The Silence of Gethsemane

by Michel Benoît

  These were the very things that John the Baptist had rebelled against from the banks of the Jordan, rejecting costly purification rites and replacing them, in a very visible way, with the water that flows from Mount Hermon (at no cost) – at the same time denouncing the corruption of the mighty Herod and the priests who grovelled to him. Yet what I saw bore witness to just how little impact his words – which would be instrumental in his death – had had. Words were not enough: there had to be deeds, or at least a symbolic gesture (such as a healing), which would show that the axe had now struck the root of the tree.

  I looked up. From the ramparts of the Antonia fortress, armed legionaries were keeping a watchful eye on the Temple esplanade, a place where trouble was always brewing. At the first sign of unrest, the slightest hint of any fracas, they would be there, swords drawn. Prevent the buying and selling of livestock? Send the money-changers packing? There would be a riot, blood might be spilt in sight of the Holy of Holies. Yet I wanted to prove to my companions that not only was I one of the Baptist’s disciples like them, but that his prediction was coming to pass, the Kingdom was at hand.

  So in a quiet corner, out of sight of the police and the legionaries, I overturned one or two tables, took a whip made of cords and swept away a few piles of coins that bore different heads from all across the Empire. The astonished money-changers wasted no time in setting up their stalls again; their only concern was that this lunatic’s actions would precipitate the armed intervention that everyone feared. Their vociferous curses were drowned out by the noise of the crowd. Then I slipped discreetly out of the Temple precinct by the side gate and disappeared into the alleyways of the Old Town.

  I had done nothing that could be of threat to the main financial and commercial institution in Israel. The important thing was that by acting as I had, I ensured that the booming voice of John the Baptist was heard here as well.

  It was on that day, or during those that followed, that I realized that by using this symbolic gesture in the Temple to fulfil what he preached on the Jordan, I had taken John the Baptist’s teachings as far as was possible in the Land of Israel. He had provided the inspiration, but I would go further. My first acts of healing were my response to his pessimistic outlook, but I now needed time to establish a new teaching based on these foundations; to open up a new path, one that he might have glimpsed without being able to follow it.

  Forgetting nothing, yet travelling beyond it all.

  16

  Unnoticed among the horde of pilgrims who had come for the Passover, we camped outside the city centre. The money-changers in the Temple might think better of their decision and lodge an official complaint against me – so I decided to keep out of sight. Nonetheless, it was apparent that my fame as a local healer had spread beyond Galilee. A few people recognized me, and asked me to pass on John the Baptist’s teachings to them.

  As the Passover celebrations were coming to an end, I had just finished one of these discussions when I spotted the elegant figure of the Judaean. He came up to me with a smile: he had been on the Temple esplanade and had seen everything, understood completely, and congratulated me for acting in the name of the Baptist and all Israel by announcing that times were changing. He wanted to introduce me to a friend of his, a prominent Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin (the supreme spiritual – and even more so political – authority in the land). Don’t worry about his title or his position, he told me. It’s true that Nicodemus has a powerful position in Israel, but he’s also a fair and upright man who is unimpressed by worldly glory. He would like to talk to the person whom I’ve told him so much about, so please grant him his wish.

  So, just as it was getting dark, in the shadow of the city walls I met this scholarly, intellectually curious and open-minded man. He was blessed with the same unbiased attitude to new ideas as the Pharisees in Galilee, although this was combined with a genuine sense of spiritual enquiry, which couldn’t always be said of my fellow northerners. He questioned me at length about the baptism by water practised by John, and I used it as an opportunity to give him an inkling of my experiences in the wilderness. Nicodemus was aware that it wasn’t enough to cut down the old tree, but that what the people of Moses urgently needed was a renaissance. Impressed by my healings, he asked if John’s baptism was the means of bringing about this rebirth as well as acting as a portent of it, or whether we had to wait for something else.

  The fact that this influential man should approach a little rabbi who had already acquired something of a bad reputation in his local area was a sign of real courage. I told him that the next time I came to the capital I would be happy to meet him again, either alone or with our friend the Judaean.

  We still haven’t left Judaea. What I wanted most of all was to go back and stay with John, who was now baptizing with his disciples at Aenon, near Salem, where the water is abundant. My companions rejected the idea, and it was then that I became aware of the rivalry that existed between them and their former fellow disciples. Although united in their opposition to the Temple, personal ambitions and power struggles were more important to them than the need to join forces! So I let them have their way and allowed them to baptize people who came to listen to me – although I never did this myself, knowing that it was part of a process of renewal that was now obsolete.

  But for John’s disciples this was going too far, and they complained to him.

  “Rabbi,” they told him, “the one who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you testified, here he is baptizing, and all are going to him!”

  Word reached me that my master was trying to put a stop to this pointless rivalry and pacify his followers. He understood the significance of my refusing to perform baptisms, and that I must have allowed it simply to appease my companions and wasn’t gathering disciples around me. He was probably aware that he had gone as far as he could go, that he would now decrease and something else would increase, and that I was ready to open up this new route. He repeated this to anyone who would listen, knowing I would get word of it through the usual grapevine.

  There was only one way to bring this petty squabbling to an end, and that was to leave Judaea and go back to Galilee. Protest as they might, I decided to get my companions out of reach of this taste of power, whose bait they had already taken, forgetting who they were, and who John was. We would set off immediately, once again passing through Samaria.

  Between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal lies a piece of land that Jacob gave to his son Joseph, where there is a spring that feeds a deep well which the local people refer to as “Jacob’s Well”. Tired out by the journey, I sat by the well while the others went to buy food in Sychar, the nearest town. It was about noon, the sun was beating down from high above and suddenly I felt very thirsty.

  A woman appeared, a pitcher on her shoulder. I said to her:

  “Give me a drink!”

  She could immediately tell from my accent that I was a Galilean, and stepped back.

  “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

  With a note of amusement, she then pointed out that I had simultaneously transgressed two laws that were entrenched in our culture: firstly, speaking to a strange woman, unthinkable in a patriarchal society. On top of that I had asked a Samaritan to give me some of her water, although Jews refuse to share anything with these heretics.

  She clearly didn’t know who I was, since Jewish rumours bypassed this ostracized region in the same way as Jews themselves. But since I insisted, she tried one last gambit:

  “But you have no bucket…”

  It was true, I was asking to drink from her pitcher, despite the fact that Jews believe that even the utensils used by Samaritans are contaminated by the same impurity that rendered them unclean from the moment their race came into existence. Then she added, provocatively:

  “Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”

  Left speechless by her w
ords, I didn’t reply. Without realizing it, the woman had just expressed something that I would have to include in my new teaching! Ever since meeting the Baptist and spending time in the wilderness, I had had a vague notion that the Law that Moses was given on Mount Sinai had become too great a burden for the Jews to bear. Opening up a new way would take us back to the time of the Jewish patriarchs, prior to the Law. We would come down from Sinai and back onto the plain, to hear what God said to Moses before he went up the mountain, while he was still prostrated before the Burning Bush.

  I owed this sudden revelation to a woman, and a Samaritan woman at that. Before answering I drank deeply from her pitcher. Once I had given it back I told her what I believed, that God didn’t dwell on Mount Gerizim or in any other place on earth. She talked about the Messiah: this constant waiting for the coming of the Messiah and the restoration of the Kingdom of David created confusion in people’s minds, provided a pretext for regular and bloody uprisings. I had always been careful not to get involved with these movements, which are so violent, reckless and doomed to failure. Even then I knew that the earthly Kingdom of David would never return. If God were to reign in Israel once more, it would be above all in the hearts of men and women. Yes, there needed to be a restoration, but not a political one – it had to be spiritual, inward.

  This had to be at the heart of what I was going to teach.

  At that moment my companions reappeared, amazed to find me having a friendly conversation with a strange woman. Alarmed at the sight of them, she ran off.

  We were still sitting eating beside the well when a group of men from the nearby town arrived. The woman had spread the word. Would the rabbi from Galilee be kind enough to accept their hospitality… They wanted to invite him to their house, this Jew who wasn’t like the others, so they could hear what he had to say, ask him questions.

  In spite of my companions’ disgusted expressions, I accepted.

  So it was that the son of Joseph, brought up in the purest Jewish traditions, spent two days among people who had broken away from Judaism and were hated by his fellow countrymen. Slept under their roof, ate food from the same dish, food that had been prepared by the unclean hands of their womenfolk.

  The next day we were back in Galilee.

  17

  Which of us is able to recall his whole life? All that remains in our memory is a fragment. Interspersed with trips to Jerusalem and a few forays into neighbouring countries, I would spend the next two years in Galilee. Tonight, as my mind ranges back and forth across the years, I am unable to put events in the right order. Yet what does that matter? At this moment, when my life may be drawing to a close, the trifling details that float like spume on the surface of the time I spent wandering are enough to answer the one question that still haunts me: during those months, did my words and deeds succeed in imparting what God expects one of his prophets to impart?

  As soon as people knew I was back in the area, word quickly spread and the sick and lame came to me in droves. Most of them went away healed. Like my earliest healings, these were the product of their own hopes, the raging despair that drove them to prostrate themselves before me. I laid my hands on these scrofula sufferers as if power were going forth from me. And there really was power – although I knew that I was neither the source of it nor even its conduit. They came to me after waging a long inner struggle that they were probably unaware had taken place. Not only was I acknowledging their tenacity in this unseen combat, but also the love of a God who never abandons his people.

  Whenever I was confronted with blind fatalism, I rebelled. At the time I didn’t realize that these healings were my first act of defiance against the established order.

  It was only gradually that I came to understand the connection between sickness of the soul and sickness of the body, between the hold that Evil has over sick people and the diseases with which they are afflicted. Through his prophetic acts themselves, every prophet must learn to recognize the reality of the invisible world that confronts him. In turn, I too was unable to avoid this age-old and obligatory apprenticeship.

  The memory of one of these healings now comes back to me, although I think it occurred later on.

  We were passing through Nain, a large village. We had just gone through the outer gate (Galilee being a land of uprisings, all the villages have fortifications of some kind), when we had to stop for a procession that was making its way out of the village: they were burying someone outside the walls.

  On a bier carried by four bearers, the body of a man, still quite young, was just visible. Behind came a woman in mourning clothes. There was no one at her side, she was alone with her grief – a widow who had lost her son, having already lost her husband. The air was filled with the wailing of the large crowd that followed not far behind, the entire population of the village.

  Did my thoughts suddenly turn to my own mother, now abandoned by her eldest son, and to whom I must surely have also seemed dead? A shudder ran through me – or was it the lava of the wilderness rising up again? The pain felt by this woman, who was the reflection of all those women in Israel who have someone they have brought into the world cruelly snatched away from them, struck me like a hammer blow. A pain so great at this moment that neither the mother nor the crowd had the strength, even if the thought had occurred to them, to appeal against this death sentence. It was unavoidable, an inevitable step that had to be taken by this young man, whose only need was now the faith in God that his own people didn’t possess.

  It was left to me to have faith on their behalf. I came forward. Startled, the bearers stood still. I touched the bier.

  “Young man, I say to you, rise!”

  I was careful not to give death a command, as if I had the power to do so. Through the son I was speaking to his mother and the other mourners. The young man sat up on the bier. As I gave him back to his mother I was aware that I was also restoring, to all those present, the belief that they had momentarily lost, that the One God of Israel is the God of life.

  Where does a prophet’s power lie? Is he able to imagine for a single moment that he can take the place of the Invisible, who it is his mission to reveal to mankind? Is he able to act like God or even, in his stead, can he create or recreate as He does? To a Jew the very thought is blasphemous, an act of reckless pride, a misunderstanding of the natural order which is quite inconceivable. I would need time to learn to control this power, a power whose source didn’t lie in me and as such was all the more precious. Time to offer myself up to it, to offer it openly to other people.

  Yet they never truly understood. Like parched ground they were thirsty for marvels, to hail something as a miracle. Among all these Jews, which of them thought to remember that God is God, that I was just a man, an ordinary Jew, and yet no Jew is ordinary when he reaches out his hand to accept power from On High? Very few, judging by my disciples who are sleeping not far away, while I alone keep watch in the night.

  Perhaps only the Judaean, who will join us here in the olive grove once he has dismissed his servants and closed the door of the upper room behind him, the room he let us use for the last celebratory supper that I will ever eat with my disciples.

  In the minds of the ordinary people, a rabbi is above all a teacher. So it was perfectly natural for me to stop at village synagogues, where there was always a group of idle gossips, squabbling and making pronouncements.

  What was I to tell them that wouldn’t merely repeat the teachings of John the Baptist? More importantly, how could I offer them a new dish, one that would whet their appetites even when the table was already groaning under the weight of such delicious talk? If I wanted to make them hear and not just listen to me, then the form of what I said would matter as much as the content.

  No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made: I was doomed to create something new.

  18

  From then on a small crowd of people followed me everywhere. M
ost of them only came a short way, listening and making comments before returning to their homes. Amid all the toing and froing I noticed that the six companions who had been with me since Capernaum had been joined by others. Among them was another Simon, known as “the Cananaean”, and Judas, referred to as “Iscariot” – two more names that were given to aspiring Zealots. Yet the fact that there was a faction that advocated violence among my inner circle – the Barjona, the Boanerges brothers, Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot – didn’t worry me. Like so many others they were just unfortunate individuals struggling to find a new direction in life, a way out of the hopeless situations in which they were trapped, not the least of which was poverty. I never imagined that it wouldn’t be long before the terrorists interpreted the fact that these men accompanied me everywhere as tacit support for their movement, so I gladly agreed to take these former rebels with me – my message was aimed at them too.

  Suddenly realizing that they were now a group, they began referring to themselves as disciples, as they had heard the Baptist’s entourage do. It smacked of the animosity that had sprung up on the banks of the Jordan and which had never really gone away, but I took no notice. To hear them talk, the rabbi whose star was on the rise in Galilee now had his own disciples, just like John the Baptist.

  Personally I never used the expression, which has Greek connotations. But if I had to have a group of constant companions (as John the Baptist did), if they were to be as much in the public eye as I was, then I wanted this inner circle to have symbolic meaning. Their very presence would become a word, one that ordinary Jewish people could immediately and instinctively understand. They had a role to play in the idea that came to me by the well in Samaria: the woman had likened me to the Patriarch Jacob, whose twelve sons founded the twelve tribes of Israel.

  If the farmers who saw us strolling beside their fields and the Pharisees who listened to me in the synagogues were to understand what it was, this dream of mine – to sink the roots of my teaching in the period prior to Sinai, to return to the patriarchs who came before the Law – then I had to have twelve companions. As soon as the right opportunity came along I would make up the number of my faithful followers to a symbolic twelve. This would show that I intended to go back to the vital intuitions that had come to me in the wilderness, the crucible in which Israel was formed.