Mark, like Matthew, mentions the thieves (indeed all do) as a testimony to the complete humiliation of God's servant and Son on the cross. Men would not even give Him that place singularly. He was indeed alone in the grace and moral glory of the cross; but to increase the shame of it these two thieves were crucified with Him, one on His right hand and the other on His left. “And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, “And he was numbered with the transgressors." Such was its outward appearance; but next, also, His words were turned against Him, not merely on His trial but in His dying moments. “And they that passed by railed on him, wagging their heads and saying, Ah, thou that destroyest the temple and buildest it in three days, save thyself and come down from the cross.” How little did they know that His very words were now on the point of being completely accomplished!
But the chief priests carried it out farther, as usual. Mocking, they “said among themselves with the scribes, He saved others; himself he cannot save.” A great truth, though not in the sense in which they meant it. Both its parts, rightly applied, are most true; of course not that He could not, but that He did not save Himself—yea, could not, if grace were to triumph in redemption. “He saved others; himself he cannot save.” It is the history of Christ upon earth; it is the history above all of His cross, where the whole truth of Christ comes out more fully though under the absolute infliction of divine wrath for our sins as well as the greatest strain of outward circumstances, but all borne in perfection. The holiness of Christ that at all cost would put away sin to the glory of God, the love of Christ that at all cost to Himself would bring eternal deliverance to others, the grace of God, was fully seen in Him; the righteous judgment, the truth, and the majesty of God. There was nothing that did not stand vindicated on the cross as nowhere else. It was the resurrection, however, that displayed all, publishing what God felt. He was raised from the dead, as it is said, by the glory of the Father. What was done upon the cross was for others; but what was towards Himself, as well as towards others, appeared in the resurrection and setting of Jesus at God's right hand. But in the mouth of unbelief, the very same expressions bear a totally different character from what they have in the lips of faith. So it is that a worldly man may show that appearance of calm in the presence of death which faith really gives him whose eye is on Jesus: in this one it is peace, in that no better than insensibility. But with ordinary believers, who do not understand the fullness of grace, there are mental anxieties beyond what the unbeliever knows, because the latter does not feel what sin is and what becomes the glory of God. When a soul believes and yet is not established in grace, it is in trial and trepidation of spirit as to the result; and it ought to be so till the heart is at rest through Christ Jesus.
How little these chief priests knew the secret of grace! He saved others, said they, and they could not but know it. Himself He would not—did not—save. Nay, in the sense of love and divine counsel, Himself He could not save. He laid down His life for us: no other wise could we be saved; and more than this, obedient to the Father at all cost, determined to carry out His will, even our sanctification. In that sense only He could not save Himself. There was no necessity of death in the nature of the Lord Jesus Christ. All other men had the necessity of death through Adam; Christ had not, though He, the last Adam, Christ, sprang from him through His mother; He did not in Himself underlie the consequences of the first Adam at all, though He in grace bore all the consequences on the cross, but not as one under them; He only bore them for others by God's will and in His own sovereign love. Therefore very expressly, as to His death, He says, “I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it again.” He alone of all men could. say so since the world began. Adam in Paradise could not speak thus; Christ alone had the title according to the rights of His person. His becoming man did not compromise His divine glory. His being God did not enfeeble His suffering as man. There was no lowering of deity; but, in result, a very real exalting of humanity. Nevertheless the Scriptures must be fulfilled: the Anointed One must die—God's glory must be vindicated—death must be encountered by dying, and its power broken not by victory but by righteousness. For this is the wonderful fruit of the death of Christ: the power of death is exhausted by righteousness, He having taken upon Himself the curse, the judgment of sin, so that God might be glorified even herein. Hence the fullness of blessing and peace to the believer. This gives the atonement its wonderful place in all the truth of God. Nothing can be substituted for it. He in atonement is the substitute for all others, and everything else as claiming to do with offering for sin is vanished away.
But as to these chief priests, they mockingly cried, “Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross that we may see and believe.” Yea, so complete was the spirit of unbelief that they who were crucified, even in the midst of their dying agonies, had time to turn round and add to His sufferings. Mark does not mention the conversion of one of these thieves. Luke does, and we know that afterward the one who was converted, instead of asking Him to come down from the cross, owned Him to be the King before the kingdom comes, believing thus without seeing. The poor soul therefore shone through the grace of God, the more because of his own previous darkness: and the darkness of the chief priests who mocked formed the somber background which made this thief so conspicuous. In the very circumstances, over which the chief priests gloried as the defeat of Jesus, the thief gloried as deliverance for his own soul. But this falls to the province of Luke, who shows us the mercy of God that visits a sinner in his lowest estate—the Son of man coming to seek and to save that which was lost. This runs through Luke more than through any other Gospel. Consequently also he shows us the blessedness of the soul in its separate state. This dying thief, when his soul left the cross, would be at once with Jesus in Paradise.
Mark, however, mentions the indignity heaped upon Jesus by the thieves, along with their companions, the chief priests, and others.
“And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.” It was more than human—God caused a witness of that hour that stood out from all before and after. There was darkness; the very world felt it. As the Lord told the Jews, the stones would cry out unless there were a voice from babes and sucklings. As John the Baptist told them, of these stones God could raise up children to Abraham. So here, the insensibility of men, the revilings and scoffings from chief priests down to thieves, against the Son of God, were answered on God's part by the veiling of all nature in presence of the death of Him who created all; there was darkness over the whole land. Above, below, what a scene!
“And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It was no exhaustion of nature. Jesus did not die because He could not live, as all others do. He had still the full energy of life. He died not only in atonement, but to take His life again. How else could He have proved the superiority of His life to death, if He had not died? Still less could He have delivered us, “We were reconciled to God by the death of His death.”
But more than that. His living again, His raising Himself from the grave, His taking life again, proved that He had conquered death, to which He had so entirely submitted for God's glory. He was put to death. By wicked hands He was crucified and slain; yet it was also entirely voluntary. In every other person death is involuntary. So absolutely is Jesus above mere nature whether in birth or in death, or all through. Besides the cry was most peculiar, such as had never been heard from a blessed holy man as He was. That which drew it forth was God's forsaking Him there. It was not a mere manifestation of love, though there never was a time when the Father saw more to love in His Son than at that moment; yea, never did He see before then such moral beauty, even in Him. But if He was bearing sin, He must really endure its judgment. The consequence was to be forsaken of God. God must abandon Him who had taken sin upon Him. And He did take our sins and endured that forsaking which is the inevitable consequence of sin imputed. He who knew no sin knew the cost to the uttermost when made sin for us.
“And some of them that stood by when they heard it said, Behold he calleth for Elias.” This seems to be mere scoffing again. There is no reason to suppose they did not know that He said, “My God, my God,” not Elias. “And one ran and filled a spurge full of vinegar, and put it on a reed and gave him to drink, saying, Let alone, let us see whether Elias will come to take him down. And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.” Now that death was consummated, the only righteous ground of life and redemption, the “veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom.” The Jewish system was doomed, and sentence executed upon its characteristic and central feature. The veil was that which separated the holy place from the holy of holies; there was no single point in the Jewish system more emphatic than the veil. For what the veil indicated as a figure was God present, but man standing outside; God dealing with the people, but the people unable to draw near to God, having Him with them in the world, but nevertheless not brought to Himself, not able to look upon His glory, kept at a distance from Him under the law. (Compare Heb. 9:8; 10:19, 208The Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest, while as the first tabernacle was yet standing: (Hebrews 9:8)
19Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, 20By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; (Hebrews 10:19‑20).) The rending of the veil, on the contrary, at once pronounced that all was over with Judaism. As the darkness supernatural was one testimony before His death, so this at His death declared the power of Christ's blood. It was not only God come down to man, but man now by the blood of Christ entitled to draw near to God, yea, all who know the value of that blood into the holiest of all. But as far as the Jewish economy was concerned, here was the abolition of it come in principle. The tearing down this chief sign and token was the virtual profaning of the sanctuary; so that now any one could look into the holiest. It was no longer the high priest alone venturing within once a year, and that not without blood; but now, because of His blood which they had spilled, little knowing its infinite value, the veil was rent from top to bottom. This was in the first month of the year. The feast in which the high priest entered was in the seventh month. Thus the destruction of the veil was the more marked now. The truth is that the real application of the day of atonement and the following feast of tabernacles, will be when God begins to take up the Jewish people. We are said to have Christ as our passover; but the day of atonement, viewed as a prophetic type, awaits Israel by and by.
Nor was this all. There was a testimony not only in nature as opposed to the scorn of men and the revilings of the crucified ones that were with Him—not only was there this darkness of nature and rending of the veil for Judaism, but a Gentile was brought forward, compelled of God to acknowledge the wonder that was there and then being enacted. “Truly this man was the Son of God.” In all likelihood he was a heathen and did not mean more than to own that Christ was not a mere man, that He was somehow or other what the Chaldean monarch heard and spoke of in Dan. 2; 4 Now the centurion went farther than they of Babylon. He felt that, though His dwelling was in flesh, yet He was a divine being, and not the Son of man merely. I do not think that when Nebuchadnezzar says that he saw one like the Son of God, he meant the full truth that we know; for the doctrine of the eternal Sonship was not then revealed, and it could not be supposed that Nebuchadnezzar entered into it, for he was an idolater at that very time. But it was a testimony of his full confidence that it was a supernatural being of some kind, “the Son of God.” At the same time the Spirit of God could well give the centurion's, or the king's, words a shape beyond what either knew. “Truly this man was the Son of God.”
The disciples were not there. They alas! forsook Him and fled; at any rate, they are not mentioned. They were so out of their true place that God could say nothing about them. Yet one who up to this time had shrunk back from the due confession of Jesus was now brought forward. “And now when the even was come, because it was the preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, an honorable counselor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.” The very circumstances that might have been supposed naturally to have filled him with fear of and shrinking from the consequences, were, on the contrary, used of God to bring out a boldness that never had visited Joseph's heart before. He identified himself with Jesus. He had not the precious place of following Him while He was alive, but the death of Jesus brought him to a point, commanded his affections, and made him, therefore, to enter courageously and demand the body of his master. Pilate, astonished, asks if Jesus was already dead. Naturally crucifixion is a slow death: people linger sometimes even for days when a person is in ordinary health. But in the case of Jesus it was but for a few hours. There was nothing farther to do. It was not, therefore, a question of mere lingering. Besides, it was the accomplishment of prophecy that not a bone should be broken, which John tells us, who is always occupied with the person of the Lord. It was according to the scriptures that He should be pierced, but not a bone should be broken, and this most remarkable circumstance John witnessed and tells us of. Mark does not notice it. Pilate “marveled if he were already dead; and calling unto him the centurion, he asked him if he had been any while dead.” It was the rapid death of Jesus, accompanied by the loud voice, that filled the centurion with amazement. This showed that it was not the death of a mere man. He had power to lay down His life. So when he was certified by the centurion Pilate gives leave.
And Joseph “bought fine linen and took him down and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulcher which was hewn out of a rock, and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulcher.” And two of the Marys beheld where He was laid. Here at least then we have genuine affection. If there was not the intelligence of faith, there was the love that lingered over the Lord they adored with true feeling—the fruit of faith which thus honored Jesus even in His death.