Let Me take that from you,
He is saying.
Give that to Me instead.
Let Me carry it.
Let Me be to blame instead.
I am big enough.
I am wide enough ...
Don't be afraid ...
Far more can be mended
than you know.
+ "Yeshua", pg. 148
For those familiar with Yeshua (or Jesus in His Latinized name), as well as those who are skeptical if His story has much truth or is merely the stuff of overzealous religious myth-making, I think Spufford's words craft a wonder-filled bit of holy imagination for us to receive a bit of a (re)introduction to Yeshua the Messiah (i.e. Christ the King) during this season of revelation.
Yeshua
And Now, At Last,
He Turns Toward the One City
Yeshua and his friends make for the dry yellow town on the desert hill where the empire's governor keeps the uneasy peace with the authorities of the one temple. It's where this story was always going. It's where a christos, a moshiakh, would have to declare himself. It's where power is. It's where the religion of the God of everything has its focus. It is the place where actions stop being provisional, experimental, retrievable, and become definite, final. It's where this drama, whatever it is, must find its ending.
In they go, Yeshua and the nucleus of twenty or so men and women who have been following him about. The narrow stone streets are packed with visitors who've come in from the province for the biggest festival of the year, a festival of death averted, in which the people of the one God remember how he saved them ... the visitors see, well, something like a parade, with Yeshua riding on a borrowed donkey, and the friends around him shouting make way, make way. Who's this? It's another bloody prophet. It's that crazy preacher ... It's the rabbi from up north who heals people. What, the river-dipping one? No, he's dead, this is another one. It's a king! Rubbish, kings ride on horses, not donkeys. But there are prophecies about donkeys. Maybe he's the one. Oh come on. This fellow? Where's his sword? It's the king, it's the king! Keep your voice down, idiot. Better get the children indoors, just in case.
Is it a king? The scene is hard to read. It's like a royal progress and a parody of a royal progress, all at once. ... It isn't clear what's happening. But something is, and though only a portion of the crowd are young enough, or hopeful enough, or desperate enough, or unwary enough, to give Yeshua their acclaim, quite a lot of them are curious enough to follow and see what comes next ...
Yeshua
God Gives Freely ...
Full of Trembling Intensity
(Later during this week of the biggest festival of the year) The evening sees Yeshua and the friends celebrating the festival in a borrowed upstairs room. His mood is strange, and they keep looking at him, perturbed, as they eat the roast lamb and yeastless bread with bitter herbs, and they share the cup of wine, and tell the story of how the one God long ago brought His people out of captivity. He doesn't seem like a person whose plans have failed; he is not confused or despondent at all. Yet he is full of trembling intensity. Everything he says seems deliberate and effortful, as if this dinner-in-lieu-of-a-revolution were a part of something terrifying he was making himself do, step by step, word by word, action by action.
After supper he does something that isn't in the festival ritual. He picks up one of the flat loaves they haven't touched yet. This is my body, he says, and he snaps it in half, using both hands. He asks for the winecup. This is my blood, he says. Do this when you remember me. It's one of those likeness things again – but the friends don't think too hard about what he means, because they're bursting out with anxiety at the finality of the way he's talking. Remember you? Remember you? Where are you going? We won't leave you. Don't worry about today; it doesn't matter. We won't leave you, teacher.
But they do. A few hours later, in the dark, on the open ground at the edge of the city where they're camped out, a patrol of temple guards find them – and the friends, looking to Yeshua for guidance and getting none, hesitate, waver, and run for it, leaving him alone in custody.
Yeshua
The Whole Process
Is Marking It Out
Quite Clearly for Death
(In custody) The only oddity is that Yeshua, who talked so eloquently, who shadow-boxed with words so deftly on occasion, refuses entirely to defend himself. All night long he only echoes back the accusations. You threatened the temple. You say so, says Yeshua. You're a blasphemer, a Sabbath-breaker, an enemy of the law. You say so. You think you can forgive sins. You say so. You claim to be king. You say so. You are a menace to public order. You say so. All night long, a human mirror-wall, reflecting back what's in front of it, except that all the while he inclines his bruised head and concentrates on whoever is speaking as if they were the only person in the world.
He does not need to ask what they want him to do for them, now, since they are telling him the answer, all the time. We need you to be guilty. We need you to be the mess that must be removed so that the world can work smoothly. We need you to be the unclean shadow of our righteousness, our good imperial order. We need you to be dirt, disease, crime, shame, humiliation, chaos, darkness, so that we can be virtue, certainty, light. We need you to be in the dirt, soon.
Daylight finds him in a procession again, but this time no one could mistake him for a king. He's stumbling along under the weight of his own instrument of execution, a great big wooden thing he can hardly lift, with an escort of the empire's soldiers, and the bystanders who've come blinking out of the lodgings where they spent the festival night don't see their hopes, or even the possibility of their hopes, parading by. They see their disappointment, they see their frustration. They see everything in themselves that is too weak or too afraid to confront the strapping paratroopers; and much though they hate the soldiers, they hate him more, for his pathetic slide into victimhood.
He looks like a paedophile being led away by the police. He looks like something from under a rock; as if he doesn't deserve the daylight. He's a blot on the new day. ... Yeshua is a joke. He's less a messiah, more a patch of something nasty on the pavement. And as he struggles on he recognises every roaring, jeering face.
Yeshua
He Knows Our Names.
He Knows Our Histories.
He's the love that makes the world, to whom all times and places are equally present. He isn't just feeling the anger and spite and unbearable self-disgust of this one crowd on this one Friday morning in Palestine; he's turning his bruised face toward the whole human crowd, past and present and to come, and accepting everything we have to throw at him, everything we fear we deserve ourselves. The doors of his heart are wedged open wide, and in rushes the whole pestilential flood, the vile and roiling tide of cruelties and failures and secrets. Let me take that from you, he is saying. Give that to me instead. Let me carry it. Let me be to blame instead. I am big enough. I am wide enough.
I am the father who longs for every last one of his children.
I am the friend who will never leave you.
I am the light behind the darkness.
I am the shining your shame cannot extinguish.
I am the ghost of love in the torture chamber.
I am change and hope.
I am the refining fire.
I am the door where you thought there was only a wall.
I am what comes after deserving.
I am the earth that drinks up the bloodstain.
I am gift without cost.
I am. I am. I am.
Before the foundations of the world, I am.
But it is killing him all the same. He never promised that you would be safe, if you tried to live without fear. The soldiers lead him out of the city gate, and, laboriously, slipping and sliding, with crunching blows from spear butts to motivate him, they drive him up the small cone of Skull Hill, where death sentences are carried out. They tie him onto the cross and plant it upright. It's the empire's punishment for rebellious slaves, slow and nasty by design, devised to be a spectacle of days-long struggle and gasping to passers-by.
On a cross you choke to death, when you're finally too tired to heave your own weight up to take the next breath. Yeshua's cross has a sign on it, over his head. HERE'S YOUR KING, it says, in all the languages of the province. The Chief Priest didn't want it, but the governor has a point to make.
And Yeshua hangs there. He twists against the ropes to snatch the precious air, which whistles in his flattened nose. He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world's grim arsenal of possibilities. And yet he goes on taking in.
Yeshua
This Is Love Going Where We Go
He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering, guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory, as if it were something precious, as if it were itself the loved child tottering homeward on the road.
But there is so much of it. So many injured children; so many locked rooms; so much lonely anger; so many bombs in public places; so much vicious zeal; so many bored teenagers at roadblocks; so many drunk girls at parties someone thought they could have a little fun with; so many jokes that go too far; so much ruining greed; so much sick ingenuity; so much burned skin.
The world he claims, claims him. It burns and stings, it splinters and gouges, it locks him round and drags him down.
This is love going where we go, all of us, when we end. Yeshua is long past trying to show what lies beyond the limits of the world. He is travelling into limit himself, now, deeper and deeper, and the limits are tightening in on him, tightening down to a ribcage that won't fill, tightening on him as consequences tighten on anyone.
He's going to the place our sorrows lead to at their worst: guilt's dead end, panic's no-exit loop, despair's junkyard where everything is busted. ...
Death ...
Yeshua
Don't Be Afraid.
Far More Can Be Mended
Than You Know.
The friends creep out at dusk and ask for the body, promising anonymous burial and no fuss. They're allowed to carry it away, wrapped in a tube of linen that slowly stains from inside. Skull Hill sees lots of such corteges. There's only time to stick what's left of Yeshua hastily in a rock tomb by the highway.
Washing the corpse properly and laying it out will have to wait; the holy Saturday is coming, and no one wants any confrontations.
Early Sunday morning, one of the friends comes back with rags and a jug of water and a box of the grave spices that are supposed to cut down on the smell. She's braced for the task. But when she comes to the grave she finds that the linen's been thrown into the corner and the body is gone. Evidently anonymous burial isn't quite anonymous enough, after all. She sits outside in the sun. The insects have woken up, here at the edge of the desert, and a bee is nosing about in a lily like silk thinly tucked over itself, but much more perishable. It won't last long. She takes no notice of the feet that appear at the edge of her vision. That's enough now, she thinks. That's more than enough.
Don't be afraid, says Yeshua.
Far more can be mended
than you know.
She is weeping.
The executee helps her to stand up.
Bonus Video Stories about People
Connecting w/ Yeshua Today
Recent posts on overviews of the Story of Yeshua found in the Bible:
With wild wonder and hope,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
