Can We Forgive God?
Commentary
Welcome to Holy Week! This week presents the focus of our faith, the events that give us strength to face the worst life can throw at us, and the promise that Jesus the Christ has put us ‘at one’ with God. This is the meaning of the ‘atonement,’ a word that was coined just to explain the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection. Mark’s Gospel focuses on the end of Jesus’ life more than any other part of the Christ story, as we can see by simply looking at the amount of reading we could do this morning (1/8th of the Gospel).
“High” churches are those that focus on ritual, such as Roman Catholic, Episcopal/Anglican, and the various Orthodoxies. Most have communion as part of every worship service, in recognition of the central importance of the Christ event.1 Many of the sanctuaries of high churches focus on the crucifix2 for the same reason. Worship services abound during Holy Week, from Palm Sunday through Holy Thursday, with a communion or Christian Seder service Thursday evening to commemorate the institution of the Lord’s Supper3 and perhaps a foot washing ceremony. The week ends with Good Friday services (often two, since most people don’t get to take off in the middle of the day to go to church, but the elderly are reluctant to drive at night) and maybe an Easter Vigil, which can run from the end of Good Friday services through Saturday night until dawn on Easter Sunday, followed by a service at the regular worship time.
The events that led up to Jesus’ death and resurrection will be rehearsed through these services, reminding us that we can never appreciate the resurrection unless we walk through Jesus’ suffering. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- that great theologian who was the founder of the Confessing Church in Germany during WWII -- said in The Cost of Discipleship:
In Easter vigils, people sign up to come to church for one hour or more, responding to Jesus’ plaintive question of Peter, James and John: “Couldn’t you watch with me one hour?” Jesus was waiting for the end of his ministry to be played out, as he prayed that we could be put right with God in some other way than suffering one of the cruelest deaths ever devised. The sanctuary can be lit with only the lights in the chancel and the first row of pews, leaving those praying surrounded by dark and silence. Prayer suggestions and scriptures can be printed in large print, so they can easily be read in the dim light. People often say that this vigil brings home the feelings the disciples must have had that long night between Jesus’ death and resurrection.
We need to help people to focus on the entire Christ event because the resurrection is sweeter by far when we have walked through Jesus’ suffering as those first disciples did.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, so that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.
This is the job of the pastor in a nutshell. In fact, it ought to be posted in every pastor’s office where we can see it at all times. There are too many niggling details, too many controversies, and too many personnel problems, not to mention infighting between groups in the local church, to keep us focused on the main reason most of us entered the ministry.
Most new pastors are shocked to find that the 6th and 8th verse of this prophetic psalm often applies to some of the people in their congregation. But the fact is, it wasn’t just Judas and Peter who failed Jesus in his final hours. The rest of them ran away when he was arrested, and it was left to the women to stand and watch Jesus’ suffering and death. Jesus had warned Peter, who had sturdily asserted that no matter what, he would never betray his Lord, that before dawn he would have denied Jesus three times. Peter was not alone, of course; Judas had sold information about Jesus to the Sanhedrin for the price of a slave -- thirty pieces of silver.
Jesus warns all of us who want to follow him that we need not expect better treatment than Jesus got. So, let’s not think that the words of Isaiah apply only to himself or Jesus. This and all of the ‘Servant Songs’4 in Isaiah apply to all those called to lead the people of God (choir directors, musicians and Sunday School teachers as well as missionaries, street ministers, and pastors). Every true servant of God will have those who spread lies or innuendo at some point in their ministry. Isaiah may say, “therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore, I have set my face like flint. . .” (v. 7) but for the person being attacked, setting one’s face like flint can end in jaw pain and a migraine.
Isaiah’s consolation for the Servant is in verses 7 and 9: “It is the Lord God who helps me…. All of them (who are tormenting him) will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up.” It isn’t always easy to turn to God when we feel unappreciated, abused, mocked or threatened. “What have I done to deserve this?” can be followed by “what now?!” Even Jesus cries out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But Jesus does not turn his back on God, does not respond to the taunting challenge: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross and save yourself!”
We can lay this Servant psalm of Isaiah alongside the reading from Mark and see why it was chosen as our Old Testament lesson for today. The story of Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin, and his treatment at the hands of the Roman guards, includes them insulting him and spitting on him (cf. v.50:6 with Mark 14:64 and 15:19). And Isaiah 50:9b refers to the inevitable death of us all, as opposed to the eternal life promised to us by Christ’s resurrection.
We can also lay it alongside Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus was quoting from the cross, and see the parallels. The Servant is mocked, as is the Psalmist (22:7). Both Isaiah’s Servant and the Psalmist cry out that “there is no one to help.” Both the Servant Song and Psalm 22 move from despair and this sense of being forsaken to praising God for delivering them.
Especially important is the fact that the Servant does not turn his back on God. He complains to the one who can be his salvation and anticipates vindication from the Great I Am. He declares his faith that God will help him and punish his tormentors. In this way, Isaiah gives us a model to follow in our lives as leaders of God’s people. It is no sin to cry out to God, to ask why we are so alone in our suffering. The greater sin is to turn our back on God, to suffer without turning to the one we are supposed to trust. Our hidden anger, our sense of being abandoned, can be shared with God. God has been there.
Philippians 2:5-11
Paul is writing to Philippi from prison, addressing a problem between two of the women in the church, who were evidently in dispute over a matter that affected the entire congregation. (It is clear in the context of the entire work that this was not a personal matter.) He urges the whole congregation as well as the two women (see 4:9) to “be of one mind.” He doesn’t mean they need to think exactly the same way. If we pay close attention, we will see in v. 5 of our reading for today that Paul wants them to be one in the way they approach disputes in general. Jesus never simply condemned people who disagreed with him or questioned him. He condemned his hearers for their hard-heartedness toward others.
Jesus, Paul says, was humble. “Though [Jesus] was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited….” Rather, he “[took] the form of a slave….” Paul is saying that Jesus was willing to be the lowest of the low; the term for slave that he uses is the designation for the child slave who brings the footbath and washes visitors’ feet. Paul may be thinking about Jesus at the Last Supper, washing his disciples’ feet. In this way, Jesus demonstrated his proclamation that “the last shall be first, and the first be the last and servant of all.”
Paul also says that Jesus’ death on a cross (v.8) was part of that humble approach. Jesus may have begged God to find another way in Gethsemane, but he went through with God’s plan. It seems that the plan, which sounded fine while he and his Father were discussing it in heaven, had become more than he thought he could bear once he had learned the weight of human flesh. And probably, neither did God anticipate the degree of suffering he was asking. After all, the Incarnation was undertaken by God to overcome the barriers that separated us from the Godhead. This was an education for God as well as salvation for us. At-one-ment requires suffering on both sides.
But the Atonement means glorification for us all as well. “Therefore God also highly exalted [Jesus],… so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Both the suffering and the glory go both ways.
Mark 14:1--15:47 or Mark 15:1-39, (40-47)
Mark has placed the “Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem” at the beginning of chapter 11, and in between that event and the 14th chapter, tells the story of the cleansing of the Temple and many sayings of Jesus. So our reading for today does not open with what is the hallmark of Palm Sunday -- the cheering crowd, the waving of palm fronds, and Jesus riding in on a donkey. It goes right to the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin.
Mark’s description of Jesus’ trial is an accusation against the Jewish hierarchy (not the Jewish people in general). These men had colluded to see to it that they had evidence that Jesus needed to die (14:1-2).
Mark counterbalances that animosity on the part of the Sanhedrin, priests, scribes and lawyers with the story of the woman who anointed Jesus5 with very fragrant nard. She is criticized for doing so, on the grounds of wasting an expensive ointment (the bottle was worth a year’s wage for the average person) more probably, the perfume, which was very fragrant, overwhelmed the guests.6 This anointing, Jesus says, is in preparation for his death. And it is matched at the end of Jesus’ life by Joseph of Arimathea’s anointing of Jesus’ body. This story also emphasizes that Mark’s criticisms are not aimed at the Jews in general, but at the hierarchy. The person who recognizes Jesus’ as Lord in his lifetime is a woman who has “a bad reputation” according to John’s gospel; Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin, anoints him after his death.
As to the trial, it could not be held at night. Trials were to be open and aboveboard (and our American system of justice follows this principle today).
Second, no trial should have been held in the home of the High Priest. There are courtrooms where it should have been held. So on those two standards alone, this is an illegal trial. As we would say today, “a kangaroo court.”
But this follows the way that Jesus was arrested. Judas led the soldiers to the spot in Gethsemane, hours after they had finished the Passover Seder, so they could arrest him secretly (14:43-46). Jesus points this out (14:48-49), saying “Day after day I was teaching in the Temple.” And we have already heard that the poor and outcasts, the disabled and the mentally ill all listened to what he had to say. It’s the rich and the priests who despise him.
Third, Mark says that the witnesses called had evidently been paid for, that is, their testimony does not agree. And even when repeating something Jesus really had said (his comment about tearing down the Temple and he would raise it again in three days), they could not agree on his exact words, or what he meant by them. Under Jewish law, they needed two witnesses to agree in order to convict.
It is highly unlikely, however, that the High Priest’s question to Jesus was, “Are you the Son of the Blessed One?”7 The Messiah was never predicted to be the Son of God. But the later books of the Old Testament do say that if we follow the will of God, we will be like “sons of the Most High.” But Jesus says “Yes,” which is blasphemy. He has claimed equality with God, saying that they will see him “seated at the right hand of the Power.” To be seated at “the right hand” means, in this context, to be sharing God’s throne. That is an outrageous claim, and the high priest was truly furious and shocked, for he tore his clothes, which were undoubtedly expensive, in a gesture of the time.
This trial is the beginning of all that Jesus had repeatedly told his disciples to expect. He knew he had stirred up enough trouble that the authorities needed him gone! They would stop at nothing to see him dead. But they could not kill him -- only the Roman court could prescribe the death penalty. But if he was claiming to be a king (the function of the Messiah throughout the Old Testament), that would do it. The Romans tolerated Judaism and the Jews’ religious laws grudgingly at best. This claim on Jesus’ part earned him a crucifixion, for it smelled of sedition.
If we skip all of chapter 14, we miss all of the above scenes. We will have missed Mark’s way of telling the story of Jesus -- the building tension of the Jewish leadership, their fear of what this man might do to their standing with their Roman captors, his attacks on their right to be the leaders of Judea, his assertions that they were not representing God properly.
Chapter 15 does stand alone, however. It begins with Jesus before Pilate, the only one who could condemn him to death. The Sanhedrin had to come to Pilate to present their case.. Nothing of his trial by the Sanhedrin is repeated here. Mark’s style of writing moves breathlessly to the main question:
PILATE: “Are you the King of the Jews?”
JESUS: “You say so.” This is a saucy response, to say the least. And the last one Pilate will hear from Jesus. The priests accuse him “of many things,” but Jesus does not respond. The priests “stirred up the crowd” and eventually got them chanting, “Crucify him!”
Mark says that Pilate wanted to please the crowd. Not likely. He hated the Jews, cared nothing for anyone’s opinion on his governance (we know this from Roman documents), and didn’t need their good will. He would remain governor as long as the Caesar didn’t hear bad reports or taxes went unpaid. Nevertheless, he did hand Jesus over for crucifixion.
Mark spares Jesus some of his suffering. In his version of the Passion, Jesus is not flogged. He doesn’t mention nails in Jesus’ hands and feet. He notes, however, that the soldiers offered him wine mixed with myrrh, which served as a pain reliever. Yet Jesus refuses that. He focuses more on the humiliation of dying on a cross, the mocking attitude of the priests: “He saved others, but himself he cannot save.”
On the other hand, Mark makes a point of saying that there were many women who had come up to Jerusalem with him. He names Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome. No mention of Jesus’ mother. But none of the disciples dared to come. They had, as Jesus had predicted, deserted him.
The other counterpoint to the high priests’ mockery and the absence of his disciples is Mark’s report that the Centurion who had supervised the crucifixion of Jesus and the two thieves said, when Jesus died, “Truly, this man was God’s son!”
Part of the awe the Centurion felt was possibly due to the swift death of Jesus. According to Mark, he was on the cross for three hours and died. Crucifixion was known to take as long as three days if the one being hung was strong and was an agonizing suffocation as the crucified could no longer lift himself a little to take a breath.
Jesus was buried in a new tomb. This is important, as tombs are places of decay, and to be placed in a cave that has previously held a dead body would have desecrated Jesus’ body. In the thinking of the day. The bodies of those executed were usually tossed into the garbage dump outside of Jerusalem. This was an open pit, salted with lime to speed up the decay of whatever was thrown in. Jesus had used it in his preaching as a vision of what hell is like.
Joseph of Arimathea came to Pilate after his duties for the day were over and asked for Jesus’ body. [Notice again: Pilate was surprised that Jesus was already dead.] Now, Joseph knew that if he touched a dead body, even putting the linen cloth around it, he would be unclean for a week. Passover started the next night, and his actions would bar him from eating the Passover meal. But he took the body, wrapped it and put him in the cave tomb. Then he had a “very large” stone rolled against the entrance. And “Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid.”
Now those last verses, 40-47 are optional. It is hard for us to stop with the stories of the women and not go to the tomb, but this is Palm/Passion Sunday, not Easter. We have gone through the pain, the Passion, if you will, on this Sunday because so many people don’t want to go through Good Friday. Oh, some will come, and if they value communion, they’ll come for Holy Thursday. But so many refuse to go through the sad, hard part of the story. They want the Resurrection, but do not appreciate the necessity of Jesus’ suffering.
Too many people see the crucifixion as “what God did to his own son so we could be saved from our sins.” We need to emphasize the divinity of Christ as much as the humanity, so that people will understand that while it was Jesus, it was truly God whom we nailed up. Incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmas, must carry through to Good Friday, or we will forever lose the importance of what happened here. Jesus’ cry on the cross “Why have you forsaken me?” has thrown us off. What we have here is a cry that can be understood as the meaning of the crucifixion from God’s side.
Are we ready to forgive God? To see the sacrifice on the cross as God reaching out to us, sharing in our pain, feeling the separation from us in ways that we can relate to. If Jesus is God as well as Man -- the long, long teaching of the Trinity -- then we need to stop for a minute and re-evaluate what God has done. This is no sacrifice as the ancient Jews understood it -- a stand-in for us. It is a sacrifice on the part of God. While God cannot die, God can suffer. And does suffer, every time we are in pain, crying out to God for pity. Every time we kill one another, cheat one another, steal from one another, lie to one another, envy one another, God suffers. This is the meaning of the crucifixion as well as the other interpretations. It makes a difference in our trust in God when we think this way, even for a moment. In light of the crucifixion, can I forgive God?
1 ‘The Christ Event’ refers to Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection. These are named this way because they hang together. No one part of this sequence of events stands alone. They form a continuous narrative in all four Gospels. The resurrection cannot be fully understood without the story of Jesus’ suffering and death.
2 Crucifixes, as opposed to crosses, feature Jesus on the cross. Some focus on Christ’s suffering, but in recent years the glorified or resurrected Christ has become the central figure.
3 Also called Communion or the Eucharist, depending on the denomination.
4 Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; and 52:13-53:12. Imagery in these passages is reflected in the Gospels’ descriptions of Jesus’ suffering and death.
5 Unlike Matthew (See Matthew 26:6-13) and John (12:1-8), she does not anoint his feet, but his head, as one would anoint a High Priest or king. See 1 Samuel 10:1, 2 Kings 9:6. The bottle came sealed, and the only way to open it was to snap the seal off, which would break the edges of the opening, so it would continue to emit scent.
6 Cf. the opening of the Song of Solomon, 1:2b-3b: “For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out….”
7 All three of these titles for God -- Blessed One, Most High, the Power -- are circumlocutions to avoid using a name for God. The third commandment, against taking God’s name in vain, was thus kept.
“High” churches are those that focus on ritual, such as Roman Catholic, Episcopal/Anglican, and the various Orthodoxies. Most have communion as part of every worship service, in recognition of the central importance of the Christ event.1 Many of the sanctuaries of high churches focus on the crucifix2 for the same reason. Worship services abound during Holy Week, from Palm Sunday through Holy Thursday, with a communion or Christian Seder service Thursday evening to commemorate the institution of the Lord’s Supper3 and perhaps a foot washing ceremony. The week ends with Good Friday services (often two, since most people don’t get to take off in the middle of the day to go to church, but the elderly are reluctant to drive at night) and maybe an Easter Vigil, which can run from the end of Good Friday services through Saturday night until dawn on Easter Sunday, followed by a service at the regular worship time.
The events that led up to Jesus’ death and resurrection will be rehearsed through these services, reminding us that we can never appreciate the resurrection unless we walk through Jesus’ suffering. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- that great theologian who was the founder of the Confessing Church in Germany during WWII -- said in The Cost of Discipleship:
Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves...grace without discipleship.... Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again…. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a [person] the only true life.
In Easter vigils, people sign up to come to church for one hour or more, responding to Jesus’ plaintive question of Peter, James and John: “Couldn’t you watch with me one hour?” Jesus was waiting for the end of his ministry to be played out, as he prayed that we could be put right with God in some other way than suffering one of the cruelest deaths ever devised. The sanctuary can be lit with only the lights in the chancel and the first row of pews, leaving those praying surrounded by dark and silence. Prayer suggestions and scriptures can be printed in large print, so they can easily be read in the dim light. People often say that this vigil brings home the feelings the disciples must have had that long night between Jesus’ death and resurrection.
We need to help people to focus on the entire Christ event because the resurrection is sweeter by far when we have walked through Jesus’ suffering as those first disciples did.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, so that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.
This is the job of the pastor in a nutshell. In fact, it ought to be posted in every pastor’s office where we can see it at all times. There are too many niggling details, too many controversies, and too many personnel problems, not to mention infighting between groups in the local church, to keep us focused on the main reason most of us entered the ministry.
Most new pastors are shocked to find that the 6th and 8th verse of this prophetic psalm often applies to some of the people in their congregation. But the fact is, it wasn’t just Judas and Peter who failed Jesus in his final hours. The rest of them ran away when he was arrested, and it was left to the women to stand and watch Jesus’ suffering and death. Jesus had warned Peter, who had sturdily asserted that no matter what, he would never betray his Lord, that before dawn he would have denied Jesus three times. Peter was not alone, of course; Judas had sold information about Jesus to the Sanhedrin for the price of a slave -- thirty pieces of silver.
Jesus warns all of us who want to follow him that we need not expect better treatment than Jesus got. So, let’s not think that the words of Isaiah apply only to himself or Jesus. This and all of the ‘Servant Songs’4 in Isaiah apply to all those called to lead the people of God (choir directors, musicians and Sunday School teachers as well as missionaries, street ministers, and pastors). Every true servant of God will have those who spread lies or innuendo at some point in their ministry. Isaiah may say, “therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore, I have set my face like flint. . .” (v. 7) but for the person being attacked, setting one’s face like flint can end in jaw pain and a migraine.
Isaiah’s consolation for the Servant is in verses 7 and 9: “It is the Lord God who helps me…. All of them (who are tormenting him) will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up.” It isn’t always easy to turn to God when we feel unappreciated, abused, mocked or threatened. “What have I done to deserve this?” can be followed by “what now?!” Even Jesus cries out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But Jesus does not turn his back on God, does not respond to the taunting challenge: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross and save yourself!”
We can lay this Servant psalm of Isaiah alongside the reading from Mark and see why it was chosen as our Old Testament lesson for today. The story of Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin, and his treatment at the hands of the Roman guards, includes them insulting him and spitting on him (cf. v.50:6 with Mark 14:64 and 15:19). And Isaiah 50:9b refers to the inevitable death of us all, as opposed to the eternal life promised to us by Christ’s resurrection.
We can also lay it alongside Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus was quoting from the cross, and see the parallels. The Servant is mocked, as is the Psalmist (22:7). Both Isaiah’s Servant and the Psalmist cry out that “there is no one to help.” Both the Servant Song and Psalm 22 move from despair and this sense of being forsaken to praising God for delivering them.
Especially important is the fact that the Servant does not turn his back on God. He complains to the one who can be his salvation and anticipates vindication from the Great I Am. He declares his faith that God will help him and punish his tormentors. In this way, Isaiah gives us a model to follow in our lives as leaders of God’s people. It is no sin to cry out to God, to ask why we are so alone in our suffering. The greater sin is to turn our back on God, to suffer without turning to the one we are supposed to trust. Our hidden anger, our sense of being abandoned, can be shared with God. God has been there.
Philippians 2:5-11
Paul is writing to Philippi from prison, addressing a problem between two of the women in the church, who were evidently in dispute over a matter that affected the entire congregation. (It is clear in the context of the entire work that this was not a personal matter.) He urges the whole congregation as well as the two women (see 4:9) to “be of one mind.” He doesn’t mean they need to think exactly the same way. If we pay close attention, we will see in v. 5 of our reading for today that Paul wants them to be one in the way they approach disputes in general. Jesus never simply condemned people who disagreed with him or questioned him. He condemned his hearers for their hard-heartedness toward others.
Jesus, Paul says, was humble. “Though [Jesus] was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited….” Rather, he “[took] the form of a slave….” Paul is saying that Jesus was willing to be the lowest of the low; the term for slave that he uses is the designation for the child slave who brings the footbath and washes visitors’ feet. Paul may be thinking about Jesus at the Last Supper, washing his disciples’ feet. In this way, Jesus demonstrated his proclamation that “the last shall be first, and the first be the last and servant of all.”
Paul also says that Jesus’ death on a cross (v.8) was part of that humble approach. Jesus may have begged God to find another way in Gethsemane, but he went through with God’s plan. It seems that the plan, which sounded fine while he and his Father were discussing it in heaven, had become more than he thought he could bear once he had learned the weight of human flesh. And probably, neither did God anticipate the degree of suffering he was asking. After all, the Incarnation was undertaken by God to overcome the barriers that separated us from the Godhead. This was an education for God as well as salvation for us. At-one-ment requires suffering on both sides.
But the Atonement means glorification for us all as well. “Therefore God also highly exalted [Jesus],… so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Both the suffering and the glory go both ways.
Mark 14:1--15:47 or Mark 15:1-39, (40-47)
Mark has placed the “Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem” at the beginning of chapter 11, and in between that event and the 14th chapter, tells the story of the cleansing of the Temple and many sayings of Jesus. So our reading for today does not open with what is the hallmark of Palm Sunday -- the cheering crowd, the waving of palm fronds, and Jesus riding in on a donkey. It goes right to the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin.
Mark’s description of Jesus’ trial is an accusation against the Jewish hierarchy (not the Jewish people in general). These men had colluded to see to it that they had evidence that Jesus needed to die (14:1-2).
Mark counterbalances that animosity on the part of the Sanhedrin, priests, scribes and lawyers with the story of the woman who anointed Jesus5 with very fragrant nard. She is criticized for doing so, on the grounds of wasting an expensive ointment (the bottle was worth a year’s wage for the average person) more probably, the perfume, which was very fragrant, overwhelmed the guests.6 This anointing, Jesus says, is in preparation for his death. And it is matched at the end of Jesus’ life by Joseph of Arimathea’s anointing of Jesus’ body. This story also emphasizes that Mark’s criticisms are not aimed at the Jews in general, but at the hierarchy. The person who recognizes Jesus’ as Lord in his lifetime is a woman who has “a bad reputation” according to John’s gospel; Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin, anoints him after his death.
As to the trial, it could not be held at night. Trials were to be open and aboveboard (and our American system of justice follows this principle today).
Second, no trial should have been held in the home of the High Priest. There are courtrooms where it should have been held. So on those two standards alone, this is an illegal trial. As we would say today, “a kangaroo court.”
But this follows the way that Jesus was arrested. Judas led the soldiers to the spot in Gethsemane, hours after they had finished the Passover Seder, so they could arrest him secretly (14:43-46). Jesus points this out (14:48-49), saying “Day after day I was teaching in the Temple.” And we have already heard that the poor and outcasts, the disabled and the mentally ill all listened to what he had to say. It’s the rich and the priests who despise him.
Third, Mark says that the witnesses called had evidently been paid for, that is, their testimony does not agree. And even when repeating something Jesus really had said (his comment about tearing down the Temple and he would raise it again in three days), they could not agree on his exact words, or what he meant by them. Under Jewish law, they needed two witnesses to agree in order to convict.
It is highly unlikely, however, that the High Priest’s question to Jesus was, “Are you the Son of the Blessed One?”7 The Messiah was never predicted to be the Son of God. But the later books of the Old Testament do say that if we follow the will of God, we will be like “sons of the Most High.” But Jesus says “Yes,” which is blasphemy. He has claimed equality with God, saying that they will see him “seated at the right hand of the Power.” To be seated at “the right hand” means, in this context, to be sharing God’s throne. That is an outrageous claim, and the high priest was truly furious and shocked, for he tore his clothes, which were undoubtedly expensive, in a gesture of the time.
This trial is the beginning of all that Jesus had repeatedly told his disciples to expect. He knew he had stirred up enough trouble that the authorities needed him gone! They would stop at nothing to see him dead. But they could not kill him -- only the Roman court could prescribe the death penalty. But if he was claiming to be a king (the function of the Messiah throughout the Old Testament), that would do it. The Romans tolerated Judaism and the Jews’ religious laws grudgingly at best. This claim on Jesus’ part earned him a crucifixion, for it smelled of sedition.
If we skip all of chapter 14, we miss all of the above scenes. We will have missed Mark’s way of telling the story of Jesus -- the building tension of the Jewish leadership, their fear of what this man might do to their standing with their Roman captors, his attacks on their right to be the leaders of Judea, his assertions that they were not representing God properly.
Chapter 15 does stand alone, however. It begins with Jesus before Pilate, the only one who could condemn him to death. The Sanhedrin had to come to Pilate to present their case.. Nothing of his trial by the Sanhedrin is repeated here. Mark’s style of writing moves breathlessly to the main question:
PILATE: “Are you the King of the Jews?”
JESUS: “You say so.” This is a saucy response, to say the least. And the last one Pilate will hear from Jesus. The priests accuse him “of many things,” but Jesus does not respond. The priests “stirred up the crowd” and eventually got them chanting, “Crucify him!”
Mark says that Pilate wanted to please the crowd. Not likely. He hated the Jews, cared nothing for anyone’s opinion on his governance (we know this from Roman documents), and didn’t need their good will. He would remain governor as long as the Caesar didn’t hear bad reports or taxes went unpaid. Nevertheless, he did hand Jesus over for crucifixion.
Mark spares Jesus some of his suffering. In his version of the Passion, Jesus is not flogged. He doesn’t mention nails in Jesus’ hands and feet. He notes, however, that the soldiers offered him wine mixed with myrrh, which served as a pain reliever. Yet Jesus refuses that. He focuses more on the humiliation of dying on a cross, the mocking attitude of the priests: “He saved others, but himself he cannot save.”
On the other hand, Mark makes a point of saying that there were many women who had come up to Jerusalem with him. He names Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome. No mention of Jesus’ mother. But none of the disciples dared to come. They had, as Jesus had predicted, deserted him.
The other counterpoint to the high priests’ mockery and the absence of his disciples is Mark’s report that the Centurion who had supervised the crucifixion of Jesus and the two thieves said, when Jesus died, “Truly, this man was God’s son!”
Part of the awe the Centurion felt was possibly due to the swift death of Jesus. According to Mark, he was on the cross for three hours and died. Crucifixion was known to take as long as three days if the one being hung was strong and was an agonizing suffocation as the crucified could no longer lift himself a little to take a breath.
Jesus was buried in a new tomb. This is important, as tombs are places of decay, and to be placed in a cave that has previously held a dead body would have desecrated Jesus’ body. In the thinking of the day. The bodies of those executed were usually tossed into the garbage dump outside of Jerusalem. This was an open pit, salted with lime to speed up the decay of whatever was thrown in. Jesus had used it in his preaching as a vision of what hell is like.
Joseph of Arimathea came to Pilate after his duties for the day were over and asked for Jesus’ body. [Notice again: Pilate was surprised that Jesus was already dead.] Now, Joseph knew that if he touched a dead body, even putting the linen cloth around it, he would be unclean for a week. Passover started the next night, and his actions would bar him from eating the Passover meal. But he took the body, wrapped it and put him in the cave tomb. Then he had a “very large” stone rolled against the entrance. And “Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid.”
Now those last verses, 40-47 are optional. It is hard for us to stop with the stories of the women and not go to the tomb, but this is Palm/Passion Sunday, not Easter. We have gone through the pain, the Passion, if you will, on this Sunday because so many people don’t want to go through Good Friday. Oh, some will come, and if they value communion, they’ll come for Holy Thursday. But so many refuse to go through the sad, hard part of the story. They want the Resurrection, but do not appreciate the necessity of Jesus’ suffering.
Too many people see the crucifixion as “what God did to his own son so we could be saved from our sins.” We need to emphasize the divinity of Christ as much as the humanity, so that people will understand that while it was Jesus, it was truly God whom we nailed up. Incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmas, must carry through to Good Friday, or we will forever lose the importance of what happened here. Jesus’ cry on the cross “Why have you forsaken me?” has thrown us off. What we have here is a cry that can be understood as the meaning of the crucifixion from God’s side.
Are we ready to forgive God? To see the sacrifice on the cross as God reaching out to us, sharing in our pain, feeling the separation from us in ways that we can relate to. If Jesus is God as well as Man -- the long, long teaching of the Trinity -- then we need to stop for a minute and re-evaluate what God has done. This is no sacrifice as the ancient Jews understood it -- a stand-in for us. It is a sacrifice on the part of God. While God cannot die, God can suffer. And does suffer, every time we are in pain, crying out to God for pity. Every time we kill one another, cheat one another, steal from one another, lie to one another, envy one another, God suffers. This is the meaning of the crucifixion as well as the other interpretations. It makes a difference in our trust in God when we think this way, even for a moment. In light of the crucifixion, can I forgive God?
1 ‘The Christ Event’ refers to Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection. These are named this way because they hang together. No one part of this sequence of events stands alone. They form a continuous narrative in all four Gospels. The resurrection cannot be fully understood without the story of Jesus’ suffering and death.
2 Crucifixes, as opposed to crosses, feature Jesus on the cross. Some focus on Christ’s suffering, but in recent years the glorified or resurrected Christ has become the central figure.
3 Also called Communion or the Eucharist, depending on the denomination.
4 Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; and 52:13-53:12. Imagery in these passages is reflected in the Gospels’ descriptions of Jesus’ suffering and death.
5 Unlike Matthew (See Matthew 26:6-13) and John (12:1-8), she does not anoint his feet, but his head, as one would anoint a High Priest or king. See 1 Samuel 10:1, 2 Kings 9:6. The bottle came sealed, and the only way to open it was to snap the seal off, which would break the edges of the opening, so it would continue to emit scent.
6 Cf. the opening of the Song of Solomon, 1:2b-3b: “For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out….”
7 All three of these titles for God -- Blessed One, Most High, the Power -- are circumlocutions to avoid using a name for God. The third commandment, against taking God’s name in vain, was thus kept.
