Jesus (54 page)

Mark also notes that there were also “many other women,” something that the evangelist explicitly highlights for the first time—that is, the existence of a larger group of women who followed him on the way to Jerusalem. These women will prove to be of great importance in the next few days.

M
ANY MEDITATIONS ON THE
Cross tend to focus on Jesus's physical suffering. And this is appropriate: the carpenter from Nazareth suffered terrible physical pain. It would have begun from the moment of his arrest, with the guards treating him roughly and, according to John, binding him, most likely by the hands. After his trial he is whipped by the Roman soldiers. The Gospels treat this gruesome event sparingly. In Matthew and Mark the information comes in the middle of another sentence: “So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them, and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.” John is similarly laconic: “Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged.” (The modest Church of the Flagellation in the Old City commemorates this.) Afterward the soldiers weave a crown of thorns and press it onto his head.

Jesus must have been sleepless throughout this night, which means that any reserves of physical strength are already depleted as he faces the physical pain. After this ordeal he has to shoulder a rough and heavy wooden beam. Finally he is nailed to the cross.

Yet physical pain is not the only kind of suffering we endure—or that Jesus suffered. And so this is not the only kind of pain he understands. Consider the other kinds of suffering.

There is the suffering of
abandonment
. In an aside, describing the events after Gethsemane, Mark writes, “All of them deserted him and fled.” The disciples, who had always vacillated between understanding and confusion and thus between following and leaving, now make their break. The one who invited them to “Follow me” now witnesses their final answer. They will not follow him here. This—his sudden shaming, his unwillingness to defend himself, his mission's apparent failure, and his acceptance of physical pain—is a place they cannot go to. It's easy to imagine the disciples not only terrified, but also ashamed as they fled, compounding their misery.

Thus, when he needs their support the most, Jesus is abandoned by his closest friends. Even though his disciples proved a fractious group, he always had the benefit of their company. Early on, he could have chosen to carry out his ministry alone or with just one person, say Peter. But Jesus chose a group—a large one, twelve apostles—to be with him almost all the time, and they also traveled with the larger circle of disciples. He must have been a naturally social person. As someone who craved company, Jesus relied on them not only for help in his ministry, but for simple friendship. Now that friendship is gone.

With the disciples unable or unwilling to participate, Jesus also suffers from
loneliness
. Throughout the Gospels we have seen Jesus's desire to be alone—he will withdraw from the disciples in order to pray by himself. Or he will remove himself from the crowds. But for the most part in his public ministry he is surrounded by other people.

Nonetheless, Jesus's life was one of existential aloneness. Shortly before Jesus's final entry into Jerusalem, the Gospel of Mark describes him walking with the disciples toward the holy city: “Jesus walked ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.” The image of Jesus walking alone, trailed by his fearful disciples, is a striking portrait of the solitary nature of his vocation.
²⁸

When I once spoke to a spiritual director about loneliness, he asked if I had ever thought about Jesus in that light. When the followers of Jesus look around, he asked me, whom do they see? They see their peers, perhaps hundreds of people with whom they can share their experiences. When the disciples look around, whom do they see? Dozens of people with whom they have much in common. When the apostles look around, whom do they see? They see eleven other men, whom they know well, and with whom they can share their concerns, joys, and hopes, their griefs and anxieties. Even assuming Jesus shared with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, there were parts of him that remained difficult for them to understand.

When Jesus looks around, whom does he see? My spiritual director held up his index finger. “There is only Jesus,” he said. He relies on the Father, but in many ways he is alone. This loneliness is complete—and brutal—in the Crucifixion.

As if that weren't enough, he suffers the terrible feeling of outright
betrayal
by one of his closest friends: Judas Iscariot.

A
FEW YEARS AGO
I served as a “theological adviser” to an Off-Broadway play that put Judas on trial for Jesus's death.
²⁹
We spent many hours sifting through the possible reasons for history's most famous betrayal. The Gospel of Mark gives no motivation for Judas's sudden betrayal. Confusing things further, Matthew has Jesus telling Judas at the Last Supper, “Do what you are here to do,” which seems to imply some acquiescence or at least foreknowledge on Jesus's part. Matthew attempts to clarify things in his account by introducing the motive of greed: “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” Judas asks the Jewish chief priests.

The Gospel of John echoes this theme. Before the Last Supper, Judas is depicted by the evangelist as the greedy keeper of the common purse. When Jesus is anointed in Bethany, shortly before his crucifixion, Judas complains, asking why the money was not given to the poor. In an aside, John writes, “He [Judas] said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.” Thus John paints Judas as greedy, and dishonest as well. Finally, Luke's Gospel tells us that at the Last Supper “Satan had entered into Judas.” Father Harrington told me that this phrase from Luke explained “either everything or nothing.”

There is another hypothesis that sometimes remains unstated by commentators: the evangelists concocted the entire story of Judas's betrayal for dramatic purposes. Some have posited that the one who betrayed Jesus could have come from outside the Twelve and that Judas was simply a convenient fall guy. Similarly, Judas may have been invented as a generic “Jewish” character in order to lay the blame for the Crucifixion on the Jewish people. The name “Judas” (the Hebrew would be Judah) lends credence to this idea. So might Paul, who suggests that Jesus was “handed over” not by Judas or anyone else, but by God.
³⁰

But a wholesale invention is unlikely. Mark wrote his Gospel around
AD
70, only a few decades after the death of Jesus. Luke and Matthew wrote some ten to fifteen years later. The Christian community of that time still would have counted among its members those who were friends of Jesus, who were eyewitnesses to the Passion, or who knew the sequence of events from conversations with the previous generation. They most likely would have criticized any wild liberties taken with the story. Rather, as Father Harrington told me, “Judas's betrayal of Jesus was a known and most embarrassing fact.” The ignominy of having Jesus betrayed by one of his closest friends is something the Gospel writers would have wanted to avoid, not invent.

Overall, none of the Gospels provides a convincing reason for why one of the twelve apostles would betray the teacher he esteemed so highly. Greed fails as an explanation—why would someone who had traveled with the penniless rabbi for three years suddenly be consumed with greed? (Unless he was indeed stealing from the common purse.)

William Barclay conjectures that the most compelling explanation is that by handing Jesus over to the Romans, Judas was trying to force Jesus's hand, to get him to act in a decisive way. Perhaps Judas expected the arrest to prompt Jesus to reveal himself as the long-awaited Messiah by not only ushering in an era of peace, but overthrowing the Roman occupiers. Barclay notes that none of the other traditional explanations (greed, disillusionment, jealousy) explain why Judas would have been so shattered after the Crucifixion that, according to the Gospel of Matthew, he committed suicide; only if Judas had expected a measure of good to come from his actions would suicide make any sense. “That is in fact the view which best suits all the facts,” Barclay concludes.
³¹

Finally, there is an explanation at once simple and complex: sin. Why do we do what we know is wrong? It is an inexplicable mystery. Perhaps Judas's reasons for betrayal were obscure even to himself.

Whatever the reason, Jesus is betrayed by one of his closest friends. Here is further sorrow for him as he hangs on the cross.

Jesus also undergoes the suffering of
humiliation and contempt.
His humility has been on display throughout the Gospels, most recently in the Foot Washing. We witness it in his reluctance to be named king, and in his withdrawal from the crowds after a miracle. Perhaps his withdrawal is both a sign of fatigue or tiredness and a further sign of his humility—shunning adulation after performing his great deeds.

But being struck and mocked by soldiers and taunted by crowds must have been—for even the humblest man—a difficult thing to bear. A few years ago I saw a woman being arrested in a parking lot, apparently for stealing something from a convenience store. The police had bound her hands behind her with plastic handcuffs. When her eyes met mine, she immediately turned her face away in shame. I wish I could have apologized for looking. Jesus was no criminal, and he had nothing to be ashamed of, but the taunts must have stung him nonetheless.

Contempt is a hard thing to bear, and Jesus received contempt from the beginning of his ministry. In the synagogue at Nazareth, the people in his hometown can barely stand to hear him—they grow so wrathful that they drive him out of the town. In the challenges from some of the scribes and Pharisees you can hear not simply questions about his authority, but outright contempt. “It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
³²

There is also the suffering of
seeing others suffer because of your suffering
. The last thing that a child wants is for his mother or father to see him suffer. Jesus knows how difficult this must be for his mother.

Recently a friend told me how painful it was to watch her eight-year-old son cry during a basketball game. She could hardly bear it. And the more we age, the more we realize this truth about our parents. After I passed my fiftieth birthday and started to experience the normal aches and pains of growing older, and whenever a physician told me that these aches and pains would mean minor surgery, physical therapy, or simply a change in lifestyle, I decided not to tell my mother. She didn't need to hear about my suffering, no matter how minor. Like every good mother, she suffered when her child suffered.

So imagine Jesus's sadness at seeing his mother suffer. If anything could have tempted him to walk away from the cross, it may have been this. I can imagine him asking the Father, “I will drink this cup, but must she drink it too?”

F
INALLY, THERE IS THE
suffering of
seeing his great work ended
.

Just outside the Old City walls, down the slope of Mount Zion, is the Church of Peter in Gallicantu, which marks the spot where Peter denied Jesus. Gallicantu, which means “cock crow,” refers to Peter's fulfillment of Jesus's prediction that Peter would deny him “before the cock crows twice.”
³³
A golden rooster perches delicately atop the church's great dome, mid-crow. While the structure is relatively new (1932), since ancient times the site has been venerated as the location of Caiaphas's house and therefore where Jesus was held after his arrest.
³⁴

The main cavern is called the Sacred Pit or Christ's Prison. It is a haunting place, which was empty on the day George and I visited. One descends a narrow stone staircase into a darkened cavern illuminated with a few wall sconces. At the bottom of the pit a bookstand holds a loose-leaf notebook bearing the text, in many different languages, of Psalm 88, which reads in part:

Who knows if Jesus was taken to this site, or if he was confined to this pit. But as a deeply religious Jew, wherever he was held, he probably recalled this psalm. As I stood in the Sacred Pit, alone in the half darkness, and read those words, I thought of Jesus saying good-bye to his great project.

Think about the months and perhaps years that Jesus poured into his ministry. Think of the effort that had gone into selecting the apostles and teaching them, as well as all the energy expended in traveling, healing, and preaching—all work undertaken to help people understand what it means to be invited into the reign of God. Accepting the end of the project into which he had poured himself, body and soul, must have been overwhelmingly difficult.

Jesus also may have wondered whether his project could continue after his death. After all, he knew that the disciples often quailed before difficulties; he watched them scatter in the Garden.
So
, he may have thought,
it is finished
. (Arguing against this possibility is Jesus's clear establishment of a church in Matthew with Peter as its head.
³⁵
)

In a meditation on retreat years ago I suddenly imagined the imprisoned man crying, out of sadness. Jesus wept for his friend Lazarus and for the future of Jerusalem; how could he not have wept for the seeming end of all he had worked for? Jesus trusts in the Father. He trusts that his obedience will in some way bring new life. He intimates that he expects his resurrection: “Destroy this temple that is made with human hands, and in three days I will raise it up.”
³⁶
But it would have been impossible for him not to be sorrowful “to death,” as he admits in the Garden.