Good Friday (Mark 15)
Neil Millar
A lot has happened in the story since last evening. According to Mark, after his betrayal and arrest in the Garden, when his disciples fled, Jesus was taken to the high priest’s house for ‘questioning’ by a coterie of priests, elders, and scribes. Their enquiries were vicious and relentless, with ‘many gave false testimony against him’. After a cruel and gruelling session, they pronounced him deserving of death, and ‘some began to spit on him’. They blindfolded, and struck, and ridiculed him, urging him to prophesy. When they’d finished their sport, they handed him over to the guards who also beat him. As soon as it was morning, as we heard, he was bound and handed over to Pilate before whom he was, once more, accused of ‘many things’.
There came a brief possibility of reprieve – when Pilate (not convinced by their story, and seeing through their motives) offered to release a prisoner. ‘Do you want me to release for you the king of the Jews?’ he said. That possibility was snuffed out in a flash – the crowd being convinced to cry for Barabbas’ release instead; to bay for Jesus’ blood.
Once more he was handed over, flogged, and then dragged off to be crucified; abandoned and reviled.
It’s a nightmare story. And it’s hard to know exactly how it could happen?? Jewish law would have condemned outright the slapdash midnight trial, and Roman governors just did not offer to release prisoners like this. But Mark is telling the story from the perspective of its victim, and when victims of totalitarian tyranny tell their stories, they sound very much like this. No one explains or justifies what’s going on; false witness, brutality, and arbitrary process abound. It’s a world of clanging doors, naked light globes, with brief flashes of tormentors’ faces; there’s no time to think, or make sense. It’s a world captured in the chilling fiction of Franz Kafka, and Rowan Williams suggests: ‘Perhaps we understand Mark a little better if we recognize the echoes of Kafka’s account of what it is like to be locked into the workings of a meaningless, nonsensical, but completely irresistible system of power, devoted to your destruction’.
Even so, two things stand out.
The first – it’s in the midst of this nightmarish sequence, that Jesus declares unmistakably, unambiguously who he is. A feature of this gospel so far, is that Jesus cautions those who recognise him not to reveal his identity – it’s sometimes called ‘the Messianic secret’. Time and time again, those who are healed, the demons who are cast out, are told to ‘say nothing to anyone’ (e.g. Mark 1: 44). Jesus doesn’t want to be identified because he doesn’t want to be known simply as a miracle worker; doesn’t want his (divine) power to be misunderstood; conceived of as dominating, controlling, wand-waving, magical.
But now, here, there’s no danger of that. And so, when the high priest asks, ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed?’ (14: 61) he replies: ‘I am’. For the first time in this gospel, he allows the secret to be revealed. Writes Williams: ‘The placing of this claim, this breaking of silence, is all-important. It is when Jesus is stripped of all hope, all power, when he stands alone in the middle of this meaningless nightmare, with no hope of life, it is then and only then that he declares who he is. And he does so in words that evoke the Divine Name itself’, the name God used to identify himself to Moses, way back in Exodus 3 – I AM.
And what this means, second, is that God is not who they imagined, or wanted God to be.
All along, Jesus’ disciples, and the crowds who followed, have been looking for a God to improve the odds – restore their national pride, restore their health and wealth, gratify their longings for power and security. But that God does not appear; that God, it turns out, is an idol. And after this declaration, I AM … silence … as if only in silence and by silence, only ‘by this failure of all that has been fantasized and longed for can he at last “say” what is to be said’. It’s as if ‘the silence of his dying is the only rhetoric for his gospel’, writes Rowan Williams; the only way of saying what needs to be said, the only way the truth of God can truly be communicated.
And so, there you have it – God, the Creator of the universe, ‘I Am’; hanging discarded, rejected, on a cross; a nonsense to all our projections … God, the self-giving lover, utterly identified with the outcast of the earth – the despised, the shamed, the wretched, the lowly …
So, what’s it like to belong to this God? To be one with God, as Jesus is?
To begin, it’s a relief, for with this God, there is acceptance, no matter who we are or what we’ve done. With this God there is welcome, in the darkest moment of life. It’s a relief, and hard. Hard, because it’s so contrary to us to embody this loving solidarity in the midst of a fearful and mostly uncomprehending world. Hard to believe that it changes anything, makes even the slightest difference. Hard to give up the fantasy of rescue, and to consent to such exposure … ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Hard because it goes so against the grain of our self-protective instincts.
Yet faith proclaims that this apparently powerless, self-emptied love poured out is the very life of the world … the source of creation, the means of redemption … Proclaims that, despite everything, despite suffering violence and death, this life is, even so, unquenchable, unkillable…
To wait at the foot of the cross is to gaze upon this mystery; and more than that, is to open ourselves to be changed by it; as our lives are joined to the heart of the crucified – the very heart of God. Amen.