Mk 14:1—15:47
(or 15:1-39)
The late Fr. Raymond E. Brown crowned his life devoted to Scripture study with a magnum opus, The Death of the Messiah. While working on this commentary on the Passion Narratives, he wrote a simplified introduction to his work which he called A Crucified Christ in Holy Week.
While there is only one event on that fateful Friday on Calvary—the crucifixion and death of Jesus of Nazareth—the Gospels have not given us a blow-by-blow account of the event. Rather, what has come down to us are different portraits of Jesus undergoing his passion. When these different passion narratives are read side-by-side, Father Brown reminds us, we should not be upset by the differences or ask which view of Jesus is more correct. All are given to us by the inspiring Spirit. Any single account cannot by itself exhaust the meaning of Jesus. It is as if one walks around a large diamond to look at it from different angles. A true picture of the whole emerges only because the points of view are different.
For Passion Sunday this year, we look at the suffering of Jesus from the point of view of Mark. The first evangelist to write, Mark portrays a stark human abandonment of Jesus: Judas betrays him, all the other disciples flee at his arrest, and Peter curses, denying knowledge of him. The Jewish and the Roman judges and executioners are cynical; the bystanders and those crucified with him mock him while he hangs on the cross. Jesus dies feeling abandoned even by God, crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That cry is quoted in Aramaic, which carries the tone of the intimacy of Jesus’ family language, the very same language with which he cries out, “Abba!—Father!” The suffering of Jesus is complete: the Abba has become a silent, faraway God.
This manner of death is the kenosis or total “self-emptying” that the apostle Paul speaks of in the Second Reading. He probably passes on to us an early Christian hymn about Christ’s emptying and glorification. Because of his obedience to the very end, God highly exalts Jesus.
In Mark, the Lord’s reply to his Son’s cry soon comes as Jesus consummates his sacrifice. The curtain in the temple is torn in two from top to bottom, signalling the passing away of the old temple and the coming of the new one, “not made by human hands.” Jesus is then confessed as truly the Son of God by the centurion, a pagan official. A Jew, Joseph of Arimathea, recovers his courage and prepares Jesus for a fitting burial. Jesus is thus acknowledged as the Son of God by both Gentile and Jew.
Finally, his body is laid in the tomb, ready for the final and definitive answer of God: he is raised from the dead, declared Messiah and Lord, “to the glory of God the Father.”
Mark tells us that though Jesus is shown as Son of God through the power and authority of his teaching and miracles, we will not be able to fathom his true identity until we see him die on the cross, obedient to the end. It really is a paradox. The most sublime manifestation of Jesus’ divinity seems to be the negation of it, when he does not cling to his equality with God.
Father Brown remarks that Mark’s portrait of the suffering Jesus can address specific spiritual needs. He writes, “There are moments in the lives of most Christians when they need desperately to cry out with the Markan/Matthean Jesus, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ and to find, as Jesus did, that despite human appearances God is listening and can reverse tragedy.”