Readings: Job 16.7-13, 17.1; Mark 15:16-39
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison in 1944 not long before he was murdered by the Nazi regime, had this to say: The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us... Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the Cross.
The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us... Bonhoeffer, as a Lutheran pastor, is following in the footsteps of Martin Luther, who said that there are two types of theology: the kind that men and women like, which we build out of wishful thinking; and the kind that flows from an encounter with the living God. The religion we build he called the Theology of Glory - it focuses on power and majesty and glory and victory over evil. And it’s false. The true theology focuses on the way God gets crucified over and over again, the way we find Him absent or powerless. Luther called that the Theology of the Cross.
What Bonhoeffer and Luther are talking about above all is Mark’s theology.
Mark’s Gospel is haunted by a question, posed by Jesus himself: who do you say that I am? The disciples during his earthly life, Mark’s own Christian community in the early years of persecution, you and I twenty centuries later – who do we say he is?
For the people of his time, the question was framed in the language of Messiah – which means God’s Anointed, God’s Chosen. It’s a Hebrew w
ord: the Greek translation is Christ. Mark’s Gospel has a unique approach to this title: whenever it is suggested that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Chosen One, Mark says that Jesus forbids people to tell. And yet, Mark clearly does think that Jesus is the Messiah. So, why should this be a secret?
The problem seems to have to do with the Theology of Glory and the Theology of the Cross. The Jews of Jesus’ day had a lot of ideas about the Messiah, and they were all about power and victory and majesty, about driving out the Roman conquerors and re-establishing a free and powerful Jewish state. Some thought perhaps the Messiah would be a superhuman figure, an angelic warrior. Others thought he might be a freedom-fighter like the Maccabeans who had freed Judaea from Greek rule a century or so earlier. Many thought that the Messiah would be a warrior-king in the line of David, and that’s what all the references to the King of the Jews are about in our reading. Mark’s Jesus is deeply concerned to stop any of that sort of thinking: he was not the Messiah of a Theology of Glory.
For Mark, it is simply too early to identify Jesus before Calvary. If we start using the language of Messiah or Christ before the Cross, we’ll only be talking about our own dreams, the sort of God we create in our own image. Mark’s message is brutally stark: if you want to talk about God’s Chosen One, behold the tortured and dead body of this executed man.
In our Gospel reading, the Jews’ obsession with the idea of the Messiah as the King of the Jews is seen as empty folly. Mocked by the Romans, in the end it becomes an obstacle to the Jews’ recognition of the true Messiah. It even blocks their ears, so that they mis-hear His last words. I don’t think we are supposed to feel smug about this: that we know, where they didn’t. Instead, I think Mark intends us to understand that he is challenging us: are we also constructing a Messiah of our own choosing, one to comfort us, to reinforce our biases, to make us feel special because He’s on ‘our’ side? Mark is inviting us to confess: what expectations of our own come between us and the real Christ? What obsessions cause us to mis-hear his words to us?
For me at least, such questions get very close to the bone. All those songs we sing about power and majesty, about ‘casting our crowns before Him’ and seeing Him enthroned on high. That great window above us which shows Christ as ruler of the heavens. I feel Mark’s sharp finger in my ribs, making me squirm over my use of that sort of theology.
And then the one who has no reason to recognise him enters the scene, the Roman centurion. Entirely ignorant of all the Jewish traditions about the Messiah, in his own language he immediately sees the truth. That’s another dig from Mark – who is this outsider who can look at a corpse and recognise the Son of God? What might ‘our’ outsiders be able to see in Christ that we can’t? What might the violent drunks on our streets, the aggressive atheists, the members of other faiths, see in Him if only we were able to show them even just His corpse? What truths might they tell us about His true identity?
Mark then both tells us who Christ is and makes it clear that this is only the beginning of an answer. Like the centurion, we will need to find His name in the language of our own hearts, not the terminology of our fantasies. Like the disciples, we need to hear Him named by outsiders and to learn from them who He is. But for now, until those moments of grace and revelation, the most we can know about Him is that God’s chosen one appears in failure, in loss.
And this failure and loss is total. The last words Christ speaks before His death are words of utter desolation: My God, My God, why have you deserted me? This man, who has been consumed by the fire of God for years, who has endured the threats of hostile crowds, physical hardship and danger, who has borne the inability of his family and neighbours to understand him, and faced the terrors of the demon-haunted desert; this man who came to Jerusalem so well aware of what might come – in this ordeal He is stripped of everything. His suffering is not just intense and prolonged physical torment, but spiritual despair, the loss of faith and hope.
Mark knew that the Christian life could contain moments of absolute desolation, moments when it seems that God has utterly deserted us. His own community knew moments like these, and we ought to admit that some of us know them too. This too is part of the human experience which Christ took on for us. This is the crucifixion of the self that Jesus talks about, the point at which absolutely everything that we believe in is put at risk.
Death, loss, and failure. Obsessions which obstruct understanding; the outsider who understands best of all. That is Mark’s account of the Cross; but then of course there is Easter Sunday, the third day. And Mark is shocking here too, in how little he has to say about it. His Gospel ends with the Easter proclamation: we are told that Christ is risen, but no more. No stories of what it was like when people met him. No accounts of the risen Christ appearing, eating, or teaching. Some people have found this ending so puzzling and even offensive that they have assumed that there was an ending which included this, and it has just got lost. The ‘lost’ part has then been supplied, reading it off more or less from what Matthew and Luke say.
But I think Mark really does end at the Empty Tomb, and this too is what he has to say about the Cross. The Cross is the last coherent thing that we can talk about. When you tell the story of Christ, you can only ever enter into the glory of Easter Sunday through the doorway of the cross and the grave. The angel tells Mary, Mary and Salome: He is not here. Desolation is transfigured. His followers’ expectations of Him could not encompass Him; neither can death. He cannot be contained; He is not here.
We can put into words the glad good news that the grave is empty, but after that it is mystery. No one can tell us what it is like to meet the risen Christ – they can tell us about the empty tomb, but we won’t find Him there. He has gone before. We will find Him waiting for us, wanting us to meet Him, appearing to each one of us in ways undreamt of. |
