Outside the City Wall

The governor’s name was Pontius Pilate. He was not a king. He was the Roman officer who ran that corner of the empire for Caesar, and he only came up to Jerusalem for the big feasts, to be there in case a crowd turned into a riot. It was early morning when they brought Jesus to his door with his hands tied. The men who brought him would not go inside. It was Passover, and walking into a foreigner’s house would have made them unclean, and then they could not have eaten the meal. So Pilate came out to them on the stone pavement and asked what the charge was. “If this man were not doing wrong, we would not have brought him to you.” “Take him yourselves, then. Judge him by your own law.” “We are not allowed to put anybody to death. And this man is turning our nation the wrong way. He tells people not to pay their taxes to Caesar. He says that he himself is Christ — a king.” That last part was the part a Roman governor had to listen to. Pilate went back inside and had Jesus brought in to him.

“Are you the king of the Jews?” “Are you saying that yourself, or did other people tell you about me?” “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and your own chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?” “My kingdom does not come from this world. If it did, my men would be fighting, so that I would not be handed over. But my kingdom is not from here.” “So you are a king, then?” “You say that I am a king. This is why I was born, and this is why I came into the world: to speak for the truth. Everybody who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” “What is truth?” He did not wait for an answer. He walked back out to the men at the door and said, “I find nothing against this man.” But they would not have it. They kept at him, saying the man stirred people up all over the country, teaching everywhere — he had started away up in Galilee and come all the way down here with it.

Galilee. Pilate caught hold of the word the way a man catches a rope. Galilee was King Herod’s country, not his — and Herod happened to be in Jerusalem for the feast. So he sent Jesus across the city to Herod, and made the whole business somebody else’s. Herod was delighted. He had been wanting to see this man for a long time. He had heard all about him, and he was hoping to be shown something wonderful. He asked question after question. Jesus did not answer him. Not one word. The chief priests stood there the whole time shouting their charges, and still he said nothing at all. So Herod and his soldiers got tired of him and made fun of him instead. They put a bright robe on him, the kind a king wears, and sent him back across the city to Pilate. Herod and Pilate had disliked each other for years. They became friends that day.

Pilate called the chief priests and the leaders and the people together and told them plainly: “You brought me this man for turning the people away. I have examined him in front of you, and I have not found him guilty of one thing you accuse him of. Neither did Herod — he sent him straight back to us. This man has done nothing that he should die for. I will have him beaten, and let him go.” Now there was a custom at Passover: the governor let one prisoner out, whichever one the crowd asked for. And there was a man in the prison called Barabbas, locked up for murder in an uprising in the city. So Pilate offered them the choice, thinking he knew what they would say. “Which of the two shall I let go — Barabbas, or Jesus, who is called Christ?” While he sat there waiting on the judgment seat, a message came out to him from his wife. “Have nothing to do with that good man. I have suffered all night in a dream because of him.” But the chief priests and the elders had been going up and down the crowd while he waited, telling them what to ask for. And the crowd shouted back: “Barabbas!” “Then what am I to do with Jesus, who is called Christ?” “Crucify him!” “Why? What has he done wrong? I have found nothing in him that he should die for.” But they only shouted louder, over and over, until their voices won. Pilate sent for a bowl of water and washed his hands in front of them all, and said he was innocent of this man’s blood and they could see to it themselves. Then he let Barabbas out of the prison, and handed Jesus over.

He was flogged. Then the soldiers took him into the courtyard of the palace and called the rest of their company in to watch, and made a game of him. They twisted some thorn branches into a circle and pressed it onto his head for a crown. They threw a purple cloak around his shoulders. They knelt down in front of him, one after another, and said, “Greetings, king of the Jews!” And they spat at him and hit him. Pilate brought him outside once more, still wearing the thorns and the purple, and said to the men waiting there, “Look — here is the man. I am bringing him out to you so that you know I find nothing against him.” “Crucify him! We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.” That frightened Pilate more than anything they had said yet. He took Jesus back inside and asked him where he came from, and got no answer at all. “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have the power to let you go, and the power to have you crucified?” “You would have no power over me at all unless it had been given to you from above. That is why the one who handed me over to you carries the greater wrong.” After that Pilate tried to let him go. But the men outside shouted that if he did, he was no friend of Caesar’s. That was the sentence that finished it. Pilate sat down on the judgment seat, out on the stone pavement, and handed him over to be crucified.

They took him out of the city to kill him, the way Rome always did it — out in the open, beside a road, where everybody could see. A condemned man carried the crossbeam himself. He started out carrying his, and he could not carry it far. There was a man coming in from the country that morning who had nothing at all to do with any of it: Simon, from Cyrene in Africa, the father of two boys called Alexander and Rufus. The soldiers took hold of him out of the crowd and made him pick up the beam and carry it behind Jesus. A great crowd went out after them, and among them women who were crying out loud for him and beating their chests. He turned around to them and said: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not cry for me. Cry for yourselves, and for your children. Days are coming when people will say, ‘Happy are the women who never had a child.’ They will start saying to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do this while the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

The place was just outside the wall, a little rise of bare rock by the road. It was called Golgotha, which means the Place of a Skull. Two other men were brought out that morning with him, both of them criminals. Somebody held out wine with bitter myrrh in it — what they gave a man to dull the pain. He tasted it and would not drink it. They nailed him to a cross. It was the middle of the morning. They crucified the other two at the same time, one on his right and one on his left, and him in the middle. Pilate had a notice fixed above his head with the charge on it, written in three languages so that anybody going past could read it: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. The chief priests came and asked him to change it, to make it say the man had only claimed to be king. Pilate said, “What I have written, I have written.” Underneath, the four soldiers on duty divided his clothes between them and threw dice for his coat, because it was woven in one piece from the top down and they did not want to cut it up. And he said: “Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.”

People stood and watched. Some of the ones going by along the road shouted up at him to come down and save himself, if he was the Son of God. The chief priests and the teachers of the law said the same thing to each other, in the voice people use when they want to be overheard: “He saved other people. He cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the king of Israel, come down off that cross now, and then we will believe him.” Even one of the two criminals said it. “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself — and us!” But the other one told him to be quiet. “Do you not even fear God? You are under the same sentence he is. And we are getting what we deserve; we are being paid back for what we did. This man has done nothing wrong.” And then he said: “Jesus — remember me when you come into your kingdom.” “Amen, I tell you: today you will be with me in the garden.” The word he used for that garden is the name of the garden of Delight, where everything began — the one Adam and Eve were sent out of. To a man dying beside him he said: today, with me, there.

Not everybody was far off. Standing near enough to hear him were his mother, and her sister, and Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary from Magdala — and the follower he loved, the one who had been lying next to him at supper the night before. He looked down at his mother, and then at that man, and he said: “Woman — here is your son.” And to the follower: “Here is your mother.” And from that hour that man took her into his own home and looked after her as if she were his.

At noon the sun failed. It went dark over the whole land, and it stayed dark for three hours, right through the part of the day when the light should have been strongest. At three in the afternoon he called out, loudly, in the language he had learned as a small boy: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” Which means: My God, my God, why have you left me? Some of the people standing near thought he was calling for Elijah, and said to wait and see whether Elijah would come and take him down.

Then he said: “I am thirsty.” There was a jar of sour wine standing there, the cheap wine the soldiers drank. One of them soaked a sponge in it and lifted it up to his mouth on a stalk. He took it. And he said: “It is finished.” And then, with a loud voice: “Father — into your hands I put my spirit.” And he bowed his head, and died.

Across the valley, in the temple, the great curtain that hung in front of the holiest room tore in two, from the top all the way down to the bottom. The ground shook, and rocks split open, and tombs came open in the rock outside the city; and afterward, when he had been raised, people saw some of God’s holy ones who had died, walking in Jerusalem. The commander of a hundred soldiers was standing right opposite him, in charge of the whole thing. He had watched men die before — it was his work. He saw how this man died, and he said: “Truly this man was God’s Son.” And the crowds who had come out to watch went back into the city beating their chests.

The women stayed. They had followed him all the way from Galilee and looked after him and paid for his food out of their own money, and they were there at the end, standing at a distance, watching: Mary from Magdala; Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses; Salome; the mother of James and John; and others who had come up the road to Jerusalem with him. Everybody who knew him was standing off at a distance, looking on.

It was the day before the Sabbath, and the evening was coming on, and a body could not be left out through a Sabbath. A man named Joseph, from a town called Arimathea, went to Pilate and asked for the body. Joseph was a rich man and a member of the very council that had condemned him. He had not agreed with what they did, and he had been waiting all his life for the kingdom of God, and he had kept that to himself. He did not keep it to himself now. Pilate was surprised the man was dead already, and sent for the commander to make sure, and then let Joseph have him. And Nicodemus came, the one who had first come to him at night, full of questions. He brought spices — myrrh and aloes, about seventy pounds of it, enough for a king. The two of them took him down and wound him in strips of clean linen with the spices in among the folds, the way people were buried there. There was a garden near the place, and in the garden a new tomb cut back into the rock, one that nobody had ever been laid in. It was Joseph’s own. They laid him in it, because the tomb was close and the Sabbath was almost on them, and they rolled a great round stone across the doorway and went away. The women had followed them. Mary from Magdala and the other Mary sat down opposite the tomb and watched the men roll the stone, and saw the place, and saw exactly how he had been laid there. Then they went home and got spices and perfumed oils ready, and rested through the Sabbath, the way the command said.