Jesus

by James Martin

  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?”

  FINALLY, 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:

  I am counted among those who go down to the Pit;

  I am like those who have no help. . . .

  You have caused my companions to shun me;

  you have made me a thing of horror to them.

  I am shut in so that I cannot escape.

  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.

  THESE SUFFERINGS ARE AN essential entry for us into the life of Jesus. For those who think of Jesus as far removed from the suffering we face, the Gospels show us not simply physical sufferings, but emotional ones as well. We do not, as St. Paul said, have a God who does not understand our suffering, but who participated in it.37 This is an entry for us into Jesus’s life and an entry for him into ours.

  Yet even in the midst of this suffering—physical pain, abandonment, betrayal, seeing others suffer, and then seeing one’s great project collapse—Jesus did not waver. It must have been an enormous temptation to vacillate in the face of this mountain of suffering. But out of obedience to what the Father is asking he does not.

  Jesus has done as much as he could. It is finished. Now, into his Father’s hands he commends his spirit. He commends his body. He commends everything.

  After all the temptations to turn away from the path that the Father was asking him to follow, and even in the face of his intense physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering, Jesus is resolute. Like his mother at the Annunciation, he says—perhaps not knowing fully what it will mean—yes.

  * * *

  THE CRUCIFIXION

  Mark 15:22–41

  (See also Matthew 27:33–56; Luke 23:33–49; John 19:16–30)

  * * *

  Then they brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means the place of a skull). And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh; but he did not take it. And they crucified him, and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take.

  It was nine o’ clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.” And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

  When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah.” And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”

  There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 22

  Risen

  “Jesus said to her, ‘Mariam!’”

  THE MOST POWERFUL SPIRITUAL experience of my entire pilgrimage came inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. On my second visit I decided to wait in the long snaking line to enter the Tomb of Christ, housed in the Aedicule, the church-within-the-church. Almost impossibly ornate, the entrance to the tomb is flanked by tall candles, with a small wooden door set into a façade of rose marble. The people in line were orderly, but fidgety. The man in front of me kept checking his smartphone. Probably ignoring some code of pilgrim’s etiquette, I peeked over his shoulder to see what could be so important and half-expected him to be typing, “Can’t talk. In church where Jesus died. Call you in 5.” Instead, he was playing a video game.

  The line inched closer to the tomb—the church guards were permitting only three or four people to enter at a time. The holiest site in Christendom was packed, with rivers of tourists flowing in and out. Franciscan friars and Orthodox monks and Ethiopian priests crossed the marble floor, carefully avoiding one another. Chanting came from somewhere nearby.

  After thirty minutes I reached the door. Along with a handful of other pilgrims I was waved into a small anteroom where we
awaited entrance to the tomb. Over the doorway the marble was carved to resemble folds of cloth, as if a curtain were overhanging the entrance. A guard offered instructions: we could kiss the stone if we wished or reverence it in some way, but we were not to spend too much time inside. Looking over someone’s shoulder, I could tell why they had only allowed a few in; it was a tiny space. When finished, we would exit the same way we entered.

  The appointed time came. As at the entrance to the Church of the Nativity, you must crouch to enter. Bending slightly, I walked in with a man and woman. Before me was a pinkish gray stone, about waist high. On ledges around the stone, which also served as an altar, dozens of tapers burned brightly. Already I knew that besides reverencing this holy site, I wanted to ask God for something, an intention. Accustomed to asking the saints for their prayers, I figured that here at this holy site, I would bypass asking the saints to pray for me to Jesus and go directly to Jesus himself. My mother was thinking of moving into a retirement community, and I prayed for that process to go well. “Make this happen, Lord,” I said. It was one of those times in prayer that I felt that I had really expressed myself, that I had been as clear as I could about this single intention.

  I knelt on the floor and bent my forehead to the cool stone, touching it with my hands as well. The moment I did this, I had an instant, powerful, vivid image of Jesus lying on the stone and then sitting up. I could see him, feel him, rising up. The image filled my mind. Emotions overwhelmed me, and I started to cry.

  Stumbling out of the tomb, I stopped by the columns outside of the Aedicule and knelt down. Why had I not understood that this was not simply the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the church of his tomb? It was also the Church of the Resurrection. George appeared from around the corner, and I asked him for time to pray.

  “Give me an hour or so,” I said.

  I spent two hours by the pillars meditating on the Resurrection. He rose from here, I thought. I thought of how he did it for everyone—past, present, and future. I thought of all the pilgrims who had come to this spot—past, present, and future. And how it changed everything.

  Around me the church almost seemed to dissolve. The marble was replaced by earth, the pillars by trees, and the pilgrims by, well, no one. It was easy to imagine the site on Easter Sunday morning. Was it a garden? In my mind’s eye it was. But what did it really look like? What happened on that first morning of Jesus’s new life?

  THE GOSPEL WRITERS MAKE it clear that Jesus was dead. As in the story of Lazarus, the evangelists note how long Jesus was in the tomb: three days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).1 Jewish belief was that the soul would linger around the body for only three days.

  All three Synoptics describe the discovery of the empty tomb as the work of women. Mark mentions “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome.” Matthew has “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary.” Luke first talks about “women who had come with him from Galilee”2 and then later identifies them as “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them.”

  The story unfolds in the Synoptics in different ways, but with the same outcome. The women, ready to anoint the body or to see the tomb, arrive there. In Matthew “a great earthquake” comes and an “angel of the Lord” rolls back the stone and sits upon it. His appearance is “like lightning” and he wears clothing “white as snow.” The soldiers, still guarding the tomb, “shook and became like dead men.” In Mark the women reach the tomb and, wondering who would roll away the stone for them to enter, find that it has already been moved. And a “young man, dressed in a white robe,” sits inside the tomb. In Luke, the women find the stone rolled away and enter the tomb. As they are trying to make sense of things, “two men” in “dazzling clothes” suddenly stand beside them. In Mark and Luke, the women are “alarmed” or “terrified and bowed their faces to the ground.”

  In each of the Synoptics the “angel of the Lord,” the “young man,” or the “two men” bear the same message. It is the message that will change the women’s lives; the lives of the apostles, disciples, and followers; the lives of all who knew Jesus; the rest of world history; and my own life. Luke’s may be the most beautiful retelling.

  “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the young men say. “He is not here,” they say, “but has risen.”

  Jesus has risen!

  In all the Synoptics the women then receive another crucial message. They are to proclaim to his disciples this great news. In Matthew and Mark they are also to tell them that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. In Mark they depart in “terror and amazement” and tell no one, so frightened are they. The earliest versions of Mark’s Gospel end at this point. Some of Mark’s text could have been lost, but the evangelist may have purposely concluded his story here, as if to draw readers in, allowing them to imagine themselves in the place of those who would hear what the women would tell.

  Matthew, who wrote his account after more time had passed and when fewer people were living who had direct experience with the Risen Christ, may have wanted to be less literary and more concrete about what the women experienced. In his version the women leave “with fear and great joy,” and on the way they are surprised to encounter Jesus himself. When they worship Jesus, he tells them to tell the “brothers” to go to Galilee, where he will meet them. In Luke, the women remembered Jesus’s words and tell everything to “the eleven and to all the rest.” But “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” Peter rushes to the tomb, stoops down and sees the linen clothes, and goes home, “amazed at what had happened.”

  The Gospel writers use vivid words to convey the intensity of the women’s emotional reactions. In Mark the appearance of the angels causes them to be ekthambeisthai, shocked or amazed, a word conveying deep feeling, which was also used for Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane. “Distraught” comes close. When they leave they are described as tromos kai ekstasis, trembling and astonished, the last word meaning “standing outside themselves.” They say nothing to anyone because of their fear. Matthew and Luke depict similarly overpowering emotions. Seeing the angels leads the women in Luke to bend “their faces to the ground” in fear. In Matthew the women, having met the Risen Christ himself, race to the disciples with phobou kai charas megalēs, fear and great joy. In contrast to their silence in Mark, joy impels them to rush off and proclaim the good news.

  John’s Gospel, though, shares a different story, and it is his narrative on which I’d like to dwell. And it is largely the story of two friends—Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

  AS IN THE SYNOPTICS, Mary Magdalene plays a central part in John’s account of the Resurrection. The role of women in reporting the stories of Jesus’s resurrection is all the more remarkable, because at the time women were often considered unreliable witnesses. Indeed, one of the arguments against the notion that the Resurrection accounts were somehow “made up” is that if the evangelists wanted to concoct a story designed to convince doubters, they would not have chosen women as the main witnesses. We can see residues of this first-century stereotype of women as unreliable in Luke’s comment that the disciples find the women’s story an “idle tale.” The Greek word used is lēros, nonsense. Luke Timothy Johnson notes, “There is a definite air of male superiority in this response.”3

  But careful readers of the Gospels (and this book, I hope) will have seen women at every stage of Jesus’s ministry, from the very beginning. Remember that at the Annunciation Mary does not feel required to ask a man—either her father or her betrothed—for permission to accept God’s invitation to bear a son. It is Mary who gently prods Jesus to perform his first miracle, at the Wedding Feast at Cana, even when her son protests that it is not yet the right time. During his public ministry, many of Jesus’s miracles are performed to heal women and those for whom women plead—he cures a woman with a hemorrhage; he raises the son of a widow in the town of Nain; he heals a woman with scoliosis or curvature of the spine.

  As a man who se
es them as more than simply objects of pity, Jesus spends time with women. In Mark’s Gospel, the earliest we have, Jesus is taught by a woman from Syrophoenicia who, in response to Jesus’s harsh words that he will not heal her daughter because she is not Jewish, challenges him. Jesus changes his mind and heals her daughter. Mary and Martha are clearly Jesus’s cherished friends, close enough to him to feel free to scold him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

  As his death approaches, more women emerge in the Gospel stories. Mary and Martha are prominently featured in the story of the raising of Lazarus; a woman anoints Jesus’s feet (or head) with precious oil; he speaks to the women of Jerusalem on the way to the cross; and it is the women who remain with him at his death, with Mary his mother joining women whom Jesus met later in his ministry, a kind of alpha and omega of his life.

  The inclusion of women was a central part of Jesus’s ministry. Gerhard Lohfink, looking at the Near Eastern context of the time, calls it “remarkable.” It would appear, writes Lohfink, “that here Jesus deliberately violated social standards of behavior.”4 For her part, Amy-Jill Levine believes the idea of any social transgression is overstated: “A look at the women in the Old Testament should immediately signal this,” she told me. “The Pharisees had women patrons. No one in the Gospels, by the way, finds this kind of friendship surprising.”

  The question of whether the inclusion of women in Jesus’s ministry broke social boundaries may be disputed. What is not disputed is that throughout Christian history women’s contributions have often been downplayed, ignored, or mislabeled. Mary Magdalene, to take one prominent example, often has been identified as a prostitute—though there is no evidence in the New Testament that she was one. The historic mislabeling apparently stemmed from the fact that Jesus was said to have driven “seven demons” from her.5 Mary was thus thought to have led a sinful early life. Also, at one point in the Gospels she is mentioned near the story of a prostitute.6 Taken together, this led some early church fathers (church leaders after the time of the disciples), especially St. Gregory the Great in an influential homily, to label her as one. But whatever Mary’s “demons” were or had been, it is clear that she was a key member of the disciples. So one of the first witnesses of the Resurrection—in some accounts the first witness—was classified as a prostitute.