THEN THE HIGH
PRIEST RENT HIS CLOTHES
Caiaphas' real name was Joseph. Caiaphas is a surname and
is the same word as Cephas, Simon's surname, that is to say, Rock. On that
Friday morning's dawn, the Son of Man was caught between those two rocks like a
grain of wheat between two millstones. Simon Peter is the type of the timid
friends who knew not how to save Him: Joseph Peter, of His enemies, determined
at any cost to destroy Him. Between the denial of Simon and the hatred of
Joseph, between the head of the church about to disappear and the head of the
Church just coming into existence, between those two rocks Jesus was like wheat
between the mill-stones.
The Sanhedrin had already come together and was awaiting
Him. Together with Annas and Caiaphas who presided, there were John, Alexander,
and all the reeking scum of the upper classes. As a rule the Sanhedrin was
composed of twenty-three priests, twenty-three Scribes, twenty-three Elders,
and two Presidents, in all, seventy-one. But on this occasion some were absent,
those who had more fear of an uprising of the people than hatred for the
blasphemer, and those few who would not lift a finger to condemn Him, but would
not defend Him openly: among these last were certainly Nicodemus, the nocturnal
disciple, and Joseph of Arimathea, who was devoutly to lay Jesus in His tomb.
They had come together to ratify with a cloak of legality
the decree of murder already written on their hearts. These delegates from the
Temple, from the School and the Bank, burned with impatience to confirm, each
for his own reasons, their revengeful sentence. The great room of the council
already full of people was like a den of werewolves. The new day showed itself
hesitatingly: the orange-colored tongues of the torches were scarcely visible
in the dim light of dawn. In this sinister half-shadow the Jews were waiting:
aged, portly, hook-nosed, harsh, beetle-browed, wrapped in their white cloaks,
their heads covered, stroking their venerable beards, with choleric eyes,
seated in a half circle, they seemed a council of sorcerers awaiting a living
offering. The rest of the hall was occupied by the clients of the seated
assembly, by guards with staves in their hands, by the domestic servants of the
house. The air was heavy and dense as in a charnel house.
Jesus, His wrists still tied with ropes, was thrust into
the midst of this kennel like a condemned man thrown to the beasts of the
Imperial amphitheater. Annas had gathered together in all haste from among the
rabble some false witnesses to make an end of any discussion or defense. The
pretense of a trial began with calling these perjurers. Two of them came
forward and swore that they had heard these words: "I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within
three days I will build another made without hands." (Mark 14:58)
At the time and for those hearers this accusation was a
very grave one, meaning nothing less than sacrilege and blasphemy. For in the
minds of its upholders the Temple of Jerusalem was the one intangible home of
the Lord. And to threaten the Temple was to threaten their real Master, the
Master of all the Jews. But Jesus had never said these words or at least not in
this form, nor with this meaning. It is true that He had announced that of the
Temple not one stone would remain upon another, but not through any action of
His. And the reference to the Temple not made with hands, built up in three
days, was part of another discourse in which He had spoken figuratively of His
resurrection. The false witnesses could not even agree about these words
confusedly and maliciously repeated, and one statement from Jesus would have
been enough to confound them utterly. But Jesus held His peace.
The High Priest could not endure this silence, and standing
up, cried out, "Answerest thou
nothing? What is it which these witness against thee?" (Mark 14:60)
But Jesus answered nothing.
These silences of Jesus were so weighty with magnetic eloquence that they enraged His judges. He held His peace at
the first questioning of Annas. He was silent now at the outcry of Caiaphas and
He was to be silent with Antipas and Pilate.
He had made already, a thousand times, the statements He
might have made now, and any other answers He might have made would either have
been misunderstood by His judges, or have been used by them as new pretexts for
attacking Him. Superhuman truths are in their very nature ineffable, and only a
shadow of them can be grasped, through a loving effort by those who already
have a faint divination of that shadow; and even to them this comes more
through the heart than through faulty and defective words.
Jesus did not speak, but looked about Him with His great
calm eyes, at the troubled and convulsed faces of His assassins, and for all
eternity judged these phantom judges. In a flash every one of them was weighed
and condemned by that look which went straight to the soul. Were they worthy to
hear His words, those flawed, self-seeking souls, empty and inane, those of
them that are not ulcerous and moribund? How could He ever, by the most
unthinkable prodigy, stoop to justify Himself before them?
Such self-justification was attempted by the son of the
midwife, the flat-nosed student and rival of the Sophists! The
seventy-year-old arguer, who for so many years had bored the artisans and the
idlers on the market-place, was capable of reciting to the judges of Athens an
eloquent and carefully arranged oration of excuses, which, from the limits of
dialectics, descended little by little to the sophistries of law courts. It is
true that the ironical old man who had set himself to reform the art of
thinking rather than the art of living, who had not been above usury, who, not
having his fill with Xantippe, had had two children by his concubine Myra, and
who amused himself with caressing handsome young men more than was becoming for
the father of a family, was ready to die, and knew how to die with noble
firmness; but at the bottom of his heart he would have preferred to descend
into Hades by the more natural road. Towards the end of his specious defense,
he tried to placate his judges by recalling his old age to them. "It is useless to kill me because I
will die very soon anyhow" —and offered to pay thirty greater minae if
they would let him go in peace. But Christ was neither a sophist nor a lawyer,
Christ whom so many posthumous Pilates have tried to belittle by comparing Him
to Socrates, so inferior to Him. Like Dante's angel, He disdained human
discussions. He answered with silence, or if He was forced to speak, spoke
candidly and briefly. Caiaphas, exasperated by this disrespectful taciturnity,
finally hit on a way to make him speak. "I
adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ,
the Son of God." (Matt. 26:63)
As long as they conducted His trial with the
usual insidious procedure, adducing falsities or asking Him about perfectly
well-known truths, Jesus said no word; but even in the infamous mouth of the
High Priest, the invocation to the living God was irresistible. Jesus could not
deny Himself to the living God, to the God who will live eternally, and who
lives in all of us, and who was present there even in that lair of demons. And
yet He hesitated a moment before dazzling those bleared eyes with the splendor
of His formidable secret.
"If I tell
you, ye will not believe: And if I also ask you, ye will not answer me." (Luke 22:68)
Now Caiaphas was not alone in putting the
question; all of them, excited, sprang to their feet and cried out, their
clawing fingers stretched towards Him, "Art
thou then the Son of God?"
Jesus
could not, like Peter, deny the irrefutable certainty which was the reason for
His life and for His death. He was responsible towards His own people and
towards all men. But, as at Caesarea, He wished others to be the ones to pronounce
His real name, and when they had said it He did not refuse it, even though
death were the penalty.
"Ye
say that I am. I say unto you, hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on
the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven."
He had condemned Himself out of His own mouth. The snarling pack about Him was frothing at the mouth with delight
and anger. In the presence of His assassins He had proclaimed what He had
secretly admitted to His most loving friends. Although they might betray Him,
He had not betrayed Himself or His father. Now He was ready for the last
degradation. He had said what He had to say.
Caiaphas was triumphant. Pretending a shocked horror
which he did not feel—because like all the Sadducees he had no faith whatever
in the apocalyptic writers and cared about nothing but the fees and honors of
the Temple—he rent his priestly garments, crying out, "He hath spoken blasphemy! What further need have we of witnesses?
Behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy. What think ye?" (Matt. 26:65-66)
And all the noisy kennel bayed out their answer, "He is guilty of death."
And without any further examination, without a single
protest, they all condemned Him to death as a blasphemer and false prophet.
The comedy of legal pretense was played to an end, and
the cloaked ghosts felt themselves relieved of an immense weight. It had cost
the High Priest a garment and he let the torn pieces hang like glorious symbols
of victorious battle. He did not know that on that very day a garment more
precious than any of his was to be torn, and he did not dream that his gesture
was a symbolic recognition of another death-sentence. The priesthood of which
he was the head was henceforth disqualified and abolished forever. His
successors were to be mere semblances of priests, spurious and illegitimate,
and in a few years the sumptuous garment of marble and masonry of the Jewish
sanctuary was to be rent by the Roman rabble.
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