Abstract
These verses cover three scenes from Mark’s passion account. We begin in Pilate’s courtyard. A boisterous ring of soldiers surrounds Jesus. They have subjected him to a near-fatal flogging—routine for prisoners sentenced to death by crucifixion. Now they’ve thrown a dirty red cloak over his bloody form and mashed a crown of thorny sticks on his head. They assault him with blows and spit, mock-saluting: “King of the Jews!” After this coronation parody, they throw Jesus his clothes and hustle him into the street. When Jesus staggers under the weight of the crossbeam on his back, they conscript someone else to carry it. At Golgotha they crucify Jesus, his crime placarded above him: “King of the Jews.” As his life ebbs away, the throng assaults him with verbal abuse: “Let the Messiah, the king of Israel, come down, that we may see and believe!” (v. 32).
At the outset of engaging this text, preachers will want to rule out two potential missteps. First, it can be tempting to conflate Mark’s version of Jesus’s passion with accounts in other Gospels. Good Friday liturgies that lead us through the “seven last words of Jesus” encourage that composite approach. Yet it is crucial that we and our listeners attend to the particularity of Mark’s spare account. In Mark, apart from an inarticulate final shout, Jesus speaks only once, quoting Psalm 22:1 (Mark 15:34). In our lection, Jesus is silent.
A second misstep would be to filter our reading of these scenes through a pre-determined atonement theology. Systematic Christological and soteriological accounts were many decades—even centuries—away when Mark composed his gospel. In 10:32, Jesus refers to his impending death as “a ransom for many” but does not elaborate. Only much later would early church fathers and mothers begin to expand theological reflection on that metaphor. Our task is to discover what Mark, in particular, wants us to see and hear.
Mark’s passion account, like the others, is deeply inter-connected with all that comes before and after it. When we consider Mark 15:16–32 in relation to Mark’s whole gospel, we discover that two of Mark’s most characteristic rhetorical tropes structure these verses. First, Mark’s strategic use of messianic titles for Jesus is prominent, with “king of the Jews”/ “king of Israel” appearing six times, three of them in our lection.
Mark’s strategy of strategically incorporating messianic titles begins with his first line and continues through the narrative. In his Gospel’s first line, Mark hands his readers clues to the identity of the protagonist of his story: “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” To “Christ” and “Son of God,” which occur infrequently, Mark adds the title by which Jesus refers to himself and his mission, “Son of Man.” Finally, in the passion scenes, and only there, we encounter “king of the Jews/king of Israel.” It is this last title that figures most crucially in our lection. Mark places the title—either “king of the Jews” (if speakers are Greek) or “king of Israel” (if speakers are Jewish)—only in the mouths of antagonists.
Second, and related, a deep sense of irony pervades all three scenes. Irony in Mark’s gospel emerges from the gap between what Mark lets his readers know, on one hand, and what players inside the action of the Gospel know (or fail to perceive). Both “Christ” and “Son of God” (1:1) are messianic identifiers. Jesus, we already suspect, is the long-anticipated, divinely anointed eschatological agent sent to renew the people of Israel. With these clues in hand, readers look on as various players in the drama, lacking the information we have, wrestle with Jesus’s identity and mission. Over and over, bumbling disciples and determined opponents either miss or simply resist clues to Jesus’s identity as his mission of teaching, exorcism, and healing unfolds.
Just before our lection begins, Pilate’s opening question to Jesus resounds: “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus replies, “so you say” (or “you say it”), neither claiming nor repudiating the title. Next, when Pilate can find nothing with which to charge Jesus that is worthy of death, he turns to the crowd and offers to release Jesus, the “king of the Jews,” to them. A kingly deliverer of the Jews is precisely what Jesus has refused to be, so they demand he be crucified and choose the defiant Barabbas instead. For the reader there is bitter irony in the crowd’s rejection of Jesus. This seals his fate.
Irony also saturates the short scene about Simon of Cyrene on the way to Golgotha. Since Simon is noted as the father of Alexander and Rufus (15:21), he is likely a known figure to at least some of Mark’s readers. Forced to carry Jesus’s cross, Simon (ironically) embodies Jesus’s teaching on true greatness as servanthood; and yet (again, ironic) Simon functions at the same time as a cog in the machinery of empire.
In the crucifixion scene itself, “king of the Jews / king of Israel” functions with doubled irony. Jesus’s battered body hangs helpless under a sign announcing “king of the Jews”—for the crowds, a great joke. They jeer relentlessly at the un-kingly figure bleeding his life out on the cross. In Mark, even the bandits crucified beside him heckle him. To all of them, Jesus is a failed fake of a king. Yet, for the knowing reader of Mark, clued in to the hidden truth about Jesus since 1:1, there is a second, richer layer of irony at work here: Jesus’s detractors bear unwitting testimony, over and over again, to what is absolutely true.
Taking these two narrative features as homiletical cues, one might start by stepping outside the boundaries of the lection to 15:39, the centurion’s announcement—“Surely this was [a/the] Son of God!” How we “hear” this proclamation by the centurion affects our reading of the rest of the passion story, argues New Testament scholar Donald H. Juel. Juel notes that the line can be read not as a sudden capitulation to faith, as generally assumed, but (with a jut of the chin?) as one final sneer at the expired “king.” 1 Hear it that way, and everything shifts. Imagine, for example, how a Roman official who’s sworn fealty to the empire might hear Mark’s passion story. He would naturally understand the centurion’s remark as a jibe. Our Roman listener would savor the soldiers’ parody and the taunts from the crowd. Jesus’s pitiful and possibly despairing death (depending how one interprets Jesus’s quotation of Psalm 22, at 15:34) makes this story a celebration of Rome’s efficiency in dealing with would-be provincial “kings.” The closing bit about an empty tomb would seem fanciful theater. In the end, nothing comes of it. Jesus’s last loyal followers, some women, say nothing. Empire wins.
Yet, the church reads differently with Mark 1:1 and Jesus’s own sayings about himself in mind. What if things are not as they appear in this scene? What if—in this dying—God is disarming those ultimate instruments of terror on which all empires rely—the threat of torture and death? What if God is fully present here, putting death itself under Jesus’s feet? We, followers of the Christ, pursue compassion and justice without fear. Why? Because we know what scoffers do not: the undoing of death that began at the cross continues. The empires of this world are on borrowed time.
A preacher could also work from inside the story, starting with the scene of Jesus’s physical and verbal abuse in the courtyard and proceeding to the foot of Jesus’s cross. There, everyone from spit-hurling guards to chicken-toting peasants and lofty priests get in on the colossal joke while Jesus dies: “Hey, Jesus, how about showing us what a king you are!” “Some king, this! —naked, face a bloody mess, too weak to save himself, let alone anybody else.” It is side-splitting, this heartbreaking crucifixion.
But imagine that someone new steps into the scene: “Hold on, everybody: what if every last one of these jokesters is playing a part they didn’t sign up for? What if the joke here isn’t on Jesus, but on them? Because I’m told that God’s power walking in this world looks more like weakness, not strength, more like failure then fanfare, more like suffering solidarity than high and mighty. Listen to them: ‘King Jesus, king Jesus!’ God has recruited every last one of these folks to broadcast the very truth they mean to deny. I know: it’s Friday now. That’s the hard fact. But make no mistake—Sunday’s coming!” 2