Mark 15 - The Crucifixion

We’ve worked our way to chapter 15. This is the hardest to recount.

I saw The Passion of the Christ a few years ago and only out of guilt. Everyone I knew had seen it. It was almost disloyal not to. I don’t go to movies like this. My husband goes to blood and guts movies. I go to the sweet fall in love, live happily ever after ones. The Passion was like watching the brutal murder of an innocent dear friend in the hands of snotty, self righteous people.

Jesus was bound and led to Pilate the Roman governor for questioning. The leading priests were accusing him of many crimes but he was silent and did not answer any of the charges.

It was the governor’s custom to release a prisoner of the people’s choice each Passover. The same crowd who a week earlier spread palm branches and hailed Jesus as the One who “comes in the name of the Lord,” now angrily scream, “Crucify Him! We want Barabbas!”

Jesus is given to the soldiers to be flogged which means he is beaten on the chest and back with a lead tipped whip. Many times prisoners bled to death just from the beating.

The soldiers dressed him in purple robes and wove thorn branches into a crown for his head, mocking and bowing to him as King of the Jews.

They led him to a place called Golgotha and crucified him there, nailing him to a cross and throwing dice to see who would get his clothes. As people passed by they shouted abuse, shaking their heads in mockery. The religious leaders were vindicated, “He saved others, he can’t save himself. Let this Messiah, this King of Israel come down from the cross so we can see it and believe him.”

At noon, darkness fell for three hours. Jesus cried out, asking God why He’d forsaken him, uttered a loud cry and breathed his last breath. The curtain in the temple separating the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies ripped in two. A Roman guard standing beside the cross whispered, “Surely this was the Son of God.”

Joseph of Arimethea, a respected member of the high council, asked Pilate for the body. It was released to him when soldiers confirmed Jesus’ death. He covered the body with a linen wrap and laid it in a tomb carved out of a rock and rolled a large stone in front of the entrance.

One of the few comments made by Jesus in this whole ordeal was in an exchange between he and Pilate. Pilate’s trying to get him to talk…to defend himself. It’s like Pilate’s saying, “Help me out here, man…I’m trying to help you! I don’t see that you’ve done anything worthy of death.”

So he asks Jesus, “Where are you from?” And Jesus would not answer him. Pilate says, “Why don’t you talk to me? Don’t you realize that I have the power to release you or crucify you?”

Jesus answers, “You would have no power over me at all unless it was given to you from above.”

The power to crucify Jesus was not in Pilate’s hands. God gave Pilate that power. Jesus knew that. And the son willingly laid his life down so we could know his father. That was the price required. He paid it.

A horrible death, brutal, inhumane by any standard. It is incomprehensible that an innocent man would willingly do this for others who were unable to pay the price themselves....would do this for you and for me.

Isaiah wrote about Jesus about 700 BC in chapter 53.

“There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance, nothing to attract us to him.

He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.

We turned our backs on him and looked the other way.

He was despised and we did not care.

Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down……But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins.

He was beaten so we could be whole, He was whipped so we could be healed.

All of us, like sheep have strayed away.

We have left God’s paths to follow our own.

Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.

He was oppressed and treated harshly yet he never said a word.

He was led like a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep is silent before the shearers he did not open his mouth.

Unjustly condemned, he was led away.“

It’s Friday. We mourn deeply.

Sunday’s coming.