We Stand Before the Empty Tomb (Mark 15.42-16.8)

Every book of the Bible—whether it’s the book of Jeremiah (1,364 verses) or 3 John (15 verses)—was written for a reason. Every book has a goal in mind, and every book intends to elicit a particular response from its readers.

The gospel of Mark is no different.

Mark has two main goals in mind, which we saw at the very beginning of this series. His first goal is to tell us who Jesus is; and his second goal is to explain and defend the universal call of discipleship—that is, to show us what it means to follow this Jesus, the Son of God, the King of God’s kingdom, the Messiah.

Last week, we got the clearest reminder of who Jesus is, given by the Roman soldier, who proclaimed upon Jesus’s death, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” And this week, he’ll remind us of the call God puts upon all of us, to be disciples of Christ.

This will be the end of our series on the gospel of Mark. But before we get into it, we’re going to need to do a bit of work, because there’s one puzzle we’ll need to sort out.

You probably noticed that we did not read v. 9-20 of chapter 16. And we’re not planning on doing that; we’re not going to see those verses next week. To understand why, we need to understand the use of brackets in our modern Bible translations. (I know, this is going to be really fun.)

In most of our modern translations, whenever you see a word or a verse in brackets, that means that the word or verse inside the brackets does not appear in many early manuscripts.

Now, most of the time, that fact makes almost no difference at all. Most of the time, it’s a word or a phrase that was added for clarification or for some other reason, but it changes nothing about the meaning of the text, or its place in the rest of the Bible. The translators include these things anyway, to be thorough, but they’re honest with us—when they put words or phrases or verses in brackets, that’s their way of saying whatever is inside the brackets was quite possibly added later, and not written by the original author.

Verses 9-20 of Mark 16 are like that. These verses do not appear in many early manuscripts; other manuscripts include these verses, but indicate that even earlier manuscripts don’t include them; and many early church theologians (like Origen or Clement of Alexandria) don’t seem to know about them. And there are several elements here which just aren’t in keeping with Mark’s writing style.

Like I said, most of the time this changes nothing, or very little. But in the case of Mark 16.9-20, it actually changes a good deal.

Most of v. 9-20 contains things we see elsewhere in the Bible: Jesus appearing to Mary and the two disciples first; then appearing to the eleven; then telling them to go into all the world and proclaim the gospel; and finally, Jesus being taken up to heaven and the disciples going out and preaching. All of those things, we see in the other gospels or in the book of Acts.

But there are two verses in particular that are problematic—v. 17-18—which says all believers should expect certain things (like being immune to snake bites and poison) that the rest of the Bible never says believers should or will expect. Some churches have based entire theologies off of these two verses alone—they’ve brought in poisonous snakes for Christians to handle. And guess what? Christians have died after being bitten.

So you see the problem. If these verses do not appear in many early manuscripts; if they contain stylistic differences from the way Mark wrote the rest of his gospel; and if they contain elements that are incoherent with the rest of the Bible, then it’s a pretty good sign that Mark did not write these verses—which means these verses shouldn’t be seen as the authoritative, inspired Word of God. There’s still some debate about this, which is why these verses are still included in brackets in our translations, but the debate isn’t very fierce: most scholars agree that Mark didn’t write these verses, and they were added later—and that’s our conviction too.

But I’ll freely admit that this fact brings up another question—and it fundamentally changes the way we read the end of this book.

We have all seen TV series in the modern era, and we’ve all been frustrated by them. The show builds and it builds and it builds and we get more and more invested and excited in the story. And then there’s a huge revelation, or a twist in the story…and the season ends. And we know we’ll have to wait another year, or two, or three, before we get the next installment.

If Mark ends at v. 8, then that’s essentially what he does: he ends on a cliffhanger. We never actually see Jesus resurrected; the women don’t go see the apostles to tell them about the resurrection; the story just ends. We know those things happened, but Mark never tells us about them. (By the way, this isn’t unprecedented in the Bible; the book of Jonah ends in a similar way.)

But if that is the way Mark truly did end his gospel (and I believe that it is), the question we need to ask is, “Why?” Why did he end his gospel in such an abrupt way?

We know enough about Mark by now to know that he leaves nothing to chance; he says as much through the structure of his narrative as he does through the text itself. So what is he trying to tell us through this mysterious ending?

The answer to that question is actually, I think, the main message behind this text—and it’s astounding. I love the way Mark ends his gospel at v. 8 of chapter 16.

So let’s get into it.

We remember the context. Jesus has just been crucified. The King was falsely accused, falsely condemned, crowned with a crown of thorns, and enthroned on a cross…and then he died. The Roman soldier saw his death and recognized that he is the Son of God, and the faithful women who had followed him throughout Galilee are standing there watching.

That is where we pick up the narrative threat again, in chapter 15, verse 42.

The Outsider (15.42-47)

The first thing we see here is the boldness of a quite unexpected disciple.

42 And when evening had come, since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath, 43 Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God, took courage and went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.

Joseph of Arimathea, as Mark tells us, was a respected member of the council. He was a Sadducee—and we remember that the Sadducees are among those religious leaders whom Jesus rebuked so many times over the course of his ministry. The Sadducees were among those who tried to trap Jesus and who called for his death.

But apparently this Joseph was more clear-sighted than many of the others; he wasn’t in the council to maintain political power or the Jewish way of life. He was looking for something bigger—Mark tells us he was “looking for the kingdom of God.” It would seem he recognized something in Jesus that the others did not.

So, Mark says, he took courage. He had to, because going to Pilate meant that he, a Sadducee, was publicly identifying himself as sympathetic to not only a convicted criminal, but to the very enemy his own group had worked so hard to bring down. It was risky. And Joseph’s courage was all the more admirable given the fact that at this very moment, Jesus’s own disciples were nowhere to be found. Joseph was an outsider, showing faithfulness to Jesus when the insiders had disappeared.

So Joseph went to Pilate and asked for Jesus’s body, so that he could bury him. V. 44:

44 Pilate was surprised to hear that he should have already died. And summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he was already dead. 45 And when he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the corpse to Joseph.

Pilate was surprised that Jesus is already dead—sometimes it took days for a crucified person to die—so he sent for the centurion to confirm that Jesus was indeed dead. (That’s important: he got outside confirmation that Jesus hadn’t just fainted, but was really and truly dead.) And when he got confirmation, he allowed Joseph to take Jesus’s body.

V. 46:

46 And Joseph bought a linen shroud, and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud and laid him in a tomb that had been cut out of the rock. And he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. 47 Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid.

Ever since Jesus was arrested (and even throughout his gospel, really), Mark has been highlighting the irony of God’s plan of salvation. Nearly everything Jesus did throughout his ministry was unexpected. Those who seemed like they should have had a religious advantage—the religious leaders of Israel—were revealed to be the ones who didn’t want anything to do with the Savior God had sent.

And now, in a way, that position has been flipped. Jesus’s own disciples are absent; they’ve all fled. It would seem as if everything Jesus had worked for had come to nothing.

But when the plan looks dead, God raises up unexpected servants, unexpected disciples. The proof of a true disciple of Christ is revealed under pressure. Sometimes the people who look most “established” in the community—in this case, the eleven disciples who had followed Jesus throughout his ministry—end up clinging to safety, while the least likely step into sacrificial courage.

That is what we see in Joseph, and it is what we see in the women as well. We see in v. 47 that Mary Magdalene and Jesus’s mother were following behind to see where Jesus was laid, because they would be coming back.

The Empty Tomb (16.1–7)

Now, in chapter 16, we make a small leap forward in time. Jesus died on Friday. It is now Sunday, the day after the Sabbath. Remember what we saw several weeks ago: Jewish tradition held that the dead would be treated with oils and spices as a way of honoring them, after their death. Given the nature of Jesus’s death, they didn’t have time to do it properly on the day he died, before the Sabbath, so now these women who had followed Jesus are returning to his tomb to treat his body.

When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?”

A couple of interesting things to note here. We saw these women in chapter 15, v. 40—they were witnesses of the crucifixion, and at least one of them was a witness to Jesus’s burial. Now they are coming to be witnesses of Jesus in the tomb. And their mindset is clear—they’re not expecting anything miraculous. They’ve expecting to find him dead. They’ve brought the spices to treat his body; they’re asking themselves who’s going to roll the stone away from the entrance (the stone was huge). They are still in the grips of grief, not in expectation of a promise.

But God has already solved the problem they expected to face (v. 4):

4 And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. 5 And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed.

So first things first: this young man sitting in the tomb dressed in a white robe is not Jesus. Presumably, it’s an angel. Mark says the women are “alarmed”—not mainly because they saw an angel, but because Jesus isn’t there.

V. 6:

6 And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.”

Mark, through this young man’s words, packs the entire gospel into three lines.

He says, “Do not be alarmed.” Don’t be afraid. Stop grieving. Stop fretting. This weekend has been horrendous—but there is no longer any reason to be afraid.

He says, “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen.” The key truth of the Christian faith is not that Jesus died. If Jesus had died, and stayed dead, he would be no Savior at all, because he would not have defeated death. He would have been like any other man—a brilliant teacher, even a miracle worker, but not the Messiah.

But Jesus is risen. He defeated sin on the cross, and he defeated death in the grave. Literally everything we need as fallen human beings—freedom from sin, and freedom from the eternal death that is the consequence of that sin—has been provided for us in him.

He says, “He is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” Jesus did indeed say this to his disciples, in chapter 14—he said that he would be raised, and go before them to Galilee. Even so, the women could easily have doubted at this point, despite the stone rolled away, despite the absence of Jesus’s body in the tomb. Maybe someone stole his body; maybe this young man was a part of some mysterious conspiracy.

But he sends them out with proof to come—not immediate proof, not the kind we always want, but proof to come. He’s going before you to Galilee, and you will see him there. If the women needed proof, they would get it very soon.

And they would get it in the very place Jesus’s ministry began: in Galilee. The risen Jesus is leading his people back to the beginning. He’s not where they last saw him—he’s not in the tomb, he’s not on Golgotha, he’s not in the Garden of Gethsemane. He’s already ahead of them.

And finally, the young man says: “Go, tell the disciples, and tell Peter.”

This is maybe the part of this whole text that hits me the hardest, because it’s so illogical. Some of you are responsible for teams in your jobs. Imagine you’ve been leading a project, and your entire team fell apart under the pressure. It’s cost you millions of euros, they’re all on medical leave for burnout—and you still need to keep going. The project still needs to happen, quickly.

What do you do in that case? You get a new team. You recruit new people. You don’t call the same folks who have just abandoned you, who have failed you so badly.

Jesus could easily have done that. He had plenty of people who had followed him who weren’t among the eleven. He could have called Joseph of Arimathea. He could have called Nicodemus, the Pharisee (John tells us that Nicodemus helped Joseph bury Jesus). He could have called the women who actually showed up. He could have called any number of people.

Instead, he goes back to those he chose at the beginning. “Go tell the disciples” that Jesus is risen, and he’s going to meet you in Galilee. Even better: “Go tell Peter.”

Peter, who had so recently vowed that even if everyone else abandoned Jesus, he wouldn’t—and who, just a few hours later, denied even knowing Jesus.

Jesus’s goal isn’t just efficiency; it’s restoration. The failures of Friday are not the end; Jesus is looking forward, and he knows exactly what he plans for these people who have failed him. He knows what he’s planning for the church they will establish.

This is the gospel. Jesus is risen, his plan is not finished, and he can use anyone—even the most abject failures—to do his will. The resurrection doesn’t just defeat death; it restores failure.

The Call (16.8)

This is incredible news, of course—so what happens now? You’d expect a lot more out of this story…but, as we saw at the beginning, we have very good reasons to believe Mark gives us only one more verse. V. 8:

8 And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

And that’s it. No appearances of Jesus before the disciples. No “and they lived happily ever after.” No matter what the angel has told them, the women are afraid; they are trembling and astonished. They flee from the tomb, and at least at first, they say nothing to anyone. They will—we know this from the other gospels—but at first, they’re just astonished and afraid.

So if Mark really did simply end his gospel at v. 8, as we believe he did, we have to ask: why did he do it that way?

In reality, it’s very much in keeping with what Mark has been doing this whole time—with what Jesus has been doing the whole time. Every time Jesus had told his disciples that he would die and be raised, he followed this announcement with a call to deny themselves in order to follow him. It’s been plain this whole time: after the resurrection, there would be a choice.

And the choice would be made, as Mark’s readers would know. By the time Mark wrote his gospel, the church already existed in its earliest form; his readers would know that the story didn’t actually end here. So they would have understood that the disciples faced this very real choice to deny themselves after the resurrection, and that they made the right choice. What happened next would never have been in question.

Mark is making a deliberate, rhetorical choice. By ending his gospel this way, he forces his readers into the story. The resurrection is announced, but it’s not “finished”. He forces us to stand at the empty tomb, and he asks us to respond.

The women are afraid when they hear the news, and we understand them. Because they are women in Israel, in the first century. Women, at this time in history, would have had no credibility—women weren’t even allowed to be witnesses in a trial. The task to announce Christ’s resurrection to the disciples has been given to them…but why should the disciples listen to them?

Have you ever felt afraid to share the gospel with someone else? Then you know how these women felt. You’ve got this incredible news to share…but what if no one listens?

The resurrection always confronts us with a choice: stay silent, or move forward, and speak. Sooner or later, we all have to make that choice anyway, as these women would—despite our fear, despite our hesitations. Mark’s gospel ends in mid-sentence because he expects his readers to finish it. He ends in uncertainty, not in celebration, because he wants his readers to feel the weight of unfinished obedience.

Jesus is risen! The resurrection has happened!

Now what are you going to do with that incredible news?

I hope you can see why Mark’s choice to end his gospel in this way is profoundly encouraging. All of us will fail, and all of us will have to decide what to do with our faith in the midst of our failure.

If you’re a hesitant disciple of Christ, wanting to move forward but afraid you don’t have all the answers, or afraid that you don’t have the strength in yourself to live for him, God is speaking to you through Mark. He’s reminding you that you don’t need to have “resurrection-level faith” to begin; even frightened disciples, like these women, are invited.

If you’re a Christian living with failure, God is speaking to you through Mark. “Tell the disciples—and tell Peter.” Those men would carry their failure with them for the rest of their lives. But that failure wouldn’t define them; the restoration they found in Christ after their failure would. Our worst moment is not who we are. We are who Christ makes of us.

If you’re a Christian who’s become complacent, a little too comfortable, then God is speaking to you. We can’t assume faithfulness because we’ve grown up in church, or because we belong to a Christian family, or because we “do all the right things. Joseph shows up when the insiders don’t. Our faithfulness shows itself under pressure, not when things are going well.

If you feel like God is absent, and you don’t know how to move forward without him… God is speaking to you too. Jesus is already ahead of you. The silence you feel doesn’t mean that God is absent; he’s before you. He knows exactly where he’s bringing you, even if you can’t see it.

And if you’re hearing this gospel, but you’re still not convinced, you need to understand that you’re standing in front of the empty tomb. Jesus Christ lived, died, was raised…and he’s now calling all of us to follow him. And you’re now faced with that same call, with that same choice.

You see, Mark leaves his gospel open because the resurrection isn’t a conclusion—it’s a beginning.
The empty tomb isn’t the end of the gospel; it’s the place where discipleship truly begins.

So how will we respond?

The Enthronement of the King (Mark 15.21-41)

When I was a teenager, my father was fired from his job. He was a youth pastor at a big church in Tennessee, and he was an excellent youth pastor. I wasn’t a Christian at the time; I didn’t much care for church; but I loved my dad.

We came to this particular church when I was thirteen. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it wasn’t a very healthy church, and my dad didn’t really fit in with the other pastors. He was quite youthful, and he had a peculiar attachment to the Bible, whereas much of the life of this church was based on the “experience” of spiritual things (I don’t mean experience in the Christian life, in the sense of maturity, but rather the experience one might have during a service). I later learned that over the years, the board of the church often complained about my dad, saying that he was too focused on simply preaching the Bible, and not focused enough on giving us kids the “experience” that they thought we needed.

After six years, they’d finally had enough; several board members lobbied hard against him, and they let him go.

I remember the night that Dad told us he had lost his job. At the time he didn’t know what would happen next; we didn’t know if we would have to move (we did—we moved to Florida soon after). He put on a brave face for us, even though he felt devastated and betrayed. I couldn’t sleep that night; I went to the kitchen for a drink of water. And I saw my dad sitting out on the back porch in the dark, by himself, just sobbing.

That memory caused a lot of bitterness in me over the years—bitterness toward the church—but strangely, it’s a good memory for me, because I have never been prouder of my dad than I was right then. I didn’t have the words to tell him why until much later. I was proud of my dad because even though he thought that he had failed us—the kids in the youth group and his family—he hadn’t. This wasn’t a failure. Dad had resisted years of pressure to do something he wasn’t comfortable with in his conscience, and even if he paid the price for it, it was the right price to pay.

When everyone else saw his firing as a defeat, I saw it as a victory. Because my dad didn’t give in to pressure; he did what God had called him to do, which was simply to preach the Word.

It’s the first clear picture I ever had of victory through defeat, and it’s what I always think of when I think of the story of Jesus on the cross, because the story of Jesus’s crucifixion is the ultimate story of victory through what seemed like defeat.

Last week we saw that Jesus was “crowned” through humiliation — he was falsely accused and tried and tortured and condemned to death…but his suffering was his coronation. In today’s text, Mark pushes further: Jesus actively takes his throne through death—and in so doing, he shows that he is not only the true King taking his throne; he is the Son of God achieving decisive victory for the salvation of his people.

Mark organizes his text in a very clear way; he gives us three “markers”, three blocks of time, to orient us—9:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., and 3:00 p.m. So I’m simply going to follow his organization.

9:00 a.m.: The King Enthroned (v. 21-32)

V. 21 starts us off just a little before 9:00 a.m. on Friday morning, actually. Jesus has been tried, he has been condemned, and he has been brutally tortured. At this point he will have lost so much blood that he can barely stand. His clothes are digging into every laceration. And he is now carrying his cross to the place of execution, outside the city, a hill called Golgotha. V. 21:

21 And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. 22 And they brought him to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull). 23 And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. 24 And they crucified him and divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take. 25 And it was the third hour [9:00 a.m.] when they crucified him.

We can’t get into every detail that happens here, but there is one in particular that we need to see. There are allusions to the psalms—particularly Psalm 22—all over this passage. We see, for example, in v. 23, that they offer him wine mixed with myrrh (which he refuses, because he said at the Last Supper that he wouldn’t have wine again until he drank it anew in his kingdom, cf. Mark 14.25). In Psalm 69.21, we read in this cry of lament from David:

They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.

In v. 24, we see the soldiers strip Jesus naked and cast lots for his clothes—a game in the midst of brutality. This is an echo of Psalm 22.17-18, which reads:

17  I can count all my bones— they stare and gloat over me; 18  they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.

You see, Mark isn’t just recording events that happened; he’s interpreting them through the lens of the Scriptures. Mark wants the reader to recognize that this man on the cross is the righteous King promised in Scripture — the one who suffers on behalf of his people.

They finally arrive at Golgotha, and at 9:00, they crucify Jesus. They nail his hands and feet to the cross and prop him upright, where he will slowly suffocate because of the pressure put on his lungs. As we saw last week, Mark doesn’t go into graphic detail about this, because he doesn’t need to—his readers were well aware of what crucifixion entailed.

V. 26:

26 And the inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.” 27 And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. 29 And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, 30 save yourself, and come down from the cross!” 31 So also the chief priests with the scribes mocked him to one another, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. 32 Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also reviled him.

Jesus is hung between two common criminals, and those passing by sling mockery and insults at him. This too is an echo of Psalm 22. We read in Psalm 22.7-8:

7  All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads; 8  “He trusts in the LORD; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him!”

So it’s the same thing we saw last week—everything here, as tragic as it is, is dripping with irony. They mock him—“Save yourself, come down from the cross!” They think the cross is a sign of his defeat; they think the sign nailed to the cross, that declares Jesus “King of the Jews”, is a joke; they think the cross disqualifies him as King. But while the sign may be intended as a joke, it’s not a joke; he is the King, and the cross is the means by which he takes his throne.

When they taunt him to save himself, they’re taunting him to do what he could do, and we all understand the temptation.

And we know it. Think about every instinct in us that runs counter to what Jesus does here. When a marriage is hard, the instinct to run emotionally or physically. When your kids push your last nerve, the instinct to explode because it feels like the only way to keep control. When being faithful to Christ costs you status, friends, or opportunities, the instinct to “come down from the cross” and preserve your image. When following Jesus means waiting, or apologizing, or losing the argument, or confessing sin — the instinct is always, “There must be an easier way.”

The crowd says, ‘Save yourself.’ And every one of us knows that voice. The cross confronts the lie that the path of least resistance is always the best path.

Jesus’s refusal to save himself is the way he saves us—which was his intention the whole time. His apparent powerlessness is in fact a manifestation of his very real power.

At 9:00, the King takes his throne—lifted up for all to see, ruling by giving his life.

12:00 p.m.: The Divine Lament (v. 33)

I hope you see that I’m not trying to paint this story as rosier than it actually was, as if it was only victory. This was Christ’s enthronement, but it wasn’t a joyous enthronement. It was an enthronement borne in sorrow and anguish. That, in part, is what makes the gospel so resonant: it’s not news that’s “too good to be true”. It’s believably good, because it was earned in blood and tears and pain we can’t even imagine.

And the pain in question—Jesus’s pain—wasn’t merely physical. On the cross, Jesus took on himself the sin of all of his people: past, present and future. At this point in the story, he has been on the cross for three hours. So for three hours, he has been enduring not only the most intense physical agony, but the wrath of God poured out against our sin. It wasn’t man punishing Jesus, but God—as Isaiah said in Isaiah 53, when he called the Savior “stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted”, saying that “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all,” that “it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief” (Isaiah 53.4, 6, 10).

And in v. 33, we see a very stark and clear picture of that—as if a window on heaven were opened, and humanity was able to see how God felt about this event. V. 33:

33 And when the sixth hour [that is, 12:00 noon] had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour [that is, 3:00 p.m.].

This was not a solar eclipse, as some have suggested, because Passover took place during a full moon, and a solar eclipse is only possible during a new moon. This was not an astronomical coincidence; it was a supernatural event.

And once again, this echoes the Old Testament. Darkness in the Old Testament was a common picture of lament. In Amos 8.9-10, God says through the prophet:

9  “And on that day,” declares the Lord GOD, “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. 10  I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on every waist and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day.

The darkness covering the land while Jesus hung on the cross was a divine expression of lament.

And of course, we also know that in the Old Testament, darkness is a sign of judgment. Remember what happened in the book of Exodus, when God was judging the Pharaoh in Egypt for not letting the Hebrews out of slavery—he covered the entire country with darkness.

This moment brings both of these themes together. Because Christ’s enthronement came through such horrendous sin and suffering, heaven laments; but at the same time, God is exercising his righteous judgment against the sin of his people. Darkness falls over all of Israel in the middle of the day, which is a terrifying thing—anyone who’s been in a power outage, and suddenly plunged into unexpected darkness, knows how frightening it is.

That fear is appropriate when we’re thinking of the judgment of God. But this is what so many of us have a hard time understanding. We always say that one day God will judge the sin of the world. And as far as the whole world is concerned, that’s true.

But if we belong to him, if we have placed our faith in Christ, we will not be condemned for our sin on that day, because that’s what happened to Jesus as he hung from the cross. As he suffered, as he suffocated, as darkness covered the land, the condemnation that we deserve was falling on him.

So you see the paradox here.

Most of us assume that if God is present, we will feel light. Mark tells you the exact opposite. In the darkness, God was doing his greatest work.

And this is absolutely vital for us to remember. If the Son of God entered darkness to bring you into light, then yourdarkness doesn’t mean you’re abandoned. You may be in a moment where you think God is absent — but Scripture insists that God is often most active when he feels most silent.

The world sees darkness and assumes God is absent. Mark shows the opposite: in the dark, God is intensely present, expressing grief over sin and exercising judgment against sin at the same time. In the darkness, Christ is on the throne.

3:00 p.m.: The Victory of the Son of God (v. 34-41)

Finally, after three hours of darkness, the light returns. It is at this point we see Jesus at his weakest; but it is also at this point that we have the clearest revelation of his identity.

V. 34:

34 And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Why does Jesus ask this question? After all, he knew why this was happening to him; he’s been telling his disciples for a long time what he was coming to Jerusalem to do—he was coming there to die.

There are two levels behind what he says; the first is purely human. Jesus is crying out exactly what he feels. Although he knows that God hasn’t forsaken him, hasn’t abandoned him—he knows the resurrection is coming—in that moment, it feels as if that’s the case. It feels as if he’s been abandoned and forsaken. Much like in the garden, when Jesus truthfully said that his soul was “very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14.34), Jesus is being honest about what he is feeling in that moment. If you have ever felt abandoned, unheard, or unseen — Jesus doesn’t shame that. He enters it. He prays your prayer for you.

But there is a much bigger, deeper level to his words. In v. 34, Jesus is directly quoting—once again—Psalm 22.1, which reads:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?

Psalm 22, at the time, was seen as the perfect lament of the suffering innocent. King David, the epitome of the righteous king in the eyes of the people of Israel, lamented because he was facing unjust persecution. Here, Jesus shows that his despair, while more intense than we can imagine, is not random; it is the righteous sufferer entering the depth of abandonment for his people.

All of the Jews watching on that hillside would have recognized this psalm. So they should have immediately recognized that Jesus, in his lament, is identifying himself with this righteous sufferer.

But they still don’t quite understand. V. 35:

35 And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.” 36 And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.”

Why didn’t they understand him, and think he was calling for the prophet Elijah? Perhaps it’s because they couldn’t hear Jesus clearly over the noise (the name Jesus called out in Aramaic, “Eli, Eli” sounds similar to the prophet Elijah’s name), or perhaps because they didn’t want to see the link he’s making with Psalm 22.

At any rate, the mocking continues—they give him sour wine to drink (presumably, he didn’t take it, as we saw before), and they taunt him: “Let’s see if Elijah comes.”

And it is on this note that the two most extraordinary moments of this event take place. V. 37:

37 And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. 38 And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

This—the curtain of the temple being torn in two—is the first. It’s not a random detail; this is theology in action. The curtain in the temple was enormous—very tall and incredibly thick. This curtain separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place, where God’s presence was meant to dwell, where men were not allowed to enter, and where the High Priest could only enter once a year.

Now, it rips open, exposing the Most Holy Place to the world.

This is a double sign. It is a sign of judgment on the temple system that rejected Jesus. (Remember the fig tree? This is a much clearer sign of the same thing.) And it is a sign that access to God has now been opened to sinners—the King grants entrance into the presence of God through his death.

Now, the Most Holy Place is open to the world—which means, the temple is everywhere. The place where God’s presence dwells is wherever his people are, because they are the ones he has saved.

We have such a hard time realizing the full weight of this truth. So many Christians live as if the veil is still hanging — as if they need to earn the right to come near God. “I’ll pray more once I get my life cleaned up.” “I can’t come to God when I’ve failed again.” “I don’t want to bring this same sin to God for the hundredth time.” “God must be tired of me.”

The torn curtain should banish all such statements from our minds. The torn curtain is not an invitation for the holy to come close — it’s an invitation for the guilty, the weary, the ashamed, and the inconsistent.

This is the King’s victory—he doesn’t come down off the cross, and he doesn’t call for Elijah to save him. He dies for his people, in order to give us God. This is reconciliation, not self-rescue; it is access, not escape.

And finally, we come to v. 39:

39 And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

The centurion was the Roman soldier who was on the hillside, guarding the site of the crucifixion. This seems like a small thing—a private moment from a single individual. But v. 39 is the climax of Mark’s gospel.

A Gentile, a Roman soldier, a man trained to admire brute power, suddenly recognizes Jesus’s true identity—not a teacher, not a leader, not a healer, but the Son of God. And what is most incredible is that the centurion finally sees Jesus for who he is, not because Jesus won a battle, called down angels, or climbed down from the cross—but because he died.

Once again, what we see here is the gospel in miniature. It is not salvation for the Jews only, but for all peoples. The nations come to faith not through displays of force but through the suffering of the Son of God.

So take courage—bring in the person praying for a loved one who seems impossible to reach. Bring in the cynic, the secular colleague, the teenager who mocks everything, the spouse who seems disinterested. The first human to confess Jesus as the Son of God in Mark’s Gospel is a pagan executioner. If God opened his eyes, no one in your life or in this room is beyond hope.

Now, Mark includes one final mention that is important—not mainly because it is important for this story, but for what comes next, which we’ll see next week. V. 40:

40 There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. 41 When he was in Galilee, they followed him and ministered to him, and there were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.

We’ll talk more about these women next Sunday, but I think Mark mentions them here to show that the centurion wasn’t the only person who was seeing Jesus rightly here. Jesus’s disciples (the twelve he had chosen to follow him) have almost all fled—but the women who had followed him have stayed. They become the key witnesses linking cross, burial, and resurrection.

This is a revolutionary detail, because women were considered second-class citizens at the time. And yet, it is through these women that the story will continue; they are the ones who will carry the testimony forward first.

They stand as a living picture of what real discipleship looks like: staying near the King even when his glory is hidden.

Mark is hitting on one of the main goals of his gospel: to show Christians what it looks like to follow Christ. And it rarely looks glorious. Mark knows full well how often following Christ will seem dark and desperate and crazy.

All too often, it will seem like there are so many better things we could be doing. Like there is so much greater happiness to be had. That we are being called to give up so much more than we’re getting.

Mark wants us to see that that is not true.

Most believers think their lives “don’t count” because they’re small, ordinary, unimpressive.

They’re the parent who gets up exhausted to love their kid again

They’re the believer who resists temptation again today

They’re the Christian who refuses the shortcut because it would dishonor Christ

They’re the widow who prays faithfully

They’re the depressed believer who shows up to church even when they feel nothing

They’re the overburdened person who chooses forgiveness instead of retaliation

They’re the believer who keeps trusting God in the dark

It will rarely look glorious. But neither did the cross. Mark’s point is simple: if your life looks unimpressive but faithful, you’re probably right where Jesus wants you.

Conclusion: The Cross as Throne, the Death as Victory

The only true way to light is through the dark, because that is the road Jesus took. The author of Hebrews tells us that Jesus endured the cross “for the joy that was set before him” (Hebrews 12.2). The way to light is through the dark.

At 9:00, the King is enthroned.

At 12:00, heaven laments and judges.

At 3:00, the Son of God wins the decisive victory.

Nothing in this text looks like glory. But everything in this text is glory.

The cross is his throne. The darkness is his royal canopy. The cry is his victory shout. The torn veil is his achievement. And the confession of the centurion is the first glimpse of the global kingdom he came to build.

We have no reason to despair, and we definitely have no reason to look elsewhere for our purpose or our happiness or our fulfillment. We have everything in him, because he died for us.

The Crowning of the King (Mark 15.1-20)

For most of us, the significance of a coronation is a bit hard to grasp. The easiest image for me to call to mind is that of the crowning of Aragorn in The Return of the King (because I love Lord of the Rings). For those of you who are British, or if you’re interested in the royal family you probably have a better idea, with the recent crowning of King Charles.

But even if a coronation is a fairly abstract idea for us, I’m guessing everyone has some of the same things in mind when they think of it. Coronations are monumental affairs, filled with pomp and ritual, fine cloth and gold. Most of the time, the entire kingdom comes out to honor the new king; when David was anointed king of Israel, all the tribes of Israel came out to pay tribute to him.

So it’s pretty hard to imagine any similarities between the coronation of a king and the events described in in Mark 15, which tells of the trial, torture and crucifixion of Jesus. But that is indeed what we see here—it is not merely torture and injustice; it is a coronation.

Almost everyone knows the story we’ve just read, at least in a vague way; we’ve seen it in a hundred paintings and sculptures and films.

Mark doesn’t go into all those details, for two reasons. The first, pragmatic reason is that he didn’t need to; he’s writing his gospel just twenty or thirty years after the events he describes. The people reading his book knew perfectly well what flogging and crucifixion were like, because they’d had ample opportunity to see it for themselves.

But the more important reason is that Jesus’s physical suffering is not the main thing Mark or any of the gospel writers want us to think about. His suffering was unbearably horrible; but plenty of people have suffered as much or worse, at least physically. Plenty of Christians have even suffered as much for their faith.

There are two main things that Mark wants us to see when he describes what Christ went through. We’ll see the first thing this week, and the second thing next week.

So here is the first thing—I’ve already spoiled it. Mark wants us to see that this event, awful as it was, was not merely a travesty; it was not merely a sin of incalculable proportions, the murder of the Son of God; it was not merely a tragic betrayal of God and his plan.

It was a coronation. What Mark describes in chapter 15 is the means by which Jesus Christ, the King of the universe, claimed his throne.

I’ve made many mentions of Mark’s love of the “sandwich” structure, in which he says one thing, then moves on to another subject, then comes back to the thing he said at first, in order to make a larger point; he does that here.

So let’s look at the first part of the sandwich, in v. 1-5.

The Silence of the King (v. 1-5)

Remember the context—Jesus has just been tried and condemned by the religious leaders (and Peter has just denied him). The religious leaders have found Jesus guilty of blasphemy, and found him deserving of death (v. 64). But Israel was under Roman occupation at the time, and under Roman law, they could not put Jesus to death themselves. So their only recourse is to submit their case to the Roman governor, who was temporarily in Jerusalem to maintain peace during the Passover, and who had his work cut out for him.

V. 1:

And as soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council. And they bound Jesus and led him away and delivered him over to Pilate.

We’ve seen this before, but I think it’s worth mentioning again. In the movies you see about Jesus, the Jewish religious leaders are often portrayed as horrendously wicked. And what they did was certainly that.

But what they’re doing shouldn’t surprise us. Remember last week, when they were interrogating him? Jesus quotes Daniel 7, identifying himself as the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Messiah whom God had sent to save his people. So the religious leaders cry blasphemy. The thing is, in any other circumstance, they would have been right. Any ordinary man who claimed to be the Son of God would be committing blasphemy; they’re only wrong because Jesus is telling the truth; he is the Son of God; he is the Messiah.

So their reaction isn’t surprising. What may surprise some of us is that these men had all the proof they needed to believe that Jesus really was who he said. They had seen him perform miracles, they had heard his teaching, they knew as well as anyone what he was doing…and they still didn’t believe.

But even this shouldn’t be surprising. It’s hard to realize how scary it is to have your entire way of life threatened.

Think back to how unsettled everyone was when COVID happened—the government closed everything down, including church services for a good while. Many Christians feared that if we gave in and obeyed the government’s demands, then nothing would stop the government from putting even harsher restrictions on churches for a lot less.

I’m not trying to reopen that debate; I just want us to remember that we know what this feels like—how scary it can be to have your way of life threatened.

These religious leaders had power, and Jesus was a threat to that power; he was, in fact, a threat to everything they held dear—the temple, the law, their rituals and identity… They saw Jesus as a threat to all of that. And it is a very frightening thing to face the prospect of losing your way of life, your national identity, and (maybe especially) the power you’ve amassed for yourself.

So of course, the religious leaders fight to preserve all this, even if it means destroying truth.

And they only way they can do it is to turn Jesus over to the Roman governor, Pilate.

Pilate was not Jewish. He likely knew little and cared little about Jewish customs or culture—he was there to keep the peace and make sure things didn’t get out of hand during the Passover celebration, when thousands of Jews from surrounding regions would flock to the temple.

So now he finds himself in a difficult situation. The religious leaders bring him this man, and in the other gospels we see that they give him a sort of twisted version of their true accusation: they tell Pilate that Jesus claims to be the Christ, the Messiah—”that is, a king” (cf. Luke 23.2). Pilate cares nothing about the charge of blasphemy…but someone claiming to be king would be a threat to the established king in Israel, Herod, and possibly even to Caesar himself.

So Pilate questions Jesus himself. V. 2:

2 And Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And he answered him, “You have said so.” 3 And the chief priests accused him of many things. 4 And Pilate again asked him, “Have you no answer to make? See how many charges they bring against you.” 5 But Jesus made no further answer, so that Pilate was amazed.

Again, Mark doesn’t give us a lot of details, but we can at least see that Jesus doesn’t answer the way Pilate expected him to—he doesn’t try to defend himself, he doesn’t try to deny the accusations, he just gives a vague answer and then falls silent: not exactly the behavior of someone trying to usurp the throne.

And that’s the first thing that Mark wants us to see. Jesus is the “King of the Jews”; he is, in fact, the King of all things, all peoples, all nations. And yet, when his throne is threatened, he doesn’t rise up with an army to defend it. He humbly takes the abuse, takes the accusations, and stays silent. Pilate didn’t know it, but through his silence, Jesus is fulfilling the prophecy of the Messiah that we find in Isaiah 53.7:

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
      yet he opened not his mouth;
                  like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
      and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
      so he opened not his mouth.

His silence isn’t weakness; it is choice. It is sovereignty.

The Condemnation of the King (v. 6-15)

Now Pilate is face with a dilemma. On the one hand, he can find no reason to condemn Jesus, because Jesus is acting like anything but a king trying to undermine the established power. On the other hand, Pilate’s in Jerusalem to keep the peace—and it’s not entirely clear how to do that. He knows what the religious leaders are telling him (and he can see that they’re accusing Jesus out of envy, as we see in v. 10), but he doesn’t know how the people will respond. Maybe condemning Jesus will actually make things worse.

So Pilate decides to test the situation. He had established the practice of releasing one prisoner at every Passover, as a way of currying favor with the people. (Usually it would be someone whom the people felt was wrongly imprisoned.) So would the people prefer he release Jesus, or another prisoner? V. 6:

6 Now at the feast he used to release for them one prisoner for whom they asked. 7 And among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection, there was a man called Barabbas. 8 And the crowd came up and began to ask Pilate to do as he usually did for them.

We don’t know much about this Barabbas, besides what he was imprisoned for. He had committed robbery, murder and insurrection, and may have been a member of a band of guerilla warriors who had risen up against the wealthy upper class in Israel, as well as the Romans—if this is the case, he would have been popular with the common people.

At any rate, what we need to remember is that Barabbas was a man who was recognizably guilty of his crimes; no one thought he had been wrongly imprisoned, no one thought he was innocent.

So Pilate addresses the crowd (v. 9):

9 And he answered them, saying, “Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” 10 For he perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up. 11 But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release for them Barabbas instead.

Just a quick word on context—people often ask why the crowds who had welcomed Jesus turned against him so quickly. Of course, the easy answer is that they turn against Jesus because God sent him to die—that was the plan. But I also think the religious leaders did a very good job at setting all this up, because only they knew what they were planning to do.

When all of this happens, Pilate is addressing “the crowd”; this would have been in the inner court of the royal palace in Jerusalem, which wasn’t huge—big enough for a couple hundred people, maximum. So the crowd he is addressing is by no means everyone in Jerusalem, and we have no indication from the Bible that this crowd was the same crowd that welcomed Jesus with hosannas at the triumphal entry. This is just a very small portion of the population, which the religious leaders managed to “stir up” against him.

V. 12:

12 And Pilate again said to them, “Then what shall I do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” 13 And they cried out again, “Crucify him.” 14 And Pilate said to them, “Why? What evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him.” 15 So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.

This is the center of the sandwich—this is the thing Mark wants to highlight by the contrast he’s making at the beginning and the end of this passage, because what we see here is the gospel in miniature.

Whether or not the crowd demanding Jesus’s death was the same crowd who sang his praises a few days earlier, they all knew who he was; they all knew enough to believe he was who he claimed to be. But they refused to believe he was the Savior, not because they didn’t have reasons enough to believe, but because they didn’t want to believe.

And naturally, we are all like them.

If you drive a car, you probably use Google Maps or Waze or something like that. We’re totally fine letting these apps help us. But if we’re driving with someone else and that person says, “Let’s switch places, I’ll drive,” that’s a different story. We don’t mind being helped, but we don’t necessarily want to give up control.

Naturally, we don’t want a King; we’ll take a Savior who meets our needs, who serves our plans. But we don’t want a King who claims our lives. If we actually pay attention to what Jesus says, left on our own, we don’t want him—he simply asks too much of us.

Left on our own, we’re all like Pilate too. He knew what was right, but he was afraid of what would happen if he didn’t satisfy the crowd. He caved under the pressure. It was far easier, far less risky, to do the job he had been sent there to do, rather than what was right.

And finally, we are all Barabbas. Of course, the Bible says nothing about what happened to him after this. We have no reason to think he believed in Christ. But the image we see here is the very essence of the gospel. Barabbas is guilty and in captivity because of his guilt—and Jesus takes his place. That is the gospel: the guilty go free because the innocent dies in their place. The apostle Paul would develop this much more deeply in his letters—in theology it’s referred to as “penal substitutionary atonement”. Jesus takes our guilt on himself, is punished in our place, so that we might go free.

What Mark wants us to see here is that the One taking our place—the innocent condemned in place of the guilty—is no ordinary do-gooder; he is not simply an innocent man. The One who takes the place of God’s sinful people is the people’s sinless King.

The Crowning of the King (v. 16-20)

And that’s what we see in the outer sections of the sandwich, which highlight Jesus’s identity as King. Pilate began by asking Jesus the question: “Are you the King of the Jews?” Then the King is exchanged for a prisoner. And finally, the King receives his crown.

16 And the soldiers led him away inside the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters), and they called together the whole battalion. 17 And they clothed him in a purple cloak, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on him. 18 And they began to salute him, “Hail, King of the Jews!” 19 And they were striking his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling down in homage to him. 20 And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. And they led him out to crucify him.

There is terrible irony in every detail we see here—it is a terrible subversion of the identity of Christ.

The Romans have already scourged Jesus—a brutal Roman torture that was enough to kill many prisoners who endured it. The flesh of his back and legs and chest would have been mostly removed at this point under the lashing of the bone-and-metal-incrusted whips. And now, on that torn flesh, they place a purple cloak. Purple is the color of royalty, and now the purple cloak would quickly have soaked through with Jesus’s blood.

Of course, the crown he receives is not a crown of gold, but a crown of thorns—in addition to being incredibly painful, it’s a cruel mockery of the glory of a true crown.

And finally, the soldiers mock him, bowing before him and saluting him as the King of the Jews, even as they are striking his head with reeds and spitting on him.

They are mocking the identity he is being accused of—that of “King of the Jews”. But in their mockery, they are unintentionally identifying Christ correctly. He is the King.

For the King who has all majesty, who possesses all glory, who deserves all worship, they give false majesty; false glory; false worship.

Sin always ridicules the rule of God before bowing to it.

The Glory of the King

It’s easy to see what happens here as an unspeakable tragedy—and it certainly is that. But it is so much more. Every humiliation Jesus endures is part of his coronation. The agony of Christ is the means by which he takes the throne as the one true King.

And every other person we see in this story is a reflection of us, at different moments and in different situations in our lives.

We see ourselves in the soldiers, because while we can’t condone their mockery, we at least understand it—nothing about Jesus in this moment seems glorious. And since Christ sometimes seems laughable, we want to laugh; we want to hide behind silence when those around us poke clever holes in our faith; and we find ourselves doubting.

We see ourselves in the crowds and in the religious leaders, because their rebellion is our own—we naturally want to be the rulers of our own lives, and anyone who would threaten our independence is an enemy. So when Jesus comes in, claiming to be the Son of God and the Lord of all the world, and giving us commandments, we want to reject that, because we’re afraid of everything we stand to lose if we follow him.

We see ourselves in Pilate, because on our own, we too want to do what is easy, not what is right. We want to things to go as smoothly as possible, with the least amount of trouble possible. Doing what we know God calls us to do may hold the promise of greater joy later, but that’s later, and for now, doing what he calls us to do is difficult and risky, and we don’t want to take the risk.

And we see ourselves in Barabbas, because we are all guilty before God, and we have the opportunity to go free because the innocent King took our place. But being set free requires us to admit that we are guilty, and many of us just can’t quite bring ourselves to do that—to fall on our knees before the righteous Judge of the universe and to plead with him, “Have mercy on me, for I have sinned.”

That is who we are.

Which makes who Jesus is all the more shocking by contrast. Our King is the one who takes his throne through suffering, who suffered and died in our place so that we might live.

So given that contrast—between who we are and who Jesus is—the question Mark forces us to ask is simple and devastating: What kind of King is Jesus?

His kingship is unlike any other: he conquers not by killing, but by being killed, not by dominating over his subjects, but by taking what we deserve. His crown is a crown of thorns; his throne is a cross; his victory is not over nations or peoples, but over sin and death. Jesus does not fit the world’s image of power, but rather shows us what true royalty, true power, true authority, looks like: self-giving love, justice through sacrifice, and redemption through shame.

And the simple truth is that this is the only kind of authority worth following; it’s what separates a leader from a dictator. It’s not difficult to serve a King like this, because we know the lengths to which he’ll go to protect us. Whatever he requires of us is only a shadow of what he endured for us. It’s not hard to serve someone who puts you first.

The glory of our King is seen in God’s plan to give him the throne. Remember a few weeks ago, when I said that God could have found another way to save us, but didn’t, because this is the best way? It’s the best way because there is no other plan that could have shown us this clearly what kind of King Jesus is.

So faced with this King, we all have a choice. We can reject him like the crowds, mock him like the soldiers (which is really the same thing—a rejection of the true King is a mockery of the true King). Or we can submit to him as Lord.

The question is, before this sort of King, why would we ever want to do anything else?

If you already serve Christ today, I pray that we would consider again the King we serve—the King who gave himself for us, who put us first. He didn’t need to put himself first, because we do that, and gladly. Consider your King, consider his thorns, remember that his condemnation should have been ours, and bow before him once again to worship him as King.

And if you don’t know Christ, I would beg you to do the same thing: consider what we see here. Jesus’s trial, condemnation and crucifixion is one of the most well-attested events in human history, even outside the Bible. These things happened, and anyone can believe they did. But only God himself can make you consider the fact that Jesus did all this for us. For you. He is inviting you, as he invites all of us, to consider your King, and to realize that there is no good reason not to serve a King like him.

The Shame of Humanity & the Victory of Christ (Mark 14.26-52)

One of the most challenging struggles in all of life is the management of shame.

All of us feel shame to a greater or lesser degree. Sometimes that shame is totally unjustified. We feel shame for things that are neither our responsibility nor our fault. Think of someone who is abused or deeply hurt by someone else. Often that person doesn’t want to talk about it, tries to hide it, because they feel ashamed of what happened, even if they did nothing wrong.

But often, things can get cloudy; it can be hard to distinguish between illegitimate shame and shame that is appropriate. People who have been wounded may use their wounds to excuse sinful behavior in themselves; people who hurt others may blame the people they hurt for the sins they themselves have committed. And still others prefer to ignore the question altogether and push it away, because it’s just too painful to consider.

Sooner or later, though, we all have to recognize the fact that all of us have reasons for shame. All of us have done things we’re ashamed of, and we carry that shame with us like a ball and chain.

This is the point where I would usually say, “I’m not saying all this to bum you out,” but that’s not the truth. I am trying to bum you out, but I have a reason. Approaching this text, we all need to remember the shame we’ve felt in the past, or the shame we still feel today. Because shame is what we see here, and remembering what it feels like to carry it is essential to understanding this text.

If you remember, last week we saw the last supper that Jesus had with his disciples; we saw the conspiracy to arrest him and betray him; we saw the woman’s beautiful gesture of anointing him for burial; and we saw the weight and meaning behind the bread and the cup Jesus shares with his disciples.

Today’s text picks up immediately after that last event.

And the first thing out of Jesus’s mouth is a prophecy—or rather, three prophecies, all of them prophecies of failure.

Prophecies of Failure (vv. 26–31)

V. 26:

26 And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. 27 And Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away, for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’ 28 But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”

The first “prophecy of failure” we see here is the hymn that Jesus and his disciples sing together. Traditionally, the Passover hymn is what’s called the “Hallel”, which was Psalms 113-118, because these psalms recount the story of God’s deliverance of his people from slavery in Egypt. And it is in Psalm 118.22 that we find the famous Messianic verse: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

It’s almost certain this is what they sang—which means that at the end of the hymn, Jesus was literally singing about his own rejection that would come in a very short time.

Afterwards, he takes his disciples out to the Mount of Olives, and there Jesus shocks them again. He’s already said that one of them would betray him;,and, presumably, Judas has now left to do just that. But now he says (v. 27): “You will all fall away.” Why? Because God said it would happen. Jesus quotes the prophecy we find in Zechariah 13.7, in which God declares, “Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.”

On the surface we could see this as Jesus simply telling them what’s about to happen: he’s going to be betrayed, he’s going to be arrested, and the disciples will all flee in fear.

But that’s not all he’s doing. By quoting the prophet Zechariah, Jesus is identifying himself as the Shepherd whom God had appointed, the Shepherd who would be struck. Which also means that the suffering that he was about to endure isn’t an act of evil that he was powerless to stop; his suffering is a part of God’s deliberate plan.

Even the violence he’s about to endure isn’t chaos; it’s covenant fulfillment.

Then he adds (v. 28): “But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” This makes sense too, because Zechariah’s prophecy doesn’t end in destruction, but renewal — God refines and restores His people. Jesus’ resurrection will be that restoration. The scattered flock will be regathered.

But faced with this prophecy of their own failure, the disciples are evidently unable to remember the hope given by the prophet Zechariah. Their collective is response is, “No.”

V. 29:

29 Peter said to him, “Even though they all fall away, I will not.” 30 And Jesus said to him, “Truly, I tell you, this very night, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times.” 31 But he said emphatically, “If I must die with you, I will not deny you.” And they all said the same.

The disciples respond just like Israel at Sinai, when God established the covenant with them. When he told them how to enter into covenant with him, they affirmed, “All that the Lord has spoken, we will do!”

In the same way, Peter tells Jesus that he’s wrong. Even if everyone else leaves you, I won’t. And they all say the same. They swear loyalty — and they all fall within hours. The Shepherd knows the sheep better than they know themselves.

The Suffering of Surrender (vv. 32–42)

In v. 32, Jesus takes the disciples to a place called Gethsemane. Gethsemane was a garden of olive trees on the Mount of Olives, and the word “Gethsemane” literally means “olive press” in Aramaic. It’s appropriate; as we’ll see, Jesus is here to be pressed, and to persevere through it. This is, really, the place where Jesus’s victory is decided, because it is here that he willingly submits to God’s will for him in the coming hours. (It shouldn’t be lost on us that this scene is a sort of inverse of another scene at the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis 3. As Adam fell in a garden, Jesus claims victory in a garden—it’s the beginning of the reversal of Eden.)

V. 32:

32 And they went to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” 33 And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed and troubled. 34 And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.” 35 And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. 36 And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

Jesus’s prayer is heartbreaking, for multiple reasons. The first is simple, and very human: he calls God “Abba”; literally, Papa. It’s what a child would have called his father at this place and time. I never thought much of this until I myself became a father.

The second reason is even more profound. Jesus says, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you.”

Think of what this means, in context. Jesus is about to die for the sins of his people. He’s about to suffer horrendously—physically, emotionally and spiritually. And he says, “Father, all things are possible for you.”

We need to understand that our sin did not force God into a box. The sin of humanity didn’t require God to come up with a sort of emergency rescue plan—the only way he could deal with sin and save his people. He’s God. He can do anything; all things are possible for him. He could have found another way to save his people.

And Jesus knows it. This plan wasn’t obligatory; it was chosen, not because it was the only possible plan, but because it was the best plan. So when Jesus prayed, “Remove this cup from me,” God could have said, “Okay.” And he could have found another way.

But although Jesus knew this wasn’t the only possible plan, he also knew it was the best. And in this moment of the most extreme vulnerability imaginable, he trusted his Father to do what was best. So he prayed, “Not what I will, but what you will.”

In that one simple phrase, Jesus accepts the “cup” that God is holding out for him.

His language is significant; the “cup” is not an image Jesus plucked out of thin air. He knows what God is doing; and so he speaks of it in the same way God did through the prophets. “The cup” was a common image in the prophets—and the cup was always filled, not with wine or water, but with God’s wrath. The cup is God’s judgment against humanity’s sin.

That cup, ordinarily, is held out to us. As God told the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 25.15):

Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath, and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it.

This is our cup—the cup of judgment against our sin. But before it comes to our lips, Jesus takes it, brings it to his own mouth, and willingly drinks it for us.

It’s difficult for us to imagine the weight of Jesus’s suffering in this moment—not only because of what was coming at him, but because even in this moment of preparation, he was alone. V. 37:

37 And he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour? 38 Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” 39 And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. 40 And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy, and they did not know what to answer him. 41 And he came the third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It is enough; the hour has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.

We need to be clear about something. Jesus’s isn’t surprised that the disciples are sleeping. He’s not asking them, “Why are you sleeping?” because he doesn’t understand. It’s very late, they’re very tired, and as Luke tells us, they were sleeping “for sorrow” (Luke 22.45)—the weight and sorrow of this evening were so heavy that they couldn’t take it anymore. Jesus knows this.

But he wants his disciples to remember, as we saw at the end of chapter 13, to “stay awake.” Later on, there will be other moments when they will be sorrowful, when they will be so full of woe that all they’ll want to do is lie down and close their eyes. And in those moments, I believe Jesus wanted his disciples to remember his voice on this night, saying, “Why are you sleeping? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.”

And it is with this example—this example of exhausted but determined perseverance—that Jesus says in v. 42, “Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.”

Isn’t it incredible that in spite of the knowledge of everything that was waiting for him, Jesus moves toward his captors, not away from them.

His surrender to God’s will, like all true surrender, isn’t the absence of fear; it’s determined obedience that trusts God when everything in us wants to run and hide and escape.

And it is with this determination that Jesus faces his captors.

The Fulfillment of Scripture (vv. 43–50)

V. 43:

43 And immediately, while he was still speaking, Judas came, one of the twelve, and with him a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders. 44 Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, “The one I will kiss is the man. Seize him and lead him away under guard.” 45 And when he came, he went up to him at once and said, “Rabbi!” And he kissed him.

Why does Judas kiss Jesus?

The first reason is purely practical: it’s the middle of the night, and it’s very dark, so these guards who don’t know Jesus well wouldn’t know how to pick him out from among the others without a sign. It’s spy stuff, the kind of signal a spy would give the enemy to indicate what they needed to do next. (Which is why Judas chooses a sign of affection, like a kiss: it’s what a disciple would do.)

But of course the irony is huge. The act of affection is perverted into a signal of betrayal. You can almost hear Psalm 41.9 in the back of Mark’s mind: “Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me.” Remember what Jesus said at the last supper? The one who will betray me “is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the dish with me.”

And, we read in v. 46:

they laid hands on him and seized him. 47 But one of those who stood by drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his ear.

Mark doesn’t include Jesus’s response to this, when he tells the disciple with the sword—Peter—to put his sword away; but he does include Jesus’s question to his captors, which reveal the cowardice of this whole conspiracy. V. 48:

48 And Jesus said to them, “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? 49 Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But let the Scriptures be fulfilled.”

They’ve had so many opportunities to do this—but they come at night, hidden from watchful eyes.

But, Jesus says, let the Scriptures be fulfilled. He’s not talking about any one specific passage—he’s referring to the entire prophetic pattern of God’s plan. Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Zechariah 12-13, even Genesis 3: all of them converge here. When Jesus says, “Let the Scriptures be fulfilled,” he saying all of this is exactly how it was meant to happen.

The disciples come to their breaking point here. They couldn’t accept it before, but everything Jesus has been telling them for so long is actually about to take place, and he’s not going to stop it (although he clearly could—he who can calm storms and raise the dead).

What could they possibly do in the face of such horror?

So we see in v. 50:

And they all left him and fled.

The prophecy that Jesus quoted earlier from Zechariah comes true in real time. The sheep are scattered, and the Shepherd stands alone.

The Shame of Humanity (vv. 51–52)

Finally, Mark includes a sort of epilogue to this scene in the garden—an epilogue that is incredibly profound.

51 And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, 52 but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.

Mark is the only gospel writer who includes this detail, which has led some commentators to think that Mark himself was the young man. We can’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the image.

A young man following Jesus, seized by the guards, who has his linen cloth ripped from his body, and runs away naked.

Naked in a garden: it’s not the first time we’ve seen this. After the first man and woman sinned against God, their eyes were opened, and they realized that they were naked, and they were ashamed.

A very frequent nightmare for teenagers (and sometimes for adults too) is to find themselves naked in school, surrounded by classmates who are clothed. The feeling of these nightmares is almost always a feeling of shame, and the fear linked to that shame—the fear of being seen in our nakedness, in our shame.

The last image before Jesus’s trial is a nightmare image of all humanity before God: naked and ashamed after our catastrophic failure.

This young man is all of us—this is how sinful humanity stands in front of a holy God: totally naked, totally shameful.

And this is the image that Christ would soon become. On the cross, it wasn’t like in the paintings we’ve seen. Jesus wasn’t wearing a loincloth. He was naked too; the only thing he wore were his wounds, and the crown of thorns. This young man was able to run away and hide, to eventually find a way to cover himself.

Jesus couldn’t do that. He was naked—and nailed to a cross, lifted high for all to see.

And even this is only a picture. He didn’t just take our shame on himself in a physical way; he took the shame of our sin on himself and stood before God to be judged for it.

This experience of being totally exposed in our sin before a holy God who holds out the cup of his wrath for us to drink… This is the experience Christ took on himself, so that we wouldn’t have to.

When we are ashamed, what do we do? We run and hide. We try to cover it; or worse, we try to deny it.

But Jesus walked toward the shame, and its just consequences.

The Shame of Humanity and the Sovereignty of God

This text forces us to face what no one wants to face.
Jesus begins by predicting the shame of his disciples. Then their shame becomes reality: they can’t stay awake, one of them reacts badly to Jesus’ arrest, they all run away—and one of them literally flees naked, exposed.
In the middle of all that is Jesus: afraid, yes; anguished, yes—but determined and resolute.

Remember at the beginning when I told you to recall moments in your life that filled you with deep shame? I didn’t say that to be cruel. I said it because feeling that shame is the only way to truly grasp the magnitude of what’s happening here (and after).
We feel our shame… but Jesus took our shame.

One of the most constant struggles in our Christian life will be remembering that. It’s easy when things are going well—when we feel we’re managing our responsibilities and faithfully obeying God. But it’s much harder when we’re struggling, when obedience to God requires effort. In those moments, we feel shame—often not only for our failures, but for the struggle itself.

Struggling to obey is nothing to be ashamed of. We are beings who live in bodies still marked by sin—how could we not struggle? Think of someone at the gym, sweating and pushing himself to the limit to get back in shape. Should he be ashamed of his sweat or sore muscles the next day? Of course not: he’s working, and that’s good. It’s a struggle, but a good struggle.

And there is no better struggle than the struggle to obey God. It sometimes frustrates us because we want to obey—and we wish it were easy. But there’s nothing shameful about the fact that it’s hard, about the fact that we have to fight; on the contrary, the very act of struggling is a sign of maturity and growth.

There’s also no shame in struggles that come from things beyond our control. There’s no shame in being traumatized after abuse. There’s no shame in having trouble standing if we’re sick or disabled (physically or mentally). Some challenges truly aren’t our fault, but we still have to face them—and it’s hard. But it’s not shameful.

Yet there are many things we do, think, or feel that bring about a perfectly legitimate shame. It’s normal to feel shame after hurting someone. It’s normal to feel shame after deliberately disobeying God. And we’ve all done that.

Every person in this room has legitimate reasons to feel shame, whatever our circumstances. We’ve all rebelled against God; we’ve all consciously chosen not to follow Him; we’ve all consciously chosen not to obey.

At first, the shame that follows failure seems easy to brush off. It feels natural, and somewhat manageable. We carry it, telling ourselves we’ll do better next time. But if we keep on sinning, as sin piles up, so does shame: we begin to see it not as natural, but as inevitable. And sooner or later, we find ourselves with a mountain of shame on our shoulders, saying, I’ll never get out of this. Every act of obedience feels pointless—like a drop falling into the sea.

Another common problem is that the idea of facing the shame of our sin feels so crushing that we simply refuse to face it. When someone confronts us about sin in our lives, instead of really listening and considering that our brother might be right, we instinctively deny it and say he’s exaggerating—because facing the shame of our failure feels too painful. And over time, we start to believe that our sin really isn’t such a big deal. That tendency produces Christians who think they’re godly, who believe they’re living for God… while in reality they’re feeding patterns of sin in their lives that they’ll never deal with—patterns that may eventually shipwreck their faith.

Brothers and sisters, our shame is real; it’s greater than we can imagine, and we must face it. We must accept the truth: we are far more sinful than we think. As I said, it’s sometimes hard to tell it all apart. It takes a lot of work to separate legitimate shame from illegitimate shame.

That work is important—but for the Christian, it’s not the first thing we must consider. The first thing we must consider is this glorious truth: Jesus took our shame.

All of it. Our past shame, yes—but also our shame of tomorrow. We never go back to square one with Him—our shame doesn’t pile up before Him; He has taken it.

If you are in Christ, then whatever shame you’re carrying today, Jesus has taken it.

So the first call of this text is simple:

Realize that your shame no longer belongs to you.

See your sin clearly… feel deeply the shame of your sin… and then, let it go.
Remember that your shame no longer belongs to you. Scripture has been fulfilled, our King has put our sin to death, and we are free.
Your Savior loves you, and His shoulders are broader than yours; He can bear what you cannot.

So see your sin clearly; feel deeply the shame of your sin; then let it go. It doesn’t belong to you anymore; the Savior who loves you has taken it.

And the second call of this text is tied to the first, because it’s tied to how we can do that:

Trust in God’s plan and His sovereignty.

Jesus stood firm when we fled; He obeyed when we rebelled; He clothed Himself with our sin and drank the cup of God’s wrath against our sin.

How could He do that? How could Christ have the courage to accept the cup of God’s wrath? Mark makes it clear—He was sorrowful to the point of death; He was seized with fear and anguish. We can’t just say, “Jesus could endure it because He’s God”—it’s not that simple. Jesus’ divinity and humanity are inseparable; He’s never less than divine, but He’s never less than human either. And in this passage, we see a human being visibly terrified by the suffering awaiting Him—a suffering that goes infinitely beyond physical or emotional pain.

So how did Jesus find such courage?

He found that courage because, as great as His fear was, His trust in God was greater still.

We see that repeatedly here. Everything that happens to Jesus, and everything that happens to the disciples, had been foretold. “Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.” “This happens so that the Scriptures may be fulfilled.” That’s the lens through which Jesus sees everything: not as an unavoidable tragedy, but as the fulfillment of the plan.

The Shepherd is struck so that the flock may be saved.
The Scriptures are fulfilled so that salvation may be applied.
The Son is left alone so that we never will be.

God’s plan is perfect—and Jesus knew it. We need to know it too. If we trust in His sovereignty, we can learn to stand firm, to persevere despite fear, despite shame—to hold fast to the end.

I don’t know what each person here is going through—but I do know that at some point, perhaps even this morning, what we see in this passage will be the truth we must cling to.

Our shame is real, but it no longer belongs to us. No matter whether you think your shame is legitimate or not—it doesn’t belong to you. It’s already been carried. Christ became our shame so that we might become His saints.

Our shame is real, but it no longer belongs to us.
And God’s plan is sometimes hard—but never less than perfect.

Since Jesus bore what we could not, we can bear what He gives us to carry, with His help. We can keep going. We can move forward. We can grow.
Marvel at your Savior, trust Him, rest in Him, and keep going.

The Passover, the Preparation, and the New Covenant (Mark 14.1-25)

Let’s admit it: looking at us from the outside, Christians are weird. No weirder than a lot of other religions, but still…weird. We do a lot of things that will look distinctly weird for someone who has no experience with Christianity.

But one of the strangest things we do as Christians is what we call “Communion”: when we take the bread and the cup, and eat and drink in remembrance of the body of Christ broken for us, and the blood of Christ shed for us.

We aren’t Catholics; we don’t believe that the bread literally becomes the body of Christ, or that the juice literally becomes the blood of Christ.

Even so: it’s a pretty weird thing to do week after week. It may even seem morbid and distasteful.

So why do we do it?

This text gives us the answer to that question, but it goes much further than simply explaining what the act of Communion means. It shows us where our hearts should be when we take it, and where our hearts should go because of having taken it together.

But before we get into it, let’s remember where we are.

Jesus has just spent all of chapter 13 telling his disciples about the end—where they are going, what will happen before his return. (I want to formally thank Joe for preaching these last two weeks; it’s a tough text, and he did a great job getting to the heart of it all.) We saw Jesus’s goal in this teaching at the very end of chapter 13, when he says, simply: “Stay awake.”

His disciples may have assumed that he was giving them a command for further down the road—but as we’ll see, it was a command for right now. Stay awake.

We’re going to have to take this text in several sections, because as usual, even in a simple narrative text, Mark has a lot in mind.

I. The Conspiracy (vv. 1–2, 10–11)

If you’ve grown up in church, you’ve probably had this experience—you go through the year like you always do, but at one or two points in the year, the atmosphere of spiritual devotion becomes a little thicker. It usually happens at Christmas, or at Easter. These are the two biggest Christian holidays, where we remember Christ’s birth and Christ’s death and resurrection. Churches always do something special for these days, as we will, and in the time leading up to them, you’ll find people reading their Bibles with a little more intensity, wanting to make a more concerted effort to think about God and meditate on what he’s done for us.

That’s what the feast of the Passover was like for the Jews.

We can’t get into all the details now, but this feast (which marked the beginning of the Feast of Unleavened Bread) was very elaborate. On the day of the Passover each family or group sacrificed a lamb in the temple and then roasted and ate it in the evening. The lamb was a reminder of Exodus 12: God is about to send judgment on Egypt, who had been holding the people of Israel in slavery. That night, he told them, an angel would pass through Egypt and kill all of the firstborn sons of every family.

But he gave Israel a way to protect themselves from this judgment. Each family was to sacrifice a lamb and put its blood on the doorposts of their homes, so that the angel would “pass over” their homes and not put their firstborn son to death.

Of course, God didn’t strictly need the sign; it’s not like the angel would have accidentally gone into the wrong houses. But through this sacrifice God commanded the Hebrews to perform, he was preparing for something much bigger, much further down the road.

At any rate, that event is what the people celebrated at Passover, and much like for us around Christmas and Easter, religious devotion intensified at this time of year. Which makes what we see in these first sections all the more surprising.

Let’s begin reading again at v. 1:

It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, 2 for they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.”

It’s no surprise that the chief priests and scribes are out to get Jesus; they have been for a long time now. What is surprising is the transparency of their hypocrisy—they want to arrest him and kill Jesus, but not during the feast. Not because the feast is sacred, but because they knew the people wouldn’t like it during the feast. They want to avoid a riot, but not murder.

Now keeping that in mind, go down to v. 10—we see something similar here.

10 Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. 11 And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money. And he sought an opportunity to betray him.

Here we see a similar kind of hypocrisy, but this time coming from a painful source: Judas Iscariot, “one of the twelve”, seeks to betray Jesus in exchange for money. It’s evil, wearing the mask of intimacy. Mark doesn’t give us a lot of information about what motivated Judas to betray Jesus (we see a little more in the other gospels, especially in the gospel of John, but we never get a comprehensive view of his heart, as we do for, say, Peter).

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter, because what Mark wants to show us is that evil is coming at Jesus from all quarters: from without and from within.

Now, we’ve often talked about how much Mark loves to structure his narrative like a sandwich, to highlight or contrast his point. We have the plotting of the religious leaders in v. 1-2, and then Judas joining their conspiracy in v. 10-11.

What comes in between—in the middle of the sandwich?

II. The Burial Preparation (vv. 3–9)

Remember the context of this chapter, the last thing Jesus said in chapter 13: Stay awake. One of the goals of the Passover—of all the feasts—was to help the people do this. To not forget what God has done. To remember that he is still active. To stay awake.

The religious leaders and Judas, plotting against Jesus, are beyond “asleep”—they’re as dead. But in between them, we see one person who is indeed awake.

V. 3:

3 And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. 4 There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? 5 For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her.

Side note: We usually try not to refer to the other gospels when we’re in one, because each gospel writer has his own reasons for writing as he does. But for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to this time. The gospel of John, in chapter 12, identifies this woman as Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, so I’m going to refer to her by name (instead of calling her “the woman who anointed Jesus”).

It’s two days before the Passover, so anticipation is high: every meal is full of meaning, and every mind and heart is (or should be) on God. So Jesus and his disciples are at Bethany, eating in the home of a friend, and Mary comes in and shocks everyone.

She breaks this alabaster flask of ointment and pours it over Jesus’s head.

This was shocking for a number of reasons. First of all, this wasn’t a normal thing to do with a guest. A servant would wash guests’ feet when they came to visit, but they wouldn’t pour ointment over their heads. This sort of thing was more likely to be seen in the tabernacle or the temple, when one could give herbs or perfumes as an offering before God.

And Mary wasn’t a servant anyway—she had been a close friend of Jesus for years.

Secondly, Mark tells us that this ointment was “very costly.” He’s understating it a bit—a flask of pure nard was worth almost a year’s wages for a laborer. It likely represented Mary’s entire life savings.

Not surprisingly, then, some of the disciples chastise her for it. “If you wanted to use the ointment well, you could have sold it and given the money to the poor.” I’ll admit this is the sort of thing I would have said; at first glance, it seems like poor stewardship of material wealth.

But what Jesus says is staggering. V. 6:

6 But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 7 For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. 8 She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. 9 And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”

The most surprising thing about Jesus’s response, I think, is not that Jesus appreciated the gesture. It’s that it meant something more than a gesture of devotion (like the woman who anoints Jesus’s feet in Luke 7—despite similarities, this is not the same event). He says in v. 8, “She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial.” We may ask whether or not Mary understood exactly what she was doing (I personally think she did, because she knew Jesus well and had almost definitely heard him say he was going to Jerusalem to die), but in the end, it doesn’t matter—she and everyone else would understand later.

Burial anointing was a Jewish custom—when someone died, they’d wash the body, wrap it in linen, and then rub it with aromatic oils and spices. This wasn’t mainly to ward off decomposition, but rather to honor the person who has died (like an extravagant display of flowers at a funeral today, but much more meaningful).

When Jesus died—as we see later on, in chapter 15—the nature of his death was such that they didn’t have time to do all this. When Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus’s body, he simply wrapped him in the linen and laid him in the tomb. It wasn’t until after the Sabbath, on Sunday morning, that the women came back to the tomb with the spices, so that they could anoint Jesus’s body.

But what did they find when they got there?

They found an empty tomb.

As it turned out, the women didn’t have to anoint his body, not just because the body was no longer in the tomb, but because the anointing had already taken place.

In addition, nard oil—the kind that Mary poured on Jesus’s head—is a fixative oil: it clings to skin and hair for a very long time. A few drops could be smelled on skin or on clothes for several days. An entire jar poured over someone’s head—mingling into his hair, his beard, his clothes, and the skin of his neck and shoulders—could have lasted as long as a week, even after washing. A quick shake of the head would have brought the smell back.

This anointing happened two days before Jesus’s arrest. This means that while Jesus was being arrested, while he was being beaten and scourged, when the crown of thorns was placed on his head, when he was being nailed to the cross, mingled in with the odor of sweat and blood, it is quite likely that he smelled the perfume, and remembered his anointing.

It would have been a simple comfort in such a painful time, but not a meaningless one.

Mary’s anointing very likely stayed with Jesus until the end. But the most important thing to see here is that Mary understood something the others seemed to have missed. Mary understood what Jesus was worth to her. He was going to die, and although she surely didn’t understand the full meaning behind his death, she definitely recognized what his death was worth. It was worth everything she had, everything she was, poured out as an offering to him.

III. The New Covenant (vv. 12–25)

So Mark gives us this contrast between Mary’s costly gesture and the plotting of the religious leaders and Judas, and it’s unsettling; Mark has made sure that we know that moving forward, things are going to get very dark.

That is the feeling with which we arrive at the day of the Passover. V. 12:

12 And on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, “Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?” 13 And he sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him, 14 and wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says, Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ 15 And he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready; there prepare for us.” 16 And the disciples set out and went to the city and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.

This seems like a bit of unnecessary detail, but if you’ve been reading this gospel with us, you’ll understand why Mark’s telling us these things. It’s very similar to what we saw in chapter 11, before Jesus’s triumphal entry in Jerusalem. Jesus tells his disciples where to go and what to find and what to say, and everything happens exactly as he says.

The religious leaders are plotting to kill Jesus, Judas is looking for an opportunity to betray him… But none of that is happening outside of God’s sovereignty. Jesus’s impending death is not a bump in the road; it is the plan. It is why he has come. God’s purposes are not derailed by human evil—they are often advanced through it.

So the preparations are made; the lamb has been sacrificed and prepared, and finally it is time for the meal.

We’ve all had Christmas dinners, Easter dinners. After the stress and busyness of preparation, everyone can finally relax and sit down and enjoy the food, enjoy one another.

This was not that kind of meal.

V. 17:

17 And when it was evening, he came with the twelve. 18 And as they were reclining at table and eating, Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.” 19 They began to be sorrowful and to say to him one after another, “Is it I?” 20 He said to them, “It is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the dish with me. 21 For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.”

It’s hard to overstate the shock this must have been for the disciples, to everyone except Judas, who of course knew what he was doing. But it did make me wonder why Jesus wasn’t more specific. Why didn’t he say, “This guy here, Judas, is going to betray me”? Why did he leave the disciples in suspense, wondering who it might be?

I think it’s because, like he said before, he wanted them to stay awake—to be on their guard. If “one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the dish with me,” could betray him, how could they be sure any of them would remain faithful?

It’s a good question—and Jesus gives the answer in what we see next. V. 22:

22 And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” 23 And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. 24 And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.

How could any of the disciples be sure they would remain faithful? They couldn’t—not on their own.

But they were not alone. Through what Jesus was about to do, God was establishing a new covenant with his people.

God had previously established a covenant with his people, saying that they would be his people, and he would be their God, on one condition: the people had to obey the law he gave to Moses. In Exodus 24, that covenant was ratified through sacrifice: Moses took the blood of the animals sacrificed and sprinkled it over the people. The blood of the sacrifice was the sign that the covenant was adopted.

The problem with covenants, though, is that they’re easy to neglect. Every married couple takes vows before their wedding; but over the years, especially when conflict arises, it’s all too easy to find excuses for not respecting the vows we made the day of our wedding. Instead of responding in love and support, we respond with anger and aggression. And we feel we can do this because we know the other person, frankly, isn’t going anywhere: they’re stuck with us.

That is what had happened with the people of Israel: they had begun to take their covenant with God for granted. They had started to think more about their own lives and their own worries than God’s plan—the plan he had stated to Abraham. They had stopped fully trusting God, and started relying on their own ability to make themselves what they wanted to be.

Of course, this wasn’t a surprise for God. He had announced his plan from the very beginning, as early as Genesis 3, and throughout the history of his people. His plan was never that the people would manage to hold up their end of the bargain; he knew they couldn’t do that. God’s plan was always to fulfill the covenant for them, and to establish a new, irrevocable covenant with them.

To put it simply, when Jesus says, “This is my body,” and “This is my blood”, he is telling the disciples that he is going to be the sacrifice that no Passover lamb could ever be. This new covenant, ratified by Christ’s blood on the cross, isn’t like the old covenant; it is not conditional on our perfect obedience. It doesn’t need to be, because Christ obeyed perfectly for us, in our place. It is done. It is finished. It is permanent.

This is the first time disciples of Christ took part in this act, and it is an act the church has repeated ever since, and for the same reasons.

Every time we take the bread and the cup, we’re not doing it in order to get something we don’t already have; we’re not doing it in order to make ourselves right with God. We’re doing to remember and to remind one another that we already are right with God, and that that isn’t going to change.

Now, does this mean that Communion is only symbolic, that is only a memorial of what Christ did? I don’t think so. From the beginning, the church has believed that when God’s people take Communion together, they aren’t just remembering, but participating in what Christ did. It’s a means of grace that God gives us, to help fuel our faithfulness to him.

But here is where a lot of people get it wrong. They look at their lives, they look at their struggles, and they don’t feel worthy to participate in this moment. They see that there are areas of their lives in which they’re struggling with sin. They see that there are relationships they’ve damaged, people they’ve hurt, or people they’ve been hurt by, and they haven’t yet taken steps to repair those relationships—to forgive, or to ask for forgiveness.

And so they don’t feel worthy to take the bread and the cup.

So what do they do when the bread and the cup are passed out? They don’t take it. They think, “Maybe next time; maybe once I’ve got my life more in order, I’ll participate.”

That instinct isn’t entirely wrong. If there are areas of our lives in which we are living in disobedience, then Communion is a forceful reminder of the need to do that: to repent of our sin, to forgive, to ask for forgiveness, to stay awake!

But it is crucial to remember that when Jesus established this ritual with his disciples, their lives were not in order. A few hours later, they would all leave him; Peter would deny him; Judas would betray him. Jesus didn’t wait for Acts 2, when it seemed the disciples finally started to get their act together, to give them the bread and the cup.

He gave it to them when they were still imperfect, still sinful, still not entirely faithful.

And it makes total sense, because the whole point of the new covenant is that it doesn’t depend on our obedience, but on his.

So if your instinct is to look at the bread and cup and feel unworthy to take it, you’re right. You are unworthy—and so am I. But that is no reason to abstain. That, in fact, is precisely why you shouldn’t abstain. Your sin is not big enough to annul Christ’s sacrifice for us. If you’ve been saved by faith, it’s because of his obedience, not yours. And his obedience is always perfect, no matter how sinful you feel. So take the reminder of this moment to repent of your sin, to go and ask forgiveness if you need to, to reconcile with your brother or sister if you need to—and then take, and eat, and drink.

Because you are not the center of this moment. None of us are. Christ is the sacrifice we are remembering; it is through the faith that Christ gave us that we are saved; Christ’s obedience is what we bring before God, not our own. He is the center.

Now, Jesus says one more thing after giving the bread and the cup to his disciples—and it’s something that should give us hope. V. 25:

25 Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.

Wine is a staple of every feast; this is something we understand well in France. Wine at a feast is synonymous with celebration.

And thank the Lord, it is the same in the kingdom of God.

Jesus says that he will not again drink wine “until that day”—what day?—“when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”

This Passover feast would be the last feast Jesus would celebrate in his earthly life…but there is another feast coming. When Christ returns, and all things are made new—everything we talked about these past two weeks—there will be celebration.

Conclusion

Let’s take a step back now.

This text frames the sacrament of Communion in a really particular way. There is a context behind it. The context of the Passover, of course—but also, the context of Jesus’s anointing in Bethany.

When Jesus gave them the bread and the cup, it was just after the meal at which they ate the Passover lamb—this memorial to the sacrifice given in Egypt, that saved the Hebrews from judgment. And while they were eating this meal—while they were taking the bread and the cup—it is quite likely that they could still smell Mary’s perfume on Jesus, surrounding him, mixing in with the smells of the meat and the bread and the wine.

While we were studying this text in home group this week, someone asked a great question: “What must the first Communion have been like for the disciples, after Christ’s resurrection?” Because this time, at this particular meal, it was a) the only time they took it with Jesus physically present; and b) the only time they probably didn’t really understand what they were doing.

But after the resurrection, it would have been different. At every Communion after this one, they wouldn’t have smelled the nard—because Christ had risen and ascended into heaven. And they wouldn’t have had a Passover lamb, because now they knew that Jesus was the Passover lamb, sacrificed to free his people from judgment, once and for all.

At every other Communion after the resurrection, and ever since, the bread and the wine alone are enough to bring all of these things to mind.

Given this incredible context, we should see that Communion isn’t just a memorial—it’s a call to conscience, and a call to action. Every time we take the bread and the cup, one question should be in the front of our minds: What is Jesus’s death worth to us?

There are many ways to answer that question, many ways to respond to Christ’s sacrifice.

Many respond like the religious leaders, like Judas: in the face of Christ, there is revulsion and rejection.

Many respond like the disciples in this chapter—with bewilderment and confusion and doubt (“Is it me? Am I going to betray him? How can I be sure I’ll stay faithful?”).

But the only right way to respond, the only fitting way, is like Mary. Faced with the imminent death of her Lord, she gave the most costly thing she had. It was a material gift, yes, but it was representative of everything she had, everything she was.

The most costly thing all of us have to give is ourselves. Our lives. Our affections and desires. Not just everything we have, but everything we are.

The idea of giving Christ everything we are can be intimidating—but it needn’t be, because we know we’re not alone. We’re not working under our own power. We have received the new covenant of Christ’s blood, which guarantees that if we have faith in him, we will make it.

So as we take Communion now, let us ask ourselves: What is Jesus’s death—what is the New Covenant he established with his people—worth to us? What should I give him that I am still holding back? And why would I want to hold back? What am I holding on to that could ever be better than what I have received in the New Covenant?

What is he worth to us?