Chapter VI: Death of Jesus
John xix. 23-30; Matt. xxvii. 33, 35, 39-50; Mark xv. 24, 29-37; Luke xxiii. 34-37, 39-46.
Meanwhile the storm of passion which His foes had raised around the silent Christ had grown less violent; though now and then the uproar would swell, as it was caught up again by the populace, renewed shouts bursting forth here and there. But by this time a mass of dank and murky vapours, which had been rising over the earth, began to mount upward towards the Cross, enveloping it as in a funeral pall. Terror speed anything the ranks of the throng; soon the space encircling the three crosses was left bare, and the little group drew nearer; it numbered only three women, with one of the disciples. There was the Blessed Virgin with her sister Mary, Cleophas' wife; close beside them was Magdalene, the sinner, while John followed in their footsteps. His name indeed is not inscribed here in the inspired history, but everything betrays his presence,— not only the reticence he shows in mentioning his own part therein, but even this very position beside his Lord, whither the Beloved Disciple could not have failed to find his way.
Face to face with the Cross, they halted, transfixed, their gaze riveted upon Him Whom they loved. And Jesus after having first remembered His torturers only only to forgive them their share in His sufferings, after remembering the companion of His anguish, that so He might open to him the heavenly gates,— Jesus at length allowed His eyes to fall upon His own friends, who came to ask one last farewell; and looking, He beheld His Mother pierced with the sword whereof the aged Simeon had years ago forewarned her.
The tenderest of all the Church's hymns, our Stabat Mater, does but feebly express the poignant grief within her Mother's heart at such a woeful spectacle. Better than anyone else Jesus realized what it meant for her: it was death He beheld drawing down upon Himself, but for His Mother could see only present grief and future loneliness. Of His Apostles, John alone remained by Him, and growing more faithful in proportion as the danger increased, he now stood close at her side, protecting Mary.
Careful not to utter her name, fearing lest He might expose her to insults by revealing who she was, Jesus said, gently,—
" Woman, behold thy son!"
And then to John,—
" Behold thy Mother!"
From that moment the disciple received Mary into his dwelling and regarded her as his Mother.
 |
| " Behold thy Mother!" J-J Tissot |
This last link binding him to earth now broken, Jesus cast Himself upon God's Bosom, that so His Passion might be consummated. It was noonday when the first shades crept round about Golgotha; thereafter they had still continued to float upwards, shrouding Jerusalem, Judæa, and the entire world in a black winding-sheet. No natural cause could be sufficient to account for this phenomenon, for the moon, just now at the full, rendered an eclipse of the sun impossible. But the ground is wont to be swathed in murky vapours at the approach of earthquakes, which tear asunder the bowels of the earth, and now the world was wrapped in the trappings of woe, to bemoan the sufferings of its God. The Cross, whereon the Christ hung in death, was hidden in a thick, black cloud; all human noises were hushed and died away, and the cry which antiquity has put into the mouth of Dionysius the Aeropagite expresses that mighty fear which shook the souls of men:
"Either the Divinity suffers, or He is moved to pity at some great woe!"
In this death of the Cross the torture grew each instant more unendurable; the lacerated feet and hands, the shattered body, wrenched so violently apart, the involuntary contraction of the muscles, the thirst, the delirium of fever,— everything intensified each separate pang to such a point that the crucified criminal cried upon death as a deliverer.
Thus, during three hours Jesus battled without uttering a single complaint. What took place in the midst of those impenetrable shades? The Evangelists, who have described the Agony in the garden, are silent concerning this of the Cross. Yet in the end a great cried pierced the gloom, revealing the mystery of these hours of anguish. Saint Mark has preserved these words just as they came from the lips of Jesus, in that familiar Aramean tongue which as a child He had learned at Mary's knee:—
"Eloï! Eloï! Lamma sabachthani?"
"My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?"
This lament is the opening of the Psalm wherein the Messiah’s Passion is all predicted,1— His strength ebbing away in streams of blood, His burning wounds and that parching thirst of whose fierceness the dying man alone has any knowledge. But what were those bodily torments compared with the sufferings which racked His soul? Indeed it was a mental agony which found an utterance in that cry of distress,—
"My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?"
Yet never did any dying soul feel as Jesus felt when now forsaken by God, because none but He alone has ever lived with God and in God. Hanging there, reviled by earth and rejected by Heaven, He lingered in lonely conflict with another Agony like that which passed over Him in Gethsemane; yet this time He drained the cup to the very dregs. To gather any faint idea of the wretchedness which seized Him in His present abandonment, we must remember that despite His own innocence, Jesus, when upon the Cross, bore the actual load of our crimes,—that he actually had taken upon Himself the wickedness of the world. And now that God had transferred two Him all sins committed from the beginning unto the end of time, these all stood forth distinctly before His dying eyes, together with their very least circumstances. Every treacherous and revengeful deed, the lewd and adulterous works of shame, blasphemies, slanders, and lying,— all together surged their foul floods into His Soul, and every other sense was swallowed up under these torrents of iniquity. And it was in the same hour wherein the Christ was, as it were, overwhelmed in that first wild onslaught, that God saw fit to withdraw His Presence from Him, as if to crush Him beneath the weight of His vengeance. Jesus, " having become sin for our sake," being made "a curse and an execration" (according to Saint Paul's expression), Jesus suffered at the hand of God such unutterable horror as no human tongue can declare. In that hour Heaven drew away from Him into the darkness; Hell alone remained before the Saviour’s sight,— wherein was disclosed that never-ending despair, eternal, infinite, even as is the God whose penalty it is.
One lowermost depth of sorrow had still to be reached; it was the knowledge of how scanty was the number of souls who should profit by His Passion. The multitude of the damned were all marshalled before His eyes; however unworthy, they were the members of His mystical Body, so closely united to Him that they could not be separated from Him without violence. And as He saw this dearly loved portion of Himself about to be wrested from Him, Jesus felt that He indeed, like them was left destitute and reprobate for ever.
" He mourned," says Arnaud de Chartres, " that the fruit of His struggles should be torn from Him; He cried aloud that His sweat, His toils, and His death, were the thus bereft of their reward; since those for whom He had suffered so much would abandoned to everlasting perdition." This, then, was what wrung from Him that mournful cry:
"My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?"
But how can we make this moment of hope and despair to which Jesus yielded harmonise with the blessedness essential to His divine personality? Here again there is involved an unfathomable mystery, the Mystery of the Incarnation. To comprehend how the Son of God could speak of Himself as forsaken by His Father, we should first need to explain how the Infinite Being could take upon Himself a finite nature; for between these two humiliations there is only a difference of degree,— the abandonment of Jesus upon the Cross only continued what was first accomplished in the Incarnation, and in these two Mysteries the Godhead remains equally inviolable. With the Christ in His anguish it was even as with those mountain chains whose white crests pierce the clouds. Often the tempests do havoc with their rugged sides, strewing them with the wreckage of the storm; yet naught can trouble the snowy peaks, which, far, far above the whirlwind's reach, stand evermore serene and crowned with light.
In that same hour, the darkness disappearing, and with it the mists of fear, forthwith the Jews found courage to re-echo those words of Jesus,— feigning to mistake the divine Name of Eli for that of the Prophet.
"He is calling upon Elias," they said.
 |
| "He is calling upon Elias," they said. J-J Tissot. |
Yet even by this and jibe they confessed to the throes of terror they had just felt; for all Israel knew that the awful Seer was to reappear upon a day of terror and blazing fire, beneath cloud-hung skies and a moon like blood, when all the heavenly powers would tremble in their spheres.
All at once another cry was heard.
"I thirst," Jesus said, giving tongue to the most excruciating pangs of crucifixion.
 |
| "I thirst," Jesus said. J-J Tissot. |
One of the bystanders hurriedly dipped a sponge into the soldiers’ bitter drink and offered it to the Saviour; and as his arm could not reach so high as the head of the Sufferer, he took a reed, set the sponge upon the end of its stem, and put it to the lips of the Christ. His deed of mercy drew forth a shriek of hatred from the mob:—
"Let's be! Let's be! And see if Elias will come to save him!"
"Let me alone," said the man; "we shall see, all the same, whether Elias will save him."
The Saviour pressed His lips to the sponge soaked with vinegar; then, with quickened powers, He fixed His gaze upon the world of men below Him. In a trice His glance swept the whole duration of time and His Work. He beheld the righteous who had gone before Him, and all those who in after days were to believev in Him who would find their way to His Cross, and there obtain their salvation.
"It is finished!" He said; everything is consummated,— My Passion, My Life, and the Salvation of mankind.
 |
| "It is finished!" He said. J-J Tissot. |
Having spoken this last farewell to earth, He gave Himself into His Heavenly Father's keeping.
" Father," He cried with a loud voice, "into Thy hands I restore My Spirit."
It was the voice of a son throwing himself into the arms of his father, yet it was likewise the utterance of "Him from Whom no one taketh His Soul, but Who layeth it down when so ever it pleaseth Him."
 |
| The death of Christ. J-J Tissot. |
Most of the disciples who were gazing upon this scene from afar, only heard "the great cry" mentioned by Saint Matthew and Saint Mark. So, then, it must have been from some witness standing closer to the Cross, perchance from Mary's own lips, that Saint Luke learned Jesus’ last words. John, too, was there, gazing upon the Saviour; and he saw that He had bowed down His head upon His breast and that He was dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment