Christian Spirituality

Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).

These words of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel are equivalent to Jesus’s words in John’s Gospel, “It is finished.” The Gospels of Mark and Matthew include only one saying of Jesus from the cross: His cry of abandonment, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The other six sayings of Jesus are found in Luke and John.

In Mark and Matthew the emphasis is on Jesus as a participant in our suffering. Jesus shares our pain and loss. Jesus knows what it is like to feel forsaken, even by God. Jesus, for the most part, is a passive victim. In Luke and John, Jesus is still a victim, but he is not passive. There is no sense of Jesus feeling forsaken in Luke or John. In Luke’s portrait, Jesus dies as a courageous and faithful martyr. We need both portraits. We need to know that God suffers with us, that God identifies with our experiences of forsakenness and feelings of abandonment. But we also need to know that neither Jesus nor God was surprised by the crucifixion, and that God incorporated Jesus’s death into God’s redemptive plan. In Luke, Jesus is the overcoming victim, offering his life sacrificially.

By sacrifice I do not mean that Jesus died to appease God’s wrath, or satisfy God’s justice, or pay some debt owed to God. I do not mean that Jesus bore a penalty imposed by God. I have said before Jesus did not die to save us from God. We do not need to be saved from God. We… [Read more…] about Was Jesus' death necessary for our salvation? (the seventh saying from the cross)

A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit (John 19:29).

According to a consensus of scholarship, Mark’s Gospel was written first just before, during, or shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E. One to two decades later the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written. Finally, one to two decades after Matthew and Luke came the Gospel of John. All the Gospels are first and foremost spiritual and theological proclamations of the meaning of the story of Jesus, not historical reports. But John’s symbolism, Jesus monologues, and metaphorical storytelling takes it to a new level.

In John the cross of Jesus is the culmination of a cosmic drama. At the cross, the worlds of ungrace and grace collide; the powers of death and life meet with explosive force. As Jesus anticipates his death he says, “Now is the judgment of the world (the domination system), now the ruler of the world will be driven out” (12:31). The ruler of the world, mythical or real, is the representative, the epitome of the power of evil and hate that crucified Jesus. This is the power that entered into the heart of Judas (13:2) and why he is called a devil (6:70). John’s Gospel is cosmic theater, depicting the clash between good and evil as the clash between the world/the Devil and Christ.… [Read more…] about The Cosmic Cross (the sixth saying of Jesus from the cross)

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

When Mother Teresa’s private journals were published after her death, the startling revelation to so many was that her writings spoke of long periods where the absence of God was more real to her than God’s presence. In these extended dry periods, she did not sense nor feel God’s presence.

The only word that Mark’s Gospel tells us Jesus uttered from the cross was this word of abandonment: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s a question, not a declaration and it reflects the sense of God’s absence that overtook Jesus when he was hanging on the cross.

Jesus is echoing the cry of the Psalmist in Psalm 22, who is looking for God’s deliverance, but God does not act. Jesus was not expecting deliverance. He had already conceded to his fate. He wrestled with this in Gethsemane. Mark tells us that he was “distressed and agitated” and said to Peter, James, and John, whom he asked to accompany him and pray for him, “I am deeply grieved, even to death” (Mark 14:33–34). He asked his “Abba,” his good and compassionate Father/Mother to take the cup from him, but it was not to be.

The “cup” that Jesus refers to was not just the cup of physical suffering unto death. It was that, but it was much more. This is where Mel Gibson’s version of the passion got… [Read more…] about Did God forsake Jesus? (The fifth saying of Jesus from the cross)

“After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), ‘I am thirsty.'”

The Gospel of John is characterized by a very high Christology that is often read back into the stories of Jesus. This is undoubtedly at least one of the factors that guides the way the author (John’s community) shapes and reformulates the sayings of Jesus into lengthy dialogues and monologues. Sometimes in John’s narrative the divinity of Jesus trumps his humanity.

This brief word of Jesus from the cross found exclusively in John’s Gospel is a case in point. Jesus’s expression, “I am thirsty,” on the surface seems to reflect a very human Jesus, but in introducing these words, John presents Jesus as being in complete control, intentionally fulfilling Scripture. (All the Gospels emphasize the fulfillment of Scripture in the passion story, but John does this more than the others. The reference here seems to be to Psalm 69:22, which in the LXX (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) contains the same Greek words John uses for “sour wine” and “thirst.” Sometimes the connections the Gospel writers make with the Hebrew text are finely stretched. It was their way of emphasizing that God was at work in and through these events.)

John’s picture is very different from the portrait painted in Mark’s Gospel of a Jesus who is mostly passive and cries out, echoing the words of the Psalmist, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” There is no sense of… [Read more…] about Thirsting for Life (the fourth saying of Jesus from the cross)

“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home” (John 19:25–27).

John’s Gospel is full of words and phrases that have multiple meanings and convey a rich symbolism. Many interpreters argue that these words of Jesus from the cross to his mother and the beloved disciple should be understood symbolically and theologically, rather than historically. In fact, these words closely resemble the formulas used for rites of adoption in the ancient world. Jesus had other blood brothers who had been present alongside his mother in Cana and they would have naturally been the ones to care for their mother. Assuming that Joseph had been dead for some time, Jesus’s mother would have been in their care.

Jesus’s mother appears twice in the Gospel of John, at the beginning and end of his ministry: at the wedding in Cana and at the cross. These two scenes form a bracket around Jesus’s ministry. At the wedding scene there is a foreboding of what is to come. When she asks him to do something to remedy the problem of running out of wine, Jesus says, “Woman, my hour has not yet come,” alluding to the hour of his death. (By the way, calling her “woman” was not intended to be derogatory or degrading in any way. Jesus also addressed the woman of Samaria (4:21) and Mary Magdalene (20:15) by this same… [Read more…] about Why no preacher quotes Jesus on Family Sunday (the third saying from the cross)