Jesus Of Nazareth Part 3

JOHN: Then no tears! Brother, take my head. Let the child take it to her stupid mother on the plate.

SALOME: He's laughing and those there are weeping.

(The Executioner brandishes his sword.) ELEAZER AND JONATHAN: Jehovah!

CURTAIN.

ACT II.

SCENE III. THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS.

Bethany, in front of the house of Lazarus.

Judas enters. Magdalene comes from the house.

MAGDALENE: You, Judas? Alone?

JUDAS: Your brother?

MAGDALENE: Dead.

JUDAS: What?

MAGDALENE: Lazarus is dead.

JUDAS: When?

MAGDALENE: Day before yesterday, in the morning.

JUDAS: This is a prophecy.

MAGDALENE: Is the Master coming?

JUDAS: He will see the invisible.

MAGDALENE: Judas!

JUDAS: He cannot prevent it. He can do nothing to prevent it.

MAGDALENE: The death of Lazarus affects you to this degree, Judas?

JUDAS: Surely. Where is Martha?

MAGDALENE: By the sepulchre, weeping.

JUDAS: And you are staying at the house?

MAGDALENE: Some one has to. The Master will come, Judas.

JUDAS: He's coming with Simon, John and Andrew.

MAGDALENE: When will he be here?

JUDAS: Before evening. So many folks on the way are stopping him. But will you be able to receive the five of us tonight? I don't understand why he made me ask you that. Hospitality is not required of two women in mourning.

MAGDALENE: He is always welcome. Even if we may not sleep tonight, my sister and I, you five will all repose.

JUDAS: Great love!

MAGDALENE: It would be nice to see the Messiah rejected at our door, consolation disdained.

JUDAS: Words!

MAGDALENE: The only ones that are not vain, his words. The only ones which tears obey.

JUDAS: Listen to me.

MAGDALENE: I am going to inform Martha.

JUDAS: Can't you hear other words than his?

MAGDALENE: You, who follow him; do you hear other words than his?

JUDAS: He no longer says anything but obscure things that scandalize, that make one suspect he may be the One who we believed MAGDALENE: The Messiah.

JUDAS: The Messiah-King, the Foretold-One; if he is, why does he speak so often of death? Is this a mortal king we are expecting? Mortal and poor? I have no more than three deniers in the common purse. After three years, the Pharisees and the great have not recognized him. Only the very low, the weak MAGDALENE: You love him less, Judas JUDAS: It's well enough for you to love. As for me, I think.

MAGDALENE: O Judas, don't go back. You renounced everything to follow him and from that day, by possessing nothing, you possessed everything. If I were living like you, his friend, in his shadow, if I constantly heard his word, the only one that seems living and certain among dead and dangerous words, I would be happy, peaceful, like a little child, without many memories, without desires, without thought. The rest of you men love badly; you never forget yourselves. As for him, Judas, he always forgets himself.

JUDAS: A man ought never to abandon himself. What a dupe! You and I, we are not made of the same material. Before being a servant girl in your brother's home, for money, you were a servant girl for every man. If the Nazarene had begged you for love you would not have refused, so today, indeed, you content yourself with pretty words.

MAGDALENE: He knows us too well to beg us for love. Rather to love a flower or the innocent animal. My heart would laugh to see men trembling before my face.

JUDAS: You are weeping?

MAGDALENE: As for him, when he looked at me, I saw myself quite wretched, completely sinful, eaten by worms. And seeing me, such as I was, he did not turn away in disgust. He neither cursed me nor condemned me.

JUDAS: By what right? He's neither priest nor doctor. You are imagining things.

MAGDALENE: You no longer believe, Judas.

JUDAS: I believed; my misery believed. He enrolled us with promises. He must establish the kingdom. He appeared to be someone mysterious; nothing ought to be impossible to him. They expected much of a man who only had to look at you to know your thoughts. He sees, perhaps, he knows everything; but he can prevent nothing. He saw the death of Lazarus; three days ago as we were walking in the country, he stopped and said, "Lazarus is dead."

MAGDALENE: It was three days ago.

JUDAS: He sees his own death; he doesn't prevent that either. He is unable to prevent anything. All he has is words. The poor folk are satisfied with them.

The others laugh and shrug their shoulders. He can do nothing, nor can he undo anything. He's only a beggar who speaks, who cannot prevent the world from going its way. Whoever has a hope, a wish, intelligence, let him avoid meeting this persuasive beggar, this seducer without hearth or home; he will conceive a hope not out of proportion to his small hope, a desire that will turn him away from his small desire and from thoughts capable of bursting his small intelligence.

He will deliver himself to his care to conduct him, and he'll permit himself to be led down roads without end, into the unknown, into the void. Further, always further from all desire, from all hope, from all that the hand can touch, from all that reason can conceive, far from the smiles of women, far from the society of friends and family, far from the warmth of the group towards the misty image of vain kingdoms, towards nothingness. I don't want that; I say no. I'm stopping myself. I am not the mule nourished on food for thought. Dreams are for the night; I am awake. I will seek the way to reconcile myself with the living, interesting myself in their affairs and interesting them in mine.

MAGDALENE: Why continue to follow him? That's not honest, Judas.

JUDAS: That's my affair.

MAGDALENE: O sad heart! To be with him, isn't that the kingdom? (enter Jesus, John, Andrew and Peter) Rabbi, your serving woman.

JESUS: Rise up, woman.

MAGDALENE: Lord, if you had come in time, my brother would not be dead.

PETER: Then it's true? Lazarus is dead?

MAGDALENE: For three days already, regretting not being able to hold your hand in his.

ANDREW: He's weeping.

PETER: How he loved him.

MAGDALENE: Will you come again, Master, now that we are here alone, two poor women who had only him? We had no relatives and I don't know what's going to become of us. As for me, I will go to work at the homes of foreigners; but my poor Martha, Master. Don't abandon that child.

JESUS: Where is she?

MAGDALENE: By the sepulchre. Some friends of Lazarus came and are keeping her company. Ah! Master! There are not many brothers who love their sisters the way Lazarus loved us! But you were much more dear to him than us, Lord.

JESUS: And G.o.d, much dearer still, Mary; if I didn't owe myself to all our people, if there were no more sick people in Israel, no more despairing, no more blind, I would say to you, "Here, I'm stopping." Would you treat me like a brother? I will work for you. That is forbidden to me! I wasn't born for the happiness of one or two. You and Martha, Mary, you've heard the word of life!

It's necessary that all hear it. It's necessary that all be revived; that the prophets be justified; that all the distress of this people may see coming to it He who will separate it from its bitterness and tear it from death's claw. Mary, your tears are not the sour tears of the blind, and you know in what fountain to wash your eyes. How many as yet know only how to howl like a beast when its young are taken from it? You have a father and you know how to speak to him. I belong to all the orphans. Magdalene will you lead me to the tomb where Lazarus is sleeping?

MAGDALENE: Where he's sleeping, Lord?

JESUS: Yes, where he's sleeping. You are looking at me, John, son of thunder!

Don't you know yet that for G.o.d, death does not exist? Judas, don't be scandalized by what I am saying: the most ancient dead of Israel, in the most long forgotten sepulchres haven't known death if they've known G.o.d. Those living, who breath and plot evil are more dead than the ashes of Jacob. Mary, your brother is sleeping, and they were in too much of a hurry to put him aside.

Lead me to the place of his slumber.

MAGDALENE: Master, I am your serving girl! And since you say so, I believe that Lazarus is sleeping.

(All leave except Judas.) JUDAS: What's he mean and what's he intend to do? If he's going to - Lunatic!

It's not a slumber, even a sleep of three days. He must feel. He is indeed dead and I am Judas. He cannot revive Lazarus any more than he can make me a believer like the sons of Jonas and Zebediah, or like this woman with her mad eyes.

"Those living who breath and meditate evil " he's a clairvoyant "are more dead than the ashes of Jacob." But he cannot prevent anything. Let him free himself from the hands in which I am going to put him. That will be the sign. What's he going to do at this tomb? It's well that I learn what he meant.

(Exit) CURTAIN/BLACKOUT.

SCENE IV. THE SANHEDRIN.

JERUSALEM: THE SANHEDRIN OF THE PHARISEES.

CAIAPHAS: (to Selomith) You've quite understood me? If you find him alone or very few about, you will corner him with your men, and having commanded him to follow you, you will lead him here by a roundabout way. If not, you will wait until the people are dispersed. It's necessary to act without uproar or scandal.

I count on your intelligence to seize the opportunity. Go. (exit Selomith) Indeed, we are all agreed, aren't we? We will deliver him to Pilate and we will demand the execution of Jesus.

NICODEMUS: We are putting too much pa.s.sion into this affair. After an appearance of justice, we are going to demand the death of a man we cannot reproach with anything precise.

DANIEL: Are you, you too, of his disciples?

NICODEMUS: No, Daniel, but I am trying to be fair, and I ask myself if it is just to condemn this Galilean that the people call a great prophet.

SARAI: No prophet ever came out of Galilee.

JOSEPH: You are forgetting Jonas.

PHAROS: Joseph, you are committing an error.

SEMEIAS: All the prophets were Jews.

SARAI: This Galilean a prophet? This ignoramus? This son of a worker?

DANIEL: Was a prophet ever seen to address himself to the little folk?

PHAROS: To banquet with publicans and lost women?

ANOTHER: His disciples are unlettered; they don't know how to read and write.

SARAI: Fishermen.

CAIAPHAS: Listen to us, Nicodemus. I am curious to know how you will defend a man who openly violates the Sabbath, choosing that day of all days to accomplish his pseudo-cures, who pardons adultery, who arrogates to himself to remit sins, who reduces the law to nothingness. What prophet ever did that? By authorising all that is forbidden by the Law; and haven't I been repeatedly told that he allows himself to be called the son of David and Messiah by the troupe of fanatic imbeciles that he drags about everywhere with him?

ANNAS: The Messiah won't give the lie to Moses; he will crown the law, justify the faith of Abraham and the predictions of the prophets; he won't abrogate the Law. This Galilean speaks against us, against the Temple; he's trying to shake up sacerdotal authority. Are these the characteristics of the Messiah, Nicodemus?

NICODEMUS: Let's question him; let's not condemn him without hearing him.

SEMEIAS: Nicodemus what have you done with your science?

SARAI: Nicodemus, what have you done with your reason, man?

JOSEPH: Are we losing our reason to want to give fair play?

DANIEL: And you also, Joseph of Arimathea, you believe this Galilean is a prophet?