Consider this post as a continuation of the previous
essay on the physical and spiritual sufferings of Jesus during the paschal
mystery. We have looked at the three distinct dimensions of Christ’s agony in
that essay. In this post, we will talk about the climax of the Lord’s agony:
the crucifixion of Christ.
The
Contradiction of the Cross
Let’s
state the obvious. To say that the salvation of man was accomplished by God by
means of Him suffering a form of public torture and death is arguably the
most ironic statement ever. It’s easy to imagine God saving us as He reveals
Himself from the clouds, sitting on a majestic throne, with His angelic
warriors surrounding Him, while proclaiming “I wipe out the sins of mankind
now!”. For a Jew, it might also be easier to imagine Christ, the Messiah,
riding a big horse, with his disciples and a big multitude of followers,
carrying swords and spears, marching and advancing towards the roman soldiers
and Caesar, engaging against them in a big war, with Christ and His Jewish army
taking the victory, thereby establishing a new Messianic, earthly Kingdom, with
the nation of God no longer subject to foreign attack and invasion, now and forever.
But to
save us by means of suffering a public execution? It doesn’t make sense
on the face of it, does it? This is probably why Saint Paul once wrote that the
crucified Christ is “a stumbling block to Jews and a folly to Gentiles.”[i]
It’s a stumbling
block to the Jews because after all, the ideal messiah isn’t someone hanging on
the cross. Why would any devout Jew during the first century, awaiting the
liberation of Israel with all excitement and zeal, point to the battered,
bruised, and dying Jesus as He hangs on a Roman torture device and say, “There
you go! That’s my Messiah! What a victory He has accomplished today!”? How
about you? Would you do such a thing?
It’s a
folly to the Gentiles because even the wisest of the Greek philosophers can
never arrive, by way of mere natural reason, to the truth that the transcendent
creator of all the cosmos would repair it from moral brokenness by way of
becoming man and dying a human death. That’s fair enough, don’t you think?
After all, you cannot arrive to that kind of conclusion unless there’s a Being
up above that revealed it to you, and this of course what the Gentile nation
lacked: the right revelation.
What’s
common to both Jews and Gentiles, however, is that they fail to see the radical
harmony between God and creation. God may be transcendent over creation,
but He is also present immanently in it as its cause and sustainer, which
allows Him to act upon it in an immediate way while maintaining His radical
sovereignty over it and also the true nature of creation. “God alone can be
freely present in the most intimate depth of the reality he has created without
acting extrinsically upon the creature by violence or alienation, and without
therefore causing changes in the natural structure of the reality.”[ii] Creator and creature are
not opposed to each other, and they can be related to each other in such a way
that God can stand in solidarity with the world, not only in the world’s life
and generation, but also in death and corruption. The Love of God is made most
manifest in Him taking upon a human nature and living among men, even entering
into the unfortunate mystery of death. It is indeed true that “the foolishness of God is wiser than
human wisdom.”[iii] God himself assumed the
folly, the joke, of being human, and we still don’t get it, the Jews and
Gentiles didn’t get it. The joke’s on us, I think.
“God with Us”
What we
see in the crucified Christ then (and what our ordinary reason and expectations
cannot provide) is the ultimate act of divine empathy. The mystery of
salvation consists of that: that God, in His humanity, has saved us precisely by
utilizing our defects, taking upon himself the effects of sin and death so
that He can beat them at their own game: in “dying he destroyed our death”.
God, in becoming human (without surrendering His deity) has showed that there
is no tension between the world and God (or at least, there shouldn’t be) and
that He is willing to “meet us where we’re at”. What a beautiful mystery! What
ineffable Love! Yahweh has walked the earth, the very earth that cannot contain
Him! Adonai has stood in solidarity with human nature that is corruptible and
susceptible to death! When we look for the proof of God’s love, there’s nothing
better than the cross. There’s nothing better than knowing God intervened and
lived and died for me. The Cross is the ultimate expression of Emmanuel: God being with us.
The Crucifixion and the Eschaton
There’s
more to it than that. The crucifixion of God is that which ushered in the
completion of redemption, the beginning of the eschatological mystery. It
is through the cross that we can truly say: “The end is now.”
“Christ’s reign will last until all his enemies are
made subject to him.”[iv] Such is the nature of the end of time. In the new
heavens and new earth, everyone will acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ,
the lamb of God, whether saved or damned[v]. It is also when the devil will finally be “thrown into the lake of burning sulfur,
where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented
day and night for ever and ever”,[vi]
signifying his defeat at the end of time, where he will be stripped off of all
influence of God’s people. The Church, composed of both Jew and non-Jew,[vii]
the bride of the lamb, will finally be fully united to her bridegroom, sharing
in His everlasting beatitude.[viii]
But let’s not be too futuristic. By that I mean that let’s
not consider the end of time as strictly an event that isn’t happening yet. For
the cross has already started the countdown. The cross has already kickstarted
the end.
At this part of the essay, I want to first focus on John
19:28: “Later, knowing that everything had know been finished, and so that
Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said: ‘I thirst.’”
What is the crucified Christ expressing here? Is it merely
an expression of physical thirst that can be quenched by drinking water? That’s
probably part of why Christ said (assuming also that from the time He was
captured to the event of the cross, He wasn’t treated nicely by His captors, so
probably He wasn’t given something to drink). But Saint John is trying to tell
us more than that. He’s saying that Christ expressed his thirst “so that
Scripture would be fulfilled”. So, there’s absolutely more to that than just a
desire to drink something.
Baptist scholar George Beasley-Murray, in his commentary on
the Gospel of John, points out that Christ was actually appealing to Psalm
69:21: “They… gave me vinegar to drink.” At the same time, Christ – seen
through John’s Gospel – is appealing to a psalm that expresses agony, noting
that the verse “is part of the lengthy description of the desolation,
isolation, and scorn experienced by the Righteous Sufferer”.[ix]
What we see here is a coexistence of suffering and prophetic fulfillment. As
Fr. White has written, “this fulfillment itself is expressed as a thirst,
an incomplete desire, and one in which, as we have seen, clearly includes
dimensions of agony.”[x]
The cry for thirst is therefore a cry concerning a completion
of something, but the completion is, by that time, still a process, still
something that hasn’t fully come to fruition. But what exactly is being
fulfilled? What is being completed? What exactly is Christ thirsty for?
I think that, following other Biblical commentators, such
as Barnabas Lindars and Gail O’ Day, it would be helpful if we look at other
Gospel passages where Christ talks about being thirsty.[xi]
This brings us to John 4, when Jesus talks with a Samaritan woman on the well.
In verse 7, Jesus asks the woman for a drink: “Will you give me a drink?” But,
if we look at the following verses, the question actually had more purpose than
merely getting a water to drink. It was used as a springboard by Jesus to talk
about His desire to “give (the) living water… (which, when drank, will cause us
to) never thirst… (a water that) will become in them a spring of water welling
up to eternal life.”[xii]
Christ also talks about “rivers of living water” that will
“flow” within those who believe in Him (7:38). It is evident, then, that Christ
is talking about the “water” of sanctification, the gift of grace that will
quench our existential thirst: “he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but
because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth
and renewal by the Holy Spirit.”[xiii]
Notice that even Saint Paul references a sort of cleansing by water in speaking
about spiritual regeneration. The New Testament, then, doesn’t consider the
analogous references to water and the quenching of thirst as alien to it when
describing salvation.
But, as Aquinas says, the Divine Missions are patterned by
the Divine Processions, such that, the work of the Trinity in the economy of
salvation doesn’t end in just the Son’s incarnation and paschal mystery, but
also in and through the work of the Holy Spirit: “(T)he love of the
Father towards the Son… is the ratio in which God bestows every effect
of love on the creature; and therefore the Holy Spirit, who is the Love by
which the Father loves the Son, is also the Love by which He loves the creature
by imparting its perfection to it.”[xiv]
This Thomistic idea is imbedded in the New Testament. Saint
John interprets Jesus’ words in 7:38 in the very next verse: “By this he
meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up
to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been
glorified.”[xv] Once Jesus is glorified,
the Spirit will also be given:
(T)he thirst of Christ, placed in a broader Johannine context, denotes
his desire for the sending of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who can only be
given once Jesus has ‘gone to the Father’ (14:2; 16:7; 17:11). This result is
in fact obtained in john 20:22 where the risen Christ communicates the Holy
Spirit to his disciples on the evening of Easter. Consequently. The cry of
thirst at the time it is uttered denotes a state of as yet unachieved
suffering, even as it claims to be the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures,
that is, the condition of the possibility for the sending of the Spirit.[xvi]
Pair this idea with Christ’s expectance on the cross (and
even before that, in His prophecies concerning His death) that He will be
glorified in the end and that He will gather a people for Himself,[xvii]
and you have the perfect image of a Christ that suffers for us with an eye
towards our salvation through Him and the Holy Spirit in drawing us back to the
Father. This expectance, this desire, this thirst to send us the Spirit as a
completion of His mission coexists with and saturates His agony in the Cross
such that one can even say that it increased His sufferings, due to the desire,
the will, to move towards a good (our salvation) but it is a good not yet fully
possessed. Christ, on the cross, knew that He is accomplishing the salvation of
the human race, but this is nonetheless a salvation not yet acquired by us in a
sense by that time. When Christ said “I thirst” then, He meant “I thirst for
you, for your deliverance from sin and death”, a thirst that can only be
quenched once the Holy Spirit is sent. Think of it as Christ already winning a
boxing match, but there’s still time left in the clock. The victory is His
already, but the trophy isn’t given yet.
Nonetheless, this follow-up through the sending of the Holy
Spirit is already foreshadowed during the cross, coupled with the start of the
eschatological reality of salvation history. After all, once the Holy Spirit
does His mission to the apostles and to the Church at large, what is there to
do, except to wait in joyful, active hope for the new heavens and new earth,
where Christ the King reigns forever, and His sovereignty over creation is
acknowledged by both Jew and Gentile?
Christ Himself has said that “no one can enter the kingdom
of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.”[xviii]
A lot of biblical commentators saw this as related to John 19:34, when blood
and water flowed from Christ’s side – both verses seen as foreshadowing the new
birth that will be given to us in baptism.[xix]
“The cry of thirst finds its response, therefore, in our acceptation of the
living water”.[xx]
Catholic priest and biblical scholar Fr. Raymond Brown, in The
Death of the Messiah, writes that the cry of Christ on the cross entails
the start of the eschaton, where he appeals to John 5:28 and 11:43 in explaining
that the cry of Jesus “causes all those who are in the tombs to hear… (and)
help(s) to call forth Lazarus from the tomb.” He also talks about 1
Thessalonians 4:16, IV Ezra 13:12-13, and Amos 1:2, Psalms 46:7, and many more
verses from scripture to prove that there are many instances in the Bible that
when the Lord “speaks, roars, and cries out”, it’s commonly tied with
eschatological themes, like the raising of the dead and the Lord’s act of
judgment.[xxi]
Even the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ cry in 27:46 is matched
with signs related to the last days. Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP points out a
few of these, such as the darkening of the sun, the temple’s curtain is torn,
the dead are raised, and the Gentiles start to acknowledge the Lordship of
Jesus (27:45, 51-54). Saint Mark also has these themes: “Darkness covers the
earth, the temple veil is rent, and (most importantly) the centurion is
converted to a recognition of Jesus as the Son of God.”[xxii]
There’s a lot of literature on the topic of how Christ’s
sacrifice ushers in the end of the world. I cannot go through all of them. But
what has been said above suffices. The crucifixion is the start of the
completion of Divine victory. To continue a Bible verse already quoted at the
start of this essay: “the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”
What is manifested on the cross is the ability of God to work out, in His
stupefying providence, His plan of salvation even in the midst of human
suffering. God, in His humanly suffering on the cross, which, at first
glance, looks like just another Roman public execution, was able to bring His
divine work to fruition. The power of God can never be stopped, not even by
death, death on a cross.
Conclusion
Saint Paul once wrote that he is “not ashamed of the gospel”
(Romans 1:16). This is amazing because, looking at the cultural context of his
time, he has all the reason to be ashamed of what he’s preaching, at least on
the face of it! Because he “preach(es) Christ crucified”, I wouldn’t be
surprised if some Jew or even Greek passerby who happens to hear the testimony
of his faith in the marketplace thinks that he talking about something
ridiculous: “This person is telling me to accept the Godhood of someone executed
and publicly tortured by his enemies? That’s something I cannot take
seriously.”
But, looking at it through the eyes of faith, the cross
proves to us the power and the saving love of the Lord even more than
other of His acts (together with the resurrection, of course). As a follow up
to what I’ve said above, the fact that God can save us even through apparently
impossible instances is a reason for us to adore God in an even more intense
way. Just like what I’ve said in my reflection on the sufferings of Jesus, this
act of radical love should be enough for us to bring us to our knees and
worship Him.
May we look at the cross with the acknowledgement of God’s
gratuitous grace. May we look at it and say: “This, which was once a mere
instrument of torture, is now an instrument of salvation!” As Christians, we
must be humbled by the fact that we are associated with the cross and its
power. Everything that God has done for us on the cross, He has done out of the
fullness of charity He has in His human heart, empowered by His divinity.
Because of it, we are saved. Because of it, we have won, and praise God for
that! Let us, like Paul, not be ashamed of the Gospel – the Gospel of the
cross, the Gospel of eschatological fulfillment.
[i] 1
Corinthians 1:23
[ii]
Thomas Joseph White, OP, The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in
Christology (Catholic University of America Press, 2015), p. 200
[iii]
1 Corinthians 1:25
[iv] 1
Corinthians 15:25
[v]
Philippians 2:10-11
[vi]
Revelation 20:10
[vii]
Galatians 3:28
[viii]
Revelation 19:9
[ix]
George Beasley-Murray, John, 351
[x] The
Incarnate Lord, p. 324, emphasis on the original
[xi]
Lindars, The Gospel of John (Oliphants Press, 1957), p. 582; Gail O’
Day, John Commentary in the New Interpreter’s Bible (Abingdon Press,
1995), 9:832-33
[xii]
John 4:10, 13
[xiii]
Titus 3:5
[xiv] Commentary
on The Sentences, d. 14, q. 1, a. 1
[xv]
John 7:39
[xvi] The
Incarnate Lord, p. 325
[xvii]
John 3:14: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the
wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up” and 12:32: “And I, when I
am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
[xviii]
John 3:5
[xix] The
Incarnate Lord, p. 326
[xx]
Ibid.
[xxi]
Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 2:1045
[xxii]
The Incarnate Lord, p. 327
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