Chapter 23 Friar Lukas
Friar Lukas
Friar Lukas walks to the shore and stares at the ocean with unseeing eyes.
Seagulls squabble over shells on the rocks but he doesn’t hear them.
He has come to contemplate Jan’s request. One heretic.
He wants to reject it outright, but if he does, he will abandon both women to his brother.
Sacrifice one, save the other, his brother said.
Sophia or Aleys. It’s not a real choice.
Both are impossible. The waves creep up the shingle, recede.
Each comes closer. If he stands here, just stands here and does nothing, he will drown.
Jan is a wolf. A wolf with a pope nipping at his heels. Only a king dares defy a pope.
The gray water mirrors a flat sky. Lukas tastes salt on his lips.
The choice wraps like a vise around his chest, so that it is hard to draw breath, even in this open air.
He is thinking of Judas and the thirty pieces of silver, how the purse would have weighed in his fist, the coins stamped with the head of a Phoenician god.
Thirty shekels from the high priests to name Christ in the garden, to kiss Christ in the garden, so that he could be stopped.
So that his radical truth would be silenced.
After, when Judas saw what he had set in motion, that Christ was condemned, he returned to the high priests.
“I have sinned,” he said to them. “I have betrayed innocent blood.” But they did not take back their coins.
Blood money, they said. Your responsibility, they said.
So Judas cast the coins to the temple floor, where they rolled and fell to stone while the priests and elders watched with cold eyes.
The bishop doesn’t care who he names.
The betrayal of Judas had been foretold. God had whispered the plot to the prophets. Zechariah, buried before Judas was born, had already predicted the price: thirty pieces of silver. Christ knew it was coming. The betrayal was necessary. And so Lukas wonders, what choice did Judas really have?