Bible Commentaries

Mark 15:5

There are few tests of a man's spiritual condition more searching and decisive than the temper with which he bears unmerited insult and railing speech. I do not refer to mere self-command, to the self-respect which forbids an answer in kind, and imposes an external calmness of manner on a swelling indignation within.... The question is not one of self-mastery under, but of superiority to, insult, which feels no anger or resentment at insolence or contempt; and this not from an abject or craven spirit, but from living on a plane of feeling up to which personal insult does not reach. This equanimity in no wise prejudges the question whether injurious language should not be reproved, and in some cases punished; as by a judge for contempt of court. We are only concerned with that serenity of spirit which is not touched or wounded by opprobrious speech, and all will admit it is a very rare gift.

—Mr. Cotter Morison's Service of Mark 15:11

A certain People, once upon a time, clamorously voted by overwhelming majority "Not he; Barabbas! not he! Him, and what He Mark 15:19

Froude, in describing Newman's preaching at Oxford, tells how once he "described closely some of the incidents of our Lord's Passion; he then paused. For a few moments there was a breathless silence. Then, in a low, clear voice, of which the faintest vibration was audible in the farthest coiner of St. Mary"s, he said, "Now, I bid you recollect that He to Whom these things were done was Almighty God ". It was as if an electric stroke had gone through the church, as if every person present understood for the first time the meaning of what he had all his life been saying. I suppose it was an epoch in the mental history of more than one of my Oxford contemporaries."

Reference.—XV:20 , 21.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No1683.

Simon the Cyrenian

Mark 15:21

I. The greatness of trifles. If he had started five minutes earlier or later, his whole life would have been different.

II. The blessedness and honour of helping Jesus Christ. Let us share His shame and help in carrying out the purposes for which the cross was borne.

III. The perpetual recompense and record of humblest Christian work.

IV. The blessed results of contact with the suffering Christ. We suppose that he yielded to the soul-conquering power of Christ. He was "the father of Alexander and Rufus".

—Alexander Maclaren, Contemporary Pulpit, vol. I. p878.

Simon of Cyrene

Mark 15:21

There is more than a picture here, there is a parable for the soul. Let us understand not only the honour of the deed, but its blessedness. No one can ever do for Jesus precisely what Simon did. And yet in spirit, in the words and deeds of our daily lives, and preeminently in the greater hours of trial and sorrow, what we are called upon to do is this very thing—to walk in the way after Jesus, and to cany His cross.

I. First: Mark the greatness of the service Simon did for Jesus. As often as our thoughts are true and our love to Jesus rises in flood, we all have a blameless envy of those who did Him service. We know no distinction to compare with theirs. The women who ministered to Him; Martha, who made Him a supper; Mary, who poured her spikenard over His head; Joseph, who gave Him a grave, stand out above all the benefactors of men. All the pre-eminences and attainments of time are less than vanity compared to theirs. But if you will give rank to the services rendered to Jesus, if you will pitch upon the greatest deed done for Him—next to that supreme office of the woman who nursed Him in her bosom and gave Him suck at her breasts—easily first of all is this deed of Simon in bearing His cross.

To this day the greatest service to be done for Christ is to carry His cross.

II. Mark 15:23

The intention of the soldiers was humane. Crucifixion was so lingering and painful that it was customary thus to deaden the consciousness of the criminal.

I. What was the Saviour's Condition at that Moment?—Intense anguish of soul combined with physical suffering.

Christ's nature was peculiarly sensitive. The sorrow at Gethsemane had already weakened Him.

Now His sorrow had reached its height.

II. Why did He Refuse the Proffered Relief?— Not to awaken men's admiration.

Not to awaken men's sympathy.

1. Because His sufferings were by Divine appointment; not simply accidental. He would not escape the full force of the penalty which He had undertaken to endure.

2. Because He was unwilling to die without a full consciousness of the conquest which He was achieving over sin and death.

III. What Enabled Him to Dispense with this Stupefying Draught?—It was the direct result of His self-surrender to the Father.

He who gives up will, purpose, life, into the hands of God, may expect that God will be all in all to him.

IV. What Lessons does His Refusal Teach Us?

1. His true nobility.

2. Our own duty under trial.

"The cup which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?"

It is our privilege to accept the Saviour's love.

He suffered, died, arose, ascended to heaven, and pleads now for us.

—F. G. Austin, Seeds and Saplings, p19.

Mark 15:23

See Keble's lines on "The Tuesday before Easter".

"Johnson," says Boswell, "with that native fortitude which amidst all his bodily distress and mental sufferings never forsook him, asked Dr. Brocklesby, as a man in whom he had confidence, to tell him plainly whether he could recover. "Give me," said Mark 15:32

"That we may see and believe:" here you have a pack of men who are setting up their own standard of evidence. What a proud "we" was that; what a blind "see" was that; what an impossible "believe" was that! Observe their line of reasoning: they charged Jesus Christ to do something of their own fixing in order that they might see and believe. They would arrest the universe in order that they might get a first-class seat upon any chariot that was driving towards the gratification of selfish conceit and desire. Were they so anxious to see and believe that they would call upon God to arrest the sun and the moon upon the hills of time? Certainly not; they were not anxious to believe, they did not want to believe, but they wanted to gratify a conceit or to satisfy a fancy or an ambition; they wanted to create a new anecdote, saying, "We said, if He would come down from the Cross we would see it and believe Him"; and God sent upon them a great negative, a contemptuous denial. None can be so deaf as God. We must take care how we set up our own little schools of evidence and our small little bodies of apologies for the deity of Christ and the redeeming efficacy of His Cross.

I. We cannot stop at any one definition of evidence, even if God were to grant it to us. He would not satisfy us, He would awaken and provoke a still keener and fouler temptation.

The eye never saved a soul, the eye is a poor instrument at best; the human may probably be the very poorest of eyes in the higher classes of animals. There is a way which the eagle knoweth not, and there is a path which the vulture's eye hath not seen, and there are paths and ways and courses of development which no human eye can see; it is the soul that sees.

II. Jesus Christ never did respond to any test set by the enemy, set by anybody. He does not accept suggestions, He reveals truths. Christ never fell into an intellectual Mark 15:34

In the thirty-seventh chapter of Transformation, Hawthorne describes Sodoma's well-known fresco of the suffering Christ at Siena. "It is inexpressibly touching. So weary is the Saviour, and utterly worn out with agony, that His lips have fallen apart from mere exhaustion; His eyes seem to be set; He tries to lean His head against the pillar, but is kept from sinking down upon the ground only by the cords that bind Him. One of the most striking effects produced is the sense of loneliness. You behold Christ deserted both in heaven and earth; that despair is in Him which wrung forth the saddest utterance man ever made, "Why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Even in this extremity, however, He is still Divine. The great and reverent painter has not suffered the Son of God to be merely an object of pity, though depicting Him in a state so profoundly pitiful. He is as much and as visibly our Redeemer, there bound, there fainting and bleeding from the scourge, with the cross in view, as if He sat on the throne of His glory in the heavens."

Towards the end of her life Mrs. Fry said to a friend: "I have passed through deep baptism of spirit in this illness. I may say, unworthy as I am to say it, that I have had to drink in very small measure of the Saviour's cup when He said, My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me? Some of my friends have thought there was a danger of my being exalted, but I believe the danger has been on the opposite side, of my being too low."

The Cry of Dereliction

Mark 15:34

The tragedy of the Crucifixion reached its climax at the sixth hour. The Blessed Master had passed through the outer circle of sorrow, and now the pale, bruised Form is lost in the thick darkness which surrounds Him. During the first hours our Blessed Lord reigns as a King—interceding, absolving, and commending His loved ones. Now a change passes over Him; His soul enters into a great loneliness. This cry shows that there was something deeper, something more awful, than the fear of death. He must taste death for every Mark 15:35

"Behold, He calleth Elias." They misinterpreted that last drear cry. They thought He was speaking to Elias and not to God. So at the very end, and on the Cross itself, Jesus was misunderstood.

I. I want to follow that misinterpretation into one or two spheres of the earthly life of Jesus, and I notice first that men misunderstood His motives. Think, for example, of His healing miracles—"He casteth out devils by Beelzebub," they said. Or think of His eating with publicans and sinners. That condescension spelled out love Divine, and they thought it was proof positive of guilt.

Men misunderstood the mystical and poetic speech of Jesus. They took Him very prosaically and literally when He only meant to suggest as music does, and so time and again they misconstrued Him. Take, for example, one of His early words, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again". Mark 15:39

One Mark 15:42-43

It is significant that all the four Evangelists tell the deed of Joseph. We can understand why it was so indelibly imprinted on their memories, and was deemed so worthy of record. The day of Jesus" death had been one long sorrow and shame. From the midnight hour in Gethsemane until Christ bowed his head in death, there had been the awful contrast between love and constancy and tender pity and holy sacrifice on the one side, and betrayal, denial, desertion, and derision on the other. But then at the close of it all, there is this brave and beautiful deed. It is a touch of tenderness after a day of unrelenting hate and cruel wrong.

I. But now let us look at the doer of this good work on Jesus. His mind and spirit are made very clear to us. Each Evangelist adds some revealing trait Joseph of Arimathæa was a man of means, of refined mind, and of high social position. He was a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, and held in good repute among his fellow-counsellors. He stood marked out from many by his high and serious mind, his incorruptible passion for justice, his native goodness of heart. He wore all through his years "the white flower of a blameless life". He belonged, to use a pardonable analogy, to that class to which our country in the days of her struggle for civil and religious liberty owed so much—the class of high-minded, devout, patriotic, country gentlemen.

We are told one very revealing thing about him. "He also waited for the kingdom of God." The kingdom of God was the phrase into which had been condensed all the high hopes and holy ambitions, all the dreams of a better state, and all the visions of the reign of God among men, foretold by Prophet and Psalmist. To wait for the kingdom of God was to be one of that band of devout and prayerful men and women, who were steeped in the spirit of the Old Testament, who had sure faith in the God of Israel, who waited for the hour to strike when the Messiah would come, and the will of God be done on earth as it was in heaven. It was that kingdom which Simeon and Anna longed to see before death should seal their eyes; before whose narrow door Nicodemus stood and did not know it, or understand its call. It was that kingdom which poor, blinded, reckless Barabbas and his fellow-brigands sought to establish in their mistaken ungodly way. That he "waited" meant that in the heart of Joseph there was a noble discontent with the corruptions and miseries and bondages of the times, and an unquenchable longing for the reign of righteousness, peace, and joy. As he passed through the land and remembered the great days of old, his heart was pained within him. As he walked in the city and saw, as Jesus saw, iniquity infesting it, and the vultures of vengeance hovering over it, his mind was filled with brooding thoughts. And as he sat in the council and looked with his clear, honest eyes into the craft and chicanery of Caiaphas and his tools, hope almost died within him. What could such a Mark 15:46

Dostoieffsky, in his powerful romance, The Idiot, describes two Russians stopping before Holbein's picture of Jesus being lowered from the cross, with mangled body, and traces of pain, wounds, and bruises on His limbs. "I like looking at that picture," says one. "That picture!" exclaims his friend. "That picture! Why, some people's faith is ruined by that picture!" He goes on to explain that it is a representation of death as a blind, implacable force, working its will on this grand, priceless Being, Himself worth more than all nature and all the earth. Scepticism, he argues, is started by the sight of this huge monster having power to destroy the Christ.

References.—XV:47.—R. M. Benson, The Life Beyond the Grave, p12. XVI.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlii. No2467; vol. xlviii. No2780. R. Stier, The Words of the Angels, p72.