Last week, we turned our attention to the final days and death of Jesus according to the Gospel of Mark. In that lec-ture, I developed the notion that the leitmotif of abandonment structures the Marcan passion narrative. From the opening verse, Mark casts Jesus' last days as an ever-widening "circle of abandonment" created by people who plot against Jesus, who fail him, desert him, and ultimately betray him. Beginning with the religious leaders and elders (14:1-2), the circle widens to include Jesus' friends -- Judas, at the Passover meal (14:10); Peter, James, and John in the garden (14:32-42); and Peter in the courtyard (14:66-74) -- and "the crowd," which accompanies Judas on his way to seize Jesus (14:43). Mark completes the circle, or so we are led to think, when we read that "all forsook him" (14:50), "all condemned him" (14:64).

But it is only with the death of Jesus that we learn the full extent of Jesus' abandonment.

³³And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. ³⁴And at the ninth hour Jesus cried in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" ³⁵And some of the bystanders hearing it said, "Behold, he is calling Elijah." ³⁶And one ran and, filling a sponge full of vinegar, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, "Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down." ³⁷And Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last. ³⁸And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

At the hour of his death, no one stands with Jesus -- not even God. According to Mark, Jesus dies absolutely alone.

Paralleling the method we used in our work on Noah and Job, I want to focus on one single moment in this narrative: the mo-ment "between" verses 33 and 34, the moment after darkness covers the whole land and before the last cry of Jesus. I want to suggest that Jesus, like Noah and Job before him, encounters God in a terror-filled moment that strips him of all "innocence" he may have had about the One he called Abba.

At the moment of his death, Jesus cries out, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" an allusion to one of the great psalms of lament, Psalm 22:1. These words that Mark discerns as Jesus' last are as provoca-tive as they are troubling, offering solace even as they terrify. From the perspective of Jesus hanging on the cross, Jesus dies believing that God has forsaken him. His Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? indicates a moment of absolute terror precisely because it forces Jesus to confront a reality that contradicts his most fundamental belief -- the steadfast faithfulness of God. In this singularly terrifying moment, Jesus loses an inno-cence about God precisely because what Jesus has held to throughout his life and to this moment of his death is that God will be who Jesus believes God most truly is -- the faithful One of Israel. A life of fidelity to the will and wisdom of God has put him on a cross, and for this he can draw comfort from nowhere and from no one, not even from the One to whom he has committed his life. As Mark has Jesus experience his death, Jesus must confront the reality that God is not faithful, that God does not keep promises made. This Torah-observant Jew must now, at the hour of his death, confront the reality that God has abandoned him.

Thus, for Jesus hanging on the cross, desolate and alone, what is left? When the intellect has nothing more to compre-hend, when the will has nothing more to decide, to what does the human heart turn? Let me suggest the following: from the perspective of the cross, Jesus' dying is a story about the limits and the possibilities of human fidelity in the face of absolute abandonment. At this point in the narrative, verse 33, Jesus does not yet know of God's vindication of his life. He does not yet know of God's raising him to new life. Stripped of everything, Jesus knows only total abandonment.

And still, at the moment of his death, Jesus can do no more than what he has always done: remain faithful to God. As Mark preserves the passion account, Jesus' fidelity to God is not dependent on God's fidelity to Jesus. What is at stake, I think, in Mark's account of the dying of Jesus, is nothing more, but nothing less, than this: the realization that we have no control over God's fidelity or God's commitment to us. All that we have, in the most literal sense of the word, is our own fidelity and our own commitment to God. Thus, what is at stake in the dying of Jesus, from the perspective of the cross, is Jesus' own integrity. God's abandonment notwithstanding, Jesus does with his dying breath what Jesus did with all his breaths. In such moments, the human heart always relies on habits deeply formed. As a Torah-observant Jew, Jesus prayed to God. But with this, his last breath, he prayed a lament, a prayer that many consider to be the single most important form of prayer in the Hebrew Bible.

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? is a prayer out of the depths of despair, an act of defiance against suffering's power to de-stroy the human spirit, a prayer to God to deliver the one praying from the power of suffering and the imminence of destruction. It is a profound act of faith in the midst of chaos, a defiant act in the midst of hopelessness. The faith that laments cries out in a loud voice, "If you, God, will turn your ear to me; if you, God, will turn your face to me; if you, God, will act -- then will I be saved!" The whole purpose of the lament, then, is to "get God's attention," because those who lament have confidence that if God knows of their suffering, God will not leave them to suffer. The faith that laments seeks to keep God ever-mindful of the fact that God too has something at stake whenever and wherever human beings suffer, that God is somehow caught up in and implicated in human suffering. The lament is faith's last, best hope that whenever the pain and power of suffering are brought into the arena of God's fidelity and God's redemptive love, both pain and suffering will eventually yield to the miracle and mystery of God. It always has, proclaim those who lament.

The story of the dying of Jesus, at least as Mark preserves it, is, thus, a root story about the tenacity of human fidelity and the amazing possibility that even as pain and sorrow shatter the human heart; even in the face of complete failure, abso-lute abandonment, and utter forsakenness; even when the demons of the soul's dark night eclipse the light of day; even when there is every reason to die in despair; even then, the human spirit has the capacity to hope, and thus, to remain faithful.

Only now do we begin to understand why Mark has cast the story of Jesus' dying as he has. Only now do we glimpse his pastoral agenda. Mark wants to push to the limits the theme of abandonment ... for the sake of his reader. You will recall that Mark's community is facing severe persecution. And so by casting the death of Jesus in terms that are both stark and chilling, Mark means to say to his reader: if, at the moment of your dying, you feel abandoned and utterly forsaken -- so too did Jesus. Make no mistake about it: if the death of Jesus is an absolutely faith-shattering experience, so too is the death of every righteous person at the hands of the godless. The difference between Jesus and you, Mark means to say, is this: you know what Jesus hanging on the cross did not know. You know that God did indeed hear Jesus' cry out of the depths. You know that God is indeed faithful. Remembering promises made to Noah and to Job, God vindicated Jesus' life ... and God will vindicate yours. Therefore, take courage; take heart!

And so, I conclude with this: that Mark's account of the dying of Jesus reminds each of us -- Jew and Christian alike, each in our own way -- that we are always saved by a hope that refuses to die into nothingness.