The Scriptures and the Cross (15:22–37)
Mark narrates the crucifixion with almost no editorial comment. He reports what was done to Jesus in plain sequence: they crucified him, they divided his clothes, they mocked him, he cried out, and then he died. But this isn’t bare reporting. Nearly every detail of the crucifixion is drawn from the Old Testament and set into the story without any citation formula.
When the soldiers crucify Jesus, Mark writes that they “divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take” (15:24). As Jesus hangs on the cross, “those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads” (15:29). At the ninth hour he cries out:
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:34)
Someone then runs to give him sour wine (15:36), and over the whole scene, from the sixth hour to the ninth, there is darkness over the land (15:33).
Each of these moments is drawn from the Old Testament. The dividing of the garments is from Psalm 22:18:
“They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.”
The wagging heads are from Psalm 22:7:
“All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads.”
Jesus’ cry from the cross, the only words spoken from the cross in Mark, is a quotation from the opening line of the same psalm. Psalm 22 opens with the lament of a righteous man surrounded by enemies who treat his suffering as proof that God has abandoned him, and he says:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? (22:1)
The sour wine answers the thirst of the sufferer in Psalm 69:21:
“For my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink” (Ps 69:21).
The darkness is the noonday darkness that the prophet Amos identified as the sign of the day of the Lord:
“I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight” (Amos 8:9).
Mark reads the death of Jesus through the lens of the Old Testament, and more specifically through the lens of the righteous sufferer in Psalm 22.
Recognizing the importance of Psalm 22 for understanding the crucifixion helps us make sense of the cry of dereliction. The cry of abandonment is real, and Mark does not soften it. The words place Jesus in the role of the righteous sufferer. But Psalm 22 does not leave the righteous man in that place of suffering forever. By the end, there is a turn:
“For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him” (22:24).
Psalm 22 concludes with the nations remembering and turning to the Lord, and with deliverance proclaimed to a people yet unborn. Instead of being abandoned, the forsaken man is vindicated and saved, resulting in worship that reaches to the ends of the earth. By quoting Psalm 22 from the cross, Jesus subtly announces Easter. He is suffering now, and it may seem to others as though God has forsaken him, but his suffering (as real as it is) is not the end of the story. The Lord has not despised him or his affliction but has heard him, and he will raise him up. He is suffering now, but salvation is coming.
Revealed on the Cross (15:39)
Mark begins his Gospel like this:
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God (Mark 1:1).
The reader knows from the first line who Jesus is. The question Mark pursues across fifteen chapters is whether anyone else will figure it out.
The answer, it turns out, is almost no one, and the one person who does is not who we might expect.
Before we get to that, God himself does identify Jesus as his Son twice. At the baptism, a voice from heaven addresses Jesus directly:
“You are my beloved Son” (Mark 1:11).
At the transfiguration, the same voice speaks to the three disciples:
“This is my beloved Son; listen to him” (9:7).
Also, the demons recognize who Jesus is, but he silences them (1:24–25, 34; 3:11–12; 5:7).
No human being in Mark’s Gospel calls Jesus the Son of God — not his disciples, not the crowds, not the religious leaders who interrogate him at trial. Not even Peter in his confession.
No one, that is, until the cross.
When Jesus dies, a Roman centurion — a Gentile soldier, an outsider to Israel’s story — stands at the foot of the cross and says,
“Truly this man was the Son of God” (15:39).
The Greek, υἱὸς θεοῦ (huios theou), echoes the very language of Mark’s opening verse. The confession the reader has held since 1:1 finally lands on human lips here, of all places.
What triggers the confession is telling. The centurion does not confess because of a miracle. He does not confess because of the resurrection. He confesses because of the manner of Jesus’s death (15:39). This stands in direct contrast to the mockers surrounding the cross moments before, demanding a sign:
“Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down from the cross that we may see and believe” (15:32).
They are convinced that a cross could never be the place where God is revealed. The centurion, watching Jesus breathe his last, concludes the opposite.
Mark is making a claim that cuts against every expectation: the cross is not the obstacle to recognizing Jesus as the Son of God — it is the revelation of it. Coming down would have been the wrong answer. Dying there is precisely what opens the centurion’s eyes. What does it mean for your own faith that the cross of Jesus is where he is finally seen for who he truly is?