'And they compel one Simon a Cyrenian, who passed by, coming out of
the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to bear His cross. 22.
And they bring Him unto the place Golgotha, which is, being
interpreted, The place of a skull. 23. And they gave Him to drink wine
mingled with myrrh: but He received it not. 24. And when they had
crucified Him, they parted His garments, casting lots upon them, what
every man should take. 25. And it was the third hour, and they
crucified Him. 26. And the superscription of His accusation was
written over, THE KING OF THE JEWS. 27. And with Him they crucify two
thieves; the one on His right hand, and the other on His left. 28. And
the Scripture was fulfilled, which saith, And He was numbered with the
transgressors. 29. And they that passed by railed on Him, wagging
their heads, and saying, Ah, Thou that destroyest the temple, and
buildest it in three days, 30. Save Thyself, and come down from the
cross. 31. Likewise also the chief priests mocking said among
themselves with the scribes, He saved others; Himself He cannot save.
32. Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross, that we
may see and believe. And they that were crucified with Him reviled
Him. 33. And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the
whole land until the ninth hour. 34. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried
with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is,
being interpreted, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? 35. And
some of them that stood by, when they heard it, said, Behold, He
calleth Elias. 36. And one ran and filled a sponge full of vinegar,
and put it on a reed, and gave Him to drink, saying, Let alone; let us
see whether Elias will come to take Him down. 37. And Jesus cried with
a loud voice, and gave up the ghost. 38. And the veil of the temple
was rent in twain from the top to the bottom. 39. And when the
centurion, which stood over against Him, saw that He so cried out, and
gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God.'--Mark
xv. 21-39.
The narrative of the crucifixion is, in Mark's hands, almost entirely
a record of what was done to Jesus, and scarcely touches what was done
by Him. We are shown the executioners, the jeering rabble, the
triumphant priests, the fellow-sufferers reviling; but the only
glimpses we get of Him are His refusal of the stupefying draught, His
loud cries, and His giving up the ghost. The narrative is perfectly
calm, as well as reverently reticent. It would have been well if our
religious literature had copied the example, and treated the solemn
scene in the same fashion. Mark's inartificial style of linking long
paragraphs with the simple 'and' is peculiarly observable here, where
every verse but vv. 30 and 32, which are both quotations, begins with
it. The whole section is one long sentence, each member of which adds
a fresh touch to the tragic picture. The monotonous repetition of
'and,' 'and,' 'and,' gives the effect of an endless succession of the
wares of sorrow, pain, and contumely which broke over that sacred
head. We shall do best simply to note each billow as it breaks.
The first point is the impressing of Simon to bear the Cross. That was
not dictated by compassion so much as by impatience. Apparently the
weight was too heavy for Jesus, and the pace could be quickened by
making the first man who could be laid hold of help to carry the load.
Mark adds that Simon was the 'father of Alexander and Rufus,' whom he
supposes to need no introduction to his readers. There is a Rufus
mentioned in Romans xvi. 13 as being, with his mother, members of the
Roman Church. Mark's Gospel has many traces of being primarily
intended for Romans. Possibly these two Rufuses are the same; and the
conjecture may be allowable that the father's fortuitous association
with the crucifixion led to the conversion of himself and his family,
and that his sons were of more importance or fame in the Church than
he was. Perhaps, too, he is the 'Simeon called Niger' (bronzed by the
hot African sun) who was a prophet of Antioch, and stands by the side
of a Cyrenian (Acts xiii. 1). It is singular that he should be the
only one of all the actors in the crucifixion who is named; and the
fact suggests his subsequent connection with the Church. If so, the
seeking love of God found him by a strange way. On what apparently
trivial accidents a life may be pivoted, and how much may depend on
turning to right or left in a walk! In this bewildering network of
interlaced events, which each ramifies in so many directions, the only
safety is to keep fast hold of God's hand and to take good care of the
purity of our motives, and let results alone.
The next verse brings us to Golgotha, which is translated by the three
Evangelists, who give it as meaning 'the place of a skull.' The name
may have been given to the place of execution with grim
suggestiveness; or, more probably, Conder's suggested identification
is plausible, which points to a little, rounded, skull-shaped knoll,
close outside the northern wall, as the site of the crucifixion. In
that case, the name would originally describe the form of the height,
and be retained as specially significant in view of its use as the
place of execution. That was the 'place' to which Israel led its King!
The place of death becomes a place of life, and from the mournful soil
where the bones of evildoers lay bleaching in the sun springs the
fountain of water of life.
Arrived at that doleful place, a small touch of kindness breaks the
monotony of cruelty, if it be not merely apart of the ordinary routine
of executions. The stupefying potion would diminish, but would
therefore protract, the pain, and was possibly given for the latter
rather than the former effect. But Jesus 'received it not.' He will
not, by any act of His, lessen the bitterness. He will drink to the
dregs the cup which His Father hath given Him, and therefore He will
not drink of the numbing draught. It is a small matter comparatively,
but it is all of a piece with the greater things. The spirit of His
whole course of voluntary, cheerful endurance of all the sorrows
needful to redeem the world, is expressed in His silent turning away
from the draught which might have alleviated physical suffering, but
at the cost of dulling conscious surrender.
The act of crucifixion is but named in a subsidiary clause, as if the
writer turned away, with eyes veiled in reverence, from the sight of
man's utmost sin and Christ's utmost mystery of suffering love. He can
describe the attendant circumstances, but his pen refuses to dwell
upon the central fact. The highest art and the simplest natural
feeling both know that the fewest words are the most eloquent. He will
not expressly mention the indignity done to the sacred Body in which
'dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead,' but leaves it to be inferred
from the parting of Christ's raiment, the executioner's perquisite. He
had nothing else belonging to Him, and of even that poor property He
is spoiled. According to John's more detailed account, the soldiers
made an equal parting of His garments except the seamless robe, for
which they threw lots. So the 'parting' applies to one portion, and
the 'casting lots' to another. The incident teaches two things: on the
one hand, the stolid indifference of the soldiers, who had crucified
many a Jew, and went about their awful work as a mere piece of routine
duty; and, on the other hand, the depth of the abasement and shame to
which Jesus bowed for our sakes. 'Naked shall I return thither' was
true in the most literal sense of Him whose earthly life began with
His laying aside His garments of divine glory, and ended with rude
legionaries parting 'His raiment' among them.
Mark alone tells the hour at which Jesus was nailed to the Cross
(verse 25). Matthew and Luke specify the sixth and ninth hours as the
times of the darkness and of the death; but to Mark we owe our
knowledge of the fact that for six slow hours Jesus hung there,
tasting death drop by drop. At any moment of all these sorrow-laden
moments He could have come down from the Cross, if He would. At each,
a fresh exercise of His loving will to redeem kept Him there.
The writing on the Cross is given here in the most condensed fashion
(verse 26). The one important point is that His 'accusation'
was--'King of the Jews.' It was the official statement of the reason
for His crucifixion, put there by Pilate as a double-barrelled
sarcasm, hitting both Jesus and the nation. The rulers winced under
the taunt, and tried to get it softened; but Pilate sought to make up
for his unrighteous facility in yielding Jesus to death, by obstinacy
and jeers. So the inscription hung there, a truth deeper than its
author or its angry readers knew, and a prophecy which has not
received all its fulfilment yet.
The narrative comes back, in verse 27, to the sad catalogue of the
insults heaped on Jesus. Verse 28 is probably spurious here, as the
Revised Version takes it to be; but it truly expresses the intention
of the crucifixion of the thieves as being to put Him in the same
class as they, and to suggest that He was a ringleader, pre-eminent in
evil. Possibly the two robbers may have been part of Barabbas' band,
who had been brigands disguised as patriots; and, if so, the insult
was all the greater. But, in any case, the meaning of it was to bring
Him down, in the eyes of beholders, to the level of vulgar criminals.
If a Cranmer or a Latimer had been bound to the stake with a
housebreaker or a cut-throat, that would have been a feeble image of
the malicious contumely thus flung at Jesus; but His love had
identified Him with the worst sinners in a far deeper and more real
way, and not a crime had stained these men's hands, but its weight
pressed on Him. He numbered Himself with transgressors, that they may
be numbered with His saints.
Then follows (verses 29-32) the threefold mockery by people, priests,
and fellow-sufferers. That is spread over three hours, and is all
which Mark has to tell of them. Other Evangelists give us words spoken
by Jesus; but this narrative has only one of the seven words from the
Cross, and gives us the picture rather of the silent Sufferer, bearing
in meek resolution all that men can lay on Him. Both pictures are
true, for the words are too few to make notable breaches in the
silence. The mockery harps on the old themes, and witnesses at once
the malicious cruelty of the mockers and the innocence of the Victim,
at whom even such malice could find nothing to fling except these
stale taunts. The chance passengers, of whom there would be a stream
to and from the adjacent city gate, 'wag their heads' in gratified and
fierce hate. The calumny of the discredited witnesses, although even
the biased judges had not dared to treat it as true, has lodged in the
popular mind, and been accepted as proved. Lies are not killed when
they are shown to be lies. They travel faster than truth. Ears were
greedily open for the false witnesses' evidence which had been closed
to Christ's gracious teaching. The charge that He was a would-be
destroyer of the Temple obliterated all remembrance of miracles and
benefits, and fanned the fire of hatred in men whose zeal for the
Temple was a substitute for religion. Are there any of them left
nowadays--people who have no real heart-hold of Christianity, but are
fiercely antagonistic to supposed destroyers of its externals, and not
over-particular to the evidence against them? These mockers thought
that Christ's being fastened to the Cross was a _reductio ad absurdum_
of His claim to build the Temple. How little they knew that it led
straight to that rebuilding, or that they, and not He, were indeed the
destroyers of the holy house which they thought that they were
honouring, and were really making 'desolate'!
The priests do not take up the people's mockery, for they know that it
is based upon a falsehood; but they scoff at His miracles, which they
assume to be disproved by His crucifixion. Their venomous gibe is
profoundly true, and goes to the very heart of the gospel. Precisely
because 'He saved others,' therefore 'Himself He cannot save'--not, as
they thought, for want of power, but because His will was fixed to
obey the Father and to redeem His brethren, and therefore He must die
and cannot deliver Himself. But the necessity and inability both
depend on His will. The priests, however, take up the other part of
the people's scoff. They unite the two grounds of condemnation in the
names 'the Christ, the King of Israel,' and think that both are
disproved by His hanging there. But the Cross is the throne of the
King. A sacrificial death is the true work of the Messiah of law,
prophecy, and psalm; and because He did not come down from the Cross,
therefore is He 'crowned with glory and honour' in heaven, and rules
over grateful and redeemed hearts on earth.
The midday darkness lasted three hours, during which no word or
incident is recorded. It was nature divinely draped in mourning over
the sin of sins, the most tragic of deaths. It was a symbol of the
eclipse of the Light of the world; but ere He died it passed, and the
sun shone on His expiring head, in token that His death scattered our
darkness and poured day on our sad night. The solemn silence was
broken at last by that loud cry, the utterance of strangely blended
consciousness of possession of God and of abandonment by Him, the
depths of which we can never fathom. But this we know: that our sins,
not His, wove the veil which separated Him from His God. Such
separation is the real death. Where cold analysis is out of place,
reverent gratitude may draw near. Let us adore, for what we can
understand speaks of a love which has taken on itself the iniquity of
us all. Let us silently adore, for all words are weaker than that
mystery of love.
The first hearers of that cry misunderstood it, or cruelly pretended
to do so, in order to find fresh food for mockery. 'Eloi' sounded like
enough to 'Elijah' to suggest to some of the flinty hearts around a
travesty of the piteous appeal. They must have been Jews, for the
soldiers knew nothing about the prophet; and if they were Scribes,
they could scarcely fail to recognise the reference to the
Twenty-second Psalm, and to understand the cry. But the opportunity
for one more cruelty was too tempting to be resisted, and savage
laughter was man's response to the most pitiful prayer ever uttered.
One man in all that crowd had a small touch of human pity, and,
dipping a sponge in the sour drink provided for the soldiers, reached
it up to the parched lips. That was no stupefying draught, and was
accepted. Matthew's account is more detailed, and represents the words
spoken as intended to hinder even that solitary bit of kindness.
The end was near. The lips, moistened by the 'vinegar,' opened once
more in that loud cry which both showed undiminished vitality and
conscious victory; and then He 'gave up the ghost,' _sending away_ His
spirit, and dying, not because the prolonged agony had exhausted His
energy, but because He chose to die, He entered through the gate of
death as a conqueror, and burst its bars when He went in, and not only
when He came out.
His death rent the Temple veil. The innermost chamber of the Divine
Presence is open now, and sinful men have 'access with confidence by
the faith of Him,' to every place whither He has gone before. Right
into the secret of God's pavilion we can go, now and here, knowledge
and faith and love treading the path which Jesus has opened, and
coming to the Father by Him. Bight into the blaze of the glory we
shall go hereafter; for He has gone to prepare a place for us, and
when He overcame the sharpness of death He opened the gate of heaven
to all believers.
Jews looked on, unconcerned and unconvinced by the pathos and triumph
of such a death. But the rough soldier who commanded the executioners
had no prejudices or hatred to blind his eyes and ossify his heart.
The sight made its natural impression on him; and his exclamation,
though not to be taken as a Christian confession or as using the
phrase 'Son of God' in its deepest meaning, is yet the beginning of
light. Perhaps, as he went thoughtfully to his barrack that afternoon,
the process began which led him at last to repeat his first
exclamation with deepened meaning and true faith. May we all gaze on
that Cross, with fuller knowledge, with firm trust, and endless love!