THE DARKNESS

THE DARKNESS

Jesus' breathing was more and more like the death-rattle. His chest heaved with convulsive efforts to breathe; loud, painful pulses hammered at His temples. His heart beat so rapidly and so violently that it shook Him as if it would tear Him loose; the feverish thirst of crucified men flamed all over His body, as if His blood had become a raging molten fire in His veins. Stretched in that painful position, nailed to the beams and not able to move, held up by His hands, which were lacerated if He let Himself hang by them, but which, if He held them up, exhausted His weak and worn-out frame, that young and divine body which had suffered so many times because it contained too great a soul, was now a funeral pyre of suffering where all the sufferings of the world burned together.

As ancient writers admitted, crucifixion was the cruelest and blackest of punishments. It gave the greatest torture for the longest time. If tetanus set in, a merciful inertia hastened death; but there were men who held out, suffering always more and more, until the second day after crucifixion, and even longer. The thirst of their fever, the congestion of their hearts, the rigidity of their veins, their cramped muscles, the dizziness and terrible pains in the head, the ever-greater agony—all these were not enough to make an end of them. But most men died at the end of twelve hours.

The blood from the four wounds of Jesus had clotted about the nail-heads, but every movement made fresh blood gush out, which fell slowly along the cross and dripped upon the ground. His head drooped on His weary neck; His eyes, those mortal eyes, whence God had looked out upon the earth, were glazing over in the death stupor; and His livid lips, parched with suffering and thirst, drawn by His painful breathing, were withered by that last kiss, the poisonous kiss of Judas.

Thus died a God, who had cooled the blood of the feverish, had given the water of life to the thirsty, who had raised up the dead from their tombs, who had quickened the paralyzed, cast out demons from obsessed souls, who had wept with the weeping, who, instead of punishing the wicked, had made them to be born again into a new life, who had taught with poetic words and proved by miracles that glorious aspiration—the life of perfect love—which raging beasts sunk in stupor and in blood would never have been capable of discovering for themselves. He had healed wounds and they wounded all His perfect body; He had pardoned evildoers, and evildoers nailed Him, an innocent man, between two criminals; He had infinitely loved all men, even those unworthy of His love, and hatred had nailed Him there where hatred punished and was punished; He had been more righteous than righteousness and they had wreaked upon Him the most iniquitous unrighteousness; He had called mean souls to holiness and He had fallen into the hands of slanderers and demons. He had brought life, and in return they gave Him the most humiliating death.

All this was necessary that men should learn again the road to the earthly Paradise; that they should mount above drunken bestiality and attain the exaltation of the saints; that they should be resurrected from their sluggish foolishness which seems life and is death, to the magnificence of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The mind may bow before the dreadful mystery of this necessity, but the heart of men can never forget the price exacted as payment of our debts. For two thousand years, men born again in Christ, worthy to know Christ, to love Christ, and to be loved by Him, have wept, at least once in their lives, at the memory of that day and of that suffering. But all our tears gathered together like a bitter sea do not compensate for one of the drops which fell, red and heavy, on Golgotha.

A barbarous king of barbarians pronounced the most vigorous words ever spoken by Christian lips about that blood. They were reading to Clovis the story of the Passion, and the fierce King was sighing and weeping when suddenly, no longer able to contain himself, clapping his hand to the hilt of his sword, he cried out, "Oh, that I had been there with my Franks!" Ingenuous words, words of a soldier and of a violent man, opposed to Christ's words, spoken to Peter among the olives, but words beautiful with all the naïve beauty of a candid and virile love. For it is not enough to weep over Christ who gave more than tears; we must fight, fight in us everything that divides us from Christ, fight in our midst all of Christ's enemies.

For, although millions of men have since wept when thinking of that day, on that Friday around the cross, all except the women were laughing, and those men who laughed have left sons and grandsons, many of them baptized, and they still laugh and their descendants will continue to laugh until the day when One alone will be able to laugh. If weeping cannot cancel that blood, what punishment can ever expiate that awful laughter?

Look at them therefore once more, those who are laughing about the cross where Jesus hangs pierced by the most agonizing pain. There they are, clustered on the slopes of Golgotha, dehumanized by hate! Look at them well, look them in the face, one by one; you will recognize them all, for they are immortal.

See how they thrust out their twitching muzzles, their scrawny necks, their noses humped and hooked, their rapacious eyes, gleaming under their bristling eyebrows. See bow hideous they are, branded with the mark of Cain. Count them over well, for they are all there, just like the men whom we now know, brothers of the men whom we meet every day in our streets. Not one is missing.

In the front row there are the priests, with crammed paunches, with arid hearts, with great hairy ears, with thick-lipped, gaping mouths, craters of blasphemy. And elbow to elbow with them, the arrogant Scribes, blear-eyed and afflicted, their faces of an excremental yellow, fabricating together lies, belching out pus and ink. And the Epulones, thrusting out before them the obscene heaviness of their stuffed bellies, brutes who trade on hunger, who fatten on famines, who convert into money the patience of the poor, the beauty of virgins, the sweat of slaves. And the money-changers, expert in illicit traffic and in oppression, who live to extort unlawfully from others; and the knotty lawyers skillful at turning the law against the innocent. And behind these high pillars of society, there is the mob of cheating scullions, of overbearing rascals, of foul-mouthed rogues, of whining beggars, of filthy servants, the lower dregs of the population, famished hounds who eat under the tables and snarl between the legs of whoever does not give them either a mouthful or a kick.

They are the eternal enemies of Christ—they who celebrated on that day their infamous Saturnalia; and they have vomited out on Christ's face their poisonous saliva, the muddy remains of their souls. This miry dross of humanity, foul and polluted, vomited out from their filthy hearts their hatred for Him who was saving them; they howled against Him who was forgiving them; they insulted Christ who was agonizing for them, Christ who was dying for them. The antithesis of good and evil, innocence and infamy, light and darkness, was never presented with such a dramatic and utter contrast as on that irreversible day.

Nature itself seemed to wish to hide the horror of that sight: the sky, which all the morning had been clear, suddenly grew dark. A thick cloud, dark as though it came from the marshes of hell, rose above the hills and little by little spread to every corner of the horizon. Black clouds gathered about the sun, that sweet, clear April sun, which had warmed the hands of the murderers, encircled it, laid siege to it, and finally covered it with a thick curtain of darkness . . . "and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour." (Luke 23:44)

Even this morning, Google may a display of the modern evolutionary thinking that pervades this world .Some men would have us to imagine that all things came into being spontaneously and therefore that we must suppose an origination of immeasurable great effects without any cause, or believe that at some time a nothing, without any willing or knowing it, and without the use of means, became a something-this is the most unreasonable assumption that could possible be attributed to a human being.