular crouch, and canopied bowers of the tender, mercenary Eves, whose tent slits comfort men far from home.

The Kidron valley beneath is dark and the Twelve have no torches. But God is their light and salvation, as the psalmist says, so who shall they fear?

A hooded crow pecks at the maggot-riddled carcass of a thing that was once itself a hooded crow.

Even now, after several days, the burned ground of the Kidron still faintly smokes in places. With the scrub removed, stones are visible, baked brown and scalded like oven bread. All is grass ash, but for occasional long strands of scorched bushes; straggled like seaweed, grey as an old prophet’s hair. Though old prophets are rare.

Everything is charred, like the Hades of the Greeks. And perhaps that is fitting enough for what must happen tonight. A year and more has led the Twelve to this point. Maybe everything has always led to this point. And, as Cephas’s mettlesome father would say: if you could choose, you wouldn’t start from here. But here is where they are.

Days of panic, days of doubt. Days when they couldn’t go on. But they did go on: there was no going back. All those days have carried Yeshua and his disciples to this now. Only the Twelve must accompany him tonight. Only the most loyal and most noble and most pious. For Zechariah said, God will come, if all with you are holy.

The Romans are a pestilence of warriors. Numberless as the locust; ferocious as the lion. The Romans are an apparatus of destruction forged by four hundred years of continuous battle. They cannot be beaten by men. But only by God. And to believe that they will be beaten might seem madness, but not to believe it is to believe in nothing.

The valley is scorched black.

They pass through it and climb the Mount of Olives among the tombs — grave caves, hollowed caverns in the rock — into Gethsemane’s groves. In the dark, the gnarled and twisted trunks of the olive trees loom out suddenly; malevolent, like a coven of withered-limb witches. Galileans are not ordinarily scared by shades and night-creeps. But this is no ordinary night. Success and failure both are to be dreaded in their ways, and so this fearful place is as fitting as any. More fitting, the fittest: for here on the Mount of Olives is where it must occur, as the Prophet Zechariah said it would:

On that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives, which is in front of Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives will be split by a vast chasm, so that half of the mountain will move toward the north and the other half toward the south … earthquake … Then the Lord, my God will come, if all with you are holy. And this will be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the peoples who have gone to war against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they stand on their feet, and their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongue will rot in their mouth. A great panic from God will fall on them; and they will seize one another’s hand, and the hand of one will be lifted against the hand of another … So also this plague will be the plague on the horse, the mule, the camel, the donkey and all the cattle that will be in those camps.

Yeshua is the Messiah, of that there is no doubt, not in the hearts of any of the Twelve. He is the anointed one, the King, but filled with so much more in hope than that. Yeshua is the King who will tonight fulfil what Zechariah prophesied, who will inaugurate the new age. Who will restore the dynasty of David. And God will destroy the Romans just as Zechariah promised He would. God will smite them and the very animals they ride upon. The odds are so incalculable that they need not be counted at all. The Twelve have swords to fight, but God will do most of the mighty work. Perhaps the Twelve will each lead a legion of angels.

Because if you believe it to be true that God killed the firstborn of every single family in Egypt, why would He suffer the Romans? It is no insanity to think that God will provide victory, not if you trust scriptures that say Yahweh killed a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrians in their sleep for the sake of His people. Not if you believe that God sent giant hailstones down on the Amorites, and stopped the sun in the sky to give Joshua sufficient daylight to butcher the survivors. Not if you believe that God bewildered Sisera’s army, so that they slew one another, without the Israelites having to draw a sword. If you believe that this is God’s country and these are God’s children, then how could you believe that He could let them fall? If you believe that Gideon, with just three hundred men, slaughtered a hundred and twenty thousand Midianites, why would an entire nation fear a few cohorts? If you believe that Samson killed a thousand men, with just the jawbone of an ass. If you believe that God smote fifty thousand and seventy Bethshemites. If you believe that David massacred every male in Edom and all the people of Ammon and sixty-nine thousand Syrians. If you believe that Ahab killed a hundred thousand foes because they mocked the God of Israel. If you believe that the Lord slew twenty-seven thousand men in Aphek by crushing them under the walls, and uncountable by the same act in Jericho, why would you think He could let the Antonia Fortress stand? If you believe that God struck dead a million Ethiopians in a single day, for daring to attack Judah, it hardly seems possible that He would not assist at all in fighting Rome.

For the covenant says that God loves His people. That is the one known certain truth. That is the foundation of a nation and its faith. If that could be a lie, then what isn’t?

The heavens are deep-water black and the stars are like spined urchins and the olive leaves slender and silver, like minnows in Galilee shallows. And if Yeshua was doing this again he wouldn’t start from here. He might ask for this cup to pass from him entirely. But here is where he is, so what must follow is this.

Yeshua and the Twelve kneel among the serpent olive roots and go into the pain of prayer, into the supplication required to make this thing come to pass. And the first hour is an ecstasy as they pour their every strength and heart into their words. They bay fearful at the skies to bring the thing required. Needed not just by them, but by this very land.

The olive trees about them shift and dance in the wind, swaying like gladiators made drunk for the crowd’s amusement. The olive trees are hollowed out in the centre, as if they should be dead. But they do not die. They thrive, as little else has thrived since the Romans came. There are twists and shards of iron nails embedded in some of the trees. When a multitude of men are executed at once, they are sometimes nailed to living olive boughs, to howl in the dark like mandrake fruit.

The second hour, in an agony, Yeshua prays more earnestly, and his sweat tumbles as if it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground. And the Twelve pray with him. This event must come to be and they have nothing left to make it but their own force and belief.

God will come, if all with you are holy.

The third hour, though anguished and distressed, the disciples pray on. They cry and beg. Through souls filled with sorrow even to death. Past exhaustion from their efforts, they prostrate and petition. And Yeshua sees that some start to tire but he says to them: ‘Rise and pray. Don’t enter into temptation. Don’t give up yet.’

Steeled, re-girded, they discover new strength. But such energies are hard to maintain: even for men as pious as the Twelve, even for those as filled with faith and conviction as they, the spirit is willing, but the body is weak.

Yet they continue. What else is there but to go on, but to fall once more onto the ground and pray? They are in the Valley of Decision and this must be decided. God will come. There is no space for doubt. Hesitation cannot be allowed. In.

Slowly disquiet creeps. A black beast crouched in the shadows. One after another the Twelve begin to fail internally, unable to command their own belief. They continue their wailing praying, but they falter in their conviction. They catch each other’s eyes and see the uncertainty there, and the doubt once released cannot be recaptured. The beseeching and the chanting continue. Yeshua is building once more into a crescendo of supplication and the Twelve are with him, but they are not with him. All of them have now confessed to themselves that this is not going to happen, not now, not tonight.

What is going to come to pass is the only thing more dreadful, more to be feared than earthquakes and plagues and angels: nothing. Void. Absence. The darkness is devoid of anything but olive trees and the wind. And their hopes are as hollow as the olive trees and the heavens are as empty as the wind. And if you could choose, you would never start from here. But since they cannot choose, the Twelve continue praying.

The Romans bring a terrible relief when they at last arrive, but at least it puts a stop to this. At least it is an ending. At least the Twelve can now admit — staring in disbelief through eyes drained and straining, tear-streaked and rubbed raw — that this isn’t working. At least they can fight now, and maybe God will be with them. Maybe this is how He wants it to run.

So Cephas charges them, one man into the mass. A bull into a pack of dogs. He storms into the traitorous men of the high priest, who head this cohort of Romans. They scatter and he hacks an ear from one as they do. But Cephas is smashed to the ground by the shields of the Romans behind. The Romans don’t scatter. The Romans train daily for moments like this. And their shields are impregnable as the walls of a fort. Some of the shields are new. Some are dented and battle-blooded. All of them are stained with dust and crossed with the blasphemous thunder bars of war-god Mars.

Charging such a shield line unarmoured is suicide. But the rest of the disciples draw their swords and make ready to run at it anyway, exhausted from effort, but mad with God and anger. They were to have had twelve legions of angels. But the angels haven’t come and the Romans have. With them Temple Guards and slaves and men-at-arms of the high priest. One without an ear, but all with blades and clubs and torches that flame in the darkness, showing the warped and wretched shapes of the olive trees.

And only now does Yeshua rise, only now does he, shaking, stop his prayers. And even the Roman who is about to fling his spear into floored Cephas ceases when Yeshua cries: ‘Enough!’

Yeshua is a prince.

Cephas shouts that they will prevail. Cephas shouts that even if the whole world falls away, he will not.

But Yeshua answers, ‘Enough, Cephas, enough, brother, it’s too late.’

And Yeshua asks the Romans who they want. And when they say Yahushua son of Joseph, he tells them it is he.

Then he says, ‘And since I am the one you want, let these others go.’

Jochanan shouts: ‘My King, let’s fight? We brought the swords!’

But Yeshua shakes his head.

Flanked by a phalanx of Roman spearmen, the Temple Guards advance towards him. Encircling but skulking, like jackals about a lion, they bind Yeshua’s hands.

Yeshua recognizes the guard who ties the thongs that bite into his wrists and says to him: ‘I remember you. I saw you in the Temple courts. You didn’t dare lay a hand on me then. But now it’s your hour: when darkness reigns.’

The centurio of the Romans — cold-eyed and stiff as lance — gives his command to depart and his men pull back into formation.

The man of the high priest who has been cut, who clutches a bloodied lump of his own cloak to the gash where once was an ear, says, ‘Wait!’ He lisps from the blood that has oozed into his mouth, ‘Aren’t you going to arrest him too?’ He points at Cephas.

The centurio laughs. He turns and laughs in the face of the bleeding man: ‘Our orders are to arrest the Nazarene Yahushua, this “dangerous revolutionary” here. And since we have done so, without injury to any of my men, we are now leaving with our prisoner. Should you wish to seize any of the others, I suggest you fucking do so. I obey your master only under the specific command of the prefect. I’ll obey a servant when the crows start shitting silver.’

And he spits then, at the bleeding servant of the high priest, who recoils from it, like a flinching child. And it’s clear that this priest-servant isn’t going to be seizing anything but his own wound. But Cephas stumbles up anyway and backs away, sword slowly waving like the head of a horned viper, and when none of the Temple Guards come at him he runs into the night. And all the other disciples turn their backs to Jerusalem and flee the other way, towards the hills and the safety of the scrub.

The Romans trudge, implacable, through the charred Kidron back to Jerusalem, Yeshua dragged by the Temple Guards at their tail.

Cephas stalks the flames of their torches at a distance.

The other disciples hide in the darkness, weeping at their failure, wondering who betrayed them. Not that a defector is necessary because previously they had gone out to the same place on the Mount of Olives, preparing for this night. And anyone could have followed them or informed on them. Even still, eventually a traitor must be chosen, a betrayer will be found. Literary completeness demands it.