Mysterium Paschale: Delving into the Mystery of the Cross
One verse that always stands out to me with particular profundity when meditating upon stories of Jesus’ crucifixion are the words of Matthew 27:45, “From noon onward, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.” The pure power of this imagery is reinforced by the reality of what happened at that moment: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, consubstantial with the Father, the Source of Life and the hope of our salvation, experienced death. Place yourself in the shoes of the Apostles: the man who they believed would fulfill all of the messianic hopes of the Jewish religion, Who would reestablish the Kingdom of Israel and bring all people to a knowledge of the One, True God was betrayed by one of His followers, unjustly tried by the Jewish religious authorities, and sentenced to death by pagans. The Man Who was believed to be the Object of their faith and the Source of their hope experienced death at the hands of His enemies. Look at the Blessed Virgin Mary: not only was this Man Who hung on the Cross One Who she believed to be His Savior, but was also her Son.
The sun being darkened for three hours is thus an apropos physical sign of the utter, almost absurd, sadness of the Crucifixion. Yet, it has another level of meaning beneath that: the words of Matthew 27:45 are meant to parallel the words of Amos 8:9, “On that day—oracle of the Lord GOD—I will make the sun set at midday and in broad daylight cover the land with darkness.” When one looks at the larger context of this verse, God is responding to the corruption in Ancient Israelite society, something manifested with particular directness in the mistreatment of the poor. Unless Israel repents, God will bring about His judgment upon Israel. Some Biblical scholars have noted that the words of Amos 8:9 parallel an earlier verse in Amos, namely the words of Amos 5:20, “Truly, the day of the LORD will be darkness, not light, gloom without any brightness!” The day on which God manifests His judgment against sinners is a day of darkness. One way of interpreting this is that the day of judgment which can be seen as a time in which God withdraws His Presence from His People. It is not a matter of God abandoning His people, but handing them over to their sins, letting them experience the moral consequences of their sin, that is, to experience what it is like to live completely isolated from God. God allows the people to not feel or perceive His Presence in as direct a manner as possible.
We see this on the Cross. Christ, as God, is the Source of life; yet, through experiencing death, Christ veiled His Goodness. No more a greater offense against God could exist than to directly insult, beat, spit upon, and unjustly condemn to death Christ Himself. In response, Christ allowed the Presence of His Divine Nature to be veiled behind His Humanity to an even greater degree. It was, in a sense, the opposite of what happened in the Transfiguration, where Christ made His Glory manifest directly to the Apostles. Nonetheless, the human and the Divine were no less united to one another, Christ was no less God in human form, upon Calvary than He was upon Mount Tabor.
Christianity is thus founded upon the claim that the Source of all Life experienced death; that God, though all-powerful, and therefore capable of preventing His persecutors from unjustly oppressing Him, chose to subject Himself to our sin and injustice, and it was in allowing Himself to be subject to our sin and injustice that He defeated, that He made expiation for, our sin; it was in sinking into the depths of Hades that He - to use the words of the Exultet - “broke the prison bars of death” and therefore made the resurrection possible.
Our initial reaction to the events surrounding the Passion and Death of Christ should be a mix of confusion and awe. For those filled with the Holy Spirit, they delve into the depths of Christ’s Passion and Death and see the Divine Goodness and Power at work in it defeating sin; yet, prior to being filled with the Holy Spirit, this same event can sever as one of the - if not the - biggest obstacle to coming to the faith. This realization was at the heart of St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 1:22-25, “For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”
Now, I’m not a huge fan of appealing to mystery when what really means is “Turn off your brain and don’t really think that deeply about the issue at hand, because I don’t really have an answer to your spiritual questions, or don’t understand the answers put forward by Scripture or the Church.” There is a need for systematic theology and the philosophy of religion. Nonetheless, one must constantly remember that salvation history represents a coming together or heaven and earth, the transcendent and the immanent. Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium do provide a detailed framework within which we can come to a deeper understanding of how it is that Christ, in dying and rising from the dead, defeated death and reconciled us to God; nonetheless, it is easy for systematic theology or the philosophy of religion, in a desire to make things make sense, to drain those core moments of salvation of that which makes them so awe-inspiring.
One can, and should, take part in as much systematic or philosophical discussion of the Passion and Death of Christ as possible, but if the intellectual nuance and clarity provided by the Death of Christ doesn’t, at the end of the day, reinforce that sense of awe, that sense that what one is looking at is sad almost to the point of being scandalous, before being pulled back to that sense or joyous trust in the Lord produced by the realization that even in these darkest moments Christ is at work producing our salvation, then one’s priorities in studying this core mystery of the faith are not in the right place.
For example, as one of the prayers associated with Good Friday in the Byzantine tradition, the the Kathismata prayer, for Good Friday, which reads: “The choirs of Angels were amazed when they saw Thee, Who art Immortal and dost dwell in the bosom of the Father, as dead and in the tomb, and with the dead in Hades, Whom as Creator and Lord the legions of angels encircle and glorify.” The text is very explicit about the shocking nature of witnessing the One Who is the Source of Life, and Who is therefore Immortal, the One Who alone has ultimate authority and glory, experience death. Yet, this is expressed in broader, creational terms: the One Who all of creation glorifies is now experiencing God forsakenness. A prayer with a similar meaning is recited in the 1st Ode for the Canon of Good Friday: “Verily, the super-terrestrial, and those below the earth, beholding Thee on Thy throne on high and in the grace below, were amazed, trembling at Thy Death; for Thou, O Element of Life; wast seen to be dead in a manner transcending the mind.”
When one thinks about this, one can easily see why, for Jews, belief in the Passion and Death of Christ would be a stumbling block, and why for Greeks it would appear as foolishness: the notion that the Messiah, a figure prophesied to be a king, asserts His authority over evil and death by being subject to evil and death? Yet, why is this same belief that is such a scandal to non-believers one of the most central elements of Christianity? It is because, in this radical act of self-emptying, God made His Divine Life to permeate every element of the human condition, thereby uniting it to Himself. Hans Urs von Balthasar notes that while many of the classical commentaries on the New Testament, especially in the Patristic era - during which the foundational Christological and Trinitarian doctrines of Christianity were still hotly debated - contain many elements of truth, they to some degree shift the emphasis away from what it ought to be. Von Balthasar uses as example the words of St. Paul in Philippians 2:5-11. Most early Christian writers, when attempting to confront the notion that Christ chose to empty Himself of His premundane glory in order to dwell on earth and experience the dishonor of the Cross, attempt to explain the meaning of the Incarnation in light of the relation between Christ’s Divinity and humanity (i.e., how Christ, in becoming human, still remains God). While this text, for von Balthasar, isn’t at odds with the Christological and Trinitarian views that emerged in the aftermath of 1 Nicaea, an attempt to merely prove this theological worldview was not the point. The point of the text was primarily soteriological in nature: God, in Christ, took part in a radical form of self-emptying, a radical self-emptying born out of, and which at no point undermines, Divine Sovereignty or Divine Freedom; in this radical act of self-emptying, Christ enters into the human condition so as to draw it back to Himself. As von Balthasar writes, “to ‘experience’ (zein peira, cf. Hebrews 2:18, 4:15) the human condition ‘from within’, so as to re-direct it from inside it, and thus save it.” God does so by placing Himself at “that point where sinful, mortal man finds himself ‘at his wits end’. And this must be where man has lost himself in death without, for all that, finding God. This is the place where he has fallen into an abyss of grief, indigence, darkness, into the ‘pit’ from which he cannot escape by his own powers.” God, in a word, experienced the God-forsakenness that mankind experiences as a result of sin in order to reconcile us to Himself.
The Church Fathers, for von Balthasar, merely had a slightly different shift in emphasis from that of the Biblical authors, one motivated by a desire to fight against the errors of their time (which struck at the very core of the Christian message); even worse were the erroneous interpretations of the Passion and Cross found among modern and contemporary philosophers, who attempted to make sense of the Cross by rationalizing it, often reading into it certain philosophical and theological ideas contrary to those traditionally held by the Church, and who often rendered large portions of the story of Christ’s Passion and Death merely symbolic. In this, they made it more palatable, but in doing so they drained it of its meaning. In response to this, von Balthasar writes, “Paul wants above all to abide by the paradox of the Cross. God’s power shows Itself in weakness; in His folly He demonstrates His superiority vis-à-vis the wisdom of men. Thus it is that, in the presence of those who have left the Cross behind them, Paul wishes to ‘know nothing…except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.’”
The true meaning of the Cross is that, by sinking to the depths of human separation from God, He overcame this separation. In dying, He shined the light of Divine Goodness and Love upon sin, pain and death; He filled the space separating us from Himself with His own Divine Presence. This was true both in terms of Jesus’ physical suffering as well as His emotional or spiritual suffering. According to Genesis 2:17 and 1 Corinthians 15:22, death is the result of sin. This is the case because, as St. Athanasius writes in his On the Incarnation, God is the Source of all being and existence, and sin is a turn away from God; sin is therefore a return to the nothingness from which we came. Death is therefore the expression of the metaphysical corruption brought about by sin. Yet, when the Source of Life experiences death, His Divine Life is so vast that it overcomes death and makes eternal life and resurrection possible. This was something explicated in the events surrounding the Resurrection of Christ. Yet, humans are not merely bodies; we are beings with a vast and rich inner life as well. Thus, not only man’s body, but also his thoughts, emotions and moral state are corrupted by sin. Thus, a turn away from God brings about not only physical death, but also moral death as well. Thus Christ, when suffering, took upon Himself the fullness of the pains associated with our separation from God. In the words of the 20th century Carmelite friar, theologian, and mystic Gabriel of Mary Magdalene,
…[T]he utter anguish of His spirit, [which is] much more sorrowful than the dreadful physical sufferings which await Him…His humanity finds itself facing the hard reality of the fact, deprived of the sensible help of the Divinity, which seems not only to withdraw, but even more, to be angry with Him…Yet, even in His agony upon the Cross, Jesus is always God, and therefore always indissolubly united to the Father. However, He has taken upon Himself the heavy burden of our sins, which stand like a moral barrier between Him and the Father. Although personally united to the Word, His humanity is, by a miracle, deprived of all divine comfort and support, and feels instead the full weight of all the malediction due to sin…
Christ experiences the full weight of separation from God, both emotionally and physically, in order to offer the Sacrifice that would to make our reconciliation with God possible. As one of the prayers associated with the liturgical texts for the Byzantine tradition on Good Friday say, “To the depths of the earth Thou descendest to fill it with Thy Glory; for my person that is in Adam was not hidden from Thee, and when Thou wast buried Thou didst renew me, who was corrupt, O Lover of Mankind.” And as the Church Father St. Maximos wrote, “If God suffers in the flesh when He was made man, should we not rejoice when we suffer, for we have God to share in our suffering. This shared suffering confers the Kingdom on us. For he spoke truly who said, ‘If we suffer with Him, then we shall also be glorified with Him’ (Romans 8:17).” This reality must remain the focus of any theological consideration of the Cross; otherwise, our approach to the Pascal Mystery at the core of the Christian faith will be reduced to either a series of doctrinal statements and theological speculations which, while true, are separated from the Biblical, theological or spiritual context that produced them, or they will be reinterpreted in a heretical and unbiblical manner.
Sources
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, translated by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005)
Greek Orthodox Holy Week & Easter Services, compiled by Fr. George L. Papadeas (Daytona Beach: Patmos Press, 1993)
St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation of the Word, chapter 4, translated by Archibald Robertson, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, second series, vol. 4, edited by Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D., and Henry Wace, D.D. (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1892)
St. Maximos the Confessor, First Century of Various Texts, in The Philokalia, vol. 2, compiled by St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, translated and edited by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1990)
Fr. Gabriel of Mary Magdalen, O.Carm., Divine Intimacy: Meditations on the Interior Life for Every Day of the Liturgical Year, translated by the Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Boston (London: Baronius Press, 2021)