The Greatest Good News

The Greatest Good News

September 6, 2020

 Mark 15:33-39

Mark is probably the least loved of the four canonical Gospels. It is terse and short on details. It doesn’t have most people’s favorite Gospel stories or sayings. At its end Jesus suffers horribly and from the cross cries out in utter despair. It would be even less popular than it is if it still ended the way it almost certainly did originally. It originally ended at Mark 16:8, which has the women who discover the empty tomb fleeing in terror and telling no one anything about what they had seen. The resurrection appearance stories that follow were almost certainly added later. Conservative Christians (the term is an oxymoron, but never mind) love John. Progressive Christians love Luke. The Roman Catholic Church bases itself on a passage in Matthew. No one much loves Mark, no one that is except me.

Yes, except me. I love Mark not exclusively but largely because it contains two events that are absolutely foundational for my personal Christian faith. They could be foundational for many people’s Christian faith if people understood them better. They are what is called the “cry of dereliction” at Mark 15:34 and the tearing of the curtain of the temple at the moment of Jesus’ death at Mark 15:38. I want here to tell you why these two passages are so important to me. I’ll consider them in the order in which they appear in Mark.

In chapter 15 of Mark Jesus is crucified. In its typical fashion Mark gives no details. The Gospel’s full account of the Crucifixion of Christ reads, “And they crucified him….” Mark 15:24a. Mark gets a lot more interesting after that cursory announcement of one of the central events of the Christian faith. We’re told how people taunted Jesus on the cross, challenging him to come down from there. That’s something he couldn’t do of course and more than any other crucified person could. We’re told that they crucified him at 9:00 am. At noon darkness descended  upon the earth until 3:00 pm. By 3:00 pm Jesus has been suffering on the cross for six hours. That’s not long as crucifixions usually went, but though Mark gives no details it’s easy enough to imagine how horrible it was to be nailed to a cross and left to die. Frankly except for its theological significance I don’t even want to think about it.

They we come to the first of the two parts of Mark’s story that I want to talk about here, the cry of dereliction. Mark 15:34 reads, “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?” It is a soul-shattering reproach of God. Jesus dies on the cross convinced that the God he thought he knew, to whom he had devoted his whole life, and on account of whom he was now dying had abandoned him in his hour of greatest need. Jesus dies alone with no God to comfort him or give him hope for what lies beyond death. Yes, three times earlier in Mark he has predicted his resurrection, but as he dies on the cross he truly seems to have forgotten all that. He dies shattered, Deserted. Hopeless. Mark’s version of Jesus’ death is a story of a very human Jesus suffering horribly and dying as an executed criminal. It is indeed a soul shattering account.

Christians have had to make sense out of Jesus’ death ever since. You have probably heard the common way that Christianity ascribes meaning to Jesus’ suffering and death. You’ve probably heard that what’s happening here is that Jesus, the Son of God Incarnate, is suffering and dying to pay the price that had to be paid to God before God could or would forgive human sin. I consider that interpretation of Jesus’ suffering and death to be horrible theology, yet it is something that has nearly swallowed Christianity whole. It is something we must set aside and move beyond if we are going to save Christianity in our context. I won’t here go into everything that’s wrong with this theory, which is usually called the classical theory of atonement. I’ll just direct you the Chapter 8 of my book Liberating Christianity, where I critique it at some length.[1] Here I will give you what I believe to be a much more compelling explanation of the meaning of Jesus’ suffering and death.[2]

It’s called theology of the cross. It’s a somewhat unfortunate name because the classical atonement theory is also a theology of the cross as is the Christus Viktor theory that is the major one found in the New Testament.[3] But that’s what it’s called, so theology of the cross it is. The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who has given the theory its fullest modern exposition, has called it “a not much loved” minority voice in the Christian tradition. It has roots in the theology of St. Paul. Luther rather liked it. He gave it the name theologia crucis, Latin for theology of the cross. Its most sophisticated modern presentation, albeit one that is rather hard to follow, is from the aforementioned Jürgen Moltmann in his book The Crucified God.[4] Moltmann is an emeritus German professor of academic theology. For some reason German academic theologians seem to think there’s some virtue in being difficult or impossible to understand. In any event, here’s a brief account of theology of the cross.

Theology of the cross begins with the understanding that what we see in Jesus on the cross is both a fully human man and much more than a man at the same time. On the cross we see both Jesus of Nazareth and God the Son Incarnate. There’s a reason Moltmann called his book The Crucified God. In Jesus of Nazareth the Romans did nothing less than crucify God. Jesus suffers on the cross. So does God. Jesus utters the cry of dereliction. So does God. Jesus dies on the cross. So does God. That last assertion is one theologians have tried to avoid for centuries whatever their understanding of the meaning of Christ’s death has been by saying that only Jesus’ human nature suffered and died on the cross. For reasons that I trust will become clear anon I soundly reject that contention. So does Moltmann.

Because the Jesus on the cross is both fully human and fully divine what we see in Jesus on the cross is God in God’s own being experiencing the worst that human life can do to a person. In Jesus on the cross God experiences unjust prosecution, torture, and execution. In Jesus on the cross God experiences being mocked as Jesus is mocked. God feels excruciating physical pain as Jesus feels excruciating physical pain. Moltmann says that in Jesus on the cross God the Father experienced the death of God’s son, the untimely death of a child being perhaps the most excruciating thing humans suffer. Most paradoxically as Jesus experiences being Godforsaken God experiences being Godforsaken.

In all of these ways in Jesus on the cross God enters into the devastating human experiences that Jesus underwent, and that makes all the difference. That’s because in Jesus on the cross we see that God is present with us not only in the best of times but in the worst of times. It is a great paradox, but in Jesus on the cross we see that God is present with us even when we are convinced as Jesus was that God is not present with us at all.[5] In Jesus on the cross we see that there is nothing that can happen to us that God does enter with us and share with us. In Jesus on the cross God sanctifies all of human life through God’s presence with us in our human lives. In Jesus on the cross we know that we are never alone. God is with us always. God has experienced what we experience, and that makes all the difference.

Let me tell you a story from my life to illustrate the point. In 2007 my twin brother Pete suffered a severe stroke as he was driving home from a rehearsal of the Tucson Symphony, with which he played violin. He was still alive when they got him to the hospital, but the doctors didn’t think he was going to survive. One of his sons called me at my home in Washington state to tell me what happened and to ask me to tell our father, who was still alive at the time living in Eugene, Oregon. My wife and I promptly drove to Eugene to tell dad what had happened. There was no way I was going to do that over the phone. After a day with dad I flew to Tucson to be with Pete and his family. By then they had decided that Pete would live, but he was in very bad shape.

When I got to Tucson Pete was still in the ICU of a local hospital. He had lost little or nothing cognitively, but he was confused and totally paralyzed on his left side. So much for playing the violin, music having been a major part of his life as a very successful public school orchestra conductor and violin teacher. His wife was a saint through it all, staying with him and caring for him as she still does today though Pete now must live in a care facility. Pete is my twin brother. I was grieving. I didn’t know what his life would be like from then on, but I knew it wouldn’t be easy. It hasn’t been.

Then on one of the days while I was in Tucson and Pete was still in the first of many hospitals and care facilities where he would be a patient I was sitting in the family room just outside the ICU where Pete’s room was. There was a crucifix on the wall, a cross with the body of Jesus Christ on it in the Catholic style. As I was sitting there feeling as bad as I’d felt since my first wife had died of cancer five years earlier I looked up at that crucifix. As I gazed at it I said to myself, “O yeah. You get it. You’ve been here—and worse.” It didn’t remove my grief, but it sure helped me bear it. I knew that I wasn’t alone and that Pete and his wife weren’t alone either. In seeing the body of Christ on that crucifix I knew that God was with them and with me. It made a huge difference for me.

That’s the power of theology of the cross. Traditional Christian atonement theory had nothing to offer me. I didn’t need forgiveness of sin. I needed to be held. I needed to be comforted. I needed to be reassured, and of course Pete needed those things more than I did. By 2007 I had already studied theology of the cross. I had already written the material on it that came out in Liberating Christianity a year later. I had comprehended it intellectually. In that ICU family room with the crucifix on the wall I didn’t just know theology of the cross, I experienced it. I lived it and lived into it. It made all the difference for me. It can make all the difference for you too.

Then there’s the second thing in the passage that we’re considering that I want to talk about here. It’s a little detail that most Christians overlook because they don’t understand it. Indeed for most of my life I overlooked it because I didn’t understand it. Here it is. At Mark 15:37-38 we read, “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” That little detail about the curtain of the temple being torn in two at the instant of Jesus’ death has immense significance. Let me explain.

What was the curtain of the temple? It wasn’t just a window covering. In the innermost part of the temple there was a space called the Holy of Holies. In the first Jerusalem temple that Solomon built in the tenth century BCE the Holy of Holies was where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. In  the second Jerusalem temple, built after the return from the Babylonian exile in the late sixth century BCE and expanded by King Herod the Great in the first century BCE, there was no Ark of the Covenant; but the Holy of Holies was still the most sacred place in all of Judaism. It was nothing less than the place where God lived. It was at the very least the place on earth where God was most immediately present. One of the purposes of all the animal and grain sacrifices that went on in the temple was to feed God, symbolically at least. The Holy of Holies was so sacred that only the high priest was allowed to enter it, and he entered it only once a year.

The Holy of Holies was separated from the rest of the temple not by a wall but by a curtain. The curtain marked the place where God was more present than God was anywhere else. It marked where people were not permitted to go. In a symbolic sense it separated the people from God. When Jesus died, speaking again symbolically not historically, that curtain of the temple was torn in two. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t happen as a matter of fact, though it didn’t. It happened in a much more powerful way than mere fact. Mark telling us that upon Jesus’ death the curtain of the temple was torn in two is a symbolic way of telling us that with Jesus’ death everything that separates us, or that we think separates us, from God is gone. There is no longer any barrier between us and God, not even the flimsy barrier of a curtain. Jesus’ death is the ultimate case of God entering into every aspect of human life, even death. The tearing of the temple curtain says to us that in Jesus dying on the cross we see God entering into and sharing every aspect of our lives and showing us that God is with us in absolutely everything that happens to us in life. That’s why the little detail about the curtain is so important.

These two stories are the greatest good news there ever was or ever could be. God is with us always and everywhere no matter what. Absolutely nothing separates us from God. It’s not so much that anything ever really did, but in Jesus on the cross and in the tearing of the curtain we can see and truly know that nothing separates us from God. Let all the people say, “Thanks be to God!” Amen.

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[1] Thomas C. Sorenson, Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to the Faith in the New Millennium, (Eugene, Oregon, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2008), Chapter 8, “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement,” 91-108.

[2] For a longer discussion of the theology I’m about to give here see Sorenson, Liberating Christianity, op. cit., Chapter 9, “The Meaning of the Cross: The Demonstration of God’s Solidarity,” 110-124.

[3] The Christus Viktor theory, also called the ransom theory, says that a price had to be paid before humanity could be released from sin, but it says the price has to be paid to the devil, who held humanity captive in sin, not to God and the classical theory of atonement says.

[4] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. It was originally published in 1972. Various editions of it are available today. For a more accessible  presentation of theology of the cross see Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context, Jesus and the Suffering World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 2003).

[5] Don’t let the fact that we’re dealing with paradox here disturb you. All profound truth is paradoxical. I’ve often told people that if someone is telling you something they claim is spiritually true and you can’t find the paradox in it, be very suspicious.