BEYOND THE ROAD TO GETHSEMANE*
(Deccan Herald, Easter Sunday, 15 April 2001)
P.N.BENJAMIN
The path that Jesus last walked as a free man, before the soldiers of Pontius Pilate apprehended him, is known as the Via Dolorosa, the road of sorrows. It was on this road that Jesus had walked his last one-mile to Gethsemane garden where Judas Iscariot planted the kiss of infamy on his cheek.
It was when he set out on this road that Jesus took the crucial decision of his life, where he consented to be part of the Passion play that was to be staged by the Romans and the Sahedrin on the Via Dolorosa. It was the final, most important parable of all his teachings, the only one that he would not live to explain to the faithful. It would become the greatest of his mysteries, an event on such a scale that it could become the central icon of a world religion.
The road to Gethsemane was akin to a bridge, which is crossed once, and no more. It is burned when you cross it; you cannot even look back. Such moments come in every person’s life. On this side lies the security of compromise, of petty, quotidian adjustment. On the far side is the difficult country of uncertainty, principles and sacrifice. Most people take a good look, weigh their options and beat a dignified retreat. The bridge stands unused. The battle is not even joined, lost before it even began.
But, a few do not hesitate. They reach the bridgehead, walk across and welcome the new land on the far side. And as soon as they have walked over, they find the bridge burnt, destroyed. A conscious choice had removed it as an avenue of retreat.
The contemporaries of Jesus did not understand him because they did not have the courage to walk their own bridges. They reached their bridgeheads but returned to the comfort of their compromises. Very few had the courage to reach the land beyond because the bridge would no longer offer an escape route once it had been crossed. There was certain finality about the choice,.
Jesus walked the path alone without fear, without a moment’s hesitation. He knew he had to cross the bridge. Today, I look back down the crowded corridors of history to see how many walked that path alone, how many crossed the bridge. How many placed compassion, truth and love over their own lives. In the darkness I see the profile of a tall figure – a man walking to Gethsemane garden. He was a man in a hurry. He had an appointment on the far side of the bridge, and he was determined that he should keep it.
Via Dolorosa will be remembered as the one traversed by a man of destiny, whose crucifixion served as a reminder that saviours have to die for their faith and to pay for the sins of their own brethren. Jesus was such a man, and so were Mahavira and Buddha before him and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr almost two thousand years later. What binds them, despite the minor differences in their beliefs, is their fearlessness and their peace with those beliefs. Each was far, far ahead of his time. Each had to speak in parable, in allegory, if he hoped to be even understood.
Christ went with three of his disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane, below the Mount of Olives. His soul, he said, was ‘exceeding sorrowful, even unto death’, and he wanted to be alone and to pray. So he left the disciples to sit and wait for him, and withdrew by himself. The earth’s shapes and sounds and colours and living creatures, we should remember, were not less dear to Christ because of his divine destiny than they are to us; rather more so, if anything. To leave them behind, to ‘ die, so early in his earthly life, was still a deprivation even though his death was to put an end forever to dying in the old pagan sense of finality.
We cry when we leave our homes to venture out into a world we long to explore. So Christ was sorrowful that the time had come when he must leave loving friends and disciples and all the familiar scenes and dear companionship he had known on earth. “O, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou will,” he prayed, reflecting as he must have done, how easy it would be for him to slip away by himself, back to Galilee, and a happy private life there like other men, with a wife, children and all the other migrations of the loneliness and mystery of our human fate. How easy, and how impossible!
He found the disciples asleep, and rebuked them rather irritably: “What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Then he again went off by himself to continue with his prayers, returning to find them once more asleep. This time he let them be. What did it matter now? Soon the Garden of Gethsemane resounded with the noise of a mob armed with swords and staves who were looking for him. Judas, to earn his thirty pieces of silver, proceeded to identify him with a kiss and a “Hail, Master!” and Christ was apprehended. Someone drew the sword in his defence, but Christ quickly told whoever it was to put up his sword, “for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”. There upon, we . are told, “all the disciples forsook him and fled”. He was alone.
Now began for Christ the farce of the judicial proceedings against him, intended to give his.execution a show of legitimacy. As I see it, Christ’s real crime was simply that he spoke the truth, which is intolerable to all forms of authority but especially ecclesiastical. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” Christ had said. In the eyes of Caiphas and his associates, as later in the eyes of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Christ had to die because the truth he spoke and the freedom he offered undermined the authority other men claimed and exercised. There followed the Crucifixion. Christ humped his cross along the Via Dolorosa until he was too weak to continue, when another took it for him. Just before he died he was heard to cry out in a loud voice: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Thus ostensibly it all ended in defeat and despair. “Well, that’s all over,” Caiphas and his friends must have thought. How wrong they were! It was only beginning. Not defeat, but a fabulous new hope had been born; not despair, but an unexampled joy, had come into the world. Christ died on the cross as a man who had tried to show his fellow men what life was about; he rose from the dead to be available forever as an intermediary between man and God.
How, rose from the dead? After his death on the cross, we are told, he was seen by the disciples and others on numerous occasions; the stone in front of the tomb where he was laid was found to have been removed, and the tomb to be empty. These are matters of legitimate historical investigation; what is not open to question is that today, two thousand years later, Christ is alive. The words he spoke are living words, as relevant now as when they were first spoken.
Christ turned the world’s accepted norms upside down. It was the poor, not the rich, who were blessed; the weak, not the strong, who were to be esteemed; the pure in heart, not the sophisticated and the worldly, who understood what life was all about. Righteousness, not power or money or sensual pleasure should be man’s pursuit. We should love our enemies, bless them that curse us, do good to them that hate us, and pray for them that despitefully use us, in order that we may be worthy members of a human family.
No words ever uttered, it is safe to say, have had anything like the impact of these, first spoken to some scores, may be hundreds, of poor, and mostly illiterate people, by a teacher who in the eyes of the world, was of small account. Besides belonging to eternity Christ belonged to his times.
On the outskirts of the dying Roman civilisation, he spoke of dying in order to live. Today, when human civilisation is likewise dying, his words have the same awe-inspiring relevance as they had then.
What Christ had to say was too simple to be grasped, too truthful to be believed. So the great majority of Christians have never been able to believe when Christ said that the whole duty of man resolved itself into loving God and our neighbour, he meant just that. It seems so simple, so obvious. And, furthermore, there is the question of who is our neighbour. In Christ’s estimation our neighbour is everyone. He said: Feed my sheep – all black, white and piebald.
The rest of the story of Christ belongs to history. Terrible things have been done in his name; the doctrine of unwordliness which he preached has been twisted to serve worldly purposes; the cross on which he died, besides inspiring some of the noblest lives which have ever been lived, and some of the noblest thoughts and actions of man, has also served as a cloak for some of the basest; his gospel of love has been enforced with the rack and the whip, and driven home with the sword.
Let others better qualified than I work out, if they can, the gain and the loss, in human terms. Here, in this world, where he was born, lived and died, we may remember how miraculously, nonetheless, his light continues to shine in the dark jungle of the human will, as I a true child of these troubled times, with a skeptical mind and a sensual disposition, most diffidently, unworthily, but with the utmost certainty testify.
Standing amid our personal Calvaries, confused and disillusioned, we need Easter to remind us that there is always “a third day” on its way. With that knowledge we can look at any evil in the face and say with confidence: “You can’t win”. Easter is the birthday of vibrant hope for every individual and for the entire world. It is also a warning to every evil power that preys on mankind, a warning that truth is again coming out of its tomb. Easter is again a ringing reminder that the human spirit cannot be confined. An eminent theologian once said: “Eternal truth is eternal. It can be distorted but not destroyed. It may have to carry a cross to Calvary or drink a r.utj of hemlock in a Grecian gaol. But after every black Friday there dawns an Easter morn”.
P.N.BENJAMIN
E-mail: benjaminpn@hotmail.com
