“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34).
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The silence of God has always been a raw human problem in times of suffering.
In the face of a compassionate and merciful but also just God, heartbreaking affliction of innocent people cannot be explained lightly. Just as Jesus’ appalling suffering in the hands of his enemies represented senseless human suffering, his haunting cry from the cross uttered the lament of the innocent and suffering humanity against the silence of God: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” How does Mark’s Gospel help us understand God’s silence as Jesus is unjustly subjected to excruciating suffering on the cross?
From the opening words of the Gospel, Mark sets the stage for the readers to develop a holistic answer to God’s silence. He announces his writing as Good News, so that though the way may be hard, even God’s silence at the height of Jesus’ suffering is part of the news which is “good” for humanity. For it is all about the Messiah, the Son of God, whose identity God personally guaranteed at the River Jordan, and for whom God’s love is personally assured by God (1:11). This divine love is agape love – perfect, unconditional, sacrificial, pure, constant and faithful. From the start, then, Mark as good as announces that come what may, the Father would never abandon the Son. Indeed, when the Son first struggles with Satan in his wilderness temptation, the readers learn that the Father has His angels to minister to him (1:13). On his part, as he emerges from the wilderness, Jesus’ heart is decisively set on the mission of preaching and living the kingdom of God (1:14). But, as the inaugurator of God’s reign, Jesus’ mission is also bound to meet with severe resistance in a world set on a different track. At the Transfiguration, as Jesus’ ministry begins to move towards its climax in Jerusalem, God reiterates his Sonship. Mark is clear enough: God the Father would always be present, particularly in the Son’s suffering. Jesus was never abandoned by his Father, for he was continuously and unfailingly supported by God throughout his life, death and resurrection.
Mark leaves ample pointers indicative that in silence, God speaks loudly. Calvary was not “nothing but darkness”, Jesus’ violent death was not all negativities, and God was not absent throughout Jesus’ ordeal and would not act at all[1] – quite the contrary. Three points in particular, among others, must feature high on our choice of pointers: (i) Jesus’ orientation to God; (ii) the necessity of messianic suffering; and (iii) a suffering God.
First of all, God’s silence creates space for Jesus’ free exercise of his human freedom.
God respects human freedom – that primary gift from God who made human beings in His image and likeness. To say that, is at the same time to assert that God is faithful to His creation. So first and foremost, God’s silence speaks loudly about the immense respect God has for the exercise of human free will. The problem of course is that humanity has abused its freedom and has always been recalcitrant. Since the Fall, God’s good creation had turned bad upon human abuse of freedom in disobeying the vision of God for human creatures (Gen 1-3). Instigated by the evil one, human beings have forgotten their creatureliness;[2] rebellion against the reign and wishes of the Creator led to estrangement.[3] Alienated from God, sinful humanity was destined to be death-bound and to die estranged from God, unless the sin-pattern in the world was interrupted, the original good creation restored, and a faithful life with God renewed. “God loved the world so much that He gave His Only Son” (Jn 3:16) to show the world a different way to live, and to save it from this death-bound recalcitrant sin-behaviour. In freedom, Jesus considered what was worth dying for is the “new people” as God’s “new creation” in God’s kingdom.[4] This required of the Son to at all costs freely and willingly orientate towards God in all things; he must love God and humanity perfectly, and to the end, with a love that will not let go. On His part, God has to yield space for the Son to do so. God’s silence testified to his respect for Jesus’ exercise of his free will to stay faithful to his mission.
In His silence, then, God painfully watched the Son who, acting in service of God and humanity, was on this painful exodus from the dreadful human pattern of sin and violence. And in that silent watch, God gave consent (like “silence means consent”) to the Son who came into the world to do God’s will (see Heb 10:5-7). God who loved us first, has given us the power to love. Love is self-giving, self-offering, self-sacrificing; self-emptying (kenotic) (Phil 2:6-11). There is no love without suffering. Pain is the price we pay for love. Parents know that experientially. In His silence, God was saying yes to the logic of love that wanted to save humanity and die for us even while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). God, in other words, said yes to the excruciating way of the cross that in love Jesus walked. Silently, and painfully, God allowed Jesus’ way of the cross to run its course. The Father and the Son are united in the knowledge that the best is only bought at the cost of great pain.
God has accepted that for Jesus to interrupt humanity’s death-bound sin-pattern, his struggle, however excruciating, must proceed without His mitigation. Both God and Christ must love to the very end, however painful, however excruciating to keep silent. The Son must be allowed to do his work to the end, to suffer to the end, even in silence. For once, since the Adamic Fall, the reorientation of human freedom to God did run its full course. The death of Jesus is that perfect reorientation of human freedom to God. Mark shows that Jesus was able to do it because he offered service to God and humanity by giving himself “in his full humanity,” “in sublime simplicity and uncalculating generosity,” and “in utter freedom and unconditionally,” to the Father and fellow human beings. In doing so, he manifested the true identity, the true purpose in life, and the true security in life that sinning humanity has lost. Jesus thus became the expression in the world of God’s “creative and redemptive Word,”[5] for by his death, we are recreated anew (2 Cor 5:17) – a new “Adam” (creature made of earth) is born. Death hurts. But the death of Jesus is also the door to a good new creation, a new beginning. God knew that death was not the end, even though darkness and nothingness apparently prevailed all around at the height of Jesus’ suffering. God knew that Jesus’ Passion would launch a new life. God’s tortured silence was in aid of that.
This is where the thought and language of Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner is most helpful. He packs deep insight in linking the cross of Jesus as a true exercise of human freedom to the crucial acceptance of God’s vision for the world. God gives self-offering love to the world. There must be human openness and human response to this love. God’s vision for humanity is a healthy relationship with God and others under the active principle of love so that His primary command is to love God and love neighbour constantly and in a perfect way. We are made with the freedom to accept God’s love and to promote or neglect it in the world. The more we are open to God and the Gospel, the more human and free we become. To love entails making sacrifices, to carry one’s cross. For the love of humanity, Jesus took it as his mission to offer that sin-interruption by freely sacrificing himself on the cross. In the actual situation in which Jesus was in, that included a willing absorption of utter humiliation, extreme torture and death as an innocent man. The right way to accept the cross is to do so in peace and non-violence and to refuse to return violence with violence. Both Father and Son did just that. In doing so, the Markan Jesus tangibly shows humanity that the right exercise of human freedom, especially in situations of severe human suffering, always involves a struggle with the silent God. On his part, Jesus was determined to and has in principle turned the human sinful condition around, “making a new beginning, restoring the image of God, paying the price or ransom in this metaphoric sense, in such a way that he is able to incorporate all human beings into his own stance of openness to God and others.”[6]
The Gospel of Mark offers the vision of that irreversible point where the history of God’s self-offering meets with its free acceptance in the world. Jesus stood precisely at that point. Jesus lived a human life so authentic and acceptable to God that God accepts the world to a point where Rahner says He can no longer let it go. In Jesus then, God is pleased to receive “that gift of creaturely freedom in which this freedom of the world definitely accepts God’s offering of Godself.” This is the definitive contribution of Jesus the true man. He is the one person who, from the depth of his interiority, lived a human existence that signifies the definitive wishes of God to the world, and at the same time the assent of the world to this God. Jesus is the one who “surrenders every inner-worldly future in death,” and who is thereby “accepted by God finally and definitively”[7]. His complete surrender of life to God reached fulfillment which became historically tangible precisely in the resurrection, where the silent God spoke loudly to the world by raising Jesus from the dead.
Thus, secondly, the silence of God at Calvary reflects the “necessity” of Jesus’ suffering death.
We can now answer the question “Did Jesus have to suffer and die?” affirmatively, just as the sacred texts insist repeatedly that the crucifixion had to be. Recall the reproach to the disciples on the road to Emmaus: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (Lk 24:26). Jesus’ triple passion-predictions spoke in similar tones: The Son of man must suffer torture, be killed, and after three days rise again (Mk 8:31; 9:31; 10:34). St Paul struck the same note of necessity: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3). So from the event of Calvary, the early Christians discerned much more than cruel killing and violent end to Jesus’ life, but accepted as well that somehow in the divine plan of salvation it needed to be so. A backward glance at the ancient scriptures convinced them that Jesus came to this world as the unwearied servant of humanity’s necessity. He “took our infirmities, and bore our sicknesses” (Isaiah 53:4) that he might minister to humanity in dire needs. It was his mission to bring to humanity complete restoration, paying the ultimate price of a humiliating and painful death.
Early Christians thus saw two factors at work at Calvary: first, human malice made Jesus’ suffering and death inevitable; second, Jesus’ own unswerving fidelity to his mission and the service of others inevitably brought him into conflict with the ruling classes, a conflict he was humanly bound to lose. Calvary became the inevitable consequence of a commitment which he refused to abandon even at the cost of his life.[8] In this regard, God’s silence is consistent with the divine plan of salvation.
Mark’s readers of the time, particularly those suffering from persecution in Rome, needed to appreciate that human perseverance in free surrender to God, as Jesus has done, does not spare one from suffering. Pain is part of the Christian path. They needed to hear clearly that Jesus loved to the end, with a love that would not let go, despite atrocious suffering. Seeking to mitigate Jesus’ suffering implicit in questioning God’s silence does not do justice to the necessary combination of Jesus’ passion and the cross on the one hand, and the excruciating emotions inevitable in dire human suffering on the other. To mitigate his suffering would only seriously de-humanise Jesus and stifle his authentic exercise of authentic human freedom.[9]
Mark thus shows that God’s silence counters a miracle faith and demands discipleship. Any direct revelation or direct intervention would lead only to a miracle-faith such as even the demons possess. Instead, to help break the sin-pattern in recalcitrant humanity, God has to take the way of death “in obscurity, in disgrace and in humility.” Jesus’ cry of lamentation and dying with a loud cry were clear pointers that there was no easy way or quick relief. Mark strenuously underscores the hard truth that “discipleship is the only form in which faith can exist”[10]. “Take up your cross and follow me” (8:34), the Markan Jesus intones. Mark’s story then concludes the way it started, as the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Jesus the suffering Son of God, the angel announced, was no longer among the dead (16:6). Jesus’ fidelity to the Father led to his crucifixion and to his resurrection. They reveal deep dimensions about love and its lack: the cross betrays human capacity for cruel deafness, that common phenomenon of lack of love and not listening to God; the empty tomb is God’s irrevocable reply on behalf of Jesus who loved well and listened closely.
Thirdly, the silence of God at Calvary reveals a suffering God.
Jesus experienced such closeness to the Father that his spiritual communion was typified by his awesome address of God as “Abba”. Jesus’ Abba-experience[11] holds the key to the confidence that God the Father would always be present to His “beloved Son”. From the moment of baptism in the Jordan, the entire ministry of Jesus the Son would be Spirit-filled and Spirit-driven, so much so that throughout his ministry, Jesus carried himself with such confidence, power and authority. The fact is, the power and authority of the Father was with him and in him through the Spirit. Indeed, the Son was so determined to do the will of the Father that despite the vision of imminent suffering before him at Gethsemane, so much so that he would humanly wished for the bitter cup to pass him by, yet he would submit to the will of the Father rather than insist on his own. In Jesus, Mark clarifies, God’s passionate love for humankind became a sorrowful Passion. As love is always willing to suffer, God suffered with the Son. Through Jesus, we have come to believe in a God who can suffer. Now, we can say, the Father Himself suffered because the Son did.[12] Incarcerated in Nazi prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw incisively that “God and suffering are not opposites but rather one and the same thing and necessarily so.” For him, “the idea that God suffers is far and away the most convincing piece of Christian doctrine.” He wrote shortly before his execution:
“God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34) … God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering … Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the dues ex machina (“God out of a slot machine”). The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help… that is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God. Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.”[13]
The work that Jesus did was the work of the Father working in him through the Spirit. So God himself hung in the gallows, as even Elie Wiesel the Auschwitz survivor was able to say. Taking that seriously, Jürgen Moltmann concluded that, like the cross of Christ, not only is God in Auschwitz, but “even Auschwitz is in God himself.”
“God in Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified God – that is the basis for a real hope which both embraces and overcomes the world, and the ground for a love which is stronger than death and can sustain death. It is the ground for living with the terror of history … for living and bearing guilt and sorrow for the future of [humanity] in God.”[14]
And yet, it is right here, that we approach the ultimate paradox: God suffers silently, in the face of deep and unjust suffering heaped on the innocent Son to the point of reducing him to a forlorn and forsaken, utterly humiliated and lamenting victim hanging on the cross.
That silence of the cross is the door to the ultimate revelation of true God and true humankind:
- Jesus is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15). Mark realistically presents a God who entered the cross with His Son to radically challenge and interrupt human hubris and pride. Silently with the Son, this God embraced rejection and humiliation. He is the God present in human suffering where to human eyes he is absent. Truly, He is the God of humankind. He is God for us.[15] While God has called forth other leaders, God has singled out Jesus. He is the vineyard owner’s true Son, the founder of God’s people. His death does not unleash God’s fury, but lavishes God’s compassion. In and together with the Son, God shows His readiness to suffer, to be “powerless”, so that human hearts and minds might be turned to God, as happens to the centurion, a Gentile, at the foot of the cross (15:39).[16]
- On the cross, Jesus also revealed the radical powerlessness of the human being. We are truly human when we accept our humanness, when we face up to the fact that we are not masters of our fate, that we are creatures – not so that God may crush and humiliate us, but that God might be, as Creator, wholly with us, “to make us true and healthy, to ‘save’ us.”[17] With God and total dependence on God, there is no fear. All this is ratified in the Resurrection when God raised the unjustly crucified Jesus from the dead and endorsed true humankind which Jesus established on the cross. This is the most crucial lesson on God’s silence for Christology – the cross as the authentic exercise of the gift of freedom, affirmed by God at Jesus’ Resurrection.
It is thus not at all difficult to see that actually God’s silence is not the absence of speech but what the fullness of speech demonstrates – namely that, even at its best, human speech falls short. In the height of human activities, especially activities that spring from an abuse of the gift of freedom, from human hubris, God’s voice is crowded out. Only when all the maddening din and rush have fallen dead, does God’s gentle voice of love gets heard. At Calvary, the fall of silence then marks the beginning of God’s bringing to an end the darkness of human sins, the dark Friday of Calvary. Only when the seeming endless day of our ingratitude and self-destructiveness is brought to a close, can the sins of the world be covered over by a clear night of a still and silent God. That silence must hold. Our sins have been committed; there is no changing that. At Calvary the Word of God has been put away, silenced! Jesus is dead. All is darkness and despair. We are left in the wreckage, in the darkness, in the silence of total ruin. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can rebuild this wreckage. Then, and only then, utterly at the end of human wits and clamour, God could and would act. God then spoke loudly in cosmic signs and wonders that left no doubt that divine intervention was at hand at 3p.m. on Good Friday – darkness descended, earth shook, rocks split, temple veil torn from top to bottom, tombs opened, dead saints walked (Mk 15:33-38; Mt 27:51-53). In all this, God in tangible ways confounded human pretensions and judged human sins. This was followed by God’s singular act of raising Jesus from the dead on the third day, by which God spoke loudly to the world that He ratified all that Jesus did and confirmed all that he stood for as embodying the very vision of God for humanity. Mark has learned from Paul that by raising Jesus from the dead, God had done something quite different from anything God had done before, for by that singular divine act, God sent the message that the salvation of each of us would be grounded on that.[18] As Gaudium et spes puts it: “The Church firmly believes that Christ, who died and was raised up for all, can through his Spirit offer humanity the light and the strength to respond to its highest calling.” So in the end, disciples are invited to return to their own Galilee to relearn and join in Jesus’ way of the cross. The end is a new beginning.
In the language of Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, the crucifixion is what “has been done to Jesus by the history of human injustice.” To act against what we consider to be injustice, we need foundation (the reason why we need to act) and support (the encouragement needed for action). Schillebeeckx locates both foundation and support in Christ. “People do not argue against suffering, but tell a story… Christianity does not give any explanation for suffering, but demonstrates a way of life.”[19] The primary form of Christology, set from the beginning in a context of salvation, is to tell “the life-story of the man Jesus as a story of God.”[20] Schillebeeckx calls the experience of senseless suffering a “contrast experience” because of the way that it diverges from what we intuitively know to be decent, humane behavior. A person who has, in Schillebeeckx’s vocabulary, a “contrast experience of suffering,” has a negative experience that grates against what it means to be a human being invested with inviolable dignity. In raising Jesus from the dead, God reveals His resistance to the contrast experience of the crucifixion. It is a model of resistance against the forces of violence and death. And it reminds us that Jesus who has suffered and died, calls us to resistance and resurrection. As it sparked the movement of the church, Schillebeeckx sees the resurrection as the singular event that gave the early disciples the experience of forgiveness for their failures and brought about their conversion, igniting a zeal to resume Jesus’ kingdom-proclamation. As the believing community gathered, they were of one heart and soul, sharing everything they had in common, practising and giving testimony to the resurrection (Acts 4:32-33).
In conclusion, the Gospel of Mark offers a sustained teaching that new life and eternal life are possible only by the death of the self through suffering and service. Our covenant with God can never be complete unless we are willing to curtail our runaway “freedom” and align our will with Jesus’ path of suffering and dying for others. Self-sacrificing love is at the heart of the Christian religion. Pain is always part of the path. On this score, Mark’s Gospel is a resounding message that self-sacrificing love serves God and others authentically. It is a Gospel of service. Discipleship to Jesus of Nazareth demands service for all people. The only solution for all humankind is to learn to love. Because Christ went to his crucifixion in love and sacrifice for human salvation, his Cross becomes the symbol of hope for the world. As the “silent” God raised the Crucified One from death, He vindicated Jesus, affirmed all that he taught and did and stood for, and exalted him for his suffering love. God is silent, but present and active.
WORKS CITED:
Bethge, Eberhard. Bonhoeffer (London: Collins, 1979).
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison (London: SCM, 1971).
Collins, Raymond F. Studies on the First Letter to the Thessalonians (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1984).
Harrington, Wilfrid J. Mark: Realistic Theologian, The Jesus of Mark (Dublin: Columba Press, 1996).
Hellwig, Monica K. Understanding Catholicism (New York: Paulist Press, 1981).
Krieg, Robert A. Story-Shaped Christology (New York: Paulist, 1988).
Luttenberger, Gerhard H. An Introduction to Christology in the Gospels and early Church (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1989).
Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
O’Collins, Gerald. Interpreting Jesus (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1983).
Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning (Grand Rapids, MN: Eerdmans, 1995).
Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’.
Rahner, Karl. Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1992).
Schweizer, Eduard. The Good News According to Mark (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1970).
Schillebeeckx, Edward. Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (New York: Seabury, 1979).
————-. Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord (New York: Seabury, 1980).
Wiesel, Elie. Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1960).
Wolff, Pierce. God’s Passion, Our Passion: The Only Way to Love Everyday (Liguori, MI: Triumph Books, 1994).
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel wrote (Night, 31) of his experience at the prayer of the Kadish (for the dead) for executed children: “For the first time I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless his name? The eternal, Lord of the universe, the all-powerful and terrible, was silent. What had I to thank him for?”
[2] “At the heart of sin lies human beings’ denial of their creatureliness” – Pope Benedict, 70.
[3] “The creation accounts in the book of Genesis contain, in their own symbolic and narrative language, profound teachings about human existence and its historical reality. They suggest that human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbour and with the earth itself. According to the Bible, these three vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us. This rupture is sin” – Pope Francis, 66.
[4] Krieg, 124.
[5] Hellwig, 99
[6] Ibid.
[7] Rahner, 211; for more details, see post No.” 269. Emmaus: At the Heart of Jesus Is Self-Sacrificing Love and the Cross” dated 1 April 2021 at www.jeffangiegoh.com.
[8] O’Collins, 96-97.
[9] See Luttenberger, 194.
[10] Schweizer, 385-86.
[11] On Jesus’ original Abba-experience, see Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 256-69.
[12] Wolff, 135.
[13] See Bonhoeffer, 360-61; Bethge, 164.
[14] Moltmann, 278.
[15] Harrington, 139.
[16] Krieg, 123.
[17] Pope Benedict, 64.
[18] Collins, 345.
[19] Schillebeeckx, Christ, 698-99.
[20] Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 80.