Christ
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Then they took Jesus, and, carrying his own cross, he went out to the Place of the Skull (in Hebrew, Golgotha), where they crucified him with two others, one on either side and Jesus in the middle. Pilate wrote out a placard and had it fastened to the cross. It read, “Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews.” This notice was read by many of the Jews, because the place where Jesus was crucified was not far from the city and because the writing was in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.
So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write ‘King of the Jews’ but ‘He said “I am King of the Jews.” ’ ”
Pilate answered, “I wrote what I wrote.” (19:17–22)
For the Jews, Jesus’ crime is that of falsely claiming to be the Messiah, the King of the Jews. For the Romans, the defendant is guilty only if the claim is true. So Pilate seems to say to Caiaphas that he understands the game that is being played. He seeks to remind Caiaphas that when such games are played, Rome always wins. Caiaphas has gambled and won. He has the prize he came for. But Rome is the casino, and by casino rules, the house never loses.
But has the Roman casino really won? When Nathanael acclaimed Jesus as “King of Israel,” Jesus declined the acclamation, saying, “You are going to see greater things than that” (John 1:49–50). Rather than merely the King of Israel, Jesus saw himself as the Son of Man to whom was given “dominion and glory and sovereignty, that all races, nations, and languages should serve him” (Dan. 7:14, italics added). Crucifixions were normally done along public thoroughfares, the better to deter potential criminals. The roads leading to Jerusalem are filled with pilgrims coming for Passover from throughout the Roman empire. Pilate labels Jesus “King of the Jews” in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. He brings about a first, partial fulfillment of Daniel and also of Jesus’ repeated statement in the Gospel of John that when he is “lifted up,” he will draw all men to himself. At the moment when Jesus ended his public ministry, some “Greeks”—possibly Gentiles, more likely Greek-speaking Jews—had wished to speak to him. He had gone into seclusion before that conversation could take place. Now those Greeks and others may see him labeled “king” in their own language and may take word about him to their distant homes.
Moreover, and more profoundly, if Jesus is in truth the Messiah, if he is in truth King of the Jews, and if he is now being executed as a criminal, then all who have any understanding of the expectations that these designations have traditionally evoked must now drastically revise their expectations. Whatever Pilate intends, this is what the Lord intends: “This is the very reason why [he has] come to this hour” (John 12:27). He has taken the role of the Messiah, King of the Jews, upon himself so that as such he may be executed as a criminal among other criminals.
In the Psalms and the prophets, misfortune is frequently stated by reference to those with whom one is “numbered”—with the living, with the dead, with the righteous, with wrongdoers, with the blessed, with the cursed, and so forth. Jesus’ execution with criminals means that he is “numbered” with them, and this permits an unmarked but exceptionally far-reaching allusion to the prophet Isaiah. To quote what would become, for Christianity, perhaps the most celebrated single poem in the Old Testament:
He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned every one to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb,
so he opened not his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
And they made his grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the Lord to bruise him;
he has put him to grief;
when he makes himself an offering for sin,
he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand;
he shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous;
and he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great,
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong;
because he poured out his soul to death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
(RSV; Isa. 53:2–12, italics added)
It was not generally thought that the Lord’s Messiah would be numbered with transgressors, much less that he himself, as Messiah, would be so numbered. But was such a thing wholly inconceivable? Had the Lord given absolutely no indication that such a disturbing eventuality might come to pass? No, Isaiah 53 had long since been a poem to give pause. By “lifting up” the King of the Jews between criminals, by thus “numbering” him with transgressors, Pilate perpetrates, against any intention of his own, a mimed allusion to Isaiah.
The Messiah, the King of the Jews, has come with the silence of a lamb, not the roar of a lion. “Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth” (Isa. 53:7, italics added). Yet the poem in which the Lord may have imagined this hour of silent anguish describes, by its end, not a defeat but a wondrous victory.
HE IS CRUCIFIED AS KING OF THE JEWS
When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four shares, one for each soldier. His undergarment was seamless, woven in one piece from the top down, and so they said to one another: “Instead of tearing it, let’s throw dice to decide who will get it.” Thus were the words of scripture fulfilled:
They divided my garments among them
and for my clothes they cast lots.
That is what the soldiers did. (John 19:23–25, italics added)
Since it is in prayer that Israel expressed its expectations of God and since the Book of Psalms is the prayerbook of Israel, this book looms large at that moment in the Gospel—namely, the Crucifixion—when ancient expectations are being most visibly revised. The quoted verses, “They divided my garments …,” come from Psalm 22 and point again to the theme of the mockery of the Jewish Messiah, who is naked and dying, by the soldiers of his enemy, who are gambling over his clothing. The full stanza (22:16–18) can be translated:
Dogs surround me,
a gang of criminals harasses me
like a lion at my hands and my feet.
I can count all my bones;
they divide my garments among them
and for my clothes they cast lots.
Another part of the same Psalm (6–8) reads:
I am a worm, not a man,
scorned by my kind, despised by my nation.
All who see me mock me;
they make faces at me, they wag their heads.
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br /> “Let him trust in the Lord, let him deliver him,
let him rescue him, then, if he delights in him!”
This is the passage that Mark alludes to when he writes:
Those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads, and saying, “Hah! You who would destroy the Temple and build it in three days! Save yourself! Come down from the cross!” The chief priests and scribes mocked him as well, saying among themselves, “He saved others; himself he cannot save. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross for us to see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him taunted him too. (Mark 15:29–32)
Matthew and Mark (but not Luke or John) quote the opening words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as words that Jesus himself speaks from the cross. The two present him (each a bit differently) quoting the Psalm in some blend of Aramaic and Hebrew: Eli, Eli (or Eloi, Eloi), lama sabachtani? The line can be interpreted in two almost diametrically opposed senses. Taken alone, it can be heard as a cry of despair. Taken as a quotation from the Psalm, a quotation perhaps inspired by Jesus’ observing his executioners gambling for his undergarment, it can take on the meaning of the Psalm as a whole. It is the latter interpretation that seems more in character for the dying Jesus in all four Gospels. In not one of them does he beg for mercy, scream in pain, or otherwise seem to lose control. His royal or divine serenity may be more complete in Luke and John, but he is extraordinarily restrained in Matthew and Mark as well. In John, as we shall see, Jesus’ very last words may be yet another allusion to Psalm 22.
More than mockery or the transcendence of mockery is involved, however, when reference is made to Jesus’ chiton, his seamless tunic or undergarment, for in his day another kind of seamless chiton was worn by the high priest. By noting that Jesus went to his death wearing a priestly garment, John was able to suggest to his original Jewish audience that Jesus was not just the lamb who was sacrificed at this Passover but also the priest who was performing the sacrifice. The Letter to the Hebrews—a book of the New Testament written around the same time as the Gospel of John and, it would seem, under the same circumstances—develops this idea at great length. For the theologian who wrote the Letter to the Hebrews, it is God’s literal self-sacrifice that accomplishes the defeat of Satan and wins eternal life for mankind, serving, along the way, as a reminder to Jesus’ persecuted followers that they need have no fear of death:
By his death he was able to set aside him who held the power of death—that is, the Devil—and liberate all those who had been held in lifelong slavery by the fear of death. For it was not the angels that he came to help but the line of Abraham. He had to become like his brothers in every way so that he could become a merciful and trustworthy high priest for them before God, able to expiate the sins of the people. For the suffering he himself endured while being put to the test enables him to help others who are being tested.…
And he did not need to offer himself again and again, as the high priest goes into the sanctuary year after year with the blood that is not his own, or else he would have had to suffer over and over again since the world began. As it is, he has appeared once and for all, at the end of the last age, to abolish sin by sacrificing himself. (Heb. 2:14–18, 9:25–26, italics added)
A priest who is his own sacrificial lamb, a lamb who is his own sacrificing priest, a father who is his own son, an Isaac who is his own Abraham, with the dagger in his own hand—it is by this fusion of identities that the crisis in the life of God is resolved. And it is this fusion of identities, as God Incarnate “sacrifices himself,” that leads to the daring claim of the Letter to the Hebrews that the death of Christ was self-inflicted.
Jesus speaks his dying words to his mother, to a beloved disciple, and at last to his Father—or to himself:
At the cross of Jesus stood his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. Seeing his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, Jesus said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.
After this, Jesus knew that everything had now been completed, but so that the scripture should be completely fulfilled, he said, “I thirst.” A jar full of sour wine stood there. Putting a sponge soaked in the wine on a branch of hyssop, they held it up to his mouth. When Jesus had taken the wine, he said, “It is accomplished,” bowed his head, and gave up his spirit. (John 19:25–30)
If the words, “After this” are taken to refer back no further than to the episode that immediately precedes, then a link exists between this scene and Jesus’ conclusion that “everything had now been completed.” Recalling that love was the theme of the Lord’s last testament and that this is the disciple whom he most loves, it may be that the Lord sees his love living on through this disciple. If Jesus’ mother still has her son, then somehow Jesus is not dead. Through Jesus’ love for his disciples and theirs for him, his work—including even his care for his own mother—will continue. The beloved disciple becomes, at this moment, the first Christian.
As for Jesus’ thirst or, more exactly, his decision to say “I thirst,” this seems to be yet another allusion to Psalm 22, in which at one point the Psalmist’s mouth “is dried up like a potsherd.” Psalm 22 reads as an ascent from the abyss of its opening “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In its exultant closing stanzas, vindication comes not for the Psalmist but for God himself:
All the ends of the earth shall remember,
and turn to the Lord;
and all the families of the nations
shall bow before him.
For kingship belongs to the Lord,
and authority over the nations is his.…
Posterity shall serve him;
his fame shall be told for generations to come.
They shall proclaim his justice
to a people yet unborn
for he has acted.
(22:27–28, 30–31)
The last words of the Psalm are, in Hebrew, kiy ‘aśah—kiy meaning “that” or “because,” and ‘aśah meaning “he has done (it)” or simply “he has acted.” In either Hebrew or Aramaic, the verb can be converted to na’aśah, a one-word sentence meaning “it is done” or “the action is complete.” The last word that the dying hero speaks from the cross may allude, then, to the last word of the Psalm. A common English translation of this word (it is a single word in Greek as well) is “it is accomplished,” but one could easily substitute the one-word sentence “Done.”
Done! What has God done by the desperate extreme of inflicting a maximally traumatic human death upon himself? He has rescued an imperiled vision. Through his Incarnation and now through his death, he has found a way to infuse the closing stanzas of Psalm 22, as well as the innumerable other statements in the Old Testament expressing what those stanzas express, with a new meaning that transcends rather than negates the old meaning. It has cost him everything to make this cataclysmic change, but he has made it, and—na’aśah—it is accomplished. He bows his head and breathes out his last breath.
HE RISES TO LIFE, INCORPORATES, ASCENDS TO HEAVEN, AND MARRIES
Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea give Jesus a hurried burial in a tomb chosen because it is nearby. It is Friday, the eve of Passover. All Jewish holy days begin at sundown. The two men succeed in their intent to have the body interred before Passover officially begins. The corpse remains in the tomb Friday night, Saturday, and Saturday night. Early on Sunday morning (his third day in the tomb, counting Friday and Saturday), Mary Magdalene goes to visit the tomb. Finding the stone rolled away from its entrance and fearing that the body has been stolen, she runs to tell Peter and an unnamed second disciple, usually taken to be John. They come running, enter the tomb, find it empty, and hasten home. Neither sees Jesus, and we read: “As late as this moment, they had still not understood the scripture and that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9). When the two
men leave, Jesus appears to Mary, who has returned to the garden where the tomb is located. She reports his appearance, but it is unclear whether anyone believes her.
Then, still on the same Sunday,
two of them were on their way to a village called Emmaus, seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking together about all that had happened. And it happened that as they were talking together and discussing it, Jesus himself came up and walked by their side; but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him. He said to them, “What are all these things that you are discussing as you walk along?” They stopped, their faces downcast.
Then one of them, called Cleopas, answered him, “You must be the only person staying in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have been happening there these last few days.” He asked, “What things?” They answered, “All about Jesus of Nazareth, who showed himself a prophet powerful in action and speech before God and the whole people; and how our chief priests and our leaders handed him over to be sentenced to death, and had him crucified. Our own hope had been that he would be the one to set Israel free. And this is not all: two whole days have now gone by since it all happened; and some women from our group have astounded us: they went to the tomb in the early morning, and when they could not find the body, they came back to tell us they had seen a vision of angels who declared he was alive. Some of our friends went to the tomb and found everything exactly as the women had reported, but of him they saw nothing.”
Then he said to them, “You foolish men! So slow to believe all that the prophets have said! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer before entering into his glory?” Then, starting with Moses and going through all the prophets, he explained to them the passages throughout the scriptures that were about himself.