THE VIPERS OF THE TOMBS

THE VIPERS OF THE TOMBS

The next morning when he went back, the herdsmen and merchants had squatted down outside, near the doors, but the courts were humming with crowds of excited people.

The sentence pronounced and executed by Jesus against the honest thieves had set gossiping Jerusalem all curious. Those blows of the whip, like so many stones thrown into the Jeru­salem frog-pond, had awakened the poor to joyous hope and had set the lords quaking with fear.

And early in the morning, all had gone up there from the dark alleys and from the fine houses, from the workshops and from the public squares, leaving all their affairs, with the restless anxiety of those who hope for miracles, or revenge. The day-laborers had come, the weavers, the dyers, the cob­blers, the woodworkers, all those who detested the swindlers, the stranglers, the shearers of poverty, traders who enriched themselves at the expense of destitution. Among the first had come the lamentable scum of the city, the dirty vermin-ridden prisoners of eternal beggary, with leprous scabs, with their sores uncared for, with their bones protruding through the skin to testify to their hunger. There had also come pilgrims from outside, those of Galilee, who had accompanied Jesus in His festal entrance; and with them Jews from the Syrian and Egyptian colonies, dressed in their best, like distant relatives who reappear every once in so often at the family home for a family festival.

But there came up also, in groups of four or five, the Scribes and Pharisees. They were fraternal colleagues, fit­ting companions for each other. The Scribes were the Doc­tors of the Law; the Pharisees were the Puritans of the Law. Nearly all the Scribes were Pharisees, many Pharisees were Scribes. Imagine a professor adding religious thoroughness to his doctoral meticulousness; or a religious hypocrite provided also with the grave face of an overt reasoning instructor, and you will have the modern equivalent of a Pharisaical Scribe, or of a Pharisee who was also a Scribe. A hypocritical imposter with academic honors; an Academician, who is at the same time a religious hypocrite; a philosophizing Quaker, are other modern equiva­lents.

These men therefore went up that morning to the Temple with much show of pride without and many evil intentions within. They came up proudly wrapped in their long cloaks, with their fringes fluttering, their chests thrown out, their eyes clouded, their eyebrows raised, with sneering mouths and quivering nostrils, with a step which announced their impor­tance and the indignation felt by them, God's privileged sheriffs.

Jesus, in the midst of all these eyes turned on Him, waited for those men. It was not the first time that they had come about Him. How many discussions between Him and the pro­vincial Pharisees had taken place here and there in the coun­try! They were Pharisees who had demanded a sign from Heaven, a supernatural proof that He was the Messiah—because the Pharisees, unlike the skeptical Sadducees, sunk in legalized Epicureanism, believed in the imminent arrival of the Savior.

But the Pharisees expected to see this Savior as a Jew, strictly observing all laws as they did, and they held that to be worthy to receive Him it was enough to be clean on the outside and to avoid any transgression of any of the trivial rules of Leviticus. The Messiah, the son of David, would not stoop to save those who had not avoided all contact, even re­mote, with foreigners and with heathens, who had not observed the smallest detail of legal purification, who had not paid all the tithes of the Temple, who did not respect at any cost the sanctity of the Sabbath day. In their eyes Jesus could not possibly be the Divine Redeemer. No spectacular and magic signs had been seen: He had contented Himself with healing the sick, with talking about love, and with loving. They had seen Him dining with publicans and sinners, and, worse than everything else, had heard with horror that His disciples did not always wash their hands before sitting down to the table. But the greatest horror, the unendurable scandal, had been His lack of respect for the Sabbath. Jesus had not hesitated to cure the sick, even on the Sabbath, and He held it no crime on that day to do good to His unfortunate brothers. He even shamelessly gloried in this, claiming blasphemously that the Sabbath was made for man, rather than man for the Sab­bath.

In the minds of the Pharisees there was only one doubt about Jesus: was He a fool or an impostor? To put the matter to the test, they had tried many times to trap Him by theological tricks, or in dialectical subtleties, but to no avail. As long as He went about in the provinces drawing after Him a few dozen peasants, they had let Him alone, sure that someday or other the last beggar, disillusioned, would leave Him. But now the affair was becoming serious. Accompanied by a band of excitable countrymen, He had gone so far as to enter into the Temple as though it belonged to Him, and had seduced some ignorant unfortunates to call Him the Messiah. More than that, usurping the place of the priests, and almost giving Himself the airs of a king, He had roughly driven out the honest merchants, pious people who admired the Pharisees, even if they did not entirely imitate them. Up to that time the Pharisees had been too easy-going and merciful towards Him. But from now on the unequaled goodness of heart of those ex­tremely mild and tolerant professors would be dangerous and untimely. The intolerable scandal, the reiterated blasphemous behavior, the public challenge, called for condemnation and punish­ment. The false Christ must be disposed of and at once. Scribes and Pharisees went up on the hill to see if He had had the brazenness to go back to the place contaminated by His boasting.

Jesus was waiting for just those men. He wanted to say to them publicly, with the open sky as witness, what He thought of them, what God thought of them, the definite truth about them. The day before, with His whip, He had condemned the animal-sellers and money-changers. Now He was dealing with the merchants of the Word, with the usurers of the Law, with the swindlers of Truth. The condemnation of that day did not exterminate them: with every generation such men spring up again, innumerable, with new names; but their faces are stamped forever with this condemnation wherever they are born and command.