Life of Christ

by Giovanni Papini

But all that faith and revelation tell us of His divinity rises up against the idea that He can ever have been subjected to temptation. If the torture and the end of His body had really terrified Him, was there not yet time to save Himself? For many days He had known that they were trying to take Him captive, and even on that night there were ways of escaping the pack of hounds ready to fall upon Him. He would have been safe if, either alone or with His most faithful friends, He had taken the road back to the Jordan, and thence by hidden paths have passed across Perea into the Tetrarchy of Philip, where He had already taken refuge to escape the ill-will of Antipas. The Jewish police were so few and primitive that they could scarcely have found Him. The fact that He did not do this, did not flee, shows that He did not try to escape death and the horrors that were to accompany it. From the point of view of our coarse human logic His death was a suicide—a divine suicide by the hand of others, not unlike that of the heroes of antiquity who fell upon the sword of a friend or a slave. What sort of a life would He have had after such a flight? To grow old obscurely, the timorous master of a hidden sect, to die at the last, worn out, the death-rattle in His throat like any other man! Better, infinitely better to finish the sowing of the Gospel on the Cross and to water it with His blood. He had spoken out His truths and now, that those truths should be everlastingly remembered He must needs link with them the horror of His unforgettable death. Perhaps this blood, like a stinging drink, would arouse His disciples forever.

But if the cup that Jesus wished to pass from Him was not fear of death, what else could it have been? Betrayal by him whom He had chosen and loved, by the disciple whose hunger He had fed that very evening with His body, whose thirst He had quenched with His soul? Or the denial close at hand of the other disciple in whom after his cry at Cæsarea He had the greatest hope? Or the desertion of all the others who would flee like scattered lambs when the wolf sets his fangs into their mother’s body? Or was it grief for that greater denial, the refusal of His own people, the Jews, of the people from whom He was born and who now despised Him like one born out of His time, and suppressed Him like a child of shame, and did not know that the blood of Him who came to save them would never be wiped from their foreheads? Perhaps in the darkness of this last vigil He had a glimpse of the fate which would befall His children later on, the bewilderment of the first saints, the dissensions between them, the desertions, the martyrdoms, the massacres, and after the hour of triumph the weakness of those who should have guided the multitude, the irrepressible schisms, the dismemberment of the Church, the wild dreaming of heretical pride, the growth of innumerable sects, the confusion of false prophets, the boldness of rebellious reformers, the simony and dissoluteness of those who deny Him in their actions while glorifying Him in word and gesture: the persecutions of Christians by Christians, the neglect of the lukewarm and the arrogant, the dominion of new Pharisees and new Scribes, distorting and betraying His teachings, the misunderstanding of His words, when they fall into the hands of the hair-splitters, weighers of the immaterial, separators of the inseparable, who, with learned vanity, eviscerate and cut to pieces the living things they pretend to bring to life.

The cup that Jesus wished to pass from Him might therefore have been not at all any wrong done to Him, but wrongs committed by others, those alive then and close to Him, or those not yet born and far-distant. What He was asking from His Father might have been not His own safety from death, but safety from the evils, which, then and later, were to overwhelm those who claim to believe in Him. The origin of His sadness would have been thus not fear for Himself, but love for others.

But no one will ever know the true meaning of the words cried out by the Son to the Father, in the black loneliness of the Olives. A great French Christian called the story of this night the “Mystery of Jesus.” The “Mystery of Judas” is the only human mystery in the Gospels; the prayer of Gethsemane is the most inscrutable, divine mystery of the story of Christ.

BLOOD AND SWEAT

And when He had prayed, He turned back to find the Disciples, who were perhaps waiting for Him to return. But the three had gone to sleep. Crouching on the ground, wrapped as best they could in their cloaks, Peter, James and John, the faithful, the specially chosen, had allowed themselves to be overcome with sleep. The obscure apprehensions, the repeated agitations of those last few days, the oppressive melancholy of the Supper, accompanied by words so grave, by presentiments so sad, had plunged them into that prostration which is more like torpor than sleep. The voice of the Master—who of us has the spiritual acuteness to realize that the accent of that voice in the sinister black silence is speaking also to our own hearts now?—called them: “What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak.” Did they hear these words in their sleep? Did they answer, shamefaced, putting their hands to their confused eyes which could not bear even the dim light of the night? What could they answer, startled, only half awake, to the Sleepless One who was to sleep no more?

Jesus went away again, more heavy-hearted than ever. Was the temptation against which He had put them on guard in them alone or also in Him? Was it the temptation to escape? To deny Himself as others were to deny Him? To oppose violence to violence? To pay with the lives of others for His own life, or to beg once more with a more despairing supplication that the peril might be averted from His head?

Jesus was once more alone, more alone than ever, in a solitude complete as infinite desolation. Until that hour He might have thought that there, close at hand, His loved friends were keeping vigil with Him. Now they had reached the limit of their endurance and had deserted Him spiritually before deserting Him bodily.

They had left Him alone; they were not men enough to grant Him the last favor which He asked, they who had received so many. In return for His blood, and His soul, for all His promises, for all His love, He had asked one thing only, that they should not fall asleep. And this small favor had not been granted Him. And yet He was suffering and struggling at that moment for the sake of those who slept. He who gave all was to receive nothing. During that night of refusals His every prayer was denied; both His Father and His fellow-men refused Him.

Satan also had disappeared into the darkness which is his own kingdom, and Christ was alone, utterly alone, alone as men are alone who raise themselves above other men, who suffer in the darkness to bring light to all. Every hero is always the only one awake in a world of sleepers, like the pilot watching over his ship in the solitude of the ocean and of the night, while his companions rest.