It was finished.
The last appeal. The last crack of the gavel. The last coin tucked deep inside my lawyer’s pocket.
Praise God, it was the last little pompous lift of the prosecutor’s chin I would ever have to see too. Some endings are sweet.
But not many.
It was finished.
The rebellion had fizzled into a thin line of smoke. After all that talk of unquenchable hope and undying dreams, it turned out that ideals are just as rooted in gold as tyranny. And with their lead financier (or “thief” to the banal) on his way to the cross, even the unexpected release of Barabas wouldn’t reignite that fire.
No. It was finished.
At least it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined, this walk of the damned. After all, how many men had taken their final steps down a road where I had lurked? And if my death was to be slow where theirs were quick . . . well, if you tallied up each man’s final moments, I wouldn’t last much longer than the time it took for all those ragged gasps to become silent air.
I was rather glad that part was finished.
If only it weren’t for the lambs. Those surplus Passover lambs, going for cheap now, the day after the sacrifice. Incessant bleating at every stall, at every street corner. Lambs shouting at the tops of their lungs that there is no sacrifice left for sins such as mine. I know it, filthy animals! Tie their muzzles shut, merchant! I would sell my own children if it would silence their bleating. Passover is for the clean. And Almighty knows the flocks of Solomon wouldn’t be enough to atone. There would be no passing over me.
I was finished.
Might as well go out laughing then. The man on the middle cross made a nice distraction. Spikes through one’s palms tend to chafe a bit, you see. But I coped as I always had – channeling all the pain and rage onto a suitably easy mark. And that unrecognizable lump of bloodied flesh who used to call himself Messiah was so easy. I gave full vent for a good long while until speech finally became exhausting and my dead eyes started to roll downward toward the crowd.
Then, suddenly, even my sadism was finished.
You don’t live as a criminal without learning how to spot your own kind. I locked eyes with the leader of the priests standing beneath us and saw a look I’d seen only in one other place – the mirror. The eyes of a murderous thief gloating over a vanquished foe stared back at me and I knew – I knew – that the nails holding the King of the Jews wasn’t there for any sin of his own.
Yet, he was finished, just the same.
This man the rumors called ‘The Lamb of God,” suffering just like me? The injustice of it frayed the edges of my sanity like the distant bleating of those cursed sheep. The cries of those lambs rang out like laughter at my childish presumption that the world should be just. Oh, I would embrace Sheol with pleasure if they would just slaughter all those cackling beasts in front of me! Preferably shorn naked, shivering, and silent.
Like a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
Clearly my mind was almost finished.
That was the sign, this childhood prophecy that crept into my mind unbidden. The sign that my dying brain was shifting into life review now, pulling long-forgotten memories from my childhood before it faded away. By oppression he was taken away and no one protested. He was executed for the sins of the people.
Bits. Pieces. Not Torah – no. It had been a decade since I had set foot in a synagogue. But paraphrases. Beliefs. The hope of my father and his father before him. The anointed one will be cut off . . . It pleased God to crush him. Crush him why?
It was a scroll I had never finished.
Those beliefs had never been mine, although they had rolled off my tongue as a boy. Rote recitations of words that made no sense. My faith had been in freedom won at the end of a sword. It was the insanity starting. That was why these random memories seemed to fit for the first time. Fit together in the life of my death-mate, of all people! Clearly, my mind was near its end. Yet somehow, in that insanity, a tiny corner of the world made sense.
Your kingdom will last forever. Your empire for all generations.
Could it be possible that it wasn’t finished?
A Messiah of contradictions. Killed, yet ever living. Silently crushed, yet forever reigning. Murdered . . . for us. For our sins. Our failed rebellions. Our murders. Our thefts. My thefts.
Behold! The Lamb of God.
That insane bleating! Those naive Passover lambs, unaware that they were marked for death so Death himself could skip over anyone marked by its blood. Over men like Moses but also – dare I think it – over men like me?
Men who deserved to be finished?
Was it desperation? Blood loss? The last hope of a dying man? I don’t know. But in the eerie darkness of a day turned night, I mustered all the strength I had, shoved my corpse upward against the spike in my feet, and the agony gave me just enough adrenaline to fill my lungs with air. Then I did the only thing a thief like me knew how to do. I turned traitor on my mocking colleague and made one last audacious grab for something I had no right to own.
“Remember me,” I gasped. “When you come into your kingdom.”
Silence. What had I expected?
Distant sobs. Then more silence. Messiah gave no indication he had heard.
If I had still had the strength for emotion, I would have understood. There is too much mercy in a word like “finished.” Closure is a balm reserved for the just.
Then his foot moved. Three times it twitched before it heaved his body up to breathe. “You’ll join me today in paradise,” came the bleat from the altar.
And then, as the earth itself began to shake, my fading consciousness heard not the whimper of a dying lamb, but the unearthly roar of a lion.
IT. IS. FINISHED.