Wounded Yet Risen: Trauma, Survival, and the Cross in Mark 15

There’s a moment in the Gospel of Mark when everything stops making sense. At noon, the sky turns black. The crowds who once shouted "Hosanna" now jeer and gamble at the foot of the cross. Even Jesus himself cries out — not in triumph, but in agony: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

What if we stopped treating that cry as a problem to solve — and started hearing it as the raw, brutal center of Christian hope?

In a world obsessed with victory stories, Mark’s Gospel stubbornly centers trauma, absence, and silence. It doesn’t rush past the cross to get to Easter morning. It sits in the wreckage. It remembers. It refuses to tie up the loose ends.

Drawing on insights from trauma studies, narrative criticism, and thinkers like Jürgen Moltmann, this special project explores what it means to speak of a "crucified God" — a God who doesn't erase wounds, but bears them. A God who doesn't skip the suffering, but inhabits it.

Maybe that's why the Gospel of Mark feels so unfinished (and maybe that’s the point). It leaves space — for the broken-hearted, for the angry prayers, for those who live with scars.

Come along as we wrestle with what it means to believe not despite the darkness, but inside of it.

Join Pastor Britt as she discusses reading the Passion of Christ from the Gospel of Mark with a trauma hermenutic!