by Ted Dekker
Chapter Twenty-Six
WE ENTERED Jerusalem with spirits buoyed by Stephen’s faith. Still there was no sign of trouble that we could see; none that we could hear on the east side of the city.
We’d dismounted and led the camels by their lead ropes, hurrying for Herod’s palace and Saba on the west side. We would find Yeshua there as well—unless he’d been freed, a prospect that Stephen put great faith in.
The others knew the city far better than I, but I led them, walking quickly. Merchants and pilgrims now crowded the streets and I wove through them, eyes on that palace rising against the gray sky.
None of us spoke as we neared, not even Stephen. We were all consumed by the same hope. Yeshua would fulfill his promise to us and we would see it with our eyes.
I broke into a run when we emerged onto the street that led to Herod’s palace, just ahead.
“Maviah…”
But I ignored Stephen and ran faster. And then they followed, sharing my urgency, their feet rushing behind me. The only thing that mattered to me now was reaching Herod’s court.
At the gate, one of his guards recognized me—a younger warrior with brown hair and kind eyes. The moment he saw me, he hurried forward and stopped in my path.
“Herod awaits you, Queen of Arabia.”
I slowed to a quick walk, relieved. So…I was expected. Something had happened.
I stopped before him to catch my breath. “And Saba?”
“Your slave?”
“Yes. He’s with Herod?”
“I don’t know.” His eyes darted to the others, who’d caught up to me.
“They’re with me. What do you mean you don’t know? You haven’t seen my slave?”
His eyes were still on the others. “With you? I…Then I will have to send word to—”
“No!” I quickly calmed my voice. “Forgive me. Yes, I understand, but they must come with me now.”
He hesitated.
“Herod will demand to see them,” I pressed, searching for the right words. “The king has Yeshua in his court, and I’ve brought Yeshua’s mother, also from Galilee.” I pointed to her. “It is critical that he question her immediately.”
The guard blinked. Then glanced between Miriam and me.
“Yeshua, the prophet?”
“Yes. You’ve seen him?”
“They took him.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“Who took him? Where?”
“To the prefect, Pilate. But…”
He stalled, as if unsure he was authorized to say more.
“But what?” I demanded.
“I was told that he is to be crucified.”
Crucified? I hadn’t heard him correctly.
“Crucified?”
“Yes.”
“No, you don’t understand. I mean Yeshua, who was with Saba. The one from Nazareth who raises the dead.”
“Yes. Yeshua, the prophet.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
“No. No, Herod would never condemn him. I’m speaking of Yeshua! Yeshua!”
He backed up a step, alarmed. “It was Pilate who condemned him.”
My mind was unable to comprehend this news. The very thought of crucifixion was unbearable. To punish him or scourge him or put him out of the temple, I might have understood. But to crucify?
Behind me, Mary began to weep. I glanced back and saw that Miriam’s lips trembled as she silently wept. Beside her, Stephen had gone pale as clay.
I faced the guard and strode forward. “No! There’s a mistake. You have the wrong man.”
“Forgive me, but this is what—”
“No!” I shouted, face hot, grabbing his breastplate. “No, no, this can’t be.”
Mary’s cry rose to a wail.
“No!” I was moving before my mind could stop me. I slapped the guard’s face. “No, this cannot be!”
“Maviah.” Stephen, behind me, voice strained.
Images of a Roman crucifixion pierced my mind. Revulsion rose through me, seizing my lungs until I couldn’t breathe. To kill Yeshua, who had never lifted a sword, was unforgivable.
But to crucify him…
My hands were trembling. In the periphery of my vision I saw two other guards hurrying forward. Miriam was behind me, and I might have turned to weep with her. Stephen was there; I might have turned to him for guidance. Saba was somewhere; I might have rushed to find him.
But my mind refused to accept what I’d heard.
“Where?” I growled. “Where is he?”
The guard motioned to the city behind him. “There, beyond the city wall. Golgotha.”
I was already running, sprinting down the side street without so much as a glance behind me.
I had to find him, you see.
I had to know that the guard was wrong.
I had to prove to myself and to the world that Yeshua could not be killed. Not him. Not the one who’d calmed the storm. I had to make them understand that to crucify Yeshua would be to end the world.
Rage pushed me as I tore up another street, angling for the northern wall. I didn’t care where my feet landed, nor who I pushed out of the way to reach the gate.
Where was Saba? My mind spun with dizzying fear.
I called out his name, but my voice was swallowed by a thickening crowd that suddenly seemed to be hurrying in the same direction as I—to the north. Their voices swelled with excitement.
Something was driving them. Something was drawing them. Some spectacle.
“Saba!” I screamed. But he was nowhere and I was lost in a sea of humanity, swept forward now with a hundred others. The sound of weeping reached me. Not one or two, but many women, wailing. A whip cracked.
Now blind with panic, I tore around the corner, shoved my way through a wall of onlookers, broke into the open, and recoiled.
The first thing I saw was his flesh, exposed through his shredded tunic. I saw his skin, but strips of it were gone, and his body was a bloody mess. Even his feet, which staggered under the weight of the massive crossbeam he bore on his shoulders.
All of this I saw at a glance, unable to attach meaning to the scene before me. I gasped and felt myself beginning to retch, and I impulsively snatched my hand to my mouth.
In that single moment, all I had come to know of Yeshua and his realm was undone.
Mocked. Crushed. Gone.
I knew it was Yeshua—this was his body, his hair, his strong hands. But it wasn’t the Yeshua I had known. They’d reduced him to a slave, the kind bought for the sadistic pleasures of vile men who fed on their own bloodlusts.
And he had yielded to them.
He stumbled to one knee, groaned softly, then struggled back to his feet with a bystander’s help. Someone jostled me and I stumbled forward on numb feet, carried along by the surging crowd.
Four grisly Roman soldiers, the kind recruited for loathsome cruelty, beat the pressing onlookers back, barking orders. A woman rushed in with a cup of water, her weeping eyes on Yeshua, but one of the guards struck the side of her head with the butt of his whip. “Away, you whore!”
She cried out and stumbled back.
This wasn’t the Yeshua I had known on the Sea of Galilee. This was the one who trembled in the garden, begging for this suffering to be taken from him. The one who stood before Herod without uttering a single word to defend himself. The one who surrendered his flesh to be torn under their whips and chains. The one who seemed to have no power. The one who was only a man, subject to the kingdom of anguish and death.
Yeshua was like Talya now, at the mercy of tyranny.
The realization of his frail mortality swelled through my mind, and with it, a new thought consumed me.
I had to save him!
Every bone in my body cried out with this compulsion. I, who had been saved by him in Petra’s arena, could not stand by while they tried to rob him of his power in this arena.
“Yeshua!” I ran out into the street and threw myself to
my knees in front of him. “Yeshua,” I breathed, battered by dread. “Tell me what to do.”
I didn’t know what I expected or what I possibly could do, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t because I saw his face, marked by trails of blood from a ring of thorny vines they’d shoved onto his head.
A voice was yelling at me, “Get back! Get back!”
But I was fixated on Yeshua’s eyes, so hollowed by pain. Terror sliced through me. The anguish in those eyes was bottomless.
From the corner of my vision, I saw the guard draw his whip back. “Away, you bloody—” But then Saba was there, snatching his arm as if it were a twig. Throwing the smaller man back. He reached me in two strides, grabbed the back of my tunic, plucked me from the ground, and pulled me through the mob to the corner of a building.
Saba enfolded me in his arms and held me close, blocking my sight of the horror.
I leaned into him, weeping bitterly as the procession moved on. Saba hushed me gently, though his muscles vibrated with tension.
I could not contain my thoughts and, there in my shattered mind, Yeshua’s demise became his fault.
He could have stopped it, I thought. Even as he could have saved Talya. He still could stop this! There were only four guards close to Yeshua—they were no match for Saba, who could snatch Yeshua and rush him far away from all of this.
Overcome by this impulse, I pushed away from him and shoved my finger at the procession. “Save him!” I cried. “Save him! Kill them all!”
Tears flooded his eyes.
“Don’t just stand there!” I trembled from head to foot, screaming at him now. “Save him! I am your queen, you are my slave!” I slapped his cheek and thrust my hand out again. “Save him!”
His face contorted in anguish, and his hand remained latched onto my tunic so I couldn’t twist away or run.
I was breathing hard, but now Saba’s own pain reached me, and I felt my anger melting. I began to sob and lowered my forehead onto his chest.
“Forgive me,” I whispered. It was all I could press past my aching throat.
I was only dimly aware that the march of death had passed through the gates leading up to Golgotha. Stephen would have reached Yeshua, surely.
But I could not bear to look at Stephen now.
I imagined Yeshua’s mother, with a broken heart, reaching for her son. But my own shame would not allow me to console her.
Mary and Martha and the others—all were likely near him, weeping.
I was only near death. And near Saba, who held me like a tender flower, silently wetting my hair with his own tears.
The Romans were going to crucify Yeshua.
For a long time we remained as we were, broken and powerless. For a long time I stood immobilized, not daring to turn my head, much less follow the procession to watch. Unlike those from Palestine, I was unaccustomed to crucifixions.
How could I watch such brutal torture?
And if it were Talya?
My body trembled. If it were Talya, I would watch. For his sake.
“My queen.” Saba had lifted his tearstained face and was staring after them.
Something shifted in me then. I took a deep breath and set aside all of my selfish thinking and became who I was—a queen for the outcasts and a mother to the broken.
Miriam would care for her son in death.
I would care for Saba. He was all I had left. He and Talya.
Wiping his wet cheek with my thumb, I took his hand without any regard for the traditions of this land, which prohibited contact between a man and a woman in public.
“Come, Saba.”
We walked in the procession’s wake, silent. The path was stained with blood. Ahead of us, women wailed and men cried out, some ripping their tunics. Others laughed, and still others mocked him.
But Saba and I walked beyond the walls in stunned silence, two foreigners who no longer belonged in this land of death. Our own awaited us, far away. Dark thoughts came to me then like black ravens in the night, and I batted them away, determined to be strong.
We followed the people up the hill called Golgotha, where two other crosses already bore criminals for all to see. But I did not lead Saba to the crowd gathered around the execution atop that knoll.
Perhaps I was too weak—too unfamiliar with the inhumane death penalty. Perhaps my own shame had imprisoned me once again. Perhaps I could not bring myself to watch as they nailed all of my hope to that tree.
“Come.” I guided him to an outcropping of rock fifty paces beyond the crowd and there sat down next to Saba, who hung his head between his knees. I wanted to comfort him further, but it was all I could do to numb my own pain.
For a long time, we said nothing. But we saw. And we heard. And we wept. It was the third hour by Jewish time—nine in the morning by Roman time.
We saw large hammers rising and falling, heard their heavy strike on nails that penetrated flesh and wood, heard Yeshua’s guttural cries of pain.
We saw the crossbar being lifted into place under a sign affixed to the vertical beam—THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS. Heard the ropes scrape over the wood as they hauled up his body. Saw them drive a spike through his feet.
We saw Yeshua with his arms spread wide, stripped of his tunic, hanging from the beams, still wearing thorns for a crown. Heard his weeping.
We saw his mother on her knees comforted by John, one of only three from the inner circle that I could see. We saw the others—Stephen, who lay prone on the ground, sobbing loudly. Lazarus, with John and Miriam, dumbstruck. Mary and Martha with other women, wailing. Arim, who had fled upon first sight of Yeshua carrying his cross, had returned to Saba and me and sat in silence behind us, speechless.
We saw the other two crucified with Yeshua; heard one mock and one cry for mercy.
We saw the soldiers cast lots for his clothing. We heard the jeering of those same Roman thugs calling for Yeshua to come off the cross if he was the king of the Jews. Several religious leaders called out: “Let him save himself if he is the Christ!”
We heard Yeshua’s words in response, straining for the heavens, “Father…Forgive them, for they know not what they do…”
The silence following his cry was deafening. Terrible offense rose up within me.
How could he say such a thing to such vile creatures as these Romans? They knew exactly what they were doing! They had crucified hundreds, thousands, and each time they knew the full effect of their torture, and they took pleasure in it.
How could Yeshua pardon them in the very act of their brutality against him? How could he release the religious leaders from their guilt so easily?
“He turns his cheek,” Saba said with wonder.
Yes. Like the Father who did not judge. The Father who had abandoned Yeshua in the bowels of this horrifying nightmare. But I dared not confess my thoughts to Saba while he suffered.
It was all I could do to not throw myself at Yeshua’s tormentors even as they stood at the foot of the cross.
The hours passed. Neither of us seemed able to move. I knew that Yeshua saw us, because his slumping head was often turned in our direction, and when it was, I could not hold back my tears.
Others who had followed him during the past few years now sat on the ground in small groups, weeping softly or dumbstruck.
A hundred times I thought I should approach him and give him my tears. Or rush up and end the torture somehow.
A hundred times I found myself unable to move.
At noon, the dark clouds that had been encroaching upon Jerusalem for the past day finally swept over the city like a black woolen blanket, blotting out the sun. Even the sky now seemed to mock Yeshua as he overlooked Jerusalem, not as a king, but as a dead man.
Those clouds smothered Golgotha with silence, and I thought, Now it will end. But it didn’t. The soldiers waited, some seated, two standing.
I swallowed. “Saba.”
He looked at me.
“What is the Way of Yeshua? Tell me agai
n.”
Saba looked at the bloody crosses against the dark sky, and I thought he wouldn’t answer because that Way seemed to have failed even Yeshua now. But he did, in a trembling voice.
“There are two realms, heaven and earth, both among us, both within us,” he said, as if reciting. “To enter the eternal realm of the Father even now, one must be reborn with faith, as an infant who knows the Father. The means to see this path into the realm is new eyes that see the realm of peace instead of the storm.”
His throat tightened as he swallowed. He continued, resolved.
“The means to acquiring this sight is surrender. To deny oneself and follow him.”
His words hollowed out my heart.
“Love without judgment is the expression of the realm of heaven on earth. This and the power to chase away the storms.”
A tear snaked down his dark cheek.
“He surrenders his life,” he said.
Then Saba fell silent.
“And where is his power now?” I said under my breath.
The horizon roiled with black clouds.
“I don’t know. But he will send his Spirit to comfort us.”
“I don’t want his Spirit,” I said. “I want him.”
“His Spirit is him.”
“No, Saba!” I said, gesturing to Yeshua’s bloodied body sagging on the beams. “That is him.”
And then I lowered my head and gave in to my grief.
Saba placed one hand on my back. I wanted to say more, to air all my doubts, but I couldn’t bring myself to shatter Saba’s reverence. Nor question Yeshua’s character.
Now I understood why his inner circle had fled. Why one of them had betrayed him. Why Peter was now absent.
Their master had failed. He who claimed to be one with the Father had proven himself to be just a man. He, like all, was only human, subject to the world and to death.
Lightning stuttered through the black layers of cloud on the distant horizon. A cry tore through the air.
“My God!”
I jerked my eyes toward Yeshua and saw that he’d managed to lift his head and prop it against the vertical post. He was staring up at the heavens.
“My God! Why have you forsaken me?”