Gourock St. John’s
Mirror
Mark 15.16-47 New Revised Standard Version
8 August 2021, Sunday School Revisited 11
Then the soldiers led him into the courtyard of the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters); and they called together the whole cohort. And they clothed him in a purple cloak; and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on him. And they began saluting him, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ They struck his head with a reed, spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him. After mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.
They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus. Then they brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means the place of a skull). And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh; but he did not take it. And they crucified him, and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take.
It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, ‘The King of the Jews.’ And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!’ In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among themselves and saying, ‘He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.’ Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.
When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’ And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’
There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.
When evening had come, and since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate wondered if he were already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he had been dead for some time. When he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. Then Joseph bought a linen cloth, and taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid.
This is one of those stories that many of us know, and yet if we were pressed to talk about it we may find that we have only the bare basics of it, or that we resort to simply saying “Jesus died for our sins” — which Mark’s gospel doesn’t say explicitly, he simply tells the story and we have come to understand its meaning over the years. It’s one of the central moments of the Christian faith — some might say the moment. There is often a friendly disagreement between those who see Good Friday’s crucifixion as the most important part of the easter story, and those who see Sunday’s resurrection as the most important part. Without death, there can be no resurrection, of course — something we who worry about the loss of certain traditions or institutions should remember. But then again, without resurrection, this is just another execution in an empire that famously crucified hundreds of thousands of people.
Crucifixion was meant to be humiliating torture, the most painful way to execute those who dared to oppose the empire. It was supposed to be a spectacle, and also to be so shameful that those who were crucified would essentially be erased from daily conversation. Friends and family wouldn’t mention them, for fear someone might connect them to the person who had been caught rebelling against Rome and turn them in too. Often bodies were left to the elements and the animals, rather than buried properly. It was intentionally as terrible as anyone could dream up. And it happened nearly every day in the Roman Empire, for about 500 years.
As an aside: you would think that if it was an effective deterrent, they wouldn’t have to do it quite so much. But we know how easily we humans fall into the trap of continuing to do things that don’t work, even harmful things, simply because it’s what we’ve always done. The death penalty and other forms of physical punishment and, indeed, many punishments in general, are no different — they don’t work but we want to believe they do.
Which is why it matters that we tell this story, in all its brutality and horror.
Not because we need or want to glorify gore, or torture, or pain. There’s plenty of that to go around in other places, other stories.
But because we do need to see the truth of what humanity can do, and the truth that it doesn’t work. We want to believe that inflicting pain on others will make us feel better, but it doesn’t. We want to believe that making an example of someone will deter others from working for change, but it doesn’t. We want to believe that punishment works, but it doesn’t. Jesus, on the cross, holds up a mirror to us as human beings and asks if this was really what we believed?
Think of the people who saw him there and looked square into that mirror.
The soldiers who pulled things out of the dress-up box and played out their fantasies of being more powerful than the monarch…as they were beating him and spitting on him, they inadvertently spoke truth by calling him the King of the Jews. In that moment they revealed themselves, who they really were and what really mattered to them, and it was to hold the power of violence in their hands, to put others below them and climb to the top of the heap by any means possible including even throwing dice to divvy up his last possessions. It’s not a flattering picture in their mirror. But could they see it?
Along with passers-by, the others who were crucified beside Jesus also taunted him, calling names and mocking his power to save. Even in the midst of their own agony, even as they bore the same punishment, they still needed to be better than the man next to them. They were likely there for committing acts of treason or violence against the empire, while Jesus was there for speaking in ways that undermined the empire’s power with God’s love…and yet when they looked into the mirror-image of the cross next to them, what they saw was one more chance to prove they were more manly than the next guy.
The women, looking on from a distance…they’d been with him from the beginning, following him through Galilee and Judea and to Jerusalem. They had been providing for him and his followers, making space, making food, sharing their resources, learning at his feet and going out with his good news. They were the only friends who didn’t run away and hide, and even they had to watch from a distance. But they saw every writhe and heard every cry, and at the last they saw the tomb and the stone’s heaviness shuddering into place. They saw their friend, their teacher, their brother, their son…and they saw an end. The end of everything. In that moment it may have felt like their lives were over too.
And the centurion. Mark says he stood facing Jesus, and when he saw everything, the way others treated him, the way Jesus responded, his final breath, he saw truth shining through all the pain and sorrow and horror: truly, this man was God’s Son. Truly.
We couldn’t see it in the thousands of other bodies, made in the image of God, on crosses. But this one was God’s flesh and bone on the cross, God’s blood pouring out, God’s breath that stopped, and we are forced to confront just what cruelty we have chosen. We could not deal with the truth of what God-with-us said and did, the challenge he posed to the way things have always been, and so we killed him instead. And if the world were being honest, we would do it again.
On the cross, Jesus reflected that truth back to us in a way we cannot ignore, though we have tried to look away, or pretended that when we continue on the wrong path it was okay because those people deserved it — forgetting what he said about “whenever you have done it to them, you did it to me.” The mirror shows uncomfortable truths, and will continue to show them to us every time we read the story and take it to heart, for we cannot stand at the foot of the cross and walk away unchanged. Or rather, we should not, though we often resist the transformation the crucifixion calls for.
When Jesus breathed his last, anguished cry, the curtain of the Temple was torn from top to bottom. The way that grieving people were to tear their clothes and put ashes on their heads, even the holy place grieved. And yet that tearing — from top to bottom, though it was taller than any human being could tear — also opened something. Sometimes we talk about grief as being broken-hearted, broken open, falling to pieces. Perhaps that’s what happened in the Temple that day, too. The curtain separating the holy place where God lived from the rest of the world and all its messiness was torn, from top to bottom. The word “torn” is a word Mark only uses one other time in his whole gospel — to describe the heavens opening at Jesus’ baptism and the Holy Spirit descending on him. The heavens were torn open and the Spirit flew…and the curtain was torn and holiness was free, unconstrained. God had experienced the depths of human suffering, unmedicated. Mental and emotional and spiritual anguish, betrayal and desertion by all his friends, bullying and taunting and mocking of his very identity and passion and love, physical brutality and torture, the loss of a child…there is nothing in this world that we can go through that God hasn’t already experienced. And the separation between God and us has been torn to pieces by grief and love, so we will never walk the dark valley alone — we always have an experienced guide.
God shows us what really does work, and calls us to a new way. Not torture or punishment or cruelty, but tearing down separation barriers and coming together to walk the journey. If God wouldn’t stay separated from us even when we were literally doing the worst we could imagine, why would we insist on separating ourselves from one another?
The curtain was torn from top to bottom, from heaven to earth…and the tomb was open and empty on the third day…and nothing, nothing, nothing can separate us from God’s love, revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.
May it be so. Amen.
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