by James Martin
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.”23 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 a
nd 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.
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.
MANY 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 act
ions 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.