When Jesus had ironically for the third time chided his disciples for their somnolence in the face of their Master's terrible suffering, he told them to arouse themselves; the Son of Man was about to be betrayed to sinful men. They had to go forward to encounter naked evil. Almost at once a crowd of ruffians appeared, with Judas Iscariot at their head. He had already arranged a sign with the crowd: "The man I kiss is your man; seize him and get him away safely." And so he greeted Jesus with a kiss, and the crowd seized him and held him fast.
The deeper significance of this episode is obscure, yet challenging. In all probability Jesus was well known to most of the crowd, sent by the chief priests, lawyers and leaders. Judas' final identification of his Master would seem to be peculiarly otiose - indeed, in Luke's account of the betrayal the chief priests, officers of the temple guard and the elders are identified as the crowd. Probably they formed part of it. Perhaps the Judas kiss had a deeper, more sinister effect, after the Gethsemane episode, of draining what was left of Jesus' charismatic power. When he was in the full flowering of his ministry no task was too great for him, but with the betrayal his powers seemed to recede; in his weak helplessness he appeared no more impressive than any criminal arraigned before the officers of the law. A not altogether dissimilar episode occurs in the Book of Judges, when Delilah coaxes from her exhausted husband, Samson, the secret of his superhuman strength, namely his Nazirite consecration to God, of which his unshaven head is a sacrament. Once his wicked wife has the locks of the hair of his head shaven off, his strength drains away, leaving him as weak as any other man. At the end of this magnificent story Samson's strength gradually returns during his captivity to the Philistines, who blind him and make sport of his powerlessness: they have already destroyed the sight of both eyes, but the hair of his head slowly regrows. In a vow of extreme dedication to God, his strength returns as the Philistines hold him prisoner in their temple and mock his impotence; his great strength is restored, and in a final mighty movement he brings down the entire temple, thereby killing more Philistines in this calamity than he did during his entire ministry. The primitive, vengeful aspect of this narrative quite rightly offends our deeper sensitivities, but the mechanism underlying it is still worthy of our attention. It stresses how those close to us in a personal relationship can either fill us with extra strength or else deplete us of it. The effect depends on their character as well as their intentions. In this respect the disciples were of little use to Jesus during his passion.
There is an immediate response among the bystanders, one of whom draws his sword and wounds the High Priest's servant. In the account of Luke Jesus restrains this show of violence and heals the servant's wounded ear, but apart from this episode his complete powerlessness is obvious, so that as he is arrested, all the disciples desert him and run away. Jesus is manhandled by the crowd, who bring him into the High Priest's house where he is minutely cross-examined. Jesus' silence in the face of the various conflicting accusations made against him is both impressive and disconcerting to foe and friend alike, reminding us of the prophecy. "He was afflicted, he submitted to be struck down and did not open his mouth; he was led like a sheep to the slaughter, like a ewe that is dumb before the shearers" (Isaiah 53:7). Finally, according to Mark, the High Priest questions Jesus directly about his messiahship, and Jesus affirms that he is indeed the Messiah and that they will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of God and coming with the clouds of heaven. To the whole assembly this is absolute blasphemy, and a unanimous verdict of guilt is proclaimed and a sentence of death demanded. How dare any man claim parity with God! Almost to prove the falsity of Jesus' claim some of them blindfold him, and while striking and spitting on him, challenge him to play the prophet and identify his assailants. Whilst this nasty game is proceeding, Jesus' disciples are well out of range, and Peter denies on three occasions ever having known the man. On a deeper level he spoke more truly than he knew, for although he had been a constant companion of the Master for three years, he had never been able to penetrate the outer appearance to reach the inner man. When the inner man was revealed in all his frailty and powerlessness, neither Peter nor any other of his disciples recognized him. He was, in fact, too much like them all in their own weakness to be of much support and comfort. They were much more concerned about their own well-being than in the safety of the one to whom they owed everything. He is now the light that has failed, the prophet discountenanced by the religious authorities and shown up to be no better than the other false messiahs who preceded him.
"As soon as morning came, the chief priests, having made their plan with the elders and lawyers in full council, put Jesus in chains; then they had him led away and handed him over to Pilate" (Mark 15:1). Pilate's cross-examination in the presence of the chief priests evokes little response from Jesus, who keeps silence, the silence both of weakness and of sepulchral strength. Pilate can find nothing wrong in Jesus sufficient to warrant punishment, let alone death, and offers to release him whom he calls "the king of the Jews". He realized that malice rather than justice lay behind the condemnation of Jesus. Nevertheless the crowd, incited by the priests, had portrayed Christ as a dangerous agitator to Pilate, who alone had the power to authorize a person's death by crucifixion. In Luke's account, Pilate hands Jesus over to King Herod's jurisdiction, but the King again gets no response from Jesus and returns him contemptuously to the Roman governor. In the end Pilate capitulates and gives Jesus over to his enemies for crucifixion after he has had him flogged. In the more extended account in John's gospel, Jesus claims a kingdom that does not belong to this world. He says he was born and came into the world to bear witness to the truth, and all who are not deaf to truth listen to his voice. But Pilate asks, "What is truth?" Francis Bacon has accused him of not staying for an answer; indeed, for two thousand years the world has remained ignorant because it has not been silent enough to hear that truth. The truth refers back to the nature of God as pure spirit and the necessity of worshipping him in spirit and in truth (John 4:23). Anyone who has seen Christ in the emptiness of agony knows God as spirit, a knowledge terrifying to man until he too has become nothing, even as Christ was during the period of his passion.
And so the outer humiliation and inner torture of Jesus proceed. The psychic hell he encountered as the ground of selfish human existence in Gethsemane is now exteriorized in the open world of direct human relationships. Its terror is to some extent diluted by its overt character; other people are also involved in it in comparison with the isolation of the remorseless psychic fury of Gethsemane. The antagonism of the masses adds its content to the psychic burden of Jesus' ordeal, but it is at least tangible and therefore more easily confronted. When the Master entered Jerusalem only a few days earlier he was acclaimed by the crowds of disciples: "Blessings on him who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven; glory to the highest heaven" (Luke 19:36-38). Now rejection alone confronts him. His lack of resistance in the face of his arrest proved conclusively that he was not a political messiah, one who would liberate Israel from the tyranny of Roman occupation. Indeed, his kingdom was not of this world, where the masses are enclosed in their restricted concerns.
If Jesus had experienced overt betrayal and rejection by those he loved, the populace felt equally betrayed by him on whom so much expectation had been fastened. He soon assumes the comforting role of scapegoat for their disappointment, incited as they are by their jealous, malicious religious leaders, who see in Jesus a spiritual authority that eclipses their merely ecclesiastical power to enforce the law. As St Paul says, "The qualification we have comes by God; it is he who has qualified us to dispense his new covenant - a covenant expressed not in a written document, but in a spiritual bond; for the written law condemns to death, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Corinthians 3:6). The written law was a light of God at the time of Moses, but it had become a sepulchre of human darkness by the time of Christ, a tragedy of all spiritual things when they become the possession of men, who imprison their contents and make use of them to their own selfish advantage. The one who bursts open the tomb of selfish complicity to the light of God's Spirit is an inveterate enemy of the religious establishment. Herein lies the tragedy of the spiritual life, the manifest triumph of the forces of evil, the victory of darkness over light. History shows us that the victory does come to an end, but not until enormous devastation has been wrought. And it seems to be inevitable that darkness must have its say, at least for a period. It is indeed a moment of triumph when Jesus is divested of his executive powers. He assumes the role of scapegoat as a source of failure, and now he can be tortured in the name of religious orthodoxy. The crowds follow blindly in the wake of the evil intentions of the ruling party, a course of events all too familiar when a despotic regime establishes itself on the ruins of a more humane predecessor. In such situations there are few more immediately pleasurable experiences than hitting a good man when he is down on the ground, alone and bleeding. And so Jesus descends precipitously into the darkness of vilification, unaided by any visible agency.
Once the death penalty has been proclaimed, the soldiers take Jesus into the courtyard, dress him in purple and place a plaited crown of thorns on his head. They salute him contemptuously as king of the Jews, then beat him about the head with a cane, spit on him, and pay mock homage to him, while the blood from the thorns beaten into his scalp trickles down his face. Once they have had their sport, they strip Jesus of his purple robe and dress him once more in his own clothes. And then comes the procession to the place of crucifixion. Jesus falls under the weight of the cross he has to bear, and a man called Simon, from Cyrene, is pressed into service to carry it for him. They bring him to the place called Golgotha or Calvary, which means the place of a skull, where he is fastened to the cross. He is stripped of his clothes, which are shared among the soldiers, who cast lots for individual garments. So the bleeding Master is nailed to his cross. He refuses the palliation afforded by drugged wine. There he is secured, exposed and naked, for all around him to gaze upon, to point to in scorn, and to ridicule. Behold the man called by Pilate the king of the Jews: tormented in soul, agonized in body, reviled by those around him, yet isolated from any human contact. The Son of Man who is also the Son of God has indeed taken on himself the full intensity of the human situation: pain of body and the horror of mental anguish, the light of hope slowly receding from him as he enters the unknown region where even God is hidden from spiritual sight. The human tragedy of meaninglessness is assumed as Jesus moves into ever-deepening darkness. Made in God's image, man sinks day by day into the slime of heedless submission to the forces of darkness. And so did Jeremiah, the sacrificial lamb of Jewish prophecy, when he was thrown into the muddy pit by King Zedekiah's functionaries, who equated Jeremiah's prophecy of doom, in the coming encounter with the Babylonian invaders, with treason against the Judean state. It was only the loyal compassion of a eunuch that saved the prophet by having him raised out of the pit before he was completely sunk in the mud to die of starvation (Jeremiah 38:1-13). There was ultimate relief for Jeremiah, at least in that appalling situation, though his life was one long chapter of suffering from the time of his call, after which he was ostracized even by those close to him, to his death, carried away by renegades to Egypt, where they hoped vainly to escape Babylonian invasion. But the justice of God can never be evaded.
The agony of human life is a compound of bodily pain, mental distress and emotional isolation even when in the closest company of one's peers. We are born lonely, for there is something of the soul that is sacred. It can never be satisfied with merely human company, for it remains unfulfilled, restless and strangely empty until it has attained the vision of God. The loneliness we all share, however oblivious of it we may be in the immediate thrust of workaday life, is unassuaged until we know God, who alone is constant and real. Jesus knows his Father intimately, and so can remain at peace even when the world is at war against him. Nevertheless, the steadfast calm of Jesus even under the pressure of human revulsion and the more terrible underlying psychic onslaught is severely tested, as he cries out those terrible words of absolute dereliction, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He is in the situation of Jeremiah in the muddy pit, but there is no one present to haul him out to safety. As we have previously noted, the words of the desolate Christ are the first verse of Psalm 22, but there is no reason to believe that he continued to the end of that psalm, which ends on a note of relief and victory after a terrible ordeal. But there is no victory for Jesus on the cross, at least in the eyes of passers-by who taunt his impotence, or the chief priests and lawyers, winking slyly to one another as they challenge the Son of God to descend from the cross and to save himself; instead of simply helping other people. If he would do that then they too would believe in him! When Samson was taunted by the Philistine nobility in their temple, God gave him strength to destroy them all; when Jesus calls to his Father there is complete silence. Even the two criminals crucified on either side of Jesus taunt him, although in Luke's softened account of the crucifixion one of them does repent and acknowledge his holiness.
After Jesus' terrible cry of desolation, wilfully misinterpreted by some of the bystanders as a call of help to Elijah, there is another loud cry. And then Jesus dies. The first fruits of his victory are made manifest by a centurion in attendance: the entire episode had impressed him beyond measure, and he was able to affirm that Jesus, unlike the false messiahs who had come to a similar end, was truly a Son of God. A number of women were also present watching from a distance, amongst whom were three closely involved in the ministry of Jesus. In John's account, one of them was his own mother, the blessed virgin Mary. Of all who had known Jesus, these women seem to have been the only ones to sustain him in his agony. This support the three chosen disciples were totally incapable of affording at Gethsemane, while during the crucifixion they were, according to the record, all discreetly absent from the scene. The deep-felt spiritual support those humble women must have given to the afflicted Christ cannot be emphasized enough. "They also serve who only stand and wait", wrote John Milton at the end of a sonnet dedicated to his own blindness. As we wait in powerless love, so the Holy Spirit flows from us as an unending source of healing, and the strength afforded those in need is out of all proportion to our apparent inactivity. This is the secret of intercessory prayer, which alone can heal the hearts of fearful men in authority and of women consumed in destructive emotional entanglements.
It is reported that the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom: the separation of sacred from profane was now abolished. All flow into a common stream of God's forgiving love, and a new era of human relationships is about to begin. All is now sacred when dedicated to God in love and to our fellow creatures in service. But how has all this been attained? The detailed account of events leading up to Jesus' death on the cross - easily available in all four gospels, each with its own special emphasis, seeing, as it were, an event from slightly different points of vantage - has been rehearsed here in order to show his deepening humiliation, his definitive entry into the realms of human agony on a gigantic scale of physical and mental torture, and his total engulfment in the darkness of unknowing as the tragedy unfolds. The word "unknowing" is used deliberately: he entered blindly into what was to befall him. He had no outer control; his strength lay alone in what he had within himself, and this was stretched almost to breaking-point by the time death had ended this part of his agony. The state of unknowing differs vastly from mere agnosticism, which is a comfortable attitude of mind in an intellectual debate about ultimate reality. It lacks, however, a living contact with personal strife that we all have to meet as part of our mortal existence. After all, annihilation at death could be regarded, in terms of pure reason, as preferable to the struggle for life that all creatures seem inherently equipped to experience - a focus of deep faith, more certain than intellectual proof, strives desperately for a manifestation of the meaning that it inwardly divines. It drives us on inexorably to the end of the unknown region, which is the vision of God.
When we consider the sufferings of Christ there is a tendency, less common nowadays than in the past, to become so emotionally involved with the person of Jesus that we fail to place his witness in the larger arena of workaday life. Personal devotion would have been quite repugnant to the man Jesus, who saw his own ministry as depending entirely on the power vouchsafed him by his Father. He is indeed the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except by him (John 14:6). The explanation of this exclusive claim is that he, in the frame of a simple man, takes on the burden of sin of the entire world, encounters all mortal darkness, whether physical, mental or psychical finally assuming the role of a deluded prophet who fails in his attempt to save the world from the inroads and defilement of sin. Though without sin - by which is meant a character that seeks its own advantage without regard for the well-being of those around it, and indeed often to their detriment - he assumes the form of a criminal on the cross of human vindictiveness, onto whom all sin can be projected and all hatred deposited. He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, but on his back the full suffering of creation is laid. As he dies, so does the darkness of sin attain illumination; it attains a knowledge of forgiveness as it bursts open to receive love. It is transfigured into something of the nature of eternal service. By his scourging the world is healed, inasmuch as every circumstance of human degradation is now lifted up to God, forgiven and restored.
The sufferings of the crucified Christ are remembered each Good Friday. In some churches the sacred Liturgy is recited, in others the traditional Seven Last Words from the Cross form the basis of an impassioned recital of the agony undergone by the Master, who bears the sins of all the world in his racked body. Jesus was crucified at nine in the morning, and at midday a darkness fell over all the land. It lasted three hours, when Jesus uttered his, terrible cry of desolation and then died. But more important than all this is the understanding that Jesus, in essence, fully embraced the agony common to all mankind. Some of us die in torture in prison camps, others in bed after an illness of variable duration and suffering. Some die shockingly in aircraft or road traffic accidents, others are killed in the course of their duty in defending their country against hostile assault. Jesus could not, in the frame of a single person, have experienced all these different modes of death, but he did know of the emotional anguish and psychic darkness that underlies them all. In other words, he imbibed the terror that we all experience when we register the imminence of death in our lives. It is this numbing terror rather than the actual mode of dying that is our greatest ordeal, the test of our ultimate faith. In this respect there are many who impress us with their complete equanimity to the fact of death; they have a clear intellectual conviction of what they may expect after death - or indeed that there is nothing to expect at all except extinction - and so can face the event calmly in their own minds. But when they are confronted with the actual threat, their comfortable composure is apt to evaporate, and they experience a terrible inner void not unlike that known to other, less assured, people. In other words, rational conviction is completely obliterated by the fact of imminent dissolution. There is nothing despicable about this: Jesus himself, though on at least three occasions he predicted to his disciples the sequence of his passion, death and resurrection, was nearly overwhelmed by the intensity of the suffering he had to bear. At that stage the intellectual assurance of ultimate victory was completely overshadowed by the darkness of evil that encompassed him. Once this ordeal has been faced in quiet helplessness, one can let the divine power take charge of what remains of one's life on earth, and be carried along the escalator of transition with the trust of a little child.
Thus the latter of the seven traditional words from the cross are less despairing: "I thirst"; "It is accomplished"; and finally, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit". This last sentence is a quotation of Psalm 31 verse 5, and is the ultimate test of all our lives on earth: what sort of spirit do we then commit to God? We do not know; Jesus' own life and ministry seemed, in the limited view of Good Friday, to be a terrible failure, to be the delusion of yet another false messiah. Time was to tell the true stature of Jesus' life, as it does of our infinitely less distinguished lives too. As the soul breaks loose from the moorings of the body to which it was firmly attached during active life in the world, so it is less concerned about the things of this world - its injustice, cruelty and humiliation - and more in harmony with the things of eternity, the chief of which is love. So Jesus commences his work on the cross with a gesture of complete forgiveness for those who, in their ignorance, strive to kill him. He ends on a note of dark acceptance, as much agnostic as comforting; and this is the honest attitude of all who are facing the nearness of death: "I have faith; help me where faith falls short" (Mark 9:24). Had Jesus had absolute knowledge of his resurrection, his witness among us ordinary mortals would have been merely theatrical, for he would have possessed that assurance to which we lesser ones grope in faith. But he too groped, and in a darkness infinitely denser than anything we could endure because of his extreme psychic sensitivity. He could have failed - otherwise the incarnation would not have embraced a totally free will. But he persisted to the end of the road, which led downwards to the least of his many brethren. The Holy Spirit works for the release of all prisoners, and not merely the charismatic effusions of the elect.