Jesus (53 page)

M
ARK BEGINS THIS LAST
stage of Jesus's earthly life by telling us about Simon of Cyrene, whom the Romans pressed into service. Roman soldiers had the right to require any civilian to help carry out a task for them. Simon is described as the “father of Alexander and Rufus,” so presumably Mark's readers would have known him.
¹⁵
(A Rufus is mentioned in Paul's Letter to the Romans.
¹⁶
) Although it's possible that the Romans asked Simon's assistance out of compassion for their prisoner, it's more likely that Jesus, weakened severely after his torture, was unable to carry the crossbeam on his own.

John's Gospel affords the Way of the Cross scant attention. His account begins simply: “So they took Jesus; and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha.” The site of execution would have been visible to all, perhaps set by the road deliberately to deter other criminals or insurrectionists. This, after all, was a public execution. As George often told the inmates on death row at San Quentin, Jesus is the most famous victim of capital punishment.

The descriptions of the actual crucifixion in the Gospels are stripped down, as if the evangelists could barely bring themselves to describe anything but the naked facts. This is sometimes baffling to those who have seen films or read books that focus on the horrible act itself. But there might be another reason for the unadorned description: the early Christians knew well what crucifixion was.
¹⁷
Victims were first affixed to the kind of crossbeam that Jesus carried by ropes or by nails driven through the wrists or forearms. In earlier times that part of the cross (which the Romans called the
patibulum
) was a piece of wood used to bar a door. The crossbeam was set into a vertical wooden beam that stood perhaps six feet high. The victim was placed in a small seat and perhaps a footrest—not out of any attempt to comfort, but to prolong his agony.
¹⁸

To breathe, victims were forced to prop themselves up momentarily on the footrest in order to draw air into their lungs, but the pain in their nailed feet and cramped legs would have gradually made it impossible to support themselves, and they would have slumped down violently, pulling on the nails in their wrists, tearing the skin and ripping the tendons, causing searing pain. It would have been nearly impossible for any human being (with a body involuntarily trying to avoid physical pain) not to experience panic. The awful process would have been repeated over and over. Victims of crucifixion died from either loss of blood or asphyxiation.

There was little need to explain this to the first readers of the Gospels.

Kai estaurōsan auton
, writes Mark simply. “And they crucified him.”

Jesus may have been stripped of his garments and left naked, completing the shaming intended by crucifixion, but this is unclear. Roman practice was to crucify the victim naked, but there might have been a nod to Jewish sensibilities. All four Gospels, however, describe the soldiers' gambling for Jesus's outer garment, which John reports was a well-made cloak, “seamless.” But the most that Jesus would have been wearing was a loincloth.

Pilate's inscription—
Ho Basileus tōn Ioudaiōn
—which Mark calls the “accusation” or “charge,” was affixed to the cross as a savage warning to insurrectionists or anyone with messianic designs. Beside Jesus were crucified two “thieves” though the word (
lēstas
) may also imply a kind of Robin Hood figure—“social bandits,” as Donahue and Harrington suggest.
¹⁹
Jesus died as he lived, in solidarity with outcasts, in this case criminals.

We can imagine, then, a public scene calculated not only to warn, but also to magnify the shame for the victim, who suffered an agonizing death. All were invited to watch and comment. The Gospel of Mark describes passersby blaspheming. They “shake their heads,” and Mark recounts a common word—
oua—
that begins their taunts, “Aha!” or “Well, well.” They scorn him: “Aha! You who would destroy the Temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross.” Next the chief priests and scribes come to deliver their own imprecations: “Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.”

In Luke “the leaders” (
archontes
, most likely, some of the Jewish leaders) scoff: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” The soldiers join in, saying: “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.” Their taunts of “save yourself” mirror what he heard when he was tested in the desert.

Jesus does not answer. Most likely he could barely breathe.

All three Synoptics describe a darkness coming “over the whole land.” In Mark's Gospel the darkness lasts from noon to three. Then Jesus shouts out, “
Elōi, Elōi, lama sabachthani!
”

Many translations say that he “cried out in a loud voice,” but “scream” may be more accurate. The Greek
eboēsen
is indicative of “intense physical suffering.”
²⁰

Mark's narrative preserves the words of Jesus from the cross in Aramaic, a sign of their authenticity.
²¹
Jesus's screaming these words from the cross must have so imprinted itself on witnesses as to be unforgettable: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Why does Jesus scream these words?

Though we have almost no access into the mind of Jesus, especially at this moment, there are several ways to think about what he says. The first possibility is that Jesus's words are not an expression of abandonment, but of hope in God. He is quoting Psalm 22, which would have been recognizable to any Jew who had received religious training. And although the beginning of the psalm expresses the frustration of a speaker who feels God has abandoned him, the second part is a hymn of thanksgiving to God, who has heard his prayer: “He did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.”

In this interpretation, Jesus is invoking the psalm in its totality, as the prayer of one who cried out to God and was heard. An example based on a more well known psalm might be someone who says, “The Lord is my shepherd,” trusting that his hearers are familiar with the rest of the psalm (“Even though I walk through the darkest valley”) and its overall thrust. That is, “The Lord is my shepherd” is taken not simply as an affirmation of God as shepherd but as shorthand for the entire psalm. This is a frequent tack taken in theological explanations of Jesus's cry.

But there is another possibility: Jesus felt abandoned. This is not to say that he despaired. I don't believe that someone with such an intimate relationship with the Father could have lost all
belief
in the presence of God in this dark moment. But it is not unreasonable to imagine his
feeling
as if the Father were absent. It is important to distinguish between a person's believing that God is absent and feeling it.

Of all people, Jesus—having faced the betrayal of his closest friends (Mark says earlier that the disciples had fled by this point, whether out of terror or confusion or shame), subject to an exhausting series of late-night inquests, brutalized by Roman guards, marched through the streets under a crushing weight, and now, nailed to a cross and suffering excruciating pain—could be forgiven for feeling abandoned. He who has abandoned himself to God's will in the Garden now wonders,
Where are you?

In a lengthy treatment of this passage entitled “Jesus's Death Cry,” Raymond Brown suggests this was in fact what Jesus was experiencing.
²²
Many Christians, he suggests, might want to reject the literal interpretation that would imply feelings of abandonment. “They could not attribute to Jesus such anguish in the face of death.”
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Yet, as Brown says, if we accept that Jesus in the Garden could still call God
Abba
, then we should accept this “screamed protest against abandonment wrenched from an utterly forlorn Jesus who now is so isolated and estranged that he no longer uses ‘Father' language but speaks as the humblest servant.” The shift from the familiar
Abba
to the more formal
Elōi
is heartbreaking. Jesus's feeling of distance reveals itself not only in the scream, not only in the line of the psalm that he screams, but also in the word
Elōi.

How could Jesus feel abandoned? How could the person who enjoyed such an intimate relationship with God express such an emotion? It may help to look at a similar situation closer to our own time.

In the early years of her life, as I mentioned earlier, Mother Teresa, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity, enjoyed several mystical experiences of closeness with God and then—nothing. For the last fifty or so years of her life, she felt a sense of great emptiness in her prayer. When her journals and letters were published posthumously, many readers were shocked by these sentiments, finding it difficult to understand how she could continue as a believer and indeed flourish as a religious leader. But Mother Teresa was honestly giving vent to her feelings of abandonment and speaking of what spiritual writers call the “dark night.” This state of emotion moves close to, but does not accept, despair. She wrote to her confessor, “In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss—of God not wanting me—of God not being God—of God not really existing.”
²⁴

In time, Mother Teresa's questions about God's existence faded, and she began to see this searing experience as an invitation to unite herself with Jesus, in his abandonment on the cross, and with the poor, who also feel abandoned. Her feelings did not mean that she had abandoned God or that God had truly abandoned her. Hers was a radical act of fidelity based on a relationship that she still believed in—even if she could not sense God's presence.

Jesus, it seems to me, does not despair. Yeshua is still in relationship with
Abba
—calling on him from the cross. Yet in the midst of horrific physical pain, abandoned by all but a few of his friends and disciples, and facing death, when it would be almost impossible for anyone to think lucidly, he might have felt abandoned. To me this makes more sense than the proposition that the psalm he quoted was meant to refer to God's salvation.

In the Gospel of John, however, there is no scream. Even from the cross, Jesus is in full command of the situation and thereby maintains what Gerald O'Collins terms his “divine composure.”
²⁵
Jesus asks the Beloved Disciple to care for his mother, who stands under the cross with three other women: his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. “Woman, here is your son,” he says to his mother. And to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”

Hearing the scream from the cross, the passersby in Mark suddenly seem to take pity on Jesus. But they are confused by his calling on
Elōi
, mistakenly thinking (for a variety of possible reasons, for example, Jesus's Aramaic or his Galilean accent) that he is calling to Elijah. Then “someone” (whether out of pity is unclear) gives him some “sour wine,” of the type that soldiers would have used. Is the “someone,” who uses a sponge and a stick to reach Jesus's lips, a soldier?

Is this vinegary wine (
oxos
), which also appears in Matthew, supposed to help him quench his thirst, revive him with its sharp smell, or mock him? It is hard to say. “Let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down,” says the someone. Is this a taunt or the hope of an onlooker moved by Jesus's calling on Elijah? Again, it is hard to say. In John the wine is given after Jesus says, “I am thirsty,” and can be viewed as a compassionate act. But in Mark the motives are unclear.

What is clear is that this marks the end of Jesus's earthly ministry.
Ho de Iēsous apheis phōnen megalēn exepneusen
, And Jesus, letting out a loud cry, expired.

The word
exepneusen
means “gave up one's breath.” Its root is the word for “spirit,”
pneuma
. We do not know what Jesus cried. Donahue and Harrington say, “It may simply have been the last shout of someone in great physical pain.”
²⁶

The Gospel of John reports that Jesus utters, “It is finished,” and “gave up his spirit.”

Then the veil in the Temple of the sanctuary is torn (
eschisthē
) in two. The only other use of this word in Mark is when the sky is torn in two at Jesus's baptism at the Jordan River.
²⁷
So at the beginning and the end of his public ministry there is a dramatic opening of the heavens, a dissolution of the boundaries between above and below.

At the same time, the centurion standing beside the cross, struck by the man's death, says, “Truly this man was God's Son!” The Messianic Secret is no longer secret. One of Mark's ironies here is that the person who finally and fully proclaims Jesus's identity is the Roman soldier who has presumably presided over his execution. Unless this is a sarcastic remark, the formerly doubtful onlooker either has been convinced by the tearing of the sanctuary veil (though it is nearly impossible for him to have known this) or more likely has been moved by Jesus's calling on God in his final moments. What has moved the man—Jesus's divinity or his humanity?

To conclude the terrible story, Mark lists the women who have been present all along “from a distance.” These are Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of “James the younger” (one of the apostles) and Joses, and a woman named Salome. When describing the women, Mark uses the word for discipleship (
akolouthein
), and so it is accurate to say they were considered disciples, who “followed him and provided for him.”

The women and the Beloved Disciple do for Jesus what many of us can do out of love when we are faced with suffering. When my father was dying, my family gathered around him in his hospital bed and simply stayed. We wanted to be there and to help him—if at all possible—and not leave him alone. Even if we are unable to do anything that will alleviate a person's physical pain, we can remain.