This week we will be taking our lead from the events we commemorate in the days leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus, and his rising from the dead on Easter Sunday. So, rather than choose a single Word of the Week, I thought it might be good to touch briefly on three words from the gospel reading for Palm Sunday — words that leaped to my mind today when I heard them or read them. The first of these is the verb strew. That, after all, is what the crowds in Jerusalem did with their cloaks and with palm branches, as Jesus rode into the city on the donkey — in that powerful combination of humility and kingliness, that shows us where true royalty lies.
The Greek verb, stronnuo, is a cousin of Old English streon, the word that gives us both strew and the thing you strew for bedding, straw. That Greek verb also means to spread, as in laying something out flat, like sheets on a bed, or flowers or fronds to decorate and smooth someone’s way. It’s a close cousin of Latin sternere, which means the same sort of thing, but in Latin we have it applied also to stones laid flat to build a road — hence the past participle strata, which in early Old English, back when the Romans first colonized Britain in the days of the first Caesars, became the word straet, and hence our modern word street. But the verb in Latin wasn’t only used of stone and gravel, or of red carpets or palm fronds. In its form prosternere you might use it to describe an act of devotion: you lay yourself flat, forward — you prostrate yourself. It’s what Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, repenting of their original sin, do as they pray to God for mercy. Too humble for our taste? Maybe we should reconsider that taste of ours!
On to the second word. “One of you will betray me,” says Jesus to his twelve closest friends, the apostles, at the Last Supper. Imagine the astonishment and the dismay. No one of them said, “That’s not true. We will all be faithful.” What Jesus said, they believed. They were dismayed because they knew that some one among them would in fact do that, though they could not imagine who or why. Or rather, the eleven innocent could not imagine who or why. Judas, who had already met the chief priests in secret, knew who it was, and why he did it, we can only guess.
Now, the word we translate as betray is the Greek verb paradidomi, which literally means to hand over, as when you hand or give somebody over to the police, or to the man’s enemies. In Latin, the prefix is different but the root verb is the same: tradere, to give-across: imagine that you are delivering up someone from one end of a bridge to the armies at the other end. From the Latin agent noun traditor, someone who hands over, we get, through the Norman French, our word traitor. And that, of course, is what Judas was. But there’s an odd thing about both the Greek verb and the Latin verb. Suppose you want to describe the teachings of someone who was the exact opposite of Judas: someone who faithfully handed over what he had learned from Jesus, the words, the teachings, and the actions of the Master. You would use that same verb in Greek, or that same word in Latin! The Latin verbal noun gets to the heart of the action: traditio, meaning tradition. Lest this be only a curious example of a word that seems to mean two opposite things, let me note something that happens in both uses. When Judas betrayed Jesus, he treated him simultaneously as someone worthless, fit to be executed, and of great value (thirty pieces of silver, I guess): nobody betrays a coward, because there’s nothing worth the betrayal. But when Saint Paul says, “I hand on to you what was handed on to me,” using that same Greek verb, he’s implying that he, Paul, is of no value, except insofar as he passes along, faithfully, what the Lord directly or through the apostles has given to him, because it’s that which is priceless. And he would die rather than betray the faith. He empties himself to be filled with Christ.
The final word I’ll look at is the Greek lestes, usually translated as thief, but sometimes as insurrectionist. Which is it? Well, you wouldn’t use the word to describe somebody who sneaks into your house to steal something, or picks your pocket. That’s a kleptes, from which we get our coinage kleptomaniac, usually to describe compulsive shoplifters or people who snitch things while they’re visiting somebody’s house. The lestes is a bandit, a marauder, a highway robber. He’s a sneak too, but once he rushes out from his place of ambush he works in the open, with violence or the threat of it. The kleptes is more of a private nuisance; the lestes is a grave threat to public order. If you can’t use the roads because they’re seething with bandits, your economy grinds to a halt. The men who waylaid the traveler on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, in Jesus’ parable, were lestai. Barabbas, whom the crowds selected instead of Jesus, was a lestes. Jesus calls Satan by both nouns: he works both by stealth and by violence.
Here is the overwhelming irony of it all. Jesus has preached in the open, sometimes to thousands of people at a time, whether on the hillside or in the plains or in the precincts of the Temple. He has never once even threatened violence, but has rather taught that we must love our enemies and pray for those who hate us and who use us badly. Yet there he is, crucified as if he were the greatest threat to law and order, to peace, to the State itself, as if he had the power to turn the whole world upside down. And here those who crucified Jesus saw more than they knew they saw — because in fact he, so gentle that he does not break a bruised reed or quench a guttering candle, has come to change the world forever.
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