Outside the barracks, in the morning sunshine that already promised heat would later reflect from the city buildings, the narrow streets should have been quiet as the shops, bazaars, and markets had closed for a festival day. Yet a crowd of hundreds waited, lining both sides of the street into the quarter of Acra. Many in the crowd were the elders and Pharisees of the Sanhedrin, their gray beards bobbing as they discussed the events with great heat. Caiaphas and the chief priests had disappeared, choosing to present public disinterest once they had been assured of the death of the prophet. Many of the others, however, were friends of Yeshua and curious onlookers, astounded and helpless at hearing that the man from Galilee had been captured and sentenced privately and quickly.
The centurion was finally satisfied that everything was ready. He carried a substantial paunch, his knees were arthritic, and he did not look forward to walking the steep cobblestone streets and beyond to the place of execution. So, with a long sigh and a tired wave of his hand, he sent the procession ahead to the street and the waiting spectators.
Their expectations of drama were not disappointed.
They saw a man with a crown of thorns pressed into His head, a man haggard from the pain of betrayal, whose mental anguish had been great enough to draw blood from the pores of His skin. He had not had food or drink during a sleepless night of inquisition, and His welted and bruised skin had been flayed raw the length of His body. He bent nearly double as He dragged the heavy beam of lumber that rested on His shoulders.
The crowd’s first view of the fallen Messiah drew a ripple of gasps of excited horror. Then the people closest to Yeshua read the inscription on the sign that dangled in Yeshua’s face from the end of the beam, partially obscuring His vision. The gasps became exclamations of surprise, and the nearest elders quickly dispatched runners to Caiaphas.
Pilate had dispensed with the customary herald who carried a wooden board to proclaim the nature of the crime. Instead, he had ordered this sign, scrawled with a stick of gypsum, and written in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek so that no person would fail to understand the simple message:
“The King of the Jews!”
**
Women on both sides of the street wept openly. Even had they not known the man or the situation, the pitiful sight would have torn their hearts.
Yeshua fell repeatedly beneath the weight of the beam. Where His body was not too badly ripped from His earlier whipping, His taunt muscles lay flat against bone, showing a man accustomed to work and easily capable of such a load. But He had lost too much blood, suffered from physical shock, and reached the verge of unconsciousness from thirst. Because of the incline of the road and the uneven cobbles, He would have had difficulty simply walking without the burden of rough-hewn lumber scraping against His raw back.
When He fell, the grizzled centurion dispassionately beat Him with the side of his spear, as if Yeshua were a stubborn mule.
What tore most at the women’s hearts was Yeshua’s struggle to continue. He fell and bore the beatings silently, somehow getting to His feet one more time. Yet each time He stumbled it took Him longer to regain His feet, with effort so excruciatingly obvious that men in the crowd had to refrain from stepping forward to help Him.
**
Some who read of my small part in this from other sources might say I was a traveler, at that moment arriving in Jerusalem for the Passover. But what pilgrim would arrive after the Passover?
I had actually just slowly passed the villas and gardens of Bezetha on my way back into Jerusalem. As I had my own share of misery—though none to compare with His—and as I was full of my own sorrow and emptiness, I did not see the procession until I was almost upon it, just outside the Tower Gate.
When I did lift my eyes, I merely saw a bloody man on His knees with a beam of lumber lying across the backs of His calves. A centurion repeatedly struck His shoulders with the side of his spear. The bloody man tried to push Himself up, but simply collapsed again and again.
Behind Him were two other men, also carrying crossbeams. Each of the three was guarded by four soldiers.
Perhaps it was my sudden interest, or that the centurion faced my direction. Certainly it made a difference that I was a lone traveler heading into the city and easily noticed. Whatever the reason, the centurion’s eyes met mine—and he beckoned me forward.
All eyes in the crowd turned on me.
“You,” the centurion said to me, “come here.”
Chapter Fifty-nine
One did not ignore the command of Roman soldiers, so I obeyed. But not with fear. For one thing, I didn’t care enough about my own life. For another, I knew I had the protection of money. Unless the centurion struck me dead on the spot, if he accused me of some offense—though I couldn’t imagine what—I could easily hire a defense. Romans are sticklers for the law, and I believed I would not be unfairly tried.
“Carry this cross,” the centurion said, tapping me on the shoulder with his spear to conscript me into service. “We go as far as the Hill of the Skull.”
Although I stood a head taller than the centurion, I obeyed without resistance. It would have been foolish to do otherwise.
Standing beside the man—who was still on His knees and gasping from exhaustion like a lathered, driven horse—I lifted the beam of wood and rested it on the meat of my right shoulder. He was so beaten, so bloody, that even then I paid no special attention to Him. And, knowing how it felt to be utterly drained, I shifted my position and offered my free hand to help Him up.
Not until He was on His feet, not until He lifted His face and shone those eternal eyes directly into my soul did I recognize Him.
Yeshua. The Messiah.
“Simon,” He said, addressing me with the short form of my name. It came out as a mumbled whisper. His lips were swollen, and His tongue pushed against a snapped tooth. “Remember My instructions to you. And remember you are a child of God. Let Him provide the healing.”
Simon. The man knew my name!
Later, I would contemplate the compassion of a man who, in the depths of this degradation, reached out to me. Later, I would come to realize that He knows each of us by name. But then, in that moment, I could only marvel that He knew me.
Simon.
Before I could speak, women broke into weeping wails. They had taken advantage of the procession’s halt and had moved to surround us. They threw themselves on the road in front of us, begging the centurion to set Yeshua free.
On His entrance into Jerusalem on the Sunday before, Yeshua had wept over the women of Jerusalem. Now, they wept for Him.
Yeshua shook His head and spoke more clearly than I would have expected from a man so thoroughly beaten and exhausted. “Daughters of Jerusalem, don’t weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are coming when they will say, ‘Fortunate indeed are the women who are childless, the wombs that have not borne a child and the breasts that have never nursed.’ People will beg the mountains to fall on them and the hills to bury them.”
They stared at Him in amazement and bewildered disbelief. Infertility was a curse. She who did not bear her husband a child was looked down upon by all other women, in danger of being replaced by another wife. And, married or not, she faced poverty and lonely old age as a widow.
At that moment, with the weight of His cross firmly on my back, I shared their shock at His response to their crying out on His behalf.
In my old age, of course, I would understand the literal prophecy of His words. When the Romans laid siege on Jerusalem, stories reached me in Cyrene of desperate, frenzied women roasting and eating their own children. And, with the scattering of the Jews, there was good reason to fear what awaited our people in the centuries ahead.
Yet since that moment of straining to rise with His cross, I have also come to believe that Yeshua was firmly rejecting their pity—and mine—because it was misplaced. When all we see is the man, the fallen prophet, we fail to see His kingdom beyond. We mourn His suffer
ing when, instead, we should mourn the reason He suffered. Among the burdens He accepted by turning toward His place of execution were my own puny sins, my despair and hopelessness, and a selfishness that kept me apart from God.
I carried the cross for Him.
Too soon, the Hill of the Skull loomed above us.
Chapter Sixty
The messengers dispatched by Caiaphas reached Pilate, who sat weary in his magistrate’s chair. By the way they were dressed, it was obvious who they were. And they could only be before him again for one reason. “Have I not finished your troublesome business?” Pilate asked.
“It is the sign on His cross,” the first messenger said. “Change it from ‘The King of the Jews’ to ‘He said, I am King of the Jews.’ ”
Pilate leaned forward and glared, then waved them away. “What I have written, I have written. It stays exactly as it is.”
**
Golgotha, the Hill of the Skull, was just north of the city. It was not named, as many think, for the skulls of the dead abandoned around the execution sites; Jewish law forbids exposure of human bones. Instead, as anyone can see, the Hill of the Skull is just that: a high, rounded, rocky plateau like the dome of a man’s head, worn by wind and rain to a dull gray. Two shallow caves, side by side, and a lower, larger cave centered below, form the eyes and gaping mouth. At certain times of day, when the sun’s light casts black shadows across those depressions, it becomes such a vision of a gaunt face that any wind moaning across its barren stone seems to speak of the cries and groans and cursings of all those who have died tortured deaths on the hill.
As we arrived, I heard new voices join the crowd, voices that began to stridently jeer Yeshua. It wasn’t until the centurion allowed me to set down the beam of wood that I saw who it was.
Caiaphas and the other priests had arrived, probably coming from temple services that allowed them, as always, to proclaim their holiness before God and man. They and other elders were circulating through the crowd, encouraging people to hurl insults at Yeshua as He stood bowed, waiting for the soldiers to begin the process of crucifixion.
Since Pilate had refused to alter the sign, it appeared that the distinguished members of the Sanhedrin were now forced to participate in the crucifixion, if only to incite derision, fearing that some in the crowd might take the sign to heart.
If any other man had been standing there—beaten, nearly naked, crusted with blood, hands bound, and about to be nailed to a cross—their fear of him would have been ridiculous. But Yeshua, swaying as He was from hunger and pain, still commanded respect. He was like a large rock jutting high above the ocean, impervious to the loud, vain splashing of the waves against its base.
Behind Him, into the ground the soldiers planted the beam I had carried to this place of execution.
**
Crucifixion is a simple process.
After the upright beam is positioned on the ground, the crossbeam is set on it. The victim is forced onto his back and laid upon the upright beam with his arms extended on the crossbeam. A long sharp nail is driven into each hand. Sometimes, when executioners have little skill or time, they pound the nail halfway up the flesh of the forearm, confident that eventually the victim’s weight will tear the arm’s soft flesh until the bones of the wrist meet the nails and arrest the downward slide of the body. Once the victim has been secured to the crosspiece, soldiers use ropes to draw him upward, and bind the crosspiece to the upright with rope or nails.
At this point, however, the soldiers are far from finished. If the victim were left hanging in this manner, death would arrive too quickly from suffocation as the body’s unsupported weight pulled against the lungs. So the soldiers turned the victim’s lower body sideways and pushed the legs upward before driving spikes through the ankles.
Only then would the soldiers step aside.
The pain is so great that a man is sometimes unable to scream. His brain floods with agony from the different parts of his body. Flies arrive to settle on his blood and eyes and nose to torment him.
Yet the real pain has not yet begun. He will usually choose the lesser agony of shifting to hang from the nails in his hands, simply because it is unbearable to place any weight on the fragmented bones of his ankles.
But he will begin to suffocate. His lungs will strain for the sweetness of air until his throat rattles. A man’s will to live is an unreasoning desperation, and it ignores his wish to die. So he fights for air by pushing up with cramping thigh muscles, supporting his weight on the iron spikes in his ankles.
When he can no longer endure this pain, he will sag again, until his lungs suck for air and he pushes his weight on his ankles again. He will alternate between these two agonies, knowing it may take hours and sometimes days before exhaustion and dehydration finally send him into black oblivion.
And the entire time it takes to die, his body will only be a scant foot or two off the ground.
This death is what awaited Yeshua.
**
There is a merciful Jewish tradition that allows women to offer the condemned a cup of strong wine mixed with a bitter gall, a brew that dulls pain. Yeshua tasted it when the soldiers passed it to Him, then refused it.
He said nothing as the soldiers drove Him to His knees. Nothing as they pushed Him onto His back. And nothing as the point of the first spike was pressed against His right palm.
As for me, I was a coward. I turned my head. The hammer came down with the peculiar clang and thud of iron hitting iron into wood. Against those two forces, iron’s impact on the flesh is soundless, if not for the screams of the victim.
Yeshua, however, met the beginning of His death with full submission, as silent as a slaughtered Passover lamb before the altar.
When I found the courage to look again, blood streamed dark from His pierced palms and soaked into the hard, cold ground.
Chapter Sixty-one
Upon my return home to Cyrene, I did not disembark from the two-masted sailing vessel that had carried me the final leg of my journey from Alexandria. Instead, I remained aboard the ship in the harbor.
I had traveled for six weeks after leaving Jerusalem. During that time, I had spent hours deciding what I must do. Even so, I had no certainty as to the right course of action.
I sent a messenger from the ship to Jaala, carrying the letters I had written during my Passover stay in Jerusalem. He also bore the scroll that would tell my wife the truth about the evening of the fire that had destroyed our family.
**
As had been my custom, I had worked late into the afternoon at my accounts in the small warehouse, long after most men had returned to their homes and families. And, as had also been my custom, I had eased my solitude with wine. I was close to drunk as I worked through some difficult transactions in the light of an oil lamp.
I had forgotten. Jaala had planned a celebration to mark Vashti’s birth date. My daughter arrived to tell me herself, her dark hair combed and pinned back, her dark eyes flashing with importance. She carried a kitten in her arms, one of many strays that tried my patience.
I became surly at Vashti’s insistence to return home. When she reminded me of the celebration, my irritation increased, more at myself for having forgotten than at her.
Vashti set the kitten down on my table. She clutched at my hem as she begged me to set aside my work. The kitten stepped onto my accounts, and I saw a place to vent my temper. I callously knocked the animal aside, and it tumbled into the oil lamp, beginning a horrible chain of events.
As the lamp fell, oil and fire spilled onto the fine wrap of silk around Vashti’s legs. She shrieked in panic and pulled away from me before I could beat the flames into submission.
She ran.
A growing flame snaked around her tender legs.
I stumbled after her.
In her desperation, she fell against an unsteady table, which crashed to the floor, pinning her in a pile of dry rags beneath the table. The flames took hold of the rags instan
tly, and her legs became a torch.
I tried to pull her away. I felt useless because of my wine-addled brain. In her terror, Vashti clawed at my face and arms. When I finally disentangled her from the table and rags, the fire had begun to spread.
I had to save Vashti before I could turn my efforts to stopping the fire. I flailed ineffectually at the flames on her legs. I finally realized I could snuff the fire by rolling my child in a rug. But by this time, too many valuable seconds had passed.
The fire around me had flickered from piles of cloth to other piles of cloth. Stopping it was unlikely, obvious to me even in my impaired state. I picked Vashti up and, with her screams of agony in my ears, made an unsteady path of escape.
As smoke began to blind me, I fell twice. When I reached the air outside, I was grateful we were alive.
Vashti continued to scream. With a jolt, I became aware of a pattern in her screams and realized it was more than the crazed sounds of senseless desperation and pain. But I could not understand her hysterical words.
She tried to pull herself back into the warehouse and fought me as I restrained her.
By then, passersby had begun to run toward us, drawn by Vashti’s shrieks. Others ran, shouting, to alert neighbors to the fire.
At some point in the confusion and screaming and roar of the growing fire, I became aware of Jaala shaking my shoulder.
She had come to the warehouse because she could not find Ithnan. She had hoped to find our firstborn son—only six years old—with his older sister, for he followed Vashti everywhere.
And in that moment of horror, I understood Vashti’s hysteria. She’d brought her brother on her errand, knowing how he loved to explore the rolls of cloth and stacks of merchandise.
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