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Catholic Commentary
The Death of Jesus
33When the sixth hour m.34At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”35Some of those who stood by, when they heard it, said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.”36One ran, and filling a sponge full of vinegar, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Let him be. Let’s see whether Elijah comes to take him down.”37Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and gave up the spirit.38The veil of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom.39When the centurion, who stood by opposite him, saw that he cried out like this and breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”
Mark 15:33–39 recounts Jesus's final hours on the cross, marked by darkness at noon, his cry of abandonment quoting Psalm 22, and the tearing of the temple veil upon his death. A Roman centurion's confession that Jesus is the Son of God represents the first human recognition of Jesus's identity during his earthly ministry, signaling that Christ's death itself reveals him as divine.
At the moment Christ dies, the temple veil tears and a pagan soldier confesses what Israel's leaders refuse to see: the cross itself, properly witnessed, reveals the Son of God.
Verse 38 — The Torn Veil The massive curtain (described in the Mishnah as a hand-breadth thick and sixty feet high) separating the Holy of Holies from the outer courts is torn "from top to bottom" — the direction emphasizing divine initiative. This is not a human act. The veil had kept the presence of God enclosed, accessible only to the High Priest once annually on Yom Kippur. Its tearing signals that in Christ's death the old cultic barrier between God and humanity is definitively abolished. The author of Hebrews will make this explicit: the veil is "his flesh" (Hebrews 10:20), and through it we now have permanent, bold access to the throne of grace.
Verse 39 — The Centurion's Confession The first human being in Mark's Gospel to confess Jesus as "Son of God" during his earthly ministry, after the divine voice at baptism and transfiguration, is a Roman pagan soldier. The irony is thunderous. Mark's entire Gospel has been structured around the "Messianic secret" — demons know who Jesus is, disciples do not. Now, at the foot of the cross, a Gentile sees what Israel's leaders have refused to see. His confession is not triggered by a resurrection appearance or a miracle, but by how Jesus died — with a cry, with dignity, with something that transcends ordinary human death. This is Mark's evangelistic argument: the cross itself, properly seen, reveals the Son of God.
Catholic tradition reads this passage as the fulcrum of salvation history. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§603) addresses the cry of dereliction directly, teaching that Jesus "took our place" — that in bearing the sin of the world he experienced the consequences of humanity's separation from God, not as one who sinned, but as one who bore the weight of what sin does. This is not a cry of despair but what the Catechism calls the expression of "the whole of [human] misery before the Father's love" (§2605). It is simultaneously a prayer, and the model of all prayer in extremity.
The tearing of the veil is a cornerstone of Catholic sacramental theology. St. John Chrysostom interpreted it as the temple "mourning and lamenting the destruction of its own constitution." But the deeper Catholic reading, following the Letter to the Hebrews (4:14–16; 9:11–12; 10:19–22), is that Christ as both priest and victim has entered the true Holy of Holies — heaven itself — with his own blood, making permanent intercession. Every celebration of the Mass re-presents this one sacrifice: the altar is the cross, the Eucharistic Prayer enters the sanctuary opened by Christ's death.
The centurion's confession anticipates the universal scope of redemption. The Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium (§16) speaks of those outside visible Christianity who may be saved through Christ's grace — and this soldier stands as an early icon of that possibility: a Gentile, an agent of imperial violence, who nonetheless perceives truth at Calvary. St. Ambrose saw in him a figure of the Church gathered from the nations.
Contemporary Catholics often experience their own versions of the cry of dereliction — illness, grief, the silence of God in prayer, the collapse of what seemed most solid. The Church does not ask us to suppress that cry or dress it in premature consolation. Mark 15:34 gives us permission — even a model — to bring our desolation to God in raw, honest language. The Psalms exist precisely for this: to pray into abandonment rather than around it. St. Teresa of Calcutta endured nearly fifty years of interior darkness, continuing her work and her prayer without felt consolation. Her journals, published posthumously in Come Be My Light, show a woman who learned to make the cry of dereliction her own prayer — not as a loss of faith, but as its deepest form. For Catholics struggling with the silence of God, this passage is not a problem to be explained away but an invitation to solidarity with the crucified Christ who has already been to the bottom of that silence and returned.
Commentary
Verse 33 — Cosmic Darkness (the sixth hour) The "sixth hour" is noon — the moment when the sun should be at its zenith. Instead, darkness covers the whole land until the ninth hour (3 p.m.), a three-hour eclipse of daylight that inverts the natural order. Mark offers no naturalistic explanation; the darkness is theological statement, not meteorology. It echoes the ninth plague of Egypt (Exodus 10:21–23) and the prophetic imagery of Amos 8:9, where God promises to "make the sun go down at noon" on the day of judgment. Creation itself mourns, or perhaps more precisely, creation participates in the weight of what is happening on this hill. The darkness also signals the hour of cosmic battle: this is the hour of the power of darkness (cf. Luke 22:53), the moment when evil believes it has won.
Verse 34 — The Cry of Dereliction Mark preserves the Aramaic — Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani — before translating it, lending the cry an immediacy and rawness unique in the Gospels. Jesus quotes Psalm 22:1 verbatim. This is not merely a prayer; it is a theological act. Jesus, the Word made flesh, dies with the Word of God on his lips. By invoking Psalm 22, Jesus is not expressing a loss of faith but entering fully into the experience of the suffering righteous one — the anawim tradition of Israel — who cries out to a God who seems absent, yet does not cease to call him "my God." The possessive pronoun is crucial: even in the abyss of abandonment, the relationship is not severed. Patristic tradition (notably Athanasius and Hilary of Poitiers) understood this cry as Jesus speaking in persona of sinful humanity, voicing the estrangement from God that sin produces — the estrangement he is himself bearing and thus destroying from within.
Verse 35–36 — The Elijah Misunderstanding The bystanders misunderstand Eloi as "Elijah" — a confusion more plausible in Hebrew (Eli) than Aramaic, suggesting the crowd may have been multilingual and partially mishearing. The offer of vinegar-soaked sponge fulfills Psalm 69:21 and may be a cruel prolongation of life to see if a miracle occurs, or possibly a rough mercy. The Elijah misunderstanding is deeply ironic in Mark's Gospel: Elijah has already come in the person of John the Baptist (Mark 9:13), and no one recognized him. Elijah will not descend to rescue Jesus; this death is not to be prevented. The taunt "Let's see whether Elijah comes" encapsulates humanity's persistent demand for a sign, a spectacular rescue — the very temptation Jesus refused from the devil (cf. Matthew 4:6).
Mark's language is deliberately ambiguous. The Greek ("gave up the spirit" or "breathed his last") can be read as a violent expiration, but John's Gospel will render this as an active handing over — Jesus lays down his life; no one takes it from him (John 10:18). The loud cry that precedes death is medically remarkable: crucifixion victims typically died in exhausted silence. The cry attests vitality — and purpose — in this final moment.