Mark 15:33-39 Darkness Descends Darkness descends upon the earth, like the darkness before the world was made, and Jesus cries out this despairing cry of abandonment. It is the victory of evil as those who would destroy Jesus at last have their; it is the very time of demons as the hellish army now returns vengeance upon the One who throughout his ministry had cast them out from their comfortable human homes. Now is sin s conquest of good. Now, Rome and Jerusalem, government and religion, have bonded with hell, and at last, victory over God is assured. At this moment, with these words, Jesus comes to the point of ultimate suffering: perfect physical pain, and fear, and separation from his own identity, and after he cries out, Why have you forsaken me? the Son of God, who spoke the universe into existence, has no words left. He lets out the final, unspeakable cry, and now, the last blasphemy: God is dead. So many elements of the story of the crucifixion in the four canonical gospels are similar and some exactly alike, but nothing tells of the individual author s point of view and theology and literary intent as the differences at this point in the story of the Messiah. And the most distinct of all are the seven sayings of Jesus from the cross. John gives us three sayings unique to his gospel; Luke, as well, has three, found nowhere else. Only Matthew and Mark share one of the
sayings, and it is the only one they recount, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But I think these two gospels have two very different intentions even as they portray Jesus crying out in the darkness. Mark shows us a forlorn Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, already betrayed by one of his friends, misunderstood by family, deserted by his closest followers, and now, at the ultimate momentultimate in both senses of the word- his final moment, and his moment of purpose; now at his ultimate moment, even God forsakes him. This, not to place blame on God, but to show the absolute dereliction of Jesus final hours; to show the terror and utter depth of the suffering of the Messiah. For the writer of Mark, the way of discipleship is the way of suffering, and the Messiah can demand that harsh path of his followers because he himself walked it, and bore the awful weight of suffering, even felt the full pain of the cross without taking the narcotic drink the women of Jerusalem commonly brewed for those condemned to die on the cross. Bore that suffering to the gaping depths of nothingness, non-existence where no light is, no hope is, where even God is not. And there is no place where God is not. Except with his Son on the cross that dark Good Friday. Mark shows us Jesus silently bearing the pain through the scourging and the bleeding, the mocking, the hanging, and the cramping, and the terrible gasping
agony of breathing, and the eclipse of the light in the sky. Silent, until he senses God his Father leave him, and he cries out in his native tongue, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani! Matthew has Jesus words in a perfect quote from Psalm 22 in the Hebrew Bible, but in Mark, the emptiness and horror cause Jesus to cry out in Aramaic, desperate and bewildered. What demons confronted him as God withdrew? What terrors did he behold? When we face danger we want some sort of defense, even if it is only the blankets at night over our heads after a bad dream, or scary movie. Yet he was utterly vulnerable- naked and nearly dead, hanging off the ground, and hell opened up before him- the darkness, and separation, and sulfur, and fire, and damnation, and he couldn t even cover his eyes from the sight of it. I have heard sermons about the pain of Jesus on the cross. And so have you, I m sure. And it must have been beyond anything we can imagine. But the gospel story is not in his pain alone. His fear in the garden of Gethsemane is not about the pain. But sometimes, though rarely, a speaker or writer will tell of his forsakenness on the cross- when God withdrew, and the burden of sin and guilt, all the hate and violence of all the peoples and tribes and nations in all ages, all the
evil done to others, all the cruelty done in the name of God, bore down upon this solitary great heart. And he gave a loud cry and expired. Usually, we are reticent to consider that God the Father could forsake his Son. God cannot forsake, can he? Of course, he cannot; God will not desert us ever, because God has deserted himself. God broke the first rule of selfpreservation so that he would never forsake us, so that nothing could ever drive God from us. But this affirmation, certainly an important and blessed and hopeful affirmation, is for another time. For now, just like his disciples, we are left in darkness. We are left to ask, Why did he die? There is yet so much to learn from him, to try to understand; and we have to beg forgiveness for our petty attitudes and pride, and Jesus needs to be alive so that we can ask him. But now it is too late. It is dark, and it feels like it will never be light again; now we are bereft of comfort and hope, and we are drifting, uncertain, fearful. Just like all the other failures in the world. A close study of the gospel of Mark will show us what it means to follow Jesus, the cost of discipleship; and we may come to understand that we have got it wrong all our lives, may come to understand that the church has got it wrong for
much of its existence. We may need to reconsider success and failure. And what it means to win. Like everyone else, Christians want to succeed, so we are more likely to talk about Easter faith than Good Friday faith. Our sermons are filled with victory in Jesus, and our hymnals, too, and our sanctuaries, and the bookstores, and our symbols. There is no doubt we have taken the degradation and humiliation and suffering out of the cross when we wear it in 14 karat and adorn it with diamonds and rubies, or stick it onto the bumpers of our cars, or denigrate others because they don t see it the way we do. But, really, how many people can relate to victorious Jesus as their world disintegrates into dust and memories, as the hell of loneliness or homelessness, despair and brokenness descend upon them. People are lost and desperate and fearful, searching for something immoveable. Aren t we all? But all too often people ask, and we give them the same answers. We give them the faulty church, or the glorious Christ with stained glass; and the church is just one more thing they don t need, and a Christ with a halo and a shimmering white robe is a thing they can t even envision. What the world does need, and what people can relate to, and what we ourselves must come to grips with, and what we must proclaim with words and lives, is the suffering Messiah, the Son of God on the cross, who this dark day dies.
What terrors do the people of the world face, who have not God as their shield and help? The same terrors, perhaps, that confront us, save that we have the hope of a loving Savior. So often, though, this hope we carry without the burden of suffering with Jesus, and so we forget the fear they face. But out there is noise, and hurt, and death, and unknowing, and being wronged. The people of the world understand what, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me means, because the world looks godless to them, and they feel alone in it. But here is One who knows what they see and feel and experience, because he was forsaken on a cross. And we need to take this Jesus out there to them. One person got it right, of all the people that day. The disciples fled, they didn t find out what it meant to confess that Jesus was the Christ. The priests walked by wagging their heads at him, mocking him; Pilate had him crucified to keep the peace in Jerusalem; the bystanders thought he was calling to Elijah for help. But the centurion understood. He said, Truly this man was the Son of God. And all that we may read about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, from the very first verse of Mark s gospel has come to fulfillment in the words of an outsider, someone who should not know. The centurion is one of those out there, he is not one of us. He hasn t worshipped God all his life, like we have; he is an
interloper, where does he get the nerve to confess the Messiah? But then, where do we get the nerve to confess Jesus the Messiah, if we have not seen him suffer and die, and have not suffered ourselves, and have not faced the emptiness, and lost everything with him? It may be that the message of Good Friday is that we have failed. The one person we thought would lead us to certainty, to great things, to a big bright church, full of eager happy people, has died. Is that, then, where he is truly leading us? Is personal or ecclesiastical success the intent of the cross? Jesus died alone, deserted even by God. What should that mean to us who love and worship him and wish to follow after him? So we come to the end of this little series, the seven saying from the cross, and next week, Easter, and resurrection and victory. These sayings of our Lord may be words that express deepest despair, or utter dependence upon God, or may show the greatest compassion and forgiveness we can imagine. They are sayings that illuminate the crucifixion and help us to understand the man on the cross. They are sayings that bring us face to face with God in the man Jesus, and force us to face the questions about ourselves.
The church has always understood this one constant thing about the crosshas always confessed that he went to the cross for us. So, when we are confronted by the cross, we must find an answer to this question: if he has done this for us, what will we do for him?