Mark: the extreme penalty (read Mark 14:53 – 15:39)
From the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus describing the persecutions instigated by the Roman Emperor Nero which followed the great fire of Rome in AD 64:
Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators Pontius Pilate.
By the ‘extreme penalty’ Tacitus may simply mean death or he may mean crucifixion; this was the most shameful and disgraceful way to be put to death. It exhibited the victim’s low social status for it was originally reserved as a punishment only for slaves, but then extended to enemies of the state.
Perhaps the most vivid example of such punishment occurred in BC 71 when the 6,000 survivors of Spartacus’s army of slaves were crucified along the Appian way stretching from Rome to Capua. You get a sense albeit rather sanitised of what this might have looked like in the final scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film ‘Spartacus’.
Such large scale crucifixion was well known also in Jerusalem. Soon after Nero punished the Christians of Rome the inhabitants of Jerusalem witnessed several thousand crucifixions by the procurator Florus. And what made that scene so horrific for the Jews was that it included those who had been given Roman citizenship and equestrian rank.
Shortly after that persecution Mark began to write his gospel, either in Rome or up the coast in Antioch; and at the end of that gospel we find the first written description of the death of Jesus. For the first audience of that gospel crucifixion was therefore an all too familiar scene. Mark did not need to know in detail what actually happened to Jesus on the first Good Friday. He could imagine it all too clearly on the basis of first hand knowledge. He knew that prisoners were scourged beforehand, he knew that they usually carried the cross beam through the streets, he knew of the specialised teams of four soldiers and a centurion who did the work, he knew that such executions take place outside a city’s walls, he knew the victims were stripped naked and their clothes given to the soldiers, he knew the size and shape of the nails and how they were hammered in, he knew the legs were often broken at the end, and he knew that bodies were normally left on the cross and not allowed burial as part of the final humiliation. All he has to say of Jesus are the words ‘And they crucify him’ and the whole scene is immediately before his readers’ eyes.
These things he could refer to succinctly and that allows Mark to tell the rest of the story in such a way as to show what was going on in what happened. He puts all his art into showing the significance of these events and what we have to learn from them. And that too is what his three successors also try to do in their own particular way. So what I shall try to do this afternoon is to explore the way in which each of the four gospel writers communicates his view of the meaning and significance of the crucifixion – what was going on in what happened. We shall of course also see what they have in common. For all of them are concerned with the spiritual, ethical and doctrinal dimensions of their narrative; what does it have to teach us about God and about who Jesus was; what does it teach us about the Christian life and how does it help us to lead such a life?
It is unlikely that Mark was the first to draw up a narrative of this week’s events. Though St Paul makes very limited use of the details of the rest of Jesus life – he does know what happened at the end. He knows about the last supper and the crucifixion and what came afterwards and writes about them long before Mark ever set to work. So we might for a moment ponder Paul’s predicament in preaching about the way Jesus’ life ended. In his sermon in the market place in Athens, Paul concentrates on God as creator and on Jesus appointed by God to judge the world – the proof of which is shown by the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. Some of the Athenians sneer but some want to hear more. And so we might imagine them asking how Jesus died. And then Paul and all the other early Christian missionaries find themselves confronted with a problem. For if they were to say that Jesus was crucified they face almost certain suspicion, rejection and mockery. Whoever heard of a crucified judge or a crucified Messiah? If he was crucified he must have been suspected of treason and was therefore a dangerous person to be associated with. If he was crucified he must have been a slave, an ignorant peasant, and to associate with someone of that class would be humiliating, and shameful. To say that your leader and teacher was crucified would hardly gain you an enthusiastic audience.
So the story of Jesus death has to be told with subtlety and skill; it has both to explain and to inspire, to be set in context and to provide both an account of unmerited suffering and a model of courage and perseverance. Hidden beneath this story of the worst kind of death the Roman world had to offer there must be seen to lie hidden the power of a very paradoxical God. If Jesus is, as all the gospel writers claim, the Son of God, how is it possible that the unique and final representative of God could be crucified?
We might think that at first that was a rather localised question relevant only to a few followers and converts. But St Mark has an ambitious view of the audience for whom this, the first Gospel was written. In the story about the women who anoints Jesus with an expensive perfume, Mark’s Jesus says this: I tell you the truth, wherever the Gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.
Mark is writing a story for everyone to learn from – a text to convert the world. And as from that woman so from all the characters in the Passion story we are intended to learn something about the gospel or good news for the world. But what good news for the world can there be in a story about crucifixion?
Well it depends in the end on whom the story is being told by. As an author Mark is clearly conscious that someone else is working along side him. His co- editor is God and the narrative they are working on was he believes first laid down by God. So Jesus says of himself at the last supper – the Son of Man goes as it is written of him. In the garden of Gethsemane, he prays ‘not what I will, but what you will.’ Even though Jesus wishes the story could be otherwise he is prepared to enact what he believes the author has planned. So in Gethsemane we are confronted by the first paradoxical aspect of God. On the one hand God seems to arrange things in advance and yet Jesus could have said no; he is making his own choice. We see the same paradox at the last supper. If Jesus is enacting a part so is Judas – there has to be a part for a betrayer and yet Judas is also responsible for what he does – as Jesus says, ‘Woe to the man who betrays the Son of Man.’ There is therefore a mysterious overlapping between God’s ordering of events and the freedom of those taking part in this story.
Paul goes further in describing this mystery when he explains to the Ephesians that God created us to do good and that he prepared beforehand the good works that we should walk in. In other words a script is being written and we have a choice to play the part or not. Each choice we make opens up another script and another series of choices but each time the consequence of our choice will already be known to God, whether it be good or bad. This story emerges from the interaction of God’s providence and Jesus free will, and however, dark the narrative may look there is an underlying, though not always comforting sense that all is still in the hands of God if you look deeply enough.
Mark’s gospel more perhaps than any of the others focuses on the darkness and the loneliness of Jesus’ passion. It emphasises the fact that having made his one choice in the garden Jesus deliberately surrenders all further choice because he has been handed over to the choices that others will make. The sense of Jesus loosing all control of his destiny is powerful in Mark. For us now something of that kind of loss of control is known most powerfully only at the latter end of our lives, when we are dying or else when we are seriously ill; or it might be known when we experience our powerlessness in the face of economic events or institutional power, or in other societies it might be known if we were being persecuted or imprisoned or put on trial for our faith. In all such circumstances we might feel handed over as the gospel puts it. Judas hands Jesus over to the Jewish leaders, those leaders hand him over to Pilate, Pilate hands him over to be crucified. He is like a parcel in a Kafkaesque party game and at each stage of the handing over a further aspect of his dignity and identity is stripped from him. He is betrayed, abandoned, falsely accused, condemned, jeered at, stripped naked and nailed up for all to see, until the final handing over to death, death by painful and public exposure. And in that whole process there is a terrible isolation – there is no-one on his side. So when we come to the only words that Jesus speaks on the cross in Mark’s gospel that sense of abandonment seems to include even God. ‘My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?’ We may know Jesus is quoting a psalm and that at its end the psalmist’s trust in God is restored, but in the way Mark tells this story, it is the sense of total abandonment which engulfs the scene. This we are meant to feel is what true discipleship may feel like if we also take up our cross. This utter powerlessness and loneliness will be ours also if not in life then certainly in our own death however it may come.
And yet this figure when he dies is declared by the centurion to be the Son of God. It is this figure who in his trial before the High Priest has answered ‘I am’ to the question ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed one?’ The paradox could not be more pronounced. It is no accident; God’s representative has been crucified. God’s power is indeed hidden in these events but that power can only by revealed with a deep dramatic irony. And irony is a powerful thread running through the whole of Mark’s narrative. We see again and again people not knowing what they are doing or saying. Jesus is mocked as a false prophet and a dressed up King with a crown of thorns as his imperial wreath and yet for his followers he is truly both King and prophet. People kneel before him now in mockery where those he healed have knelt in reverence. For his followers those who accuse Jesus of blasphemy are themselves blaspheming. They laugh at Jesus for saving others but not being able to save himself, whereas it is precisely in his refusal to save himself that God is most clearly at work. If they see Jesus come down from the cross they will believe. But throughout the gospel it is made clear that Jesus will provide no such signs; he will not come down from the cross; seeing signs is not a basis for belief or rather it is only what they now see in Jesus on the cross which can be the basis of true belief. What the crowd here says is the polar opposite of the crux of Jesus teaching: ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.’
There is only one figure in the story who exemplifies such behaviour – Simon of Cyrene who helps Jesus bear the cross. Just as there is only one figure who truly sees, the Centurion, who responds to Jesus’ death with the words, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God.’ Simon of Cyrene helps us to see at least part of what Jesus means by taking up the cross. It is often assumed that taking up your cross mean a kind of stoical putting up with suffering, discomfort or hardship – a personal and individualised cross the main purpose of the bearing of which is to put others to as little trouble as possible. But that is most certainly not what carrying the cross means to Jesus. What Simon of Cyrene does is to carry the cross of Jesus for part of the way to Golgotha. He shares the burden, he takes up the burden on Jesus’ behalf. Simon takes up not his own cross but that of Jesus that of someone else. What Jesus means by taking up the cross, is the taking up of the burden of suffering on behalf of someone else.
So finally we might consider why Marks crucifixion story is as dark as it is. It is dark because of three things Mark seems to believe. 1. In the life of God’s unique representative on earth there will inevitably be suffering such as this because of the distance human society has travelled away from God. To be a true disciple you have to look long and hard at the darkness and suffering and injustice of the world; you may at times escape from that darkness in the surviving joys of nature, art, human learning, and human love, but in the end you have always to come back to the darkness, suffering and injustice. 2. Mark’s second fundamental belief is that however hard the disciples try to ignore the fact, Christ and his Church will be persecuted if they remain witnesses to God’s love and justice. The disciples repeatedly ignore the three predictions that the Son of man will die and rise again and when it happens they run away astonished and afraid. Mark’s portrayal of the trial and crucifixion may in part be based on what actually happened but it may also reflect what was happening to Jesus followers in his own day in the late 60s. And the disciples of his own day may also be finding it hard to accept persecution. This gospel is written both to help them face the darkness and to give hope to those who are in the darkness of suffering something of what Jesus suffered. 3. And Mark’s third fundamental belief is that such suffering is somehow on behalf of others. If we have ever been blessed by witnessing the way someone faced their dying with courage and integrity, honesty and love for those around them, we will know that we have received a precious gift – somehow our fear of our own dying will have been lifted. If we have ever seen someone deeply moved even to tears by the story we have had to tell of our own suffering, we may have known how the burden became easier to bear because this other person has been able to carry it with us.
Both are cases of what Mark may believe is going on in the crucifixion. Shortly be fore the entry into Jerusalem, Jesus is recorded as saying, ‘The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.’ It is a puzzling saying, but one which may be intended to provide another clue as to the meaning of these events. In what sense does the cross serve or ransom us. What are we being ransomed or bought back from? A traditional answer would be that we are ransomed form sin or the devil. But the devil does not play a part in Mark’s narrative as he does in Luke and John. So here we might suggest that we are being delivered from fear. We will not be defeated by the darkness, because the Son of God has bourn it for and with us. Jesus is showing us that the darkness can be bourn even in the most extreme feelings of abandonment. And even then Jesus persists in calling on the God he feels has abandoned him. God remains in the darkness the one who will give him a good listening to, even if he does not now reply. And as we give ourselves to the story so it is possible that we will find the strength to look our own suffering in the face and yet feel that the burden of it is being bourn with and for us. His heart is broken to comfort ours. By his grief our wound is healed, by his ruin our fall is stayed. And in this way Mark shows the cross to be indeed the hiding place of God’s power. Amen.