The Death of Hope
AM Psalm 31 • PM Psalm 35
1 Kings 11:26-43 • James 4:13-5:6 • Mark 15:22-32
Mark’s is the earliest account we have of Jesus’s crucifixion. It is also the sparest and most unsparing. In today’s reading and in verses before and after it, there is none of the mitigation in other gospels. It’s all torture, humiliation, mocking, and despair. There is no sympathy and entreaty from one of the two others crucified (“Jesus, remember me…”) as in Luke. There is no exchange between Jesus and Mary and “the disciple whom he loved,” as in John. Jesus does not show us his compassion by asking forgiveness for his killers, as in Luke. His last utterance is not one of those we read in Luke and John—“It is finished” or “Into thy hands I commend my spirit”—but (as also in Matthew) a moan of abandonment and doubt: “Why have you forsaken me?” And then a final agonizing cry.
For me, and I suspect for many others writing Morning Reflections, the drill is to read over the day’s passages several times, give them a few days to ferment, then to see where they lead, what ideas or connections they provoke. That’s what I tried with today’s gospel, but riffing on Mark’s version of the Passion did not feel right at all.
These verses are of one of the few irreducibly critical moments in our story and in Christian identity as well as arguably the darkest passage in the New Testament. I think maybe each of us should find a quiet time in a quiet place to read the verses, and perhaps all of chapter 15, and then do our best to be there: to both remain in our present world and to try to imagine our way back into those terrible hours, and to do that without thinking of the resurrection—to try to experience what must have felt like the absolute death of hope. Because that experience is close to the heart of who we are, I think it calls us to go there, trying not to flinch too much, and to ask what it means to bring that moment back into our own world.
Written by Elliott West
Elliott teaches history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for thirty years.