Since Ash Wednesday or thereabouts, the weather has remained torrid. As the heat grows with the hour and all but reaches boiling point at midday, I look forward to the evening and its coolness. But the humidity continues even beyond midnight, and makes me sweat in sleep despite a hard-working electric fan beside the bed.
The landscape has lost its green cover. When the sun began to singe its leaves, our help moved the orchid, once weighed down by bluish-purple flowers, to the shade. The drought has pushed it and the yellow chrysanthemums almost to the point of death. Garden life seems moribund, except the roses, which appear to thrive in hot weather. They certainly have guts (once defined by Ernest Hemingway as “grace under pressure.”)
The roses, mostly pinkish red, suggest flames, fire, which in this month, March, has claimed a number of homes and lives. Only the other morning, we heard the wailing of a siren and debated among ourselves whether the vehicle that passed on the road behind the trees across from our house was a fire truck or an ambulance. (It was an ambulance and I was tempted, but did not proceed, realizing that still it was improper, to heave a sigh of relief.)
Another fire came to mind, one that happened at a fictional time, in “The Long, Hot Summer,” a 1958 film by Martin Ritt, based on the stories of William Faulkner. (The film later set off a TV series of the same name.)
In one of the film’s high points, Jody, the son of Will Varner, a wealthy and powerful man in the town of Frenchman’s Bend, Mississippi, sets a barn on fire during a confrontation with his father, trapping both of them inside. But Jody relents and releases Will after they settle their differences, fed by Will’s partiality towards Ben Quick, a stranger that Will invited to live with and work for them, finding in him an image of his strong-willed self, which lamentably he failed to see in his son.
But some people suspect Ben as the cause of the fire because of his father’s reputation as an arsonist, and accordingly the men of the town move to hang him. At the last minute, however, Clara, Will’s daughter, whom Will wants Ben to marry and who eventually got to like the man, drives up and rescues Ben.
Now I should blame the heat for the loose associations that my mind makes. But the frame-up of Ben Quick leads me to the most notorious frame-up of all – that of Jesus, during what must have been his longest and hottest summer, the stage of his life, in fact the last, now called the Passion.
To compare Ben Quick with Jesus Christ is to overstretch the imagination. Yet somehow I see parallels. Both were falsely charged – Ben with burning the barn, Jesus with claiming to be the Son of God. In both cases we find a woman and a father. Clara came to rescue Ben. Mary came and stood by the cross of Jesus, making his every suffering her own. Ben’s father, the arsonist, brought his opprobrium upon his son. Jesus gave himself up for humanity’s sake in obedience to his Divine Father.
In fact, fire features in the case of Jesus too. Luke tells us that at one time Jesus alluded to his suffering and death in these words – “I have come to bring fire on the earth – and how I wish it were already kindled. I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is finished.”
Was there a drought when Jesus was crucified, just as there seems to be one now? It might have been spring, and not summer, in Jerusalem. Whatever about this, Matthew, Mark and Luke write that there was darkness; Matthew and Mark add that the temple veil was rent from top to bottom. Matthew puts in another meteorological phenomenon as well – an earthquake.
Which from time to time hits the country. And we hope that it is not strong enough to topple buildings, although it could be scary and push people out of their homes and offices into the streets and the blaze of the long summer.