The Death of Christ
Mark 15:21-41 Expand passage
A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross. They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull). Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. And they crucified him. Dividing up his clothes, they cast lots to see what each would get.
It was the third hour when they crucified him. The written notice of the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS. They crucified two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, "So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!"
In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves. "He saved others," they said, "but he can't save himself! Let this Christ, this King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe." Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him.
At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"--which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" When some of those standing near heard this, they said, "Listen, he's calling Elijah."
One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. "Now leave him alone. Let's see if Elijah comes to take him down," he said.
With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.
The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, "Surely this man was the Son of God!"
Some women were watching from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. In Galilee these women had followed him and cared for his needs. Many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem were also there.
I am a primary school teacher and when I had to plan a series of lessons on the Church and Easter I decided to ask the children in my class to write down everything they thought about Easter and what it was. I planned to do the same at the end of my lessons to see what, if anything, they had learnt or understood in a new light. I was pleasantly surprised by the number that knew it had something to do with Jesus, even if the details were a little hazy. I was not surprised by the fact that almost everyone in the class made some reference to chocolate eggs (although I was surprised by how few could spell ‘chocolate’ correctly!).
I spent some time reading through the Easter story, straight out of the Bible, with my class and putting some of the plot points in context for them; relating the Passover meal to the story they knew from Exodus, explaining why Romans were present in the narrative, outlining the timescale of events. I called the story ‘The Passion’, so that the children I was teaching could take on board the fact that the Easter story had its own special name, in the same way that the Christmas story is called ‘The Nativity’. The use of the word ‘passion’, as I had hoped, prompted some debate amongst my class as to why it had been used, and reminded some children of the title of the recent film, The Passion of the Christ.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines passion as ‘strong and barely controllable emotion or an outburst of such emotion’ which, at first, seems a feeling in little evidence in the stark and raw account of Jesus’ death on the cross given in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 15:21 – 41). In just twenty short verses the great teacher who had galvanised people through the land is killed with little pity or ceremony, but much abuse and pain.
Yet our God is One who works through, and with, the worst to bring out the best. Through the bleakest situations in a life can come the most loving relationships and the most enduring and worthy traits of character. The Bible is full of stories of God lifting up the most unlikely and ill-qualified person for a job and enabling them to do it splendidly. It seems apt that this God, whose hope changes things when they seem at their most hopeless and whose love works in people when they are at their most unlovable, should set in motion his greatest act of love, his ‘passion’, in this apparently bleak and hopeless situation.
When we join the account (v. 21) Jesus is being taken out to be killed. He has been hurriedly and unjustly tried in the dead of night and given over to the merciless Roman authorities. The soldiers assigned to him mocked him, spat on him, beat him with clubs and whipped him. The whip they used would have been made out of leather, lead and bone and was specifically designed to rip at flesh. It had been known to pull out the eyes, sever the veins and rip open the stomachs of Roman prisoners.
The final indignity before crucifixion itself was to be made to carry the instrument of one’s own death, but by this stage Jesus, who had not had any sleep for more than a day and who had been viciously beaten, was not physically able to carry his own beam (v. 21). The recent Mel Gibson film has been criticised by some for its violent portrayal of Jesus’ death, but the cut and bleeding body of Jesus depicted in the film is probably closer to the reality than the more sanitized versions we are used to seeing in our churches and elsewhere. This was a fit and healthy young man hours away from death.
Those who were there mocked him. If you were writing this scene as the end of the life of Jesus and wanted to show him as an abject failure in all he had tried to do then you couldn’t write in a better supporting cast. There was the crowd; the people who had flocked miles just to hear him speak, who had welcomed him into the city like a king (Mark 11:9) and who had then screamed for his execution and were now mocking him as he hung dying. There were the chief priests and teachers of the law; there to ridicule Jesus (v. 31) and see him stopped in the tracks before he could upset the status quo any further. Even the criminals crucified alongside Jesus appeared to spare him no solidarity; they too heaped insults on him (v.32). A little further away were Jesus’ mother, his disciples and others who had spent time with him (v. 40). All the key people he had influenced were here to witness his death. Any hopes they had had appeared to be dying with their friend.
Naked, insulted, battered, bleeding, gasping for every breath and alone in the darkness (v. 33) Jesus began to die and after hours of pain cried out the famous words “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). Heaped onto Jesus’s aching, bleeding shoulders were the sins of the world. Jesus took for us the punishment for our disobedience and suffered the unbelievable torture of a time without God. Along with Jesus’s prayers earlier in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14 v.36) this line prompts us to really meditate on Jesus’s nature as man and God. We cannot fully understand this and we cannot know what Jesus was feeling as he hung approaching death or what was going through his mind. This we can know; that while all those around him stood mocking his failure to save himself he had to cope with the knowledge that he could have stopped it all. Instead he let it happen, all for the love of those who had shouted for his death and were cursing him as he died.
The point at which Jesus actually dies, the crux of the whole story, has huge significance for Christians but passed almost unnoticed at the time. The soldiers there with him did not themselves notice until later on in the day. Even the account in Mark, written after the event when its significance was better understood, keeps it simple: “With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last” (v. 37). With every breath becoming more of a struggle Jesus’s human body finally gave up and he died, in great pain. The curtain in the temple ripped as a symbol of what had happened; God had found a way to reach out again to his people despite the sin that threatened to corrupt the relationship for evermore. The fact that the curtain ripped from top to bottom signifies clearly that revival of our link with God is not down to anything we can do, but is due to his reaching out.
When Jesus arrived in the world he did so quietly in a stable, with only a handful of people aware he had even entered the world and even fewer realising anything of the significance. Jesus had entered the world as a baby with no fanfare or celebration and he left it as a man with a similar absence. There was no glorious praising of God at his wondrous love, no cheering of Jesus as he allowed sinners to sacrifice him, no support and encouragement from the great and the good, his friends or his family. There were only shouts of hate and looks of hopelessness. There was only pain. Jesus had entered the world in the darkness in readiness to perform an incomprehensible duty of love and he left the world in the darkness too in completion of that duty. In a most unlikely way, and a most unlikely setting, this was the ‘outburst of strong and barely controllable emotion’ that offered hope to us all.
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