Videos from Fr Claudio Doglio
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From the Cross, Authentic Faith Is Born
“The Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were to occur in two days. So the chief priests and the scribes sought a way to arrest him by treachery and put him to death. They said, ‘Not during the festival, for fear of a riot among the people.’”
Thus begins chapter 14 of the Gospel according to Mark, which narrates the passion of Jesus in a shocking way. Chapters 14 and 15 of Mark mark the culmination of the narrative, with the tragic events of Jesus’s condemnation, death, and resurrection. It is the fundamental moment in evangelical history. A scholar from the past said that the Gospel of Mark is the story of passion with a long introduction.
Everything narrated up to chapter 13 serves as an introduction to the Passion event. To understand the drama, note that the Jewish authorities have decided to eliminate him; he bothers them and is a dangerous prophet. In their plan, they would like to avoid the Easter festival, which is now imminent because there are many people in Jerusalem, and they fear that the people are on the side of Jesus.
They plan to arrest him after Easter. This is the first ending in which Mark shows Jesus to be the master of the situation. They don’t take him when they want to; they capture him only when he decides to be apprehended. And his murder will take place during Easter, because it is there, in that historical and festive context, that God’s plan for the new covenant is fulfilled.
At the end of the eschatological discourse in Mark 13, Jesus emphasizes the disciples’ need for vigilance in four moments: “You do not know when the lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or cockcrow, or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping.” It is time for the Easter supper; at midnight, it is prayer in Gethsemane, and the disciples sleep until the rooster crows. There is Peter’s denial; in another sense, the disciple is sleeping. In the morning, Jesus is brought before Pilate, sentenced to death, and hung on the cross.
The warning is addressed to the disciples: do not sleep through the drama of the cross, that is, do not be estranged; be ready with your eyes wide open, not as blind people but as healed people capable of seeing what the Lord does.
The first scene of the passion story takes place in Bethany and recounts a dinner at which an unidentified woman performs a prophetic act, wasting costly perfume: “She broke the bottle and spilled it on the head of Jesus.” Ancient perfumers packaged these precious perfumes in sealed alabaster jars. These jars had fragile necks that could not be opened but had to be broken. When the alabaster vial was broken, the perfume had to be poured and then consumed. The cost of that perfume is estimated at 300 denarii. If one denarius is the daily wage of a worker, that is almost a year’s wages. A considerable amount, thrown away like this to honor Jesus, to waste all that money on a perfumed ointment to express affection for Jesus, “It could have been sold for more than three hundred days’ wages and the money given to the poor.”
This scene is prophetic and provocative, and it opens the story of passion because this is typically our argument. Many of us can identify with it perfectly because of the waste of this gesture of love, a gift, a very precious ointment that could be monetized, “It could have been sold for more than three hundred days’ wages and the money given to the poor.”
Instead, Jesus affirms the woman and calls her a prophet. He considers her capable of deep understanding: “Let her alone. Why do you make trouble for her? She has done a good thing for me. The poor you will always have with you, and whenever you wish, you can do good to them, but you will not always have me. She has done what she could. She has anticipated anointing my body for burial. Amen, I say to you, wherever the Gospel is proclaimed to the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”
This woman has intuited, says Jesus, his imminent burial. And what women could not do after the death of Jesus, that is, anoint the body, this woman prophet did before, as a gesture of love. She has wasted a lot on Jesus. In what sense is this story the key to reading the passion? Because, after all, the passion of Jesus is a waste; it is a huge waste, a life wasted; the Son of God, an intelligent, slender, thirty-year-old young man, strong, brave, good, to die like that … but it’s not a waste. Still, how many things could he have done! He could have organized so many things! Dying young, dying innocent, dying as the Son of God … is not a waste.
Human logic, economic, commercial logic, and the religious sphere… would say that it is not right; it is the same criterion that has guided the disciples throughout the entire itinerary of the Gospel. Jesus has announced that ending, but they continued to follow their ideas and schemes, without accepting that great revelation of Jesus, who speaks of his life as a waste of love. He is throwing away his life precisely out of love, for an excess of love, and the disciples, a little mercantile, are numb in the face of events.
When they organize the dinner during that very significant celebration of the Easter of liberation, remembering the ancient covenant, Jesus, with the cup of wine in his hands, says, ‘This is my blood of the covenant.’ It is a strange phrase, ‘my blood is the blood of the covenant I make with you.’ Jesus is aware that he is about to shed his blood, as Moses did with the blood of the calves. So now, Jesus, with his blood, creates a new covenant in his blood, that is, his life given is the foundation of a new relationship that unites the disciples with Jesus. The institution of a new covenant, a new reality, and a new relationship between the disciples and Jesus is the event of the Church.
It is the institution of this new reality, the new covenant that unites Jesus with humanity willing to accept him. After dinner, late at night in Gethsemane, Jesus prays. He prays with the invocation of the Son. It is the only time in the Gospels when the Aramaic word ‘Abba’ is placed on the lips of Jesus. The Aramaic word ‘abba’ is a term of endearment, not simply father; it corresponds to ‘dad.’ It is a sweet and affectionate term with which Jesus expresses filial trust in God and humanly reveals all his tension. Mark notes without much consideration that Jesus began to feel anguish, fear, and deep trouble, and asks his Father for help, if it may pass the cup, understood as a moment of suffering, aware of what will happen. Jesus trusts the Father and asks Him if it is possible to avoid it. He does not want to avoid it, but, humanly speaking, he is afraid. He wants to do the Father’s will. The will of the Father is not the death of Jesus; Jesus does not want to die, and God the Father does not want God the Son to die.
The will of the Father and the will of the Son is to show humankind how much God loves them, and there is no better way than to let himself be killed, remaining faithful to that revelation. At that moment, Jesus told humanity, “God loves you until death.” On that occasion, the man in Jesus says to God, “I love you until I give my life.” It is precisely the glorious event of free and generous self-giving.
The disciples sleep. They don’t notice anything. They are unable to keep watch with him. He invites them to be vigilant so as not to fall into temptation; they fall at the moment of trial, the great temptation. They are all on the ground; they are asleep, afraid, fleeing, and abandoning him. However, there is a young man covered only with a sheet; a soldier grabs him, he drops the sheet into the guard’s hands, and runs away naked.
We said at the beginning of this course that Mark is most likely the young boy himself. The evangelist, a young 12- to 15-year-old at the time of the event, secretly participated in that scene, and no one knew of his presence. Only he can tell about it, but this symbolic gesture becomes very impressive. Imagine the scene in the Garden of Olives on a full-moon night, because the Easter night falls on a full moon, with a soldier holding a sheet in his hand while a naked boy runs away and disappears. It is a symbolic image of the resurrection and an announcement before the tragic end that will be fulfilled.
Mark then presents the facts of the passion we know well in a concise, synthetic way, without additions, comments, or adjectives. He presents the drama of the events: Jesus is arrested, interrogated, sentenced to death, and handed over by Pilate at the insistence of the authorities. The Roman political power also condemns him and orders the execution of the sentence by the method for slaves: crucifixion. Jesus is taken away together with two brigands who must undergo the same torture: he is bound, crucified, and nailed to the cross.
At the moment of his death, the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom, and just before the earth darkened, the sun was eclipsed. It is an apocalyptic scene, that is, one of great revelation. There is cosmic darkness, and the veil of the temple, which separates the most sacred place, is torn in two. At that point, the centurion who was guarding at the foot of the cross, having seen him die that way, said: “Really, this man was the Son of God.”
And this is the second vertex of Mark’s narrative, the profession of faith of the Roman centurion who, having seen Jesus die in that way, that is, with confident total abandonment, without screaming, cursing, insulting, or complaining, is deeply affected. The centurion reaches the mature faith of the Christian disciple, follows the deposition from the cross and the burial of Jesus. He is not thrown into a common grave, as would have been the fate of any other condemned, because a rich man, Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish authorities, intervenes. He shows up and asks for the body of Jesus and buries him in his new tomb. But it is late; they must return on the night of the Jewish Passover dinner. We would say that there is a curfew at six in the evening, and, therefore, there is no more time for the anointing; the rites are suspended and postponed. Saturday follows the day of great rest, the day of the feast.
The next morning after Saturday, the women buy the oils to anoint the body of Jesus, but there is no body to anoint; another woman had already anointed him during the dinner at Bethany, ahead of time, prophetically, in that generous waste; and the angelic figure acting as a catechist for women who had been surprised to find the grave empty is described by the same term as the young man with the sheet: νεανίσκον = ‘neaniskos.’
It is not said to be an angel but a young man. What is in the grave? An abandoned sheet. The guards, like those in Gethsemane, held sheets in their hands, but Christ was gone, naked. It is the image of the resurrection. The risen one is younger and faster. He is the victor who flees, abandoning everything.
It is the announcement of the new creation. That mass of stone that had been placed in front of the tomb would not have been able to be removed by the women; they wonder who will remove it, but upon looking, they realize it has already been removed. God’s intervention has already eliminated the fundamental problem of death. And the young man explains to the women: “Do not be amazed! You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Behold, the place where they laid him. But go and tell his disciples and Peter…(Peter, who denied him but was not rejected by Jesus) ‘He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.’” He precedes them and us in daily life.
Thus ends the Gospel of Mark abruptly. “The women went out and fled from the tomb, seized with trembling and bewilderment. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”The ending is a surprise. But the Gospel continues in the lives of catechumens who heard this splendid story on Easter night and now adhere to it by accepting baptism, immersing themselves in water, and rising with Jesus to new life.
Reading and meditating on the Gospel of Mark is a way to become disciples again, to follow him wholeheartedly, to learn the style of Jesus, and to welcome his grace that opens our eyes. He surpasses us and precedes us, and we want to learn from him and follow him on his way, recognizing him as the Christ, the Son of God.