The Kiss

‘One of you will betray me,’ he’d said. ‘One of you, but I don’t know which one.’ But he’d also told us that he loved us all. It was gone midnight in Gethsemane and we were sitting around a fire. The garden was beautiful in the twilight. The hills ranged as if they possessed their own life, and the flowers filled my head with the intoxicating liquor of night perfume.

                The sky along the far edge of the valley started peeling from inky black to blue, transitioning to a bluer and bluer clarity. The Sun broke the horizon like a halo crowning the head of a cherubim. At that moment a cock crew and several soldiers marched through the gates of Gethsemane towards us.

                ‘Are you the man they call Christ?’ one asked in Aramaic, the deficiencies of his Latin tongue showing through.

                ‘Why?’ asked Mary Magdalene. ‘This is public land. What do you want with him?’

                I approached Jesus. Putting both my hands on his shoulders I kissed his coarse cheek. When I stepped back from him the light in his eyes had brightened. It seemed a knowing had come upon him.

                Two of the soldiers took him by the arms and escorted him from the garden. I slunk off back to the fire and sat down, thinking about my god. Peter looked at me, his eyes black in the half-light, and I could see they were glassy with tears. They will revere me in years to come, I thought, for I have done a necessary thing – I have fulfilled the prophecy.

                As I watched Christ die on the cross amongst the innumerable crucifixes of Golgotha, more slowly than the long and drawn out history of all human suffering, his all-too-human body drained of the last of its life, I bent down to kiss his feet. I looked at the other bodies, some writhing in pain, some almost departed from this life, some long gone, now drying out like the husks of Egyptian slaves or the relics of mummies. My eyes watered onto the dirty skin of his blistered bloodied feet, the dirt and tears and blood intermingling like life in the midst of death.

                I kiss the human, I thought. I worship the god, but I kill that which is most holy: I have killed the sacred bond that only two brothers can share. I looked up at the eyes which had gone white. Christ was dead. They would soon bury the body, but I knew the image of my brother strung up there on the two interwoven planks of wood like common fowl would stay with me throughout the ragged course of my life.

                I went back to my room in Judea. I looked in the mirror and saw a miserable face looking back at myself, the eyes sunken and puffy. I recalled the hands reaching up, reaching out, and smiled at the way the fools had taken to my brother as if he were the Messiah.

                I laughed to myself, took out the quill and parchment, and began to write.