Mark 15.25-47
A Good Friday Sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 2 April 2021
Two questions confront us when we come to the Bible history: Did it really happen? And, if it did, what does it mean? In any case, that’s how it seems to me. Many in recent years have contradicted this. “It is a beautiful story,” they say, “and it has a meaning, whether it happened or not.” It is true that stories can carry a meaning, and sometimes a true meaning, regardless of whether they happened. But the story of the man on the cross would seem to mean that injustice rules, and death is unavoidable. And if you bring it together with the resurrection—well, of course, the meaning would be that death is not the final word. But then if it did not happen, this is a lie. “If Christ did not rise,” says St Paul, “then you are still in your sins, and of all people Christians are the most to be pitied, and I am a liar.”
Today, we focus the cross. Did it happen, and what does it mean?
Crucifixion was not a nice thing. The Greeks used to impale people like a sausage on a skewer. The problem with that is that they died too quickly. The Romans invented a better method: hang them by their outstretched arms. They could be nailed through their wrists or tied, it worked both ways. But they had to have a footrest. Once at a beach mission, as part of a play, we tied someone’s arms to a horizontal beam and lifted him onto the centre-pole of the marquee. We had to get him down pretty fast, because he couldn’t breathe. Crucifixion kills by suffocation. As you slump forward and the weight of your whole body compresses your chest you can’t breathe. If you want someone to stay alive they have to have a foot-rest. So long as they can push down on their feet and relieve the weight on their chest they will stay alive. People were known to live up to four days. Eventually exhaustion caused their legs to give way, they could no longer breathe, and died within minutes. One of the early reforms that Christianity brought to the Empire was to banish crucifixion.
Crucifixion was not the only death penalty: beheading, stoning were more normal. Crucifixion was reserved for runaway slaves and for treason. Jesus claimed to be King of the Jews—at least that was what the High Priest told Pilate. So he was crucified as an enemy of Rome.
Crucifixion was horrible. You didn’t talk about it in polite society. A person was flogged, stripped of their clothes (and their dignity), nailed, hoisted up, and put on display—blood, urine, faeces—unable even to brush away the flies. “This is what happens to you if you defy the majesty of Rome.”
If you were inventing a hero, this is not how you would have him end up. The cross is utter defeat. The greatest problem the early Christians had to overcome was admitting that their leader had been crucified. People would jerk back: “Surely you don’t expect me to put my trust in someone who was crucified!” It was like saying your leader was a child-abuser. “The utterly vile death of the cross,” was how one ancient described it. One thing you can be sure of: Jesus crucifixion is a fact of history; no one would have made it up.
I think the High Priest and those who condemned Jesus decided this was how it should be. Many believed he was the promised King-Messiah. How best to destroy that illusion, than make him a prisoner of Rome, and get them to crucify him. Don’t the Old Testament Scriptures say, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree?” He would not only die in utter humiliation and defeat; he would also be under the curse of God.
Mark gives us a pretty matter-of-fact account of it, that corresponds in most of its details to what we know of Roman practice, but one thing stands out: Jesus cry of dereliction—just before he stopped breathing. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Not only did he die in utter disgrace, he died admitting that God had abandoned him. Surely that proves the court was justified in its sentence; he was a false Messiah who was abandoned even by God.
Once again, we run against something that can only be historical. No Christian in their right mind would invent a story in which Jesus cried out that God had abandoned him. It must be true. But then, it raises another question: why did Mark record it? Surely he would want to hide something as damning as that! But he proclaims it. Why? It must be precious to him; it must have meaning.
Jesus knew what was coming. As best he could, he even prepared his disciples for it. But it was so far from what they hoped, that they couldn’t get their minds around it. He told them that he would give his life as a ransom for many, but they couldn’t take it in. Early on the night he was arrested, when they ate the Passover meal together, he told them his body would be given for them, and his blood would enact the new covenant. But it was all riddles. Mark records these things to help us understand what happened, who were not overwhelmed by the actual course of events, as the disciples were.
Mark then tells us that as Jesus died, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. What could that have meant?
Sometimes we wish Mark would just come out with it and tell us what it means. He doesn’t. People knew what Christians were saying. Mark want us to know why they said what they said. He wants us to hear it from Jesus, and from the events themselves, and what those who were there thought—like the centurion leading the execution party, who was so affected that he said, “This man must be the Son of God.”
The curtain which separated the inner sanctuary from the rest of the temple was too prominent and too well known for its tearing—from top to bottom—to have been made up. It was twenty meters high and as thick as a man’s hand is wide. To some it might have signified God’s anger against Jesus. To others it would have signaled that something was very wrong with the court’s decision. To Christians it indicates more: the barrier between God and his people had been torn open. Jesus’ death had brought reconciliation. That curtain kept people out of the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary of the temple where God’s presence was thought to be. Only the High Priest could go there, once a year, to present the blood of the annual sacrifice for sin. The curtain represented the unapproachable holiness of God. But that curtain was torn from top to bottom. There is no doubt what Mark thought it meant.
It forces us to think about sin and its effects. One of sin’s effects is to blind us to the enormity of sin. When our first parents turned away from God’s word and thought they knew better, they hardly knew the consequences of their rebellion, But God did. He saw Cain smashing out his brother’s brains. He saw the slave kingdoms of the ancient world. He saw the wars, the genocides, the holocaust, all the cruelty, the lies. Here is God—a God who is utterly good—who has created a universe and given it over into the hands of human beings—and it is all good. And he has told them how to keep it that way. And they have walked away from him and said, “No, but we will do it our way.” That event shook the foundations of heaven and earth.
But what have they walked away from? They have turned their backs on the very source of their life. It is only his good will that keeps them existing. Sin creates an impossible situation: a universe which is the property of a good God, whose creatures have run amuck and created endless evil. Our smallest sins are rebellion against the ruler of the universe and have unimaginable consequences. You would think that God, knowing where it would all lead, would have destroyed our ancestors at the beginning and started with something new. For his own reasons he chose a different path, and it all led to the cross where Jesus died, for the redemption and reconciliation of lost mankind.
The Son of God—God himself—came down from heaven and became a human being, to do for us what only a man could do: stand in our place as our king and take upon himself the horrible consequences of sin. “God made him sin, who knew no sin.” That is what the Bible says. Jesus became sin—sin in all its awfulness. He was treated as an enemy by his people, betrayed by his own friend, denied by his closest associate, put through a show-trial, mocked, tortured, humiliated, ridiculed by the people he came to save, hung up to die in agony, and finally abandoned by his heavenly Father, as God turned away from this repulsive representative of Sin. “God made him Sin, who knew no sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
That is why we call today “Good Friday.” “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” says St Paul, “not counting our sins against us.” He goes on to appeal to us, “I beg you, therefore, be reconciled to God. He made him sin, who knew no sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”