The Mystery of Christ
The Liturgy as Spiritual Experience

by Father Thomas Keating

Chapter 2 Part VIII

The Easter-Ascension Mystery

The Passion

 When they brought Jesus to Golgotha (which means the place of the skull), they tried to give him wine drugged with myrrh, but he would not take it. Then they crucified him and divided up his garments by rolling dice for them to see what each should take. It was about nine in the morning when they crucified him. . . .
    With him they crucified two insurgents, one at his right and one at his left. People going by kept insulting him, tossing their heads and saying, "Ha, ha! So you were going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days! Save yourself now by coming down from that cross!"
    The chief priests and the scribes also joined in and jeered, "He saved others, but he cannot save himself! Let the 'Messiah', the king o Israel, come down from the cross here and now so that we can see it and believe in him!" the men who had been crucified with him likewise kept taunting him.
    When noon came, darkness fell on the whole countryside and lasted until midafternoon. At that time Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
    A few of the bystanders who heard it remarked: "Listen! He is calling on Elijah." Someone ran, and soaking a sponge in sour wine, stuck it on a reed to try to make him drink. The man said, "Now let's see whether Elijah comes to take him down." 
    Then Jesus, uttering a cry, breathed his last.
[Mark 15:22 - 38]
From the Gospel of Passion Sunday

    The double-bind is one of the crucial experiences of the spiritual journey. No one ever experienced it to the degree that Jesus did. By "double-bind" I mean a crisis of principle that brings about an overwhelming problem of conscience. Two apparent duties that call out for total adherence seem to be in complete opposition to each other. This is not the same as hitting bottom where there is no place to go but up. It is the agonizing problem of facing two opposing goods that cannot be integrated or resolved. Our dilemma is not a choice between good or evil, which would be a temptation. It is usually a choice between two apparent goods. Or again, an event may arise in our life that is absolutely contrary to our deepest loyalties, to our spiritual tradition, religious education or cultural conditioning. Such a choice or event causes incredible suffering, especially to those who are most advanced in purity of conscience, For a crisis of this kind there is no solution on the rational level. The double-bind can only be resolved by moving to a higher level of consciousness, where the two opposites that seem irreconcilable on the level of reason are resolved, not by rational explanation, but in the light of the new perspective that sees the opposites as complementary rather than contradictory.

    One of the classical examples of this kind of crisis appears in the book of Job, one of the great wisdom books of the Old Testament. Through most of the book, Job is struggling with the problem of innocent suffering. He knows himself to be innocent and yet he is experiencing tremendous suffering on every level of his being. He ends up sitting on a dunghill, covered with sores from head to foot. All his possessions, his family and friends have been taken from him, and he is overwhelmed by physical infirmities. Yet he had never offended God in any way. Prior to his misfortunes, he was recognized by everyone as a just man. His comforters, representing the cultural preconceptions of the time, kept telling him, "If only you will admit that you have sinned, God will forgive you and your suffering will be taken away."

    In Job's day misfortune was considered a sign of personal sin; either one had done something wrong in early life, or one had committed a hidden sin. Job was confronted with the dilemma of being faithful to his own integrity (he knew he had not done anything wrong) or of accusing God of injustice for allowing him to suffer as if he had committed some secret crime. Job maintains his innocence throughout the book. His double-bind consisted of trying to avoid accusing God of injustice and at the same time, of remaining faithful to his conscience which told him that he had done nothing wrong. 

    The resolution of Job's double-bind comes in the last chapter of the book, when God reveals to him a higher view of reality without explaining the mystery of innocent suffering. God seems to say that suffering is one of the impenetrables of life while remaining an inescapable part of it.

    Job's suffering helps us understand what the passion of Jesus involved as a double-bind. In the desert Jesus experienced the human condition with the same concreteness with which we experience it, namely, in the form of the emotional programming of early childhood. As Jesus' life unfolded, his awareness of his personal union with the Father constantly increased. As he approached the end of his life, he revealed the God of Israel, not as a God of armies, of fear or of sheer transcendence, but as the God of compassion, a Presence that bends over creatures with incredible tenderness, care and affection. At the same time, God is firm in training his children so that they may grow into the transcendent destiny that he has planned for them.

    None ever knew God the way that Jesus knew him. He penetrated the depths of the Ultimate Reality and revealed that the interior life of Limitless Being is relationship: a community of persons sharing infinite life and love. Jesus entered into that relationship, made it his own, and tried to transmit it to his disciples. For him, the Father, Abba, was absolutely everything. In coming to the age of reason and to full reflective self-consciousness, Jesus never suffered from the feeling of separation from God that is our experience as we come to rational consciousness. This feeling of separation is the source of our deep sense of incompletion, guilt and alienation.

    Jesus took upon himself the human condition more and more concretely as his life progressed. In the Garden of Gethsemani, he took upon himself the sin of the world with all its consequences. He experience every level loneliness, guilt and anguish that you or I or any human being has ever felt. The ghastly sum of accumulated human misery, sin and guilt descended upon him. He felt himself being asked by his Father to identify with this misery in all its immensity and horror. This was the double-bind Jesus articulated so graphically in the Garden of Gethsemani. After pleading in vain to the apostles to watch one hour with him, he withdrew a little way from them and fell on his face crying out, "Abba, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me!" The clear realization that he was being asked by the Father to thrust himself as far from him as anyone has ever experienced, caused him unimaginable agony. By absorbing the separate-self sense into his inmost being, Jesus became sin. As Paul writes, "He who knew not sin was made sin for our salvation."

    Jesus was torn between the choices presented by the double-bind: "Am I to become sin and thus renounce my personal relationship with Abba?" Or again, "Am I to become sin and thus experience separation from the One who is my whole life?"

    His prayer continues, "nevertheless, Father, not my will, but thine be done."

    Jesus made this petition three times over and as he prayed, he sweat drops of blood, manifesting the incredible agony of his double-bind. The source of Jesus' dread was not so much the prospect of physical suffering, but the impending loss of his personal relationship with the One who meant everything to him.

    "Father, how can I, your Son, become sin?" That is the cup of bitterness that Jesus desperately wanted to avoid. And yet, because of his boundless love for the Father and for us, he kept repeating with ever-increasing desperation, "Not my will, but Thine be done!"

    "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me." (Matthew 26:39) That is the voice of human weakness reaching to infinity, the voice of human sinfulness that Jesus took upon himself and identified with in the Garden.

    "Not my will, but Thine be done." That is the voice of God's infinite love for us, throbbing in the heart of Christ, forgiving everything and everyone. Infinite weakness and infinite love have met in the passion and death of Jesus. Our anguish has become his anguish.

    Jesus rose from his prayer and returned to the disciples only to find them asleep. There was to be no human support for him in his supreme moment of isolation and need. Soon all but one of the apostles would run away. Soon he was to be rejected by his own people, condemned by the civil and religious authorities, subjected to insult and mockery, and crucified between two murderers. In his last moments he would watch his life's work disintegrate before his eyes.

    As Jesus approached the end of his physical endurance on the cross, he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" With these words, he revealed the fact that the act of taking upon himself the entire weight of human sinfulness had cost him the loss of his personal union with the Father. It is the final stage of Jesus' spiritual journey. This double-bind, when it was resolved at that moment of his resurrection, catapulted him into a state of being beyond the personal union with the Father which had been his whole life until then. While his sacrifice opened up for the whole human family the possibility of sharing in his experience of personal union with the Father, it opened up for him a totally new level of being. His humanity was glorified to such a degree that he could enter the heart of all creation as its Source. Now he is present everywhere, in the inmost being of all creation, transcending time and space and bringing the transmission of divine life to its ultimate fulfillment.

    Unity with the Godhead was the resolution of Jesus' double-bind. There is a resolution for every double-bind. It remains, however, a terrible crisis. In the face of such a crisis, one may regress to a lower level of consciousness. But one who seeks God will not give into this temptation. The energy built up by living with the seemingly impossible situation will eventually give birth to the resolution that only God knows and that only God can give.

More information can be obtained by reading the book The Mystery of Christ by Fr. Thomas Keating.  It is offered in our Book Store.