The Witnesses

We left, this morning, a few verses, three verses, at the end of the section that we read in Mark chapter 15, and to these we return now. And I think it’s worthwhile just reading the section again from verse 33. It’s page 853 if you’re using one of the church Bibles. Page 853. Mark 15:33. And Mark tells us:

“When the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. 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?’ And some of the bystanders hearing it said, ‘Behold, he[’s] calling Elijah.’ 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.’ And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. 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!’

“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. 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.”

Amen.

Just when you think of that final statement there, “There were many other women who came … to Jerusalem,” and then you look back to Mark chapter 11 and Mark’s record of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, we can only assume that a number of these women were present on this occasion as they entered Jerusalem with these great shouts of “Hosanna!” and “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”[1]

Well, let us just ask for God’s help:

Our gracious God, we bow before you. We are here in the evening hour of this day. Our lives are an open book to you. You search us, and you know us. You know our fears and our failures. You know our hopes and our aspirations. You know where we stand in relationship to the things of your Word, and many of us have had occasion today to bless you because of the way in which you have chosen to use your Word in a Life Group, or through our children or our grandchildren, or through the words of a song that we’ve been singing, through a talk that’s been given—that you’ve already used your Word today to direct our paths, to stir us up to love and to good works.[2] And so we are the beneficiaries of the fact that you speak when your Word is opened up and taught.

And so now in the evening of our day, as the shadows fall across the daylight and as we prepare for a new week before us, we ask again that the Spirit of God will conduct that divine dialogue whereby, in a way that is frankly quite mysterious to us, via the voice of a mere man we actually hear from you in a way that is unmistakable and that calls us to faith and calls us to obedience and calls us to a fresh understanding of who Jesus is and what he’s done. So accomplish these things tonight. Help us in speaking and in listening, we pray. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Well, as I say, we left off—for those of you who were not here this morning—we left off at verse 38, with the picture of “the curtain of the temple” being “torn in two, from top to bottom.” And I’m simply calling these final three verses that are in this section “The Witnesses.” “The Witnesses.” Because Mark now tells us first of all about a man who was required by duty to be an observer of what has taken place, and then he tells us of these women who were present not on account of duty but on account of their devotion, on account of their love for Jesus. And so we’ll look at them in turn.

The Centurion

First of all, in verse 39, this centurion. We have been introduced to individuals who fulfilled this role in the Roman army as we’ve gone through this Gospel and other Gospels too. This man’s responsibility on this particular occasion was clearly tied to the crucifixion not only of Jesus but also of the two robbers who were crucified with him. He was really the head of the execution squad, and so it is understandable that it would be he who would answer the question posed a little later on by Pilate.

You will see that, if your Bible is open, in verse 44, which we’ll come to, all being well, on Good Friday, in the evening, “Pilate was surprised to hear that he”—that is, Jesus—“should have already died. And summoning the centurion”—that’s this man—“he asked him whether he was already dead. And when he learned from the centurion that he was dead,” then “he granted the corpse to Joseph,” this man from Arimathea who had asked for it. And so, in the space of just a few words, you will notice here, in this thirty-ninth verse, Mark provides us not actually simply with a climax to this particular scene, but in some ways, here we are at the climax of the entire Gospel of Mark. I wonder if you would think of that as overstatement.

If you think about the way the Gospel of Mark began, in the very first verse, it begins, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Okay? That’s how he starts it out. “I’m going to tell you,” he says, “about Jesus, who is the Son of God.” And then as the Gospel record unfolds for us, we’re introduced to Jesus in his teaching, in his miracles, in the prediction of his death, then in his suffering, as we’ve seen, and now, finally, in his death. And it is quite remarkable and yet totally fitting that following the death of Jesus, the word that should be proclaimed—albeit interestingly, surprisingly, from the lips of this individual—should be this great declaration: “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

Mark now has brought us to the point where all of his work is virtually completed. He has not been writing a biography, as we said at the beginning. He’s not been writing a history. He’s provided biographical details, the history is intact, but he’s been writing a gospel, and he has been presenting to these first-century readers the record of this Jesus of Nazareth: where he’s come from, who he is, what he’s done, and now his death upon the cross—good news now reaching its great finale in the words of this man.

Now, you will notice that it tells us where he stood, what he saw, and what he said. We don’t need to belabor these points, but they should be noted by us.

“And when the centurion, who stood facing him…” It’s quite a picture, isn’t it? This man of capacity as a soldier, somebody for whom there would be a routine element to these events, somebody who was not a novice when it came to these things, has, as a result of his name appearing on the duty roster for the day, found himself in this most unusual of situations, standing for three hours in what we noted this morning was an unnatural darkness. And in that unnatural darkness, he finds himself close enough to virtually see everything and to hear everything that would be said. Therefore, he is a perfect individual to be used as a witness to the identity and work of Jesus.

And we’re told what he saw. What he saw is straightforward too: “when [he] … saw that in this way he breathed his last…” So, what Mark is telling us is that the thing that was so striking to this centurion was the manner in which Jesus died. You see that in the text. It makes sense, doesn’t it? “And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last…” In what way? In a way that was entirely unlike most crucifixions, as we saw this morning. Most of those who were crucified found that over a prolonged period of time, their life eventually just ebbed away. But here this centurion had stood and watched what has actually been a relatively sudden death, and not simply one that has come with suddenness but one that has come with a great proclamation of both trust in the fatherly care and triumph over sin and the grave. And it is this intensity, this passion, the volume of it all, that has been expressive of the manner of the death of Jesus. And so Mark tells us that this man was particularly impacted by what he saw. And it was then on account of that that he said what he said. Jesus breathes his last, and the man then says, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

Now, let’s just leave this statement as it stands for the moment. Think about this: the religious leaders—to whom this centurion would have paid some kind of attention—the religious leaders had branded Jesus as an impostor. The religious leaders had brought him before the Roman authorities, charging him as being guilty of blasphemy. In other words, he was not the person he was apparently claiming to be. That’s what he said. And that was the overwhelming impact of all that had led up to Jesus now hanging on this cross. The man, in response to his responsibilities, has engaged in what he’s been told to do. He has heard all of that hubbub, he’s heard the interaction, he’s heard the words of Jesus from the cross, he knows the religious perspective, he’s aware of the fact that his closest followers are nowhere to be found, and now he says, “But I’ll tell you what I believe: I flat-out disagree with these religious leaders. I don’t think they’ve got it right.”

Now, he would be familiar with this kind of thing. You know, these people who do this sort of stuff, they have—if we can say so sensibly, they have a nose for this kind of thing. They know when somebody is seeking to be deceitful, duplicitous. And he senses from Jesus—in both his manner of dying, in his bearing on the cross—he senses that this man is both innocent and this man is admirable. And he concludes from where he stands that the character of this Jesus of Nazareth is somehow tied to his relationship with God. And putting all of this together, he declares, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”

Now, if you take a commentary and begin to delve into it, the commentators will take a long time saying that he might have actually said, “This man was a son of God,” not “This man was the Son of God,” and so on—as if it would have mattered tuppence to the man whether he used the definite article or not. It really is a colossal waste of time and print for individuals to plow around in this stuff. Because there is no reason for us from this statement to try and make this man say something more than he says or to try and make this man’s statement fit with our understanding of what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God.

In short, let me ask you a question: Are we free to declare the centurion the first Christian convert following the death of Jesus? I would answer no. Because we don’t know what he meant by saying “Son of God.” What he meant as a pagan, what he meant as a Roman, when you think of Romans and gods, when you think of all of the pantheon of gods and the various people who were called gods and demigods, partial gods, and so on—this man is making a very striking statement, but it is not necessarily an orthodox statement in relationship to Christology, in relationship to our understanding of the theology of the New Testament as it unfolds after the Gospels.

I don’t think the man probably grasps the significance of what he says. But Mark is inviting his readers to make the words of the centurion their own words, so that here, in the context of weakness and of rejection, Jesus is declared to be the Son of God. And that is what Mark has been doing for fifteen chapters. He has been recording the identity of Jesus, he has been pointing out who he is, he has been moving, advancing the ball up the field, so that these first-century readers, who are confronted by persecution, who are pressed upon by all kinds of circumstances, may themselves, in reading this Gospel, become absolutely convinced—in a way that probably was beyond this centurion, but absolutely convinced—that this man Jesus is none other than the Son of God.

And it is quite fabulous, isn’t it, that the statement doesn’t come from the lips of a disciple? The statement doesn’t come even from the lips of a Jew, who had the background. But the statement comes from a gentile army officer with no prior connection to Jesus at all. So God says, “I’m going have somebody just stand up at the end of the whole crucifixion thing and make it absolutely clear who my Son is. Now, why don’t I use the Roman centurion? That would be an unlikely one, wouldn’t it? I certainly can’t use any of the followers of Jesus—they’ve all done a bunk—and the religious leaders, they got it completely wrong from the get-go, so none of them are possibilities. Why don’t we just have the centurion?” And there’s a sufficient work going on in the heart of the centurion to be able to make this great declaration: “Truly, I’m absolutely convinced this man was the Son of God.”

It’s an interesting study for somebody to think about the proximity to the cross and these amazing encounters that take place. You’ve got this man, the centurion, face-to-face with Jesus, desperately hoping that as the story unfolds, with the resurrection and then the preaching in Jerusalem on Pentecost—I’m phenomenally hoping, as you are, that he was one of the three thousand who heard the Word and believed.[3] He finally put it together, said, “That’s what I actually meant. I couldn’t quite say it the way I wanted to say it.” And then when he was baptized, he said, “You know”—of course, it’s conjecture on my part, but this is my hope, you know, and your hope, too, I think, that we’ll meet this centurion one day, and he’ll tell us, “I wasn’t quite sure what I was saying when I said it, but boy did I get it. After Peter preached that sermon on Pentecost, it just dawned on me wonderfully. And I was baptized. I became a follower of Jesus.”

Well, if he managed to do that, he was able to do what one of the other fellows in close proximity did not have the opportunity to do—namely, the thief beside Jesus on the cross. And yet in the dying embers of his day, he discovers who Jesus is and what he’s done. You say, “It’s never too late.” Well, it is possible to be too late. But in the economy of God, he sweeps people into his kingdom by his grace and by his mercy, not on account of their peculiar knowledge of theology, not on account of their background, of a history of a wonderful life, but it’s the story on the cross of a bad man who went to heaven, and it’s the story at the foot of a cross of an unlikely man who makes this great declaration.

The Women

So, if the presence of the centurion was demanded by duty, here in 40 and 41 we have the presence of the women who are there on account of their love, on account of their devotion. “There were also women looking on,” you’ll notice, “from a distance”—bewildered, brokenhearted, but still present.

Now, this ought to strike us, those of us who’ve been faithful in going through the Gospel of Mark. Because up until this point, those of us who’ve been paying attention simply and solely to Mark will be aware of the fact that there has been little to no mention of women in this kind of context. There is in the early chapters the story of Peter’s mother-in-law; she’s on the receiving end of Jesus’ healing power.[4] And there are others who are healed. But if you read the Gospel of Mark, when you get to this point, you could fairly reasonably conclude that this Jesus movement was just like a gigantic Promise Keepers: that it was a men-only movement, that women were virtually excluded from it. Because Mark doesn’t introduce us to Martha and Mary; that’s Luke who does that. Mark doesn’t tell us, as Luke does, about the devotion of certain women. You can find that in the eighth chapter of Luke: “And the twelve were with him, and also some women who[’d] been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them [and for] their means.”[5] Mark doesn’t give us any of that at all.

And so here, as you get to the end of the life of Jesus and you find yourself before the cross of Christ, it is here that we’re introduced to the fact that the women have played a strategic role in the ministry of Jesus. The closest we’ve come to it in Mark is in the record of the lady in chapter 14 who had prepared Jesus for his burial.[6] She’s not identified for us. She’s anonymous in the Scriptures.

In the Epistles, we discover that there is a whole succession of devoted women who are at the heart of many of the New Testament churches.

But now, with the men out of the picture, we discover that the men having bailed, only the women have hung in there. And what we discover is that there has actually been a female element in the entourage of Jesus all along—that there have been women who have played a very important role in what Jesus and the disciples have been doing. R. T. France says what we have here “is a rare glimpse both of the practical aspect of Jesus’ itinerant lifestyle, requiring a support group and the supply of material needs.”[7] So the idea that somehow or another, Jesus and his fellow disciples were a sort of self-contained band of twelve men in need of nobody and in need of nothing, and certainly not in need of any kind of female engagement in their lives, is a total fiction. And you will notice that it was not tied to just three people, but “there were also,” verse 41 says—“and there were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.” It is to these individuals who remain faithful to the last that the privilege of being the witnesses to the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus—it is to these women that the privilege is given.

And that in itself is striking. Because they were living in a society that gave no legal status to the testimony of women, so that a woman could not testify in a court of law. So if you were inventing something, if you were planning to write a Gospel and make sure that everybody found it really, really, really believable that Jesus really died, that he really was buried, that he really rose again, the one thing you would definitely make sure you didn’t do was make your witnesses women—which is exactly what God does. There’s no way that the men are going to be the witnesses, because they’re nowhere to be found. But these women, we’re told, are standing there at a distance.

If you allow your eye to go down, verse 47 tells us, at the end of the chapter, that “Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid.” Incidentally, when you have statements like “Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses,” in the same way as we saw it with Rufus and Alexander, the sons of—Simon, is it? Yes, Simon of Cyrene—and he just mentions Rufus and Alexander.[8] And now he just mentions the lady who was “the mother of James the younger and of Joses.” We can safely conclude that these individuals were well-known in the early church. So it’s a point of identification. And he’s able to identify the lady in relationship to her sons, who were themselves well-known. Doesn’t mean very much to us. We don’t know who they were; we have no further record of them. But that’s why it’s here. These were real people in real time giving a real report of what really happened.

Verse 47, they “saw where [Jesus] was laid.” Then as you go into chapter 16, it is again “Mary Magdalene” and “Mary the mother of James, and Salome”; they’re the ones who bring the “spices, so that they might go and anoint him.”[9] Into 16:5, it is to them that the information is given of the fact that although they are seeking Jesus of Nazareth, the one who has been crucified, he is actually “risen; he is not here.” So they’ve become the recipients of the news. They then become the ones who are the declarers of the news. When you go into the Acts of the Apostles and the unfolding story of the developing church, then we discover that these women are present in the upper room when they gather for prayer in prospect of the giving of the Holy Spirit.[10] When you read on into the Acts of the Apostles, you discover that these women are the women who are opening their homes and giving hospitality to those who are the proclaimers of the good news.[11] When you read the Epistles, you discover, particularly in the epistles of Paul, that there is a whole succession of devoted women who are at the heart of many of the New Testament churches.

And this is important to understand and necessary to affirm. Does it then set women free to assume the roles of pastor and preacher and to assume roles that are entrusted only to men in the church? The answer is no. For that would be to turn the Bible on its head. But a woman does not need to fulfill a role assigned to a man to ever grant her significance, either in society or in the home or in the church. For the significance that is given to woman is a significance ordained by God, designed by God, and for which a woman is uniquely equipped by God. And so for those roles to be blurred or reversed or contravened is actually to do a disservice to the very distinctions of gender which are written into the very heart and life and society by God who made us.

And it is surely one of the sorriest aspects of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century evangelicalism to watch the significant collapse in relationship to these things—not, as professed, as a result of a unique discovery of the Greek language never known before. But no, let’s be honest: as a result of an unwillingness to be disregarded in a culture that has completely lost its way about what it means to be a man, about what it means to be a father, about what it means to be a woman, about what it means to be a mom. And if the church of Jesus Christ chooses to continue to capitulate on these things, then there is no saying where subsequent generations of our children’s children will find themselves in the culture in which we presently live.

It is imperative, loved ones, that when we take the Bible, we take the Bible, and so to affirm as we seek to do here the vital, significant role that is assigned to women within the Scriptures—to recognize that although Mark has not highlighted this, he has not been disguising it; he’s not been covering it up. And when we put the pieces together between himself and the other Gospel writers, we realize what is obvious as the nose on our face: that it is impossible for Jesus and the others to do what they did without the support, the encouragement, the partnership, the discipleship, the engagement, the ministry, the insight, the prayer, the service, the activities of this vast company of vital women.

A strategic role played by women in the ministry of Jesus. A strategic role played by women in the history of the church. A strategic role played by women in the present ministry of Parkside Church. And for this I and the rest of us are immensely thankful both to God and to you women.

Let us pray:

Lord, [your] Word abideth,
And our footsteps guideth;
Who its truth believeth
[Life] and joy receiveth.[12]

We pray, gracious God, that you will save us from ourselves, from our constant desire to be approved by a culture that has already decided about us that we’re not only wrong but that we’re actually stupid. Help us not to crucify the truth of your Word on the cross of our own selfish agendas. Help us, Lord, to care more about what you say about us than about what others say about us. We realize, Lord, that these elements, these principles, cut right into the very heart of where our society is tonight, and we ask you, we plead with you, Lord, to give us wisdom, to know how to live, to know what to say, to know when to say it, so that we might be, as we’ve reminded our children tonight, the very “light of the world.”[13] Help us, we pray, so that our faith might rest secure in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

[1] Mark 11:9–10 (ESV).

[2] See Hebrews 10:24.

[3] See Acts 2:41.

[4] See Mark 1:30–31.

[5] Luke 8:1–3 (ESV).

[6] See Mark 14:3–9.

[7] R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, The New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 663.

[8] See Mark 15:21.

[9] Mark 16:1 (ESV).

[10] See Acts 1:14.

[11] See Acts 16:14–15.

[12] Henry Williams Baker, “Lord, Thy Word Abideth” (1861).

[13] Matthew 5:14 (ESV).