Once more, Pilate went out and said to them, “Look, I am bringing him out to you, so that you may know that I find no guilt in him.” So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple cloak. And he said to them, “Behold, the man!” When the chief priests and the guards saw him they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him. I find no guilt in him.” (John 19.4-6)
When Ernest Gaines wrote his book A Lesson Before Dying in 1993, he wanted to tell the story of a man wrongly convicted of a crime, but because this black man was living in Louisiana in 1948, he didn’t stand a chance. That man, Jefferson, was visited regularly by the black school-teacher who taught him how to die with dignity, regardless of the color of his skin, regardless of the wrong done to him.
Near the end of the book, as Jefferson awaited his execution, Gaines describes the morning when the electric chair is hauled into the County Jail. He writes, “The sheriff walked in front, and a man wearing a cowboy hat followed the chair. The man with the cowboy hat kept saying be careful, be careful; he didn’t want that chair bumping into anything.”
“The sheriff opened the door to the old storeroom, and the two strangers took it inside, then everyone followed. They did not shut the door, and Fee could hear them talking in there, though from where he was in the hall he could not see them. . . Other people who had come to work were also in the corridor. A woman was saying that she had seen it, and it looked just gruesome.”
“A man said it did look gruesome and that’s why they called it Gruesome Gerty. The man told the woman that whoever sat in Gruesome Gerty’s lap when she was hot never sat down again. The woman replied, ‘That is gruesome.’ Fee heard the man with the cowboy hat tell someone to go out to the truck and bring in the instruments. A white man standing behind Fee asked him if he had seen it. Fee said he surely had, and it looked mean.”
“The white man told Fee he had better watch himself, or maybe they would have to bring Gerty back for him to sit in her lap. Another man laughed nervously. . . And a woman said she wished she had played sick and stayed home today. A man told her that anyone who wanted to leave was free to stay away between twelve and three. The woman said she was not going to be anywhere around here.”
“Someone asked was it always between twelve and three, and another man said yes, it always was. And someone else said the Lord died between twelve and three on a Friday. A woman said yes, and so did two thieves, one on either side of him. Fee heard the woman saying that she definitely was not going to be here during that time. She said she felt sick already.”
Gaines’ book, based on historical events surrounding the real-life wrongful death of a black man in Louisiana in the 1940s, presents in these paragraphs the depravity, vulgarity, and toxicity that rest in the human heart, a haunted house if there ever was one. It is a place filled with bloodthirst, brutality, and betrayal.
Reading Gaines’ book, the reader is left feeling dispirited and dejected, coming face to face with such blatant and decadent disregard for another man’s life. It is not a pretty picture of our capacity for wrongdoing and our appetite for taking human life. But, apparently, we have a strong stomach because broken and beaten and bruised bodies are a dime a dozen in human history.
It was on a Friday between twelve and three when another innocent man suffered the loss of his life, strapped to an instrument of death as gruesome and loathsome as Gerty’s lap, his human dignity stripped from him along with every bit of his clothes, his bloodshot eyes seeping tears as he hears nothing but mockery and foolery, a tailgate party from hell as he hangs on the cross.
Pilate, the local sheriff in this instance, seems at first disinclined to join in the raucous and furious cries for this man’s hide, the bloodthirsty mob chanting in unison, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” much like Roman crowds demanding blood in the gladiator arenas, gleefully awaiting the thumbs down that signaled a sentence of death.
As the shouts of the mob grow louder, the resolve of Pilate grows weaker, until he finally throws up his hands and tells them to have it their way. “Take him yourselves and crucify him,” he tells them, eager to wash his hands of the whole mess, ready for a stiff drink to ease his conscience. Turning his back, not only on the innocent man, but on the crowd, he returns to his office, hurriedly completing the paperwork on another crucifixion.
With his capitulation, there is no one, absolutely no one, to take the side of the accused, no one to stand up to the crowd, no one to stand with the accursed, the absence of anybody to protest the shenanigans the ugliest part of the whole story. There is betrayal everywhere, enough to stretch all the way from the praetorium to outside the city gates, where the gibbet waits, Gruesome Gertie.
As we, like Fee in the sheriff’s office, watch men get the execution scene set up, little different from indifferent hot dog vendors getting their food carts ready for the lunch crowd, we feel it first in our stomach, then in our throat, and last in our eyes, when a tear falls, if we let our feelings get the better of us, the feeling that there is something crooked in the human heart, something not right, something twisted.
It is more than cowardice, although there is enough of that to go around. It is more than corruption, although there is plenty of that also. It is a crack in our heart, an abyss where there should be none, an empty space devoid of decency, a fracture that refuses to be healed, but always festers with deceit, decadence, and underhanded dealings.
And because of that black hole in our heart, we find ourselves too often turning our back on the innocent bodies beaten before us, turning a blind eye to the injustices inflicted on the nobodies, turning away from the cries of anybody who looks different from us, smells different from us, sounds different from us. We find it way too easy to betray our brothers and sisters.
As Cassius tells Brutus, another first-class betrayer, the fault is not in our stars, but in our hearts, where good and evil struggle every day for dominance, and where evil, because it plays a game without rules, seems to get the better of our better angels, allowing the demons in the playground of our hearts to call the shots, failing to realize that once we owe them, they are like loan sharks who are never satisfied, not until they have a pound of flesh, or in this instance, ten ounces, the weight of the human heart.
Hearing the story of the betrayal of the man called Jesus of Nazareth, it is easy for us to point fingers, decrying the debased ways of Judas, a spineless sap for sure, denouncing the cowardice of Peter, a fair-weather friend if there ever was one, and denigrating the sleepy-headed disciples, clearly a class of freshmen who cowers at the first sight of seniors coming down the hallway.
But, in all honesty, our fingers should not be pointed at them, convenient as it is, because, truth be told, they are only stand-ins for us, prior incarnations of our persons, people who look and sound and act a whole lot like we do. When put in the same circumstances, there isn’t a dime’s difference between us and them, even on our best days.
Nobody makes that point clearer than the preacher and writer Fred Craddock, who once told of his own cowardice when the chance was his to prove his character. It happened when he was a graduate student at Vanderbilt, leaving his wife and children at home for a few weeks so he could prepare for his comprehensive exams in Scripture.
Needing a break from his studies, every night he’d leave his small, rented apartment to go to a nearby diner to have a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee. He’d gone so often the cook knew what to throw on the grill as soon as he spotted him coming through the door. The guy was kind enough to keep his coffee cup refilled as he sat there pondering what New Testament questions his examiners were going to put to him.
One night, he noticed a man when he walked in, the man waiting for somebody to take his order. Oddly, Craddock says the cook took his own order, even refilled his coffee, and had taken care of everybody else in the diner, except for that one man, who stood alone. Finally, the cook behind the counter said to the man, “What do you want?”
Craddock couldn’t hear what the man said, his voice soft and timid, this old, gray-haired, black man. Whatever he said, the cook went to the grill, scooped up a little dark patty off the back of the grill, and put it on a piece of bread without any condiments. He handed it without a napkin to the man, that cold patty on that single slice of bread.
The man paid him and walked out the side door, the one where the garbage cans were, sat down on the curb of the street, where noisy eighteen-wheelers whirled by in the night, nothing to season his sandwich except their fumes. Watching the man and watching his own reaction to the situation, Craddock got a glimpse into his own fractured heart.
He writes, “I didn’t say anything. I did not reprimand, protest, or witness to the cook. I did not go out and sit beside the man on the curb, on the edge. I didn’t do anything. I was thinking about the questions coming up on the New Testament exams. And I left the little place, went up the hill back to my room to resume my studies, and off in the distance I heard a cockcrow.”
That is the sound that is heard today, even louder than the shouts of the crowd, heard clearer than Pilate’s wheeling and dealing words or Peter’s cussing and words of denial. The crow of the cock, piercing our ears, haunting our consciences, causing acid in our stomachs. It is the sound that cuts through our excuses, our feeble-heartedness, and our slick maneuvering. It is a sound reserved for cowards, those who can’t or won’t stand up for right, the mealy-mouthed and the weak-spined, who let innocent people suffer and die at the hands of sick-minded and hard-hearted men.
At the end of Gaines’ book, the black man Jefferson is strapped to Gerty’s lap on the Friday between twelve and three, just as planned, the room crowded with curious spectators and soulless creeps, little different from the crowd that circled around the cross on another Friday between twelve and three, always the same crowd gawking and haggling over a dead man’s possessions.
After the execution, the deputy makes a point of paying a visit to the school teacher who had spent the last weeks teaching Jefferson how to die like a man, not like a hog, as his own attorney likened him to in his trial. Paul, the deputy, says to Grant, the school teacher, “Jefferson was the strongest man in that crowded room” as he was being executed.
The same could be said of the Crucified One. He was the strongest man in that crowded place. The rest, we can conclude, were just your everyday cowards.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 