Skip to main content

God dies

Picture from LatinTimes


‘You’re so powerless, Pilate,’ Jesus thought as he stood in the praetorium.  The prefect of Caesar had washed his hands off his responsibility to uphold the truth. 

‘What is truth?’ he had asked.

He did not wait for an answer.  Jesus was not going to answer him anyway.  He knew as well as Pilate that definitions were not what mattered to either of them.  ‘I am the truth,’ Jesus had said many times.  ‘You are the truth,’ he would have told Pilate, ‘if you wish to be.’ 

‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ The crowd outside the praetorium clamours louder and louder.  Being very religious, they have not entered the praetorium.  The praetorium is a pagan place and Yahweh’s chosen people should not enter pagan places on the Passover day lest they be defiled.

The High Priests, Annas and Caiaphas, instigated the people by wielding their religious power.  Jesus had set the axe at the very root of their religion.  Their religion meant rubrics and rituals.  Jesus told them to dump those things.  Teach people to love.  That’s the only religion: love.  Everything else will follow once people learn to love.  Compassion will follow.  Goodness will.  Truth too. 

The priests do not want love, compassion, goodness, truth.  They want rubrics and rituals.  They want power. That’s what you want too, Pilate: power.  I saw your knees shaking when these people said, ‘If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend.’  You know very well, Pilate, that these people are playing a game.  They shout, ‘We have no king but Caesar.’  But you know that they detest Caesar more than Caesar detests them.  Right now they want my death because they think I’m decimating their religion.  The priests made them believe that. It is very easy to make people believe such things because they really don’t want love and truth and such things.  They want power.  The priest loves his power over his flock.  The chief priests love their power over the priests and the people under those priests.  The High Priest loves his power over everyone.  You love your power over all of them, Pilate.  You are all in love with power.  Yes, safeguard your power, Pilate, by bowing to their wish. Otherwise they will ask Caesar to decimate you.  To avoid a political turmoil from a people whom Caesar detests the most, he will grant their demand and decimate you.  Save your power, Pilate.  Send me to the cross that they have already prepared for me.  I love that cross now.  It will liberate me from myself, from my heart that cannot let love be buried beneath an ossified heap of rubrics and rituals. 

‘Behold the man!’ Pilate brought Jesus out.  The man looked terribly pathetic.  Pilate had asked his soldiers to scourge him.  The soldiers revelled in that job.  They loved to scourge people.  It intoxicated them.  Every lash of the whip on a helpless man’s flesh rose like a froth of frenzy in the soldiers’ veins.  They loved it.  They relished it especially when one of them brought a ring of thorns and fixed it on Jesus’ head and mocked him saying, ‘Ah, there! Now you look like a king.  The King of Jews. Ha ha ha.’

‘Behold the man!’ The sight of the man with whiplashes all over his body and blood-spattered face intoxicated the people.  ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’  Pilate was disillusioned.  He had thought that the sight would arouse pity.

That’s what I told you, Pilate.  I belong to the cross.  I embrace the cross happily in order to save my heart.


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers





Labels:

Comments

  1. CRDApril 1, 2018 at 1:22 AM

    Beautifully written.

    You should probably write something on Judas too. I personally think he's a misunderstood soul.

    Cheers,
    CRD

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
8 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more