Six Hours

Mark 15:24-39

March 20, 2016 (Palm Sunday) • Mount Pleasant UMC

Just five days ago, everything had been different. Five days ago, Jesus had ridden into town on a donkey, and it seemed like the whole world was celebrating his arrival. Well, maybe not the whole world, but a lot of folks who were in Jerusalem for the Passover were really excited to see him ride down the Mount of Olives and into town. “Hosanna!” they had sung. “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mark 11:9-10). Now, those were words from the psalms that were sung every year as pilgrims entered Jerusalem, but this year, they were were directed specifically at Jesus. He was their savior, their coming king, or so they hoped, and this was his time. They waved palm branches in anticipation of a coming kingdom, a kingdom of peace and life. They were sure the moment was coming when he would overthrow the Romans and give them back their nation. Five days ago, people welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem as a king.

Four days ago, everything had been different. Jesus had stayed the night at Bethany, just over the Mount of Olives, and though his entry into the city had been quieter this day than the day before, it did not go unnoticed. He had spent part of the day in the Temple courts, and when he saw the ways the religious leaders were taking advantage of people, it made him angry. The outer court, which was the only place where Gentiles and Jewish women could come and pray, had been turned into a marketplace, a first-century strip mall. There were money changers in one area, and since you couldn’t pay the Temple tax with Roman coins, everyone had to get their money changed before they went into the Temple proper. Then there were the animal inspectors, because you couldn’t offer a sacrifice that had any kind of blemish, so you would bring your animal in for inspection and if the slightest defect was found, you had to buy a certified sacrificial animal, which just happened to be available in the next booth. Now, if you’ve ever exchanged money from one currency to another, you know the likelihood of there being a “small charge” (which isn’t all that small) for the service. And you don’t have to imagine too hard to realize that there probably weren’t very many, if any, animals brought in from outside that were approved. After all, those who ran the Temple complex made money if you bought their animal. So this place of prayer has been turned into, as Jesus says, “a den of robbers.” Jesus, in response, turns over the tables and runs out those who were selling things. “My house,” he said (quoting the prophet Isaiah), “will be called a house of prayer for all nations” (11:17). Four days ago, the chief priests and teachers of the law begin to wonder (again) if maybe they need to do something about Jesus.

Three days ago, things had been different. Jesus spent the day back in Jerusalem, answering questions and arguing with the religious officials. “Tell us,” they said, “by what authority are you doing these things?” Jesus pushed back. “If you tell me the nature of John’s baptism, I’ll answer your question.” Well, the religious leaders hadn’t liked John the Baptist much either, but they knew he was popular with the people. They couldn’t discount his ministry, nor could they honestly affirm it. “We don’t know,” they said. “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things,” Jesus said (11:27-33). Three days ago, Jesus deliberately refused to back up his actions with any kind of authority.

Two days ago, Jesus seems to have been absent from Jerusalem, maybe spending time with his friends in Bethany, but one day ago, he spent the evening in the city, enjoying Passover dinner with his closest friends, his disciples. And what happened in the next twenty-four hours, beginning with that meal, has been the subject of our study this Lenten season. We’ve been walking with Jesus as he ate the Passover, as he prayed in a garden called Gethsemane, as he was arrested and tried before the high priest and the Roman governor, and as he was beaten and humiliated by those who thought they had real power. One day ago, Jesus was celebrating the freedom represented by the Passover. This day, just a few hours later, he is bound, beaten, ridiculed and about to be crucified. The twenty-four hours that changed the world come down to the last six hours in which Jesus willingly gives his life for you and me—for the salvation of the world.

There is no getting around it: crucifixion was a horrible death. None of the Gospels go into detail; Mark simply says, “And they crucified him” (15:24; cf. Matthew 27:35; Luke 23:33; John 19:18). There are actually better descriptions of the crucifixion in Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 than there are in the Gospels. But Mark doesn’t need to give details because, in those days, most everyone had seen a crucifixion. It’s been said that crosses were not depicted in Christian art until everyone who had ever seen a crucifixion had died. It wasn’t the nice, clean image we have in our heads. I remember one man telling me that the most violent film he’d ever seen was Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, and though Gibson’s interpretation may be speculative at times, one thing for sure he got right: crucifixion was ugly, horrible and brutal. The Romans did not invent crucifixion, but they seem to have perfected it (Evans & Wright, Jesus, the Final Days, pg. 28). They made it into a method of execution that would prolong the victim’s pain for as long as possible. Some victims would last for days as they died slowly from asphyxiation and dehydration. Some would suffer congestive heart failure and shock (Garland, NIV Application Commentary: Mark, pg. 586; Hamilton, 24 Hours That Changed the World, pg. 99). It was so awful that one Roman writer said it would be better, if you were sentenced to crucifixion, to commit suicide. Cicero called it the “extreme and ultimate punishment” and the “cruelest and most disgusting penalty.” Josephus called it “the most pitiable of deaths” (Hamilton 96). We still have a word to describe the pain of crucifixion: “excruciating,” which literally means “out of the cross.” It describes the most intense and unbearable pain.

The images we have from movies and paintings of what the hill of Calvary looked like are mostly wrong. For one, Jesus would have only carried the crossbeam through the city streets, not the whole cross. The vertical beam stayed at the site of the crucifixion, firmly embedded in the ground. The crossbeam, which Jesus would have carried, weighed about a hundred pounds. So imagine Jesus, weakened from the beating his body has taken already, trying to carry a hundred pounds on his back through the Jerusalem city streets. No wonder he stumbles and falls. No wonder the guards have to compel Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross the rest of the way (15:21). That Jesus can carry it any distance at all is miraculous. A second misconception is the way Jesus would have been nailed to the cross. Crucified men were either nailed through the wrists or tied to the crossbeam; evidence for both practices have been found. They were not nailed through the palms. We know Jesus’ wrists were nailed because after the resurrection, he invites Thomas to look at his hands as evidence of what he had been through (cf. John 20:27). His feet, however, are another matter. We usually see them depicted one on top of the other, in the front of the cross. But as recently as 1968, archaeological evidence has been discovered that show a crucified man with nails that went through the side of his ankles, suggesting that victims were placed on the cross, straddling the center beam, and the feet were nailed on either side, which would, then, create greater pain and put more stress on the body (Hamilton 98). If you saw the film Risen this Lent, you saw a film that actually got it right depicting the way men were crucified.

One more thing the movies typically get wrong, and that’s the height of the cross. I’ll need some help with this. We picture Jesus being way up in the air, but most scholars believe today that Roman crosses were no more than nine feet tall (Hamilton 99). If you allow room at the top for the sign that details the charges—which, in Jesus’ case, is exactly what the religious leaders accused Jesus of when they took him to Pilate, the exact reason the soldiers beat him so badly, that he was “king of the Jews” (15:26)—then Jesus’ feet were probably not much more than three feet off the ground, about the height of standing on a chair.  Now why is that important? Because it means people wouldn’t have to look up that far to see him, and he could clearly hear everything that was said. So when Jesus, as the Gospel of John reports (19:25-27), entrusts his mother to John, he can look right into her eyes and she can look into his. When the soldiers are gambling for his clothing (John 19:23-24), he can hear the dice being rolled. And when the people are mocking him, he can hear every word they say (Hamilton 99). He’s much closer than we imagine.

So what is it Jesus hears? They hurl insults at him (the word there is blaspheme; Garland 590). They shake their heads at him. They yell at him. And those are the people who are just passing by, which could have been a lot of people. Crucifixions were carried out in very public places; they were meant as a deterrent to crime. So these are the folks who drive by a highway accident and even though they have no idea what’s happened, they still have an opinion. Worse are the chief priests and teachers of the law, who also mock Jesus, but what Mark reports them saying is ironic at best. “He saved others,” they say, “but he can’t save himself” (15:31). They meant that as an insult, but it’s actually a very true statement. You see, Jesus went to the cross to save us from our sins, to offer himself as the sacrifice. In the Old Testament, when you wanted to express your sorrow for your sin, for what you had done wrong against God, you offered a sacrifice, something that was precious to you, something valuable to you, and you gave that to God as a way of expressing sorrow and repentance—because repentance always costs us something. The problem with that system, though, is that you had to do that every time you wanted to repent; it did not last forever, and so sacrifices were a regular part of worship. The book of Hebrews reminds us that such sacrifices needed to be repeated because “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (10:4). But Hebrews goes on to say that Jesus offered a perfect sacrifice. He willingly offered himself and established a new type of relationship between us and God (Evans & Wright 37). John put it this way: Jesus “is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). When Jesus was on the cross, he was dying for the sins of everyone, and that’s why what the religious leaders say is so profound and true. If Jesus saved himself, he couldn’t save us or anyone. If he abandoned the cross, we would have no hope of forgiveness. He saved others because he didn’t save himself, so what was meant to be a taunt actually becomes a profound truth (cf. Garland 591).

And all of this takes place over six long excruciating hours. Six hours that changed the world. Jesus is crucified, Mark says, at nine in the morning. For three hours, he listens to the people taunt him, mock him, ridicule him. Can you imagine that? Being in horrible pain physically while people are making fun of you constantly? The torture we talked about last week hasn’t stopped. Then, at noon, the world gets very, very dark. Now, this would not have been some sort of eclipse; this is Passover, when the moon is full and not in the right position for an eclipse. This is something strange, something out of the ordinary, something supernatural. In ancient times, darkness was associated with mourning, with the death of great men, or as a sign of God’s judgment (Garland 591). At the very least, this darkness got people’s attention. Something important and powerful was happening. And so for three hours, the world is dark and, at least by Mark’s account, the activity around the cross gets quieter. Darkness does that. It brings a quiet, a reflective mood. And then, at three o’clock in the afternoon, which was one of the Jewish hours of prayer (Garland 589), Jesus cries out with a loud voice, something not normally heard at crucifixions since the punishment made it difficult to breathe (Garland 594): “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” (15:33). At the time of regular daily prayer, 3 p.m., Jesus’ thoughts turn toward the psalms as they always would have, and he begins to pray Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” What awful words! Words we don’t expect from the lips of the Son of God. We’ve heard them so often that we’re too familiar with them, but can you imagine what those words would have done to those standing at the foot of the cross, who believed Jesus was the Son of God? What did it mean that he was forsaken by God? How could that even be? How could that even happen?

Well, I can’t begin to explain how God the Son could be separated from God the Father, and we don’t have time to get into a huge theological debate anyway (maybe you can save that for your LifeGroup discussions this week). But I do want to point out an important truth here: forsakenness is not the same as absence. I think some of you need to hear that today. When Jesus cried out that he was forsaken, that does not mean he was abandoned by God, or that God the Father was somehow absent. God the Father is never absent. God is not playing hide and seek with you. But it is true that sometimes we experience what we might call the silence of God, and I believe that is what Jesus, in some way, was experiencing on the cross. And in one way or another, I’m guessing that’s something you’ve experienced, too—the silence of God. You pray, and it seems as if no one is listening. You believe, and your world just seems to get worse. You stay faithful, and he leaves anyway. You sacrifice for your kids, and they take advantage of you. You pray and heaven seems indifferent. You ask for healing and she gets cancer anyway. And you echo that cry from the cross, “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?” You’ve been there, haven’t you?

I have. It was my third year in seminary, right after January term, just before the second semester was ready to begin. I had a full slate of classes scheduled, and I was gearing up when I began to develop a severe, lingering shortness of breath. Of course, being a man, I didn’t tell anyone, especially not Cathy, for about four days. And one evening, we were out for a walk when I either confessed the shortness of breath or she noticed me breathing hard as we walked up and down the hills of Wilmore. Shortness of breath, she reminded me, was nothing to take lightly, especially for a heart patient like myself. So the next day, at her prompting (or insistence), we called my cardiologist, who wanted to see me as soon as possible. Of course, that meant a trip back to Indiana from Kentucky where I was in school. So we made the 5-hour trip home, where the doctor listened to my heart, checked me over, and put me immediately in the hospital. Classes were going to begin in just a few days, and I was in the hospital, not certain what was going on. I got me checked in, they poked me four times to start the IV, and then Cathy left to stay at my parents’ house for the night. And I remember laying there more than a bit discouraged. Here I was, preparing to enter ministry, to work full-time for God, and this was happening. Why was I sick? Why was I struggling to breathe? What was going to happen? Didn’t God know I was on his team? All sorts of feelings rolled over me that night, and I spent some time talking—or complaining—to God about it. There was a part of me that felt as if God had left me there, forsaken me in the hospital. Now, I know that my forsakenness was nowhere near Jesus’ experience on the cross, and you might be thinking that my experience isn’t anywhere near what you’ve experienced either. But in that moment, in that place, it was the way I felt. But do you know how I knew God wasn’t absent? Because I wouldn’t have been talking to him if he were. Feeling forsaken does not mean God is absent. If God were absent, Jesus wouldn’t be calling him “MY God.” Forsakenness means we feel as if God is silent, not absent.

Silence and absence are two different things. Andrew Peterson, a Christian songwriter, has perhaps put it best in a song called “The Silence of God.” Listen to these words, and see if they don’t echo your own experience.

It’ll drive a man crazy; it’ll break a man’s faith

It’s enough to make him wonder if he's ever been sane

When he's bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod

And the heavens’ only answer is the silence of God

It’ll shake a man's timbers when he loses his heart

When he has to remember what broke him apart

This yoke may be easy, but this burden is not

When the crying fields are frozen by the silence of God

And if you’ve got to listen to the voices of the mob

Who are reeling in the throes of all the happiness they’ve got

When they tell you all their troubles have been nailed up to that 

cross

Then what about the times when even followers get lost?

’Cause we all get lost sometimes…

Silence does not mean absence, and in my hospital room, as I prayed and complained, I eventually experienced a sense of God’s presence. I didn’t get any answers. I didn’t hear a voice say, “It will be all right.” And I wasn’t healed supernaturally—because the answer to prayer is not getting what we think we want. The answer to prayer is receiving God’s presence. And that’s what I received, even in the midst of the silence of God. And there, on the cross, Jesus, too, experienced the silence of God, not the absence of God. But even in that silence, God was working. In fact, it’s in that time of silence when God was working the most, when he was saving the world through his son (cf. Garland 607).

One person at the foot of the cross recognized this. Mark tells us that after Jesus prayed about his forsakenness, he let out one last loud cry and “breathed his last” (15:37). As this happened, Mark tells us that a Roman centurion, a man who has been in the Roman army long enough to be promoted through the ranks to a significant position of authority, a man who is battle-hardened and very experienced in the art of death, this man notices the way Jesus dies and, in that moment, says, “Surely this man was the Son of God” (15:39). Mark is not necessarily saying that the centurion became a Christ follower at that moment, but somehow, as he noticed the way Jesus died, as he watched him take his last breath, the centurion saw in Jesus something beyond just another criminal dying for his crime. He saw something different in Jesus, enough to make him confess that this Jesus, this crucified man, must be who he said he was—the Son of God. So many people who had gathered at the foot of the cross, including so many passersby and religious officials who mocked Jesus, completely missed what was going on here. Even the disciples (most of whom were not at the foot of the cross) didn’t really understand until later. But this centurion, this Roman soldier—he got it. He knew, deep in his soul: “Surely this man was the Son of God.”

So, what’s your confession? We’ve walked with Jesus through the last 24 hours of his life. We’ve been with him in the Upper Room as he shared a last meal with his disciples. We’ve walked with him to his place of prayer, stood with him as he was arrested, listened in as he stood trial, joined with the crowd as they demanded Barabbas instead of Jesus, and felt the pain as he was beaten and crucified. We’ve journeyed through these 24 hours that changed the world, but perhaps the bigger question, at least for this moment, is whether or not these 24 hours will change your world, your life. What’s your confession as you stand at the foot of the cross? Who is that man up there on the cross, dying for your sin? Is he just a failed rabbi, or a misguided revolutionary? Is he a teacher who didn’t know when to speak and when to keep silent? Is he just an unfortunate man caught up in a plot against his life? Or is he the Son of God? Is he the one who came to save you from your sin? Is he the hope of the world? What’s your confession today? Because it’s not enough to just know what happened during those 24 hours. It’s not enough to learn new tidbits of information, though I hope that has happened over these last few weeks. It’s not enough to simply learn about the culture and the method of crucifixion. We have to allow these 24 hours to change not just the world, but to change our world. As we enter into this Holy Week, what’s your confession? Who is Jesus to you? And what difference will it make in your life that he’s there, on that cross, offering his life as a sacrifice for your sin?

This morning, as we pray, I want to invite you to picture Jesus on the cross, and to not shy away from the brutality of what happened there. But as you gaze at Calvary, I invite you to picture yourself standing at the foot of that cross. You’re close enough to speak to Jesus. What do you say to him? What do you call him? Do you join with those who mock him? Or do you call him Lord, Savior, Rabbi? What does he say back to you? Does he call you Servant, Disciple, Friend? Does he call you by name? What is your confession this day? As we go to prayer, I want to invite you to come and kneel if you would like. If you haven’t yet allowed Jesus to come into your life and make you a new person, if you haven’t yet experienced the love of Jesus flowing through your heart, now is the time. There is no better day than today; none of us are promised tomorrow. Come and pray and ask him to come into your life; if you need someone to pray with you, Pastor Rick and many others would be willing to do that. If you already know Jesus, I bet you know someone who doesn’t. So let’s be in prayer for them this morning, especially as we enter this Holy Week, that they would come to know that, truly, Jesus is the son of God, and the six hours he spent on the cross changed the world and can change their world as well. So let’s go to prayer, and let’s invite Jesus to be who he wants to be in our lives.