Mark 15

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 when they crucified him. 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. [KJV—²⁸ And the scripture was fulfilled, which saith, And he was numbered with the transgressors.] 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.

In 1968, an archaeologist named Vassilios Tzaferis was invited to help excavate a Jewish tomb in Jerusalem dating to the 1^st century. During this process he discovered an ossuary, a box designed to hold the bones of the deceased. The inscription on the outside of the ossuary revealed that the bones within belonged to a man named Yehohanan. What was truly interesting about these particular bones was that in the ossuary was a heel bone with a nail driven through it. As it turned out, here, in this ossuary, was the first ever archaeological find of crucified remains. While there has never been a question that crucifixion was a commonly used method of execution in the ancient world, no crucified remains had been found before this date. Tzaferis writes:

The most dramatic evidence that this young man was crucified was the nail which penetrated his heel bones. But for this nail, we might never have discovered that the young man had died in this way. The nail was preserved only because it hit a hard knot when it was pounded into the olive wood upright of the cross. The olive wood knot was so hard that, as the blows on the nail became heavier, the end of the nail bent and curled. We found a bit of the olive wood (between 1 and 2 cm) on the tip of the nail. This wood had probably been forced out of the knot where the curled nail hooked into it.

When it came time for the dead victim to be removed from the cross, the executioners could not pull out this nail, bent as it was within the cross. The only way to remove the body was to take an ax or hatchet and amputate the feet. Thereafter, the feet, the nail and a plaque of wood that had been fastened between the head of the nail and the feet remained attached to one another as we found them in Ossuary No. 4. Under the head of the nail, the osteological investigators found the remains of this wooden plaque, made of either acacia or pistacia wood. The wood attached to the curled end of the nail that had penetrated the upright of the cross was, by contrast, olive wood.

At first the investigators thought that the bony material penetrated by the nail was only the right heel bone (calcaneum). This assumption initially led them to a mistaken conclusion regarding the victim’s position on the cross. Further investigation disclosed, however, that the nail had penetrated both heel bones. The left ankle bone (sustentaculum tali) was found still attached to the bone mass adjacent to the right ankle bone, which was itself attached to the right heel bone. When first discovered, the two heel bones appeared to be two formless, unequal bony bulges surrounding an iron nail, coated by a thick calcareous crust. But painstaking investigation gradually disclosed the makeup of the bony mass.[1]

Pictures of this crucified heel can now be seen readily online. It is a jarring image that jolts us out of our complacent and easy talk of “crucifixion” and reminds us of the blunt and violent cruelty of the act itself. When we read of the crucifixion of Jesus, then, we are not reading of a hazy religious act bathed in pious hues. Rather, we are turning to something raw, something real, something horrific, something painful. And yet, for the believer, it remains for us something life-altering, something God-honoring, something soul-saving.

Jesus experienced the full extent of the agony of the cross for us.

We begin by seeing that Christ embraced the full extent of the agony of the cross for us.

²³ And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it.

Crucifixion was a truly agonizing, horrific ordeal. As a result, people created ways to attempt to lesson the physical pain. One way was the consumption of concoctions that acted as anesthetics. Mark mentions one here: “wine mixed with myrrh.” William Lane notes that “[i]n the first century A.D. the army physician, Dioscorides Pedanius, who made an intensive study of almost 600 plants and 1,000 drugs, observed the narcotic properties of myrrh.”[2]

Jesus is offered a solution to lessen the pain, “but he did not take it.” From a human perspective, of course, there would have been no shame in doing so. Such is even prescribed in Proverbs 31.

⁶ Give strong drink to the one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress; ⁷ let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more.

Yet Jesus refuses. Why? Why did He not drink the anesthetic? It was because He desired to experience the full extent of the agony of the cross for us. He died there for our sins. He died there in our place. And if He was to die on that cross, He would die in full substitutionary experience, taking onto and into Himself all of the agony, all of the pain, all of the searing wincing grief of that instrument of torture. He would take no shortcuts. He refused to do so. He must know the full horror of it so that the full horror of our rebellion against God could be quelled and squashed.

Furthermore, He must endure it all without failing. In Hebrews 4, we read this of Jesus:

¹⁵ For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

He embraced the pain of humanity and weakness of humanity in its totality so that He might redeem humanity in our lostness. There was not a single ounce of pain He wanted to avoid. There was not a single bit of agony He would sidestep. He would take it all and obliterate it on the cross.

Such was Christ Jesus’ identification with man. Such was His obedience to the Father. Such was His substitution for us.

You worship a God who faced the human tragedy head on and never flinched!

Jesus experienced the full extent of the shame of the cross for us.

What is more, Jesus submitted Himself to the shame of the cross.

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 when they crucified him.

Those words, “and they crucified him,” are powerfully understated. It would be hard to overstate just how obscene, how grotesque, and how shameful the act of crucifixion and the object of the cross was to the ancient mind. The annals of antiquity bear this out time and time again. Consider:

“Even the mere word, cross, must remain far not only from the lips of the citizens of Rome, but also from their thoughts, their eyes, their ears.” (Cicero, Pro Rabirio)

The cross is “the most wretched of all ways of dying.” (Josephus, War)[3]

“To say that their ceremonies centre on a man put to death for his crime and on the fatal wood of the cross is to assign to these abandoned wretches sanctuaries which are appropriate to them and the kind of worship they deserve.” (Minucius Felix, Octavius, speaking of Christians)

“…to say ‘pleasure’ is gentle on the ears, but to say ‘cross’ is harsh. The harshness of the latter word matches the pain brought on by the cross.” (Varro, De lingua Latina quae supersunt)

Crucifixion is “that plague.” (Cicero, In Verrem)

Martin Hengel notes, “It is certainly the case that the Roman world was largely unanimous that crucifixion was a horrific, disgusting business.” He goes on to observe that “the words crux or patibulum do not appear in Caesar at all, not because he did not use crucifixion as a punishment…but because he did not want to write about that kind of thing.”[4]

It was to this that the Lord Jesus submitted Himself. It was to this that He gave Himself in His great saving word: this despised cross, this cruel tree, this “plague,” as Cicero put it.

The cross was an obscenity to the ancient world. The cross was a word that was not spoken in polite society. It was shameful. It was degrading. It was obscene. It was violent. It was humiliating. It was dehumanizing.

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 when they crucified him.

Jesus is nailed to the cross and the Roman soldiers “divided his garments among them, casting lots for them.” These events fulfilled the words of Psalm 22:

¹⁴ I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; ¹⁵ my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death. ¹⁶ For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet—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.

Jesus is stripped, crucified, and hoisted up on a cross for all to see. He hangs there bearing the shame of that cruel instrument of pain. This public execution and desecration of the body was shameful to Romans but doubly so to Jews. In Deuteronomy 21 we read:

²² “And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, ²³ his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance.

Paul will pick up this idea and repeat it in Galatians 3.

¹³ Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”

Cursed!

Shamed!

Exposed!

Humiliated!

Here is the cross seen from the human perspective! Here is the most debasing of all executions! And Jesus submits Himself to it! Why? For you! For me! For us! He hangs there for us!

See there the depth and breadth of the awesome love of God! See there the forgiveness and mercy of the Lord! See there the great substitution!

For it was my shame that He took! It was my humiliation that He embraced! It was my pain and my agony that He opened His arms to receive! For me! Because He loves me and because He loves you!

Jesus experienced the full extent of the mockery of the cross for us.

But there was more. There was also the mockery directed at Him on the cross.

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. [KJV—²⁸ And the scripture was fulfilled, which saith, And he was numbered with the transgressors.] 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.

Oh the wicked extent of the mockery heaped on the Lord Jesus! He is mocked by the sarcastic sign: “The King of the Jews!” He is mocked by the two robbers on His left and right. He was mocked by “those who passed by derid[ing] him”! He was mocked by “the chief priests with the scribes”!

And what did they say about Jesus? They said that He had failed. They said that He was a liar and a fraud. They said that He was no King at all! They used His words, misunderstood though they were, against Him to taunt Him. They told Him to come down from the cross. They said that He could not save Himself. They even said that if He came down they would believe.

If ever the blindness and wickedness of man was demonstrated on this side of eternity, it was here. The Son of God who came to take away the sin of the world, humanity’s only Savior and hope, is crucified and mocked by those that He would save! The King is treated as a fool! The Savior is treated as a madman! Jesus is treated as a devil!

And why? Because this is what humanity in its lostness and rebellion and insanity and foolishness does. We take the only thing that is beautiful and nail it to a tree. We take the only one who is sane and condemn Him as crazy! We take the only one who can save and taunt Him as one who cannot save!

Imagine with me that a Roman citizen from two thousand years ago is somehow transported into our church. They enter and immediately note the cross behind me in the baptistry and, this morning, the huge cross we have put up to the side of the sanctuary in anticipation of Easter. What would they have thought? Surely they would have thought that they had wandered into some kind of death cult, some kind of macabre society that loves shameful and grotesque things like crosses.

Imagine being in the early church and knowing that most people who looked at you shuddered in horror at your worship of a God who would go to a cross! What kind of God goes to a cross?! This is what makes it all the more amazing that Paul, in 1 Corinthians 2, would write:

² For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Do you see? “What you do not want to talk about is the only thing we want to talk about! What you seek to cover up we shout from the rooftops! What you see as the shame of fallen man is, for us, our salvation! We preach Christ and Him crucified!”

Church! Christ took the shame so that we could get to glory! He took death so that we could get life! We stand with the crucified Lord and call all men and women and boys and girls to the cross! We dare not, we must not abandon the cross! It must be planted in the very center of the church and it must be at the heart of the gospel we proclaim and profess to believe!

On the cross of agony, the cross of shame, the cross of mockery, Christ hung for us to take our shame and agony so that we could have peace and joy and life

Do not turn away from the cross. Come to it! Come to Christ crucified and risen!  Come to Him in repentance and faith and live!

 

[1] https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/crucifixion/a-tomb-in-jerusalem-reveals-the-history-of-crucifixion-and-roman-crucifixion-methods/comment-page-2/#comments

[2] William L. Lane, The Gospel According to Mark. The New International Commentary of the New Testament. Gen. Ed., F.F. Bruce (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1974), p.564

[3] Lane, p.561, n.46.

[4] These many references to crucifixion are found throughout Martin Hengel’s fascinating and highly recommended book, Crucifixion.