At midday a darkness fell over the whole land, which lasted till three in the afternoon; and at three Jesus cried aloud, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mark 15: 33-34)>/P>
DEATH COMES to all of us. To those who are thoughtful, this prospect comes to be seen increasingly as a merciful release from the unceasing toil of the world and the mounting decrepitude of the body. To those who are spiritually aware, death is the portal of entry to a fuller life in which much that we cannot understand in our present place of vantage may at last be opened to our comprehension and where we may see a little more clearly. To some death comes at the close of a long eventful life when the body's functions finally fail. To others the advent of death is abrupt, like an unwelcome intruder impinging himself at the peak of a useful, promising life and summarily calling the participant to a distant realm of unknown quality, far removed from his present surroundings. Death is at once man's friend and also his judge and accuser. It brings destruction with it and a termination of a life that may have been supremely worthwhile, for its summons is final.
But death is not to be equated with crucifixion, although some types of death are experiences of crucifixion. Crucifixion is the destruction of an innocent victim by a savagely evil impulse which has triumphed over the forces of light and compassion. The heart of the tragedy of crucifixion is the manifest triumph of the spirit that denies over the Spirit of God who affirms life and brings man closer to the divine image implanted within him. Until a person has seen and experienced the domination of evil, life-denying power over the warmth of love in personal sacrifice, he has not fully tasted of life. As I have already observed, there is nothing more terrible to behold than the manifest triumph of evil over good.
The evil of which I speak is not the impersonal inroads that a fatal malady makes in the life of a young person so that his promise is thwarted before it has had time to blossom fully. Neither is it the indifferent natural disasters that bring destruction to vast populations for no apparent reason. Jesus Himself observed that the eighteen people who were killed when the tower fell on them at Siloam were in no way more guilty than al1 the other people living in Jerusalem. Those who had died had, we believe, a new existence to experience, but those who were left were given time for repentance. (Luke 13: 4-5) Inasmuch as we all have partaken of the selfishness that rules the world, we must also be prepared to taste the evil that comes from this sinful participation. What we call retribution, or what the Hindu-Buddhist tradition knows as "karma", has a communal as well as an individual component. Indeed it has cosmic reverberations, for the psychic dimension is so interpenetrating in its intimacy that nothing we do or think leaves us without making its impact on the deeper core of the world, whose sensitivity is continuous with our own. When misfortune comes to us, we cry out: "Why did this have to happen to me?", as if we by virtue of our self esteemed innocence did not deserve such a blow. We have forgotten the communal component.
There is, in fact, very little place for innocence in a world where selfishness is of the very order of communal life. Well did the Psalmist write: "In iniquity I was brought to birth and my mother conceived me in sin." (Psalm 51:5) This does not, of course, suggest that the act of procreation is evil, but that the soul when it incarnates into matter is immediately enclosed in a dense psychic atmosphere of sin. This sinfulness is not a particular judgement on the parents of the child, who may well be fine people intent on preserving the purity of family life and surrounding their children with an environment of true religion, as we most certainly believe the parents of Jesus did. It is rather a sober commentary on the world at large into which the child must inevitably take his place when he has outgrown the parental tutelage. If he is of the calibre of a normal person, the temptations to self-gratification and the ambitions of material success will, to greater or lesser extent, prevail, and his inner character will be to some degree marred and corrupted. If he were of the stature of Jesus, the insidious inroads of personal temptation would have no effect on his inner life, because he would be at one with the Father. But even, and indeed especially, if he remains truly innocent - and this true, tested innocence in the face of the world's temptation to attain personal power at the expense of others is to be contrasted with the immature, untested innocence of a child who has had no opportunity of experiencing such temptation - the full power of the world's stain and corruption will be raised against him. Indeed, it has to be so, because such a person is of the stature of a saint, and anyone aspiring to sanctification must confront the dark evil which denies, corrupts and destroys.
It would seem then that the answer to the question of why a particular person should be the victim of a misfortune is three-fold. Firstly, no one is exempt from bearing his share of the burden of the sin of the world. Secondly every misfortune borne with courage strengthens the character and gives one invaluable insights into the nature of reality. The last part of the answer is relevant only to the truly saintly person who has, in his quest for the vision of God, implicitly undertaken to bear the sin of the world; no one can know God before he has known every aspect of mortal suffering and degradation, as Jesus did. But to gain this ultimate knowledge, one has to enter the cloud of unknowing, and this means being prepared to lose contact with every article of faith that had previously sustained one in one's spiritual life. The ordeal of Job resulted in his personal enlightenment; the martyrdom of Jesus brought with it the enlightenment of the world. But neither the fictional Job nor the historical Jesus knew this when they were at the peak of their agony, even if they might possibly have been able to expound it intellectually to others at an earlier part of their ministry. This is the mystery of crucifixion.
The are, as we have already noted, two manifestations of God's transfiguring work in the world: the downward thrust of the Holy Spirit from the spiritual plane, through the psychical, to the material world, and the upward ascent of the Holy Spirit awake and vibrant in an aspiring soul. The point of contact is the hard, opaque, separative existence of men in a world of gravity unenlightened by grace. "The light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never mastered it." (John 1:5) But the darkness has no intention of submitting to the light. Unredeemed man prefers his petty world of sensual gratification, mean, materialistic ambition, and selfish exploitation of his fellows to the spiritual world of freedom and self-abandonment to the providence inherent in the present moment. He will resist, to the death of his natural disposition, any attempt to shift him from the present situation of comfort and ease in which he finds himself. And yet he must be moved from the illusory world of safety and complacency to the realm of growth and experience, if he is to remain alive. The unfathomed psychic residue that darkens the universe has accrued from unresolved, unredeemed demonic activity, by which I mean actions performed by unenlightened beings, whether human or angelic, for selfish motives, to the exclusion of full, universal participation.
Thus we have the vertical flow of the Holy Spirit, downwards and upwards like the movement of the angels that Jacob saw in his vision of the ladder, which rested on the ground with its top reaching to heaven. (Genesis 28:12) And there is the horizontal barrier of uncomprehending material substance which blocks the power of that spiritual light by its opacity and inertia. This is symbolised by the Cross, on which the spiritual has to be sacrificed for the redemption of the material. And yet, were it not for this material barrier, the spiritual would remain unmanifest in the world of forms, the world that is to become perfect through the transfiguration of matter to Spirit. In other worlds, the dark incomprehension of the material world which is interpenetrated by the negative psychic forces that emanate from the "superhuman forces of evil in the heavens" (Ephesians 6:12), is not only the accuser of the light, its challenger, and its potential destroyer. It is also the way by which that light may finally experience itself in the world of forms and know itself also in the fellowship of created things. Perhaps even God learned something of His own nature when His Word incarnated and took on the tragic form of a crucified man. To be God is beyond our understanding in the glory and majesty of deity; to be man is limiting and humiliating in the transience and mortality that is the burden of humanity.
In the great confrontation between the life that affirms and the life that denies, between the power that lifts up the world to God and the power that erases, disintegrates, and reduces the world to nothing, between the person who moves towards the realisation of the divinity within him and the person who affirms the bestiality deeply set in the bodily consciousness, it is decreed that the lesser must have its time of triumph over the greater. This is the unbearable tragedy of mortal life. We, in our earthly consciousness, work with al1 goodwill towards the triumph of justice, righteousness, and understanding. And yet, as I have previously shown, each advance in what we call civilisation brings with it a necessary reaction, for man can never be satisfied with a purely worldly utopia. The boredom inherent in such a state of benign inertia would almost necessarily bring in its wake warfare and internecine strife. Indeed, the assertive drive innate in all normal people must be given its due; if it cannot be realised in creative work or sustaining relationships, it will rapidly be deflected to self- indulgence and then perverted to frankly anti-social activity. A worldly utopia in which a quiescent population lacked nothing for its material comfort but had no deeper reality to confront and explore would soon become as intolerable to contemplate as the heaven portrayed in popular versions of the religions of the world, in which a state of self-satisfaction is attained in a realm in which nothing of real moment ever seems to happen.
The reason for all this is that man was not made to live forever on this earth; at most it is a temporary abode where, in the limitation of a time-space universe, he may work out his salvation in the school of suffering, thereby coming to a fuller understanding of his own nature. Nor was man meant for the psychic realm. This too, after many spectacular episodes, comes finally to a dead-end which is bounded by the mirror of glamour casting its diverting reflections on all who gaze upon it. Neither worldly ambition nor psychic powers are able to transcend the limitation of the ego. On the contrary, they affirm it subtly and unobtrusively, no more dangerously than when the individual is full of good intentions, believing he is doing good and being of help to others. As the personal self is inflated, so the spiritual self recedes into the background. It can play its full role only when the person dedicates himself to service in the world of a type that brings no acclaim with it, and cultivates the practice of prayer.
"Miserable creature that I am, who is there to rescue me out of this body doomed to death?" (Romans 7:24) St Paul's cry comes from the heart of all men and indeed from the soul of the universe itself. Who can deliver the creation from the death that invades life and cuts off its meaning, from the darkness that triumphs over the light of aspiration, from the self concern that imprisons people in a private world of selfish loneliness? St Paul answers: "God alone, through Jesus Christ our Lord." And the way in which this is attained is by submission to the darkness that ends in death, by forming a relationship that binds together even those whose vision is limited to material self-aggrandisement. The end of the life of a truly Spirit-filled person is the confrontation with the dark inertia of creation that resists change, and in this resistance is carried passively back to the chaos that existed before God breathed His Spirit on the darkness. The darkness too is divine, for everything that exists comes from God, but it is undifferentiated darkness, sometimes equated with the nothing out of which God created the universe. (2 Maccabees 7:28) The divine indwelling in al1 things ensures that there is nothing that does not come from God or is apart from Him. But there is a hierarchy of values, a gradation of glory which has been achieved by mankind working in the closest collaboration with the Holy Spirit. From the primal darkness, there has arisen a world civilisation presided over by the great spiritual geniuses of mankind, in whom the Spirit dwelt demonstrably. They have bequeathed the light of the Spirit to their followers, most of whom have dissipated it, but a few of whom have allowed it to kindle their own souls, so that they could in turn transmit it to those who followed them. And each in whom the light has truly shone, has added his contribution to the resurrection of the world. Many of these geniuses of the Spirit were able to live in some degree of compatibility with their surroundings, and they died in peace. But others had to take on themselves the burden of martyrdom.
Martyrdom in its spiritual context is never assumed by an act of personal will. It is forced on the saint by circumstances beyond his control. Willed martyrdom merges imperceptibly into exhibitionism on the one hand and suicide on the other. No wonder we should pray not to be brought to the test, for this is the test: to wrestle with the evil of the world in the assurance that the evil will prevail over the claims of the self, which has been purified, indeed transfigured, in the course of long and arduous service to the world. If the sacrifice of self has undertones of resentment, on the one hand, or of assurance, on the other hand, that the future - whether here or in the life beyond death - will see the victory of good over evil so that the evil is finally routed, overcome and destroyed, that sacrifice will lead to such hatred on its own behalf that the forces of evil will gain a victory undreamed of by the self-appointed martyr.
In the experience of crucifixion that marks the peak of spiritual attainment in this world, the one who enters this most fearsome ordeal must have left behind any concern for success in the work ahead of him. He must also have put away the natural personal preferences for his brethren that divide them into the favoured and the unfavoured, the liked and the disliked. True love, so searching that few could bear its full impact, goes beyond the affection we hold for those who are dear to us. Indeed, it must, if necessary, lower them, as Jesus did His brothers and mother on one occasion (Mark 3: 31-35), while it exalts the indifferent crowds of stricken people to fellowship with them. In this way, the aspirant leaves behind an immature type of value judgement based on the fruits of his actions, and also a private world of limited personal attachments. What is even more important is that he must also have ceased to hate the evil of the world. Instead he must feel compassion for all things; this is the fruit of identifying himself with all manner of sentient beings in the world - the corrupt and unclean no less than the noble and pure. This all-embracing compassion must take the place of anxious concern that the forces of right should triumph over those of wrong - as if we can properly judge what is right or wrong in so many of the world's dilemmas. Furthermore, this compassion is no longer an identification with the wretched of the earth in the comfortable security of a private existence. It is, on the contrary, a personal humiliation, so that one takes on, both to the outer gaze of hostile spectators and to one's inner consciousness all the attributes of the poor, the prisoner, the blind and the broken. The saving work of the spiritually anointed one, prophesied in Isaiah 61:1 and proclaimed by Jesus (Luke 4:18), finds its full and final fulfilment in the Passion of Christ. The healer of others cannot be healed Himself; the one Who showed men the way to heaven is excluded Himself; the bringer of abundant life is drained of life on a Cross that symbolises the intersection of the spiritual and the worldly with the manifest triumph of the worldly. This tragedy was no new event in Jesus' time, and it has not ended, not even two thousand years later.
There is a tendency amongst many contemporary thinkers to emphasise the Resurrection at the expense of the Crucifixion. While the Resurrection is certainly the central fact of the Christian faith and cannot be proclaimed too often or too joyfully, it must be remembered that the Crucifixion which preceded it bore no certainty of a full resurrection of the slain one. Since all men rise from the dead into some type of after-life existence, it is not to be wondered at that Jesus also rose. But what did, on that occasion, rise from the dead, and how did that resurrection set in motion the resurrection of the universe?
Martyrdom has unfortunately been the lot of man since human consciousness first expressed itself. Our own century has seen enough martyrs viciously destroyed to make one despair of the triumph of God, as indeed one might be obliged to do were it not for the perfect sacrifice made by one Man. We cannot tell what attitude of mind prevailed amongst the world's martyrs. Some were, we may imagine, filled with hatred against their persecutors, while others looked for the ultimate triumph of what they believed. But how many were filled with charity to those that destroyed them? How many could flow out in love even to the power that denies? There was at least One who could pray to His Father (and our Father too) to forgive His destroyers, for they were blind and did not understand what they were doing. The great and unattainable teaching of the Sermon on the Mount - unattainable to those who live in the world of separation - at last rings true in this final confrontation: "Do not set yourself against the man who wrongs you. If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn and offer him your left... Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors... Your heavenly Father makes his sun rise on good and bad alike, and sends the rain to the honest and the dishonest... There must be no limit to your goodness, as your heavenly Father's goodness knows no bounds." (Matthew 5: 38-48)
This attitude is not one of determined harmlessness, even in the face of intolerable provocation, which finds its modern counterpart in the questionable ideological position of non-violence and pacifism. I say it is questionable because experience teaches us that people who proclaim a non-violent, pacific approach to life are all too often violent inwardly and not at peace with themselves. The point I made in a previous section about the inadvisability of adopting too austere a style of life before one is spiritually ready should be remembered, for it applies also to the non-violent ethic. A great deal of inner work under the guidance of the Spirit has to be undertaken before the assertiveness of the self, which is as much a part of the personality as the drives to procreation or to spiritual understanding, can be diverted from violent reactions that follow personal affronts to a more constructive, compassionate way of life. There is more love in confronting another person in conscious enmity than in evading a real relationship by covering one's emotional sensibility with a layer of assumed kindness that serves only to separate oneself from him. Such an attitude is in fact mere condescension. One is so inwardly sure of the rectitude of one's own position that one will not consciously even hear what the other person has to say. The one who loses most in this transaction is the person who prides himself on his understanding. Those who are wise learn more from difficult encounters than from the writings of the learned.
The attitude of Jesus on the Cross was more than mere acceptance and forgiveness. It was one of identification. The "seven last words from the Cross" preached during the three hours on Good Friday to commemorate the period when darkness fell over the whole land and enveloped Jesus in intolerable gloom, may well be apocryphal in context as well as in sequence. But of one 'word' I have no doubt, because it is so damaging to the witness of those Christians who cannot face the implications of Jesus' full humanity: "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?" It comes from Psalm 22, and has been recited by Jews undergoing martyrdom throughout the ages. Even if the complete obfuscation of divine consciousness implicit in these words is thereby softened, the fact that Jesus had to repeat the Psalms to assuage His agony speaks fully of His human identity and His participation in the gloom, dread and intolerable doubt of all those confronting death, especially when their particular mission seems to be doomed. And the end of that particular three hours was one of doom. Silence prevailed. It is important to understand this, lest we relax too easily into the welcome Resurrection, as if it were a foregone conclusion right from the beginning of Jesus' ministry. Death had triumphed over life; man's fear and jealousy had killed God's gift to mankind. Once more a glorious hope for humanity was proved by the cynics to be yet another delusion.
The Spirit had buried Himself so deeply in the darkness of the uncomprehending earth that His light appeared to have been finally extinguished. The new gift of the Spirit was the ability to take on every vice and perversion, every stain and disfigurement that had disgraced the history of the world, that made men blanch in horror. And so He descended into Hell while the light appeared to have failed. And the good men rejoiced.