The Hope of Glory by Jon Meacham

Author:Jon Meacham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

Jesus’s cry on the cross about being forsaken by the Father raises intriguing questions. If, as the faithful suppose—and as the gospels, in their Passion predictions, insist—Jesus was fully briefed on his earthly mission, then how could his cry be taken literally? Why ask whether God has forsaken him? Why cry in pain when he must have known that resurrection lay ahead?

We don’t know. What we can say is this: Mark and Matthew have already told us that, at Gethsemane, Jesus asked that the cup pass from him but that the Father’s will, not the Son’s, should be done. In Mark and Matthew, then, Jesus is more of a tragic character than in Luke or John (which do not include the “My God, my God” word from the cross).

To me, this more human Jesus is a compelling figure, and I suspect Mark and Matthew thought so, too. By portraying him as one who would cry out in pain and in anguish, they make him more accessible, more understandable, more like us. The interpretative issue, the Roman Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown wrote, “is whether the struggle with evil will lead to victory; and Jesus is portrayed as profoundly discouraged at the end of his long battle because God, to whose will Jesus committed himself at the beginning of the Passion, has not intervened in the struggle and seemingly has left Jesus unsupported….Jesus cries out, hoping that God will break through the alienation he has felt.” As a people whose lives are frequently defined by feelings of alienation—from one another and from the Creator—we recognize in Jesus what we ourselves suffer, thus drawing closer to the truth of the cross.

And that truth is grounded in history, for whatever we might think of the accuracy of the Last Words or of the sundry details of the crucifixion, we can safely say that Jesus of Nazareth really did suffer and really did die on a Roman cross. Such (along with the empty tomb) was the primary teaching of the oldest New Testament traditions—traditions that gave life and energy to the church that we know even now.

If he did not suffer, if he did not bleed, if he did not feel every bit of the pain of execution as he gulped for air, then he would not be the Christ we know. He was fulfilling his epochal role in history on that cross; he was not playacting, not a god pretending to die. He was the Word made flesh, who was, however strangely and incomprehensibly, full of grace and truth.

There is that word again, the word we first heard in the interview with Pilate: “truth.” The Greek meaning of the term both from Pilate’s lips and in the prologue of Saint John’s Gospel is “unconcealed,” or “real,” as opposed to that which is mendacious or misleading.

The cry about being forsaken is as moving a moment as we find in the gospels, or in any work of ancient literature. It is important, too, for us to note that, read in its entirety, Psalm 22 is a journey from despair to hope.

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