The Silence of Suffering 

March 30, 2018

Helen Jacobi

Good Friday     Mark 15

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The Mark version of the crucifixion story is stark. 

It is the first version to be recorded. 

It has Mark’s signature style of simplicity and focus. 

No words wasted. 

No analysis and theologizing.

Yet the clash of worlds and power is there for all to see.

On one side human power – represented by the palace, the governor’s headquarters; the whole cohort of soldiers; the purple cloak which is a sign of royalty, and the crown of thorns; Jesus is labelled King of the Jews, or King of the Judeans (which has a more political ring to it) and the soldiers pay homage to him. Mark’s community are to be in no doubt that this was a political execution. Jesus is crucified between two bandits, not “robbers” as is sometimes translated. These are not thieves who break into your house; these are bandits – armed rebels who steal and plunder from those in power. [1]  This is the same word Jesus uses when he throws the moneychangers out of the Temple – “you have made it into a den of robbers”; you are just like the bandits roaming our roads. (Mark 11:17).

Then there is religious power – those who pass by mock him and remind him that he said he would destroy the temple and build it in three days; 

the chief priests have the upper hand now. They will protect their Temple. 

After Jesus dies the curtain of the Temple is torn in two. This was the curtain that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple. 

Only the high priest was allowed to go behind the curtain which was where the ark of the covenant was kept – God himself was thought to dwell there. The curtain is torn from top to bottom – not by human hands.

And the account finishes with Joseph of Arimathea going to Pilate to ask for the body – just to remind us about Pilate again – and political power.

Political and religious power triumph.

Rowan Williams says “Good Friday presents us with a stark duality – human power revealed as hostile to meaning and hope, and divine meaning and hope exposed as completely vulnerable to human power.” [2]

It seems human power has triumphed.

In the middle of Mark’s account the political language pauses and we hear that complete and utter vulnerability: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mark has darkness cover the land to emphasise this darkest of hours. There is nothing left. The politics don’t matter.

The religious debates don’t matter. All is lost.

Jesus is alone and forsaken.

Like a mother holding her dying child; like a refugee in Syria with no food, a father who cannot feed his children; like a child cowering in a school cupboard as another shooter is on the rampage in the US.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

“divine meaning and hope exposed as completely vulnerable to human power.” [3]

Gospel writers Matthew and Mark include the words “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”; Luke and John do not – edited out maybe because they are too stark; too alone. 

And yet I think these words are the heart of today, Good Friday.

They tell us that God does not flinch from pain, our pain, it is real, it is not pretend.

One of the early heresies of the church was that Jesus did not really die – he somehow slipped away. Mark has Pilate double check with the centurion that Jesus is really dead – yes he is dead. 

“divine meaning and hope exposed as completely vulnerable to human power.” [4]

Why we ask? What was the reason for all of this? Some grand plan?

Remember the gospel writers are writing after the fact. 

They know about the resurrection, and they aren’t writing history as we would understand it, so we need to be careful of the words of “prediction” that are put in Jesus mouth –  eg Mark 10:32 “they will mock him and spit upon him and kill him and in three days he will rise again”.

Jesus in the moment on Good Friday is dying and he does feel completely forsaken. This is not pretend suffering.  

Rowan Williams says all we can then do is to keep silent before the cross. 

He says all there is “is our own stillness, learning to look death in the face” [5].

We look at death, and because we find God there then we are not afraid.

It is not that we do not suffer, we do.

It is not that we do not feel our pain and the pain of others, we do.

But we are not afraid.

Rowan Williams again – the cross “is the darkness in which God is allowed to be God, in which the world descending into inner chaos, returns to the very moment of creation, when God speaks into the darkness. 

Our silence, our acceptance of the death of creation in the death of Jesus, makes room for the word that recreates the broken world.” [6]

[1]Greek word is lestes/ lestai “Bandit was the generic term for any rebel or insurrectionist who employed armed violence against Rome or the Jewish collaborators.” Reza Aslan Zealot p18

[2]Rowan Williams “The Shadow of the Crucifix” in Darkness Yielding ed Jim Cotter et al 

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