The Book of Longings

Ana, unsure where to begin when she arrives in Jerusalem, heads to Bethany, to the home of Lazarus. Lazarus tells her of the rising reputation of her husband, how his message incited much excitement among the Jews. His preaching of love generated talk that Jesus is the long-promised Messiah and the Jews await his word to start a revolt against the Romans. Ana wants only to stop Judas. Lazarus tells her that Jesus went to the city and there caused quite a commotion when he cleared the Temple area of the moneychangers and the merchants. Ana heads to the city.

Once in the city, Ana goes to the garden near Gethsemane where she knew her husband went to pray. She finds not Jesus but rather Judas, hunched over his knees in obvious distress. He confesses to his sister that he arranged for Herod’s men to arrest Jesus. He believed Jesus’s death would cause the Jews at last to revolt. “I wanted to give the people a reason to revolt. I wanted to help bring about God’s kingdom. I thought It was what he wanted me to do” (370). Now he sees the magnitude of his error and begs Ana’s forgiveness. Ana asks only where she might find Jesus. Judas tells him the palace of Caiaphas, the high priest. Ana heads to the heart of the city.

She finds the streets clogged and, to her horror, sees her husband carrying a crossbeam, struggling to make his way through the streets, pushed along by Roman centurions. He is bloody from beatings. Ana runs to him when he stumbles under the weight of the beam. She gently wipes the blood from his eyes with the sleeve of her cloak. “I will not leave you,” she whispers. “Not a single act of your love will be squandered. You’ve brought God’s kingdom as you hoped” (374). The soldiers hustle him along. Ana goes to the execution site on Golgotha, determined not to look away, not to abandon her husband at his moment of death. She meets Mary and Jesus’s sister there. The soldiers nail Jesus to the cross and raise it up. For more than three hours the women watch as Jesus writhes on the cross, as his life slips slowly away. The moment before he expires, Ana looks up and meets his eyes, saying, “Everything that ever passed between us was present then” (378).

Even as soldiers lower Jesus’s body from the cross and Ana assists Jesus’s sister in preparing his broken body for burial, Ana understands she is in danger if she stays in the city. She stays the night with Mary. Tabitha, her childhood friend, is there. Ana is overjoyed, but she still struggles to understand why Judas acted against her husband. She learns from Mary the depth and the conviction of her husband’s mission and the impact he had on the people who thronged to hear him preach. News comes to the home that Judas committed suicide by hanging. Ana is not sure how to feel. She mourns the cousin of her childhood but cannot entirely forgive his part in the horrific death of her husband. Although Mary invites Ana to return with her to Nazareth, Ana understands she must return to the freedom of Alexandria. She yearns to return to the commune of the Therapeutae. Tabitha, enticed by Ana’s description of the women’s colony and by the idea of an ascetic life of study and prayer, begs to return with her. The next morning, early Sunday, they depart Jerusalem, Ana taking a last lingering look at the “harrowing brightness” (393) of the sun rising over the hill at Golgotha.