The Rock (17 page)

“Who are you talking about?” I said.

“The strumpet who founded this Temple of Abomination with which you are so enamored,” replied Ka’b. “She built it upon a relic that she came halfway across the world to find.”

“You mean Calvary?”

“No! No! No!” exclaimed Ka’b. “I mean the cross. She stumbled upon Calvary by accident, pursuing a mad search for what Christians call the true cross, the two pieces of wood upon which they claim Jesus was crucified. Just imagine! A harlot who scalded her son’s wife to death in a steam bath, and then decided to relocate the fulcrum of creation from Moriah to the place of her find, which she claimed was Calvary.”

The woman my father was fulminating against was Flavia Helena Augusta, the mother of Constantine the Great, who had come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage three hundred years before the arrival of the sons of Ishmael. A long and tumultuous life had she, rising from lowly servitude in an inn to mother of the first Christian Roman emperor. She left Rome suspected of collaboration in the murder of her daughter-in-law, Fausta. Maybe finding the cross was her atonement. No one will ever know for sure. Certainly, the guardians of the Church of the Resurrection, who deemed her a saint, would vehemently deny my father’s accusations.

But Ka’b was right about one thing. Helena had single-handedly reshaped the geography of the Holy City, and with it the fate of the world. She had cut right through to the heart of the matter with
a devastatingly simple insight: The actual wood of the cross could bear witness to the story of Jesus in a way that no words could ever do.

No one had dared to think such a thought before. The empress just brushed aside the objections of her theologians, who thought it unseemly for Christians to revere a relic. They had simply read too many books.

I can see her driven by an all-consuming desire to see and touch the incontrovertible proof of the suffering of Jesus, and wanting to spread fragments of that proof, the wood of the true cross, until they filled all corners of her son’s empire, touching the common folk with whom she so identified, giving them the opportunity for a magical union with Him, one in which the frail trappings of their miserable existence on earth—an existence her origins made her all too familiar with—could finally be transcended. The beaten and broken body of the Messiah, in Helena’s eyes, was not just a story of suffering—it was one of community through the passion of Jesus. And the bonds of that community were going to be forged through the truth of the cross, a truth that Helena had extracted from the rubble and turned into the magnificent New Temple I grew up in awe of.

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H
ow did she know where to look?” asked an incredulous Umar. The Caliph and the Patriarch had left Adam’s Chapel and were standing beneath the basilica of the church in another underground crypt, this one bearing Helena’s name. Here, Sophronius said, the true cross had been found.

Sophronius said that Helena had searched high and low for the cross for weeks, and as he recounted her many stratagems to unearth information, it was as though he himself had been there. The indefatigable empress, he said, had checked and crosschecked anecdotes from the locals, visited one holy site after another in the blistering heat of summer, and distributed bags of silver from wagonloads brought all the way from Rome. She followed every lead provided by priests, every clue volunteered by the army of soothsayers and would-be prophets who populate this city. She took to grilling carpenters on the types of wood from which crosses were made in the time of Jesus. She even questioned a blacksmith about the shape of the nails that might have been used by the Romans.

But it was all to no avail. Any clues that might have survived from the time of Jesus had been erased by the emperor Hadrian’s workmen when they laid a new Jerusalem on top of the ruins of the one the emperor had razed to the ground.

“Why not build the church anywhere?” asked Umar. “Or use a
replica of the original thing? Why go to all this trouble to possess the actual cross?”

Human beings, Sophronius replied, treasure the mementos of the dead whom they have loved—the greater the love, the more intense the need. It was inconceivable for the Blessed Virgin and the Apostles to not seek the crown of thorns, the nails, the sponge soaked with the blood that had washed away their sins. There had probably been no need to bribe the centurions, who were, after all, ordinary Romans who had no stake in the murder. But what if they had been required to pay a little something? Surely, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, both men of wealth, would have paid the soldiers’ price. No amount would have been too high when you think of what it meant to fondle such blessed things.

Nothing but the actual cross would satisfy Helena. She could not bear to continue living in the knowledge that the instruments of His Passion—the Pillar of the Scourging, the Crown of Thorns, the Holy Lance, the nails, and, above all, the cross—were lying buried in some obscure, forgotten place. Helena had come all the way from Rome to a pompous if provincial town of no great commercial or political importance to bring to light the instruments of His agony and the place of His Resurrection, so that all might be able to see and venerate them. God willed that she would not return without them.

“But she had reached an impasse,” said Umar. “What did she do next?”

“She realized that the reason she could not find the cross was because it had been hidden so well.”

“By whom?”

“By those who were of old the beloved of God, until they showed with their saliva contempt for Him who through His saliva opened the eyes of the blind.”

“Who?”

“The Jews.”

“But I thought they were no longer in the city!” exclaimed Umar. “You yourself said as much when you insisted that we maintain the ban on their presence.”

“They come to weep,” replied Sophronius. “We gave them permission to enter one day a year in exchange for payment. Just as they purchased the blood of the Messiah, we allow them to purchase their own tears. The day after Jerusalem was taken and destroyed by the Romans, one could see women dressed in rags, and the old bearing their tatters and their years, gather for a time of mourning, proving by their bodies and their dress the meaning of the wrath of the Lord. Every year, on the day of the destruction of the Temple, we let this rabble of the wretched gather on Mount Moriah, and while the wood of the crucifix of the Lord shines and glows and celebrates His Resurrection, and the symbol of the cross is topmost on the Mount of Olives, the children of this wretched nation bemoan the destruction of their former Temple. But they are not worthy of compassion, using as they do the occasion of our generosity to filter back into Jerusalem in ones and twos to live in hiding. It is impossible to police them. A number even now live and work in the city.”

“Why would the Jews care what happened to the cross?” Umar asked.

“Because their forefathers had to conceal the proof of their terrible deed. Finding His cross would expose them, and bring down upon their heads the curse written in their own law.”

“So what did Helena do?” asked Umar.

“Her soldiers rounded up several hundred infiltrators into the city. These were then forced to choose among themselves twenty with knowledge of the law. When the twenty were brought before her, she asked them to search out the one person most knowledgeable among them. They hesitated, wherupon she ordered all twenty to be burned at the stake. Only then did the oldest man in the group, a rabbi by the name of Judas, get pushed to the fore. It was claimed by his friends that the secret had been handed down to him by his father, who, in turn, had received it from his father. Judas tried at first not to confess. But Helena ordered him thrown into a well. On the seventh day, he relented.”

“What did he say?” asked Umar, thoroughly absorbed in the story.

“He asked to be taken to the old Rock, the site of Solomon’s Temple.”

“Praise be to God!” exclaimed the Caliph.

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T
he indomitable Helena, said Sophronius, seated herself on a makeshift platform on the Temple Mount. The empress’s hair, which she wore knotted over the middle of her head, was drawn back severely. Her tight, thin-lipped face suggested a woman accustomed to being obeyed. From where she sat, amid the ruins of the Temple adorned with two desultory statues erected by Hadrian, she would have faced a colonnade of steps descending to the sacred pool in the southern half of the city. The emperor had built a square fountain surrounded by porticoes at this terminus. The steps leading down to the pool continued the cold, classical colonnade of the Cardo, effectively halving the pagan city that he had built.

“As Mary bore the Lord and gave Him to the world, so I shall uncover His cross and teach His Resurrection,” said Helena. Your ancestors hid this wood, and I, a woman, have come to bring their tricks to naught. Now tell me why have you brought us to this pierced stone that your people come to anoint each year, and before which they rend their garments upon departing? Perhaps it is hidden here, in the cave that lies underneath? Why else would your kind visit here?”

“We come on the date of the destruction of our Temple,” the old man said. “We come to mourn, the way you would mourn the death
of a loved one by visiting the site of his burial. In the year of Jesus’ crucifixion, our Temple was still standing here, centered on this rock; it lay inside the Holy City, whereas your own scriptures say that Jesus was led out of the city to be crucified—which is why the cross cannot be here.”

“Where is it, then?” said Helena. “The Holy Gospel says that He was crucified at a place called Calvary. You Hebrews call it Golgotha. That is where I will find his sepulchre and the cross. Tell me where Golgotha is. That is all I want from you.”

“Golgotha,” said Judas, “is known to us as the place of the skull. But I don’t know where it is.”

“Are you choosing death with severe torments over a good and gracious life?”

“Would a man in the desert, Your Highness, desire to eat stones when he can eat bread?”

“Then get on with it!” demanded Helena.

Judas fell to his knees, prostrated himself upon Moriah’s summit, and, according to my father, who heard it from Sophronius, loudly made this appeal: “O God, who made the earth and meted out its dust with the hollow of His hand. O God, who dwells in the glorious light that no man can withstand. O God, who made the countless Seraphim to continuously praise Him with their voices, saying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Mighty Lord whose glory fills the earth.’ You, O God, are the Lord of the Universe. Everything is the work of your hands. If it be your will that the Son of Mary reign, He whose being is derived from you, I beg you, perform this miracle for me and, just as you revealed the bones of Joseph to Moses, reveal to me the treasured wood of your cross. If it is buried somewhere in this Holy City, may the sweet smell of incense ascend from it. Then I too shall believe in Christ who was crucified, He who will reign forever and ever.”

The sweet smell of incense did not ascend. No sooner had Judas finished his speech than a luminous cross appeared in the sky, extending from its foot over the Mount of Olives, to a place several hundred paces away from where Helena and Judas were standing.
According to eyewitnesses, the brilliant light emanating from the cross surpassed the light of the sun and lasted for most of the day. Christian and heathen alike were inspired by a combination of fear and joy. They flocked to the churches to seek their salvation, now that the prophecy had been fulfilled: