The Crucifixion: Total Annihilation and the Dawn of Union

This meditation is the penultimate in a series reflecting on each of the five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Passion of Jesus Christ, exploring them through the lens of St. John of the Cross's teaching on the "Dark Night of the Soul." While this is the final "sorrowful mystery" we'll explore a little tomorrow the time in the tomb. Each mystery has traced a deeper descent into darkness: from the Agony in the Garden, where the will was first surrendered; through the Scourging, where attachments were stripped away; to the Crowning with Thorns, where the mind was emptied of its false crowns; and the Carrying of the Cross, where the soul learned to walk forward under a weight it could not understand. Now we arrive at the summit. Or rather, the abyss. The Crucifixion is where the night becomes absolute, and where, paradoxically, the dawn begins.

(The Image above is a drawing of the Crucifixion by St. John of the Cross).

 

A Meditation on the Fifth Sorrowful Mystery and the Dark Night of the Soul

 

Have you ever lost something so completely that you didn't just grieve the loss, but felt as though you yourself had disappeared along with it? Not just a job, or a relationship, or a sense of purpose, but the very scaffolding that held together who you thought you were? There comes a moment in certain kinds of suffering when the pain is no longer about what has been taken from you. It is about the terrifying realization that the "you" who once possessed those things no longer seems to exist. The mirror is empty. The name you answer to sounds foreign. You reach inward for something solid and find only air.

Most of us will do anything to avoid that moment. We rebuild. We distract. We narrate our suffering into a story with a moral, a purpose, a redemptive arc, because at least a story gives us a character to play. But what happens when even the story collapses? When there is no narrator left to tell it?

This is the place where the fifth Sorrowful Mystery begins. Not with nails and wood, though those are present. It begins in the place beyond all coping, all narrative, all spiritual consolation. It begins in the Cry.

 

The Cry of Dereliction

Three of the four Gospels record darkness falling over the land from noon until three in the afternoon. Then, from within that darkness, a voice: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46, NRSV).

These words have disturbed theologians for two thousand years, and rightly so. The Son who declared, "The Father and I are one" (John 10:30), now screams into a void where the Father seems absent. Scholars have long noted that Jesus is quoting the opening line of Psalm 22, and some have rushed to point out that the psalm ends in vindication and praise, as if Jesus were merely citing the first line of a hymn whose triumphant conclusion everyone would recognize. There is truth in that observation. But we must not use it to domesticate the horror. When David first wrote the hymn, the pain, the horror he was experiencing, was real. The victory at the end, the faith he had, didn't diminish the anguish he experienced. It didn't "undo" the forsakenness.

Jesus did not whisper this psalm. He cried out with a loud voice. Whatever theological resolution Psalm 22 contains in its later verses, the experience in that moment was one of devastating abandonment. To skip past the anguish to the resolution is to miss the entire mystery.

And it is a mystery. The God-Man experiences the absence of God. The one in whom "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell" (Colossians 1:19) enters a place of total emptiness. This is not theater. This is not pretense. Something real and fathomless is happening on Calvary, something that shatters every tidy formula we have for understanding how divinity and suffering relate.

This was the lowest of lows. It was the culmination of the humiliation God endured when the Second Person of the Trinity chose to empty himself, to take on the form of a man, to go to the depth of human experience, to the depths of God-forsakenness. He chose to endure an experience many of us experience in the midst of suffering. He cries out "why," and he feels that He's been abandoned, even feels that God has left him to suffer.

If you've ever cried out to God, "why," then know this. Jesus chose to enter that experience, too. He did it not because God was actually absent. The Three Persons of the Trinity are never really absent from one another. But in his humanity, He descended into quite literally everything He planned to redeem.

Now, when you feel forsaken by God, that's precisely where you encounter Christ on the Cross. Where you find forevermore that God hasn't left you alone. He's with you. He has entered into all suffering, the depths of God-forsakenness, so that you'd always find God precisely there. In the moments of utter hopelessness, in the times of utmost despair.

When you cry out "why," God doesn't give you an academic answer. He doesn't give you an explanation for your suffering. We checked our intellect at the crowning of thorns, our will in the Garden, and we pressed forward under the weight of our demise when we carried the cross with our Lord. If you've ever asked, "why does God allow bad things to happen to good people," his answer isn't an apologetic, an argument, a justification, or an explanation.

He does better than that.

He enters into the greatest evil the world has ever seen (when the creation killed its Creator). He enters into the deepest pain, the lowest sorrow, the abandonment of not only his closest friends, not only the anguish of betrayal, the mockery, and the humiliation. He enters into the very depths of God-forsakenness. God's answer to the "problem of evil" or the "problem of suffering" is precisely this moment. His answer to the problem of evil, of suffering, of forsakenness, isn't to explain it away.

It is to enter into it, and to join you there. 

It is to enter the place of forsakenness so that you and I would always find Him there, even when all is lost, when all is hopeless, when nothing makes sense, when we can no longer endure the pain.

 

The Excessive Light That Blinds

St. John of the Cross understood this mystery with a depth that few spiritual writers have matched. In his teaching on the Dark Night, he describes a paradox that turns our instincts inside out: the deepest darkness the soul experiences is not caused by God's absence. It is caused by God's overwhelming proximity.

He explains this with a striking analogy. When a beam of pure sunlight enters a room, the air appears full of dust and particles that were previously invisible. The light does not create the impurity; it reveals what was always there. Similarly, when God draws unbearably close to the soul, the soul becomes acutely aware of everything in itself that is unlike God. The resulting experience feels like abandonment, like punishment, like the withdrawal of all grace. But the truth is precisely the opposite.

The darkness is the shadow cast by an excess of light.

John draws on the Pauline language of Romans 6 and describes this as the death of "the old man."

The old self, the constructed self, the false self built on attachments and illusions and the subtle pride of spiritual accomplishment, must be utterly annihilated.

Not reformed. Not improved.

The cross and the Christian faith don't offer a self-help program. The cross is not therapy.

It's a death.

Annihilation.

And this annihilation cannot be accomplished by human effort.

It is something that happens to the soul when God moves close enough to burn away everything that is not love.

This is what Calvary enacts in history. The Cross is not merely an instrument of execution. It is the place where the old humanity, the entire architecture of the false self that the human race has been constructing since Eden, is taken into the body of Christ and put to death.

Paul put it clearly: "We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin" (Romans 6:6). The crucifixion of Jesus is simultaneously the crucifixion of everything in us that is not yet real.

 

The Ray of Darkness

Now consider the darkness that covered the land. Luke tells us that "the sun's light failed" (Luke 23:45).

For three hours, creation itself went dark, as though the world could not bear to witness what was happening, or as though the light of the world, hanging on the Cross, had drawn all light into himself and left none for the sky.

The mystical tradition has a name for this: the Ray of Darkness.

The phrase traces back to Pseudo-Dionysius, writing in the late fifth or early sixth century, who spoke of the divine darkness that transcends all knowledge, a darkness that is not the absence of light but rather a light so intense that it overwhelms every faculty of perception.

To the eyes of the soul, this brilliance registers as total blackness.

Stand for a moment in that darkness. Imagine Golgotha at three o'clock. The land is dark. The man on the center cross has just screamed the most desolate words ever spoken. The bystanders think he is calling for Elijah. His mother stands below. His friends, save one, have fled.

There is nothing here that looks like victory. Nothing that looks like God.

And yet...

...this is the moment of closest proximity.

This is where God is most fully present, most radically self-giving, most completely poured out for us.

The darkness is not the sign of God's departure. It is the weight of God's arrival, an arrival so total that no human faculty can register it as anything other than annihilation.

 

Not Survival, but Transformation

Here is the insight that changes everything: the purpose of the Dark Night is not to test whether you can endure it.

It is not an obstacle course for the spiritually elite.

The purpose of the night is transformation.

It is a re-birth.

You do not pass through the darkness and emerge on the other side as a stronger version of your old self.

You emerge as someone else entirely.

Or more precisely, you emerge as who you always were but could never become while the old self was still running the show.

You become who God had in mind before Creation itself. You become who God created you to be. 

Paul understood this with the clarity of someone who had been knocked off his horse and blinded by light. "It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20).

That small sentence contains the entire trajectory of the Dark Night. The "I," the constructed itself, the defended itself, the narrated itself (who we've tried to make the author/hero of our own story), and even the part of ourselves that prayed to God as if we wanted Him to merely help us along on our project of self-improvement, that "I" has been crucified.

What remains is not nothing. What remains is Christ. 

What remains is the true self, hidden with Christ in God, now free to love without the contamination of ego.

This is what St. John of the Cross calls union. Not the obliteration of the person, but the fulfillment of the person.

The log thrown into the fire does not cease to exist. It becomes fire. It becomes radiant, warm, and luminous.

And notice: this union is achieved not by ascending but by descending. Not by climbing a spiritual ladder but by dying on a cross.

Jesus did not demonstrate a technique for enlightenment.

He underwent an execution.

The path to union with God passes directly through the place where every human resource fails, where prayer feels like talking to a wall, where faith is indistinguishable from doubt, and where the only thing left to do is to let go of the last thing you are holding, which is yourself.

"Father, into your hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46). That final word from the Cross is not resignation. It is the most radical act of trust in the history of the world, spoken from inside total darkness, with no evidence that anyone is listening.

 

Living This Mystery

So what does this mean for you, today, in your ordinary life?

It means that the dark passages are not detours. They are the road. When you find yourself in a season where God seems absent, where your prayers bounce off the ceiling, where the spiritual practices that once sustained you feel hollow and mechanical, you may be closer to God than you have ever been. The darkness may be the shadow of the wing of the Almighty, hovering so near that you cannot see it.

It means that you can stop trying to save yourself. The frantic effort to maintain your spiritual résumé, to feel the right feelings, to produce the right experiences, can be laid down. The Cross has already accomplished what your efforts never could. Your task is not to crucify yourself. Your task is to consent to the crucifixion that is already underway, to stop climbing down from the cross every time the pain becomes unbearable.

Practically, this consent looks like showing up. It looks like sitting in prayer when prayer feels pointless. It looks like choosing faithfulness over feelings. It looks like refusing to fill the emptiness with noise, distraction, or false comfort, and instead letting the emptiness be what it is: a space being hollowed out for God.

And it means holding on to one unshakeable truth when everything else has been stripped away: the darkness ends.

Not because you figured out how to end it. But because darkness was never the final word. The Cross stands on a Friday. But Sunday is already approaching, hidden in the darkness, waiting to break open the tomb.

The night is real. The nails are real. The cry of abandonment is real. But so is the dawn. And the dawn does not merely follow the night. It is born from it.