Mark 15:16-41

Jesus is Maltreated and Humiliated

Mark 15:16-20 – Roman Guards Mock Jesus

The soldiers mocked him, ridiculing his alleged kingship. The purple cloak was the closest they could get to regal garments. They knelt before him, saluted him and worshipped him in jest, putting a fragile, flexible reed in his hand in imitation of the kingly sceptre of power.

They put a hastily twisted crown of thorns on his head, though no mention was made of the size of the thorns or of violence used in putting it on his head. They hit him on the head with a reed, more like a whip than a club. And they spat on him.

Their actions were degrading and rough, and Mark made no explicit mention that they did in fact flog Jesus. As mentioned earlier his intent was consistently to see Jesus’ physical pain as secondary to his emotional and spiritual turmoil.

The Son of Man Comes – Cosmic Salvation

Mark 15:21-41 – Jesus’ Crucifixion and Death

Cyrene was a city in North Africa. In that case, Simon would have been a diaspora Jew, making his perhaps once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He was not a Jewish resident and would presumably have been staying somewhere outside the city. Mark gave his name, and the names, too, of two of his sons. Perhaps they were personally known to the Markan community. 

Simon did not offer to carry Jesus’ cross. The Roman guard compelled him. Jesus would have been unknown to him. 

It was normal practice for condemned criminals to carry the crossbeam of their own cross to the place of crucifixion. That Jesus did not carry his may have been a reflection on his physical condition. Though Mark had given no details of Jesus’ treatment, he may indeed have been flogged beyond the point of his any longer having the required strength.

On an earlier occasion, after telling his disciples of his own coming death, Jesus had gone on to say to them: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (8.34). Without realising it, Simon has been cast in the role of the obedient disciple. The irony would hardly have been lost on Mark. The chosen disciples had left him; a stranger accompanied him on his last journey. 

Crucifixions happened outside the city walls, preferably where they could be publicly viewed. Their purpose, after all, was to deter political dissent.

Myrrh was an anesthetic. Dissolved in wine it was customarily offered to criminals about to be crucified. Jesus did not take it, perhaps because he chose to do nothing that would deaden his capacity to assent totally and deliberately to the price of his loving. He had also said at his Last Supper that he would not drink of the fruit of the vine again until he tasted it new in the Kingdom of God.

Mark gave little descriptive detail, simply saying that they crucified Jesus. He had made the point that none of the male disciples was an eyewitness of the event. Women disciples, as he would mention later, were present, but they were only looking on from a distance (15:40). Perhaps Simon (from Cyrene) stayed for the crucifixion and death, though Mark did not mention this. It is also impossible to be sure whether Simon later became a disciple (possibly like his sons). If he had remained at the scene, he could have provided further details to other disciples, though it also possible that he had returned to Cyrene before being “interviewed”!

Strangely Mark made what looked like a somewhat irrelevant comment about Jesus’ clothing. In doing so, he was effectively referring the literate reader to Psalm 22:18. 

Facing the Scandal of Crucifixion

The inclusion of references to Psalm 22 illustrated the need felt by the early communities to throw light on the otherwise shocking obstacle of their leader having been executed in such an apparently powerless and totally dehumanising way. They searched their Scriptures, often in their liturgical celebrations, not so much to prove that things had to happen in the way they did, but to show how Jesus’ fate was not without figurative precedent. It provided them some means to come to terms with the mystery.

Psalm 22 was used to provide a basic framework for the account of the crucifixion. 

The echoes in the narrative of so many of the verses of the Psalm show a strong literary dependency on it. 

The narrative continued:

Mark was deliberately ironic. The normal practice of publishing the crime over the head of the criminal (in this case done in mockery) unwittingly proclaimed the truth to the faithful reader and to all with eyes to see. 

The sons of Zebedee had not long before asked to sit, one on his right and the other on his left, when he came into his Kingdom (10:37). They were nowhere to be seen – hiding in fear and disbelief. In another ironic gesture, Mark had two criminals in the places of honour.

The procession of successive mockers took up the point mentioned in Psalm 22: 7-8. Passers-by (pilgrims on their way into the city to have their lambs killed in the temple in preparation for the feast), a group of chief priests, with scribes among them, and the criminals crucified with him, all took their turns in the chorus.

They taunted him to save himself. Yet to save himself would have been precisely the impossibility that Jesus had so consistently affirmed. Salvation, entry into the Kingdom, was gift of God. It was by being prepared even to lose their lives that people opened themselves to God’s saving action. “Those who seek to preserve their lives will lose them; those who lose their lives for my sake of me and for the sake of the Gospel will save them” (8.35).

For the sake of the Gospel Jesus was prepared to lose his life. In no way would he have withdrawn from his total commitment to the message he had lived and preached.

Apocalyptic Description - 1

Whatever about the possibility of eclipses, etc., this comment was not about natural phenomena. This was apocalyptic language. It drew the reader into the knowledge that what was truly happening was happening at the level of mystery, of deeper reality. This was the moment of the “coming of the Son of Man in power” that Jesus had told the chief priests and the scribes of the Sanhedrin they would personally witness. This was the moment of the coming of the Kingdom, the climactic moment of the world’s salvation. God had answered the prayer Jesus had uttered in Gethsemane. God had strengthened the beloved even to death. The world had been judged, and the integrity of Jesus had become the criterion of life and death.

Given possibly the choking effect of the physical strain of crucifixion, Jesus’ cry, to one bystander at least (perhaps a guard unfamiliar with the niceties of Galilean dialect), sounded as though he had called on Elijah, not on Elohim (a name of God). The soldier offered him the sour wine, standard issue for Roman soldiers. Whether his comment was mockery or wonder was uncertain. 

Mark had begun his narrative with the prophetic return to earth of Elijah in the person of John the Baptist (1:6; 9:12-13). Now at the end of the narrative the name of Elijah echoed again. In fact, the words shouted out by Jesus were the opening words of Psalm 22, the only words of the crucified Christ recorded by Mark. What did they imply? 

At face value they were a cry from the heart, the expression of the deepest desolation wrung from the depths of the dying Christ. Even the dying Jesus could not feel, could not experience, the presence within him of his loving God. His emotional exhaustion had drained from him every hope of feeling anything else beyond the pain that wracked his body and heart.

Other commentators believe that the opening line of Psalm 22 was meant by Mark to identify the whole psalm with its range of emotions, from initial desolation, through memory and appeal, to hope, to certainty, and eventually to triumph and praise. In their minds Mark may have intended his readers to assume that all those reactions coursed through the heart of the dying Christ. To have done so would certainly have given the story a “happy ending”, but at the price of Mark’s consistent emphasis on Jesus’ self-emptying, even to the point of spiritual and emotional desolation.

Where Was God When Jesus Died?

God was not absent from the death of Jesus or helplessly detached from what was going on as Jesus was being tortured and killed. God was present and active, giving to the dying Jesus the desire and the strength to persevere in his decision to love (and to accept his consequent powerlessness in the face of human irresponsibility). Though the dying Jesus had probably moved beyond the stage where he could decide anything, in fact God was empowering him to remain in touch with his inner truth, to continue to love to his limits, and to become perfect in the process.

For Mark, there was no particular solemnity associated with Jesus’ last moment: there was no mention of peaceful acceptance, simply a loud cry preceding his final breath. 

Apocalyptic Description - 2

The observation need not be taken literally. Mark was dealing with an apocalyptic moment expressed in apocalyptic language. He was making the point that, with the death of Jesus, the veil that was considered to conceal the sacred presence of God in the centre of the Holy of Holies in the temple had been torn aside and God had become accessible to all, without any need for priestly mediation. The temple had indeed become redundant. God’s Kingdom had broken definitively into the world. The Son of Man had come “on the clouds of heaven” in the clear view of all who had eyes to see.

Some commentators see a further meaning in Mark's comment. According to the priestly mindset, the killing of victims was understood to divert God's punishment for certain sinful activities - as though God somehow required death in order that God's anger be satisfied. That sacrificial mindset disposed the high priestly cast to accept without quibble the death of Jesus. In Mark's mind, their killing of the innocent Jesus exposed their radical misconception of the merciful God. The tearing of the curtain symbolised the revealing to everyone "with eyes to see" of the emptiness of the sacrificial system, and the ultimate demise of the temple and of priesthood.

Mark’s intention in referring to the centurion’s comment is uncertain. 

a) Psalm 22:27 had made the point: “all the families of the nations shall worship before him”. He may have wished to convey that eventuality, not necessarily by implying any literal conversion on the part of the centurion, but symbolically: the exclusivist attitude of some strands of temple piety had been shattered, and the “nations” now enjoyed free access to God.

b) Many scholars would see the centurion’s comment at the end of the narrative forming a literary balance with the opening sentence of the whole story, where the author had expressed his faith in Jesus as Son of God. For Mark’s balance to be honoured, it is not essential that the remark be interpreted literally.

c) To have the desolation of Mark’s portrayal of the crucifixion softened by an act of faith on the part of the centurion would rather have spoilt his dramatic effect. Other interpretations are possible. The word used to describe the centurion’s stance had a certain confrontative flavour. The centurion’s comment may have been sarcastic: “If this is God’s son, who is interested in such a God or in such a son?” His later report to Pilate of Jesus’ death (15:44-45) conveyed a matter-of-fact sense of “business as usual” and maintained the general tone of dehumanisation highlighted by Mark.

The women looked on from a distance. The distance separating them would have meant that their personal support to Jesus as he hung dying was probably negligible. Like the other disciples they may have lacked courage, and chose not to approach more closely. Yet they were at least there and they observed – which could not be said of the male disciples.

Only at this stage, at the very end of his narrative, did Mark mention the presence of women followers of Jesus, who were in fact not just followers but practical supporters and apparently quite numerous. For some reason he had virtually written them out of the storyline. Were there no traditions about the women disciples preserved in the collective memory of the early communities? Such exclusion would certainly have mirrored the patriarchal attitudes of the time, but Jesus himself had positively challenged such ways of thinking.

Was the Mother of Jesus Present?

Mark specifically noted that one of the three women disciples present at the crucifixion of Jesus, in addition to Mary Magdalene and Salome, was

• Mary, the mother of James the Less and Joses, 

Likewise one of the three women who would later go to the tomb on the Sunday following his death, along with Mary Magdalene and Salome, would be 

• Mary, the mother of James,

Presumably the Mary variously identified in different places was one and the same person: 

• Mary, mother of Jesus (whose brothers were James, Joses, Judas and Simon) - identified earlier in the narrative at Nazareth (6.3),
• Mary, mother of James and Joses - present at the crucifixion, 
• Mary, mother of Joses - who would observe where the body of Jesus was laid, 
• and Mary, the mother of James - who would discover the burial tomb to be empty.

Undoubtedly, Mary was quite a common woman’s name, as were the names James and Joses, so the women could in fact have been different women. Given the closeness of time and place, the Mary present at the crucifixion, burial and empty tomb of Jesus would almost certainly have had to be the same Mary. It would seem to be quite an unusual coincidence if among the disciples of Jesus there were two (or three) Marys, each with sons James and Joses.

Most likely, then, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was present at Jesus’ crucifixion.

Yet, why was Mark inconsistent in his identifying of this Mary at the crucifixion, and, more to the point, why did Mark not identify her as mother of Jesus? Perhaps his reason may simply have been that the important thing about her was not that she was Jesus’ mother but that she was a faithful and courageous disciple: blood relationship did not rate as significant in the community of disciples. 

If Mary, the mother of James and Joses, was indeed the mother of Jesus, we may wonder about her own inner struggle as her Son slowly died. Presumably in her identification with the mind and heart of her crucified son, she herself would have had to sacrifice her deepest natural maternal instincts to join with him in a wholehearted “yes” to his choice for integrity, trust and death to self - literal and psychological - that he required of all true disciples. Mary, indeed, accepted radically the call to discipleship, and through her total death to self, wrung from her heart and will as her son died before her eyes, she became in traditional devotion the model of all disciples. She did the will of God. (3:35).

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