WWUTT 2237 Jesus Mocked and Crucified (Mark 15:16-34)

It is often depicted that Jesus was crucified on a hill far away and it was out of the way of everybody else.

There were three crosses up there, but when you read the gospel accounts, he was crucified in a public place when we understand the text.

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Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. In our study of the Gospel of Mark, we've been reading of the crucifixion of Jesus in chapter 15.

Picking up where we left off yesterday, I'm going to start reading in verse 16 and go through verse 34 in the

Legacy Standard Bible. Hear the word of the Lord. So the soldiers took him away into the palace, that is, the praetorium, and they called together the whole

Roman cohort. And they dressed him up in purple, and after twisting a crown of thorns they put it on him, and they began to greet him,

Hail, King of the Jews. And they kept beating his head with a reed and spitting on him, and kneeling they were bowing down before him.

And after they had mocked him, they took the purple robe off him and put his own garments on him, and they led him out to crucify him.

And they pressed into service a passerby coming from the countryside, Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross.

Then they brought him to the place Golgotha, which is translated Place of a Skull, and they tried to give him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it.

And they crucified him, and divided up his garments among themselves, casting lots for them to decide who should take what.

Now it was about the third hour, and they crucified him, and the inscription of the charge against him read,

The King of the Jews. And they crucified two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left.

And those passing by were blaspheming him, shaking their heads and saying, Ha! You who are going to destroy the sanctuary and rebuild it in three days, save yourself by coming down from the cross.

In the same way mocking him to one another, the chief priests also, along with the scribes, were saying,

He saved others, he cannot save himself. Let this Christ, the

King of Israel, now come down from the cross, so that we may see and believe. Those who were crucified with him were also insulting him.

And when the sixth hour came, darkness fell over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour,

Jesus cried out with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthanai, which is translated,

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Often when we have this picture of Jesus being crucified, we think of it as being on a hill, and there were three crosses on that hill, and that hill was kind of isolated and alone and far away, right?

That's at the beginning of old rugged cross on a hill far away, stands an old rugged cross.

Now that could just simply be referring to the fact that that that place, which we also call Calvary is a long way away from where we are now.

But that that tends to be the the thing that we think of in our mind.

That's the picture that we have the mental picture of the crucifixion was that this was on an isolated hill somewhere outside of Jerusalem.

The reality, though, and this is really set more by Mark, I think the detail is given by Mark more so than what we saw in Matthew.

It was more important that the Romans hang Jesus in a place where he could be seen.

And that wasn't necessarily a hilltop, certainly not one that was far away. It was on a road.

And Mark even captures that here where there are people passing by him.

The I think even the film The Passion of the Christ, I don't endorse any Jesus movies, especially not

The Chosen. So I don't encourage anybody to watch these. But I think it was in The Passion of the Christ. All of this is happening on a hill.

It's off in the distance. Nobody is passing by because it's kind of a dead end sort of a place.

Here we are at the place where these criminals are going to be hung. The place of the skull, often depicted as a hill that might have even looked like a skull.

Maybe a couple of tombs down there look like the eye sockets or something like that. It's called the place of the skull because it's a place of death.

That's where criminals were put to death. It probably had the stench of death with maybe more than one body remaining there.

Some of these criminals having no tombs that they would be buried in. So maybe there was just a big pit on the backside of it.

We don't know. But it would have been the place that people expected criminals would be hung and done so in a public place that others could see it and know we better not cross the

Romans because this is what will happen to you. So this was a place that was very public and a lot of people saw it.

And so it was very well understood by many that Jesus was crucified and died.

It would have been all over Jerusalem that this had taken place. Probably even around the countryside as word travels.

Jesus the Christ, the one that we thought was going to be the Messiah, the one who was going to be our emancipator who would release us from the tyranny of Rome.

He was killed by the Romans. He was crucified on the road. I saw it.

I passed right by it. He was there. I looked up at him, mocked him with the rest of them who were mocking him.

You know, kind of the thing that you see in movies that take place perhaps in a medieval time and somebody is executed publicly.

There are members of the crowd not only hurling insults, but throwing things, lettuce and tomatoes or manure, mud, something like that.

It wasn't necessarily what would have been happening where Jesus was hung. We don't have any description like that given in the

Gospels, but he was certainly crucified in a public place that many saw it and many hurled insults at him and shook their heads at him.

Like this was the guy. What a disappointment. So let's come back up to 16. We'll kind of work through these things here.

You may notice here in Mark that as we went through these details, there was no mention of thus the prophecy was fulfilled.

When you do this in Matthew, Matthew is constantly referencing passages that were pointing to exactly this happening, like where the

Romans were casting lots for his garments. Yep, there was a passage about that or where Jesus was crucified between two thieves.

He was numbered among the transgressors. There's a passage about that. So Matthew will make those Old Testament references.

Mark did not. And remember, this has been the penmanship of Mark. This is his way of storytelling.

He's doing an action story where he's just rolling out these events in a more quick manner and catching the highlights, still including significant details.

Mark can be very detailed in some of the things that he describes, but he's attempting to tell a story in which he wants you to get the best parts of it, the most important parts of it.

That's the story that Mark is telling. Matthew is more methodical. He's more particular, especially on Old Testament fulfillment, how these things tied in, how

Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophets. That was a statement he made in the Sermon on the Mount. So Matthew's going to show the way that Jesus fulfilled those things and the way that he tells his gospel.

Luke is a lot more tied into eyewitnesses. We're going to see that when we get to the Gospel of Luke here in just a couple of weeks.

We're not far away from that. So here, as Jesus is mocked, we get to that portion of this process,

I guess you could call it, Mark 15, 16. So the soldiers took him away into the palace that is the

Praetorium, and they called together the whole Roman cohort, and they dressed him up in purple, and after twisting a crown of thorns, they put it on him.

So here is the mockery of Jesus. You know, I remember seeing the Jesus film.

If you know what I'm talking about, I can't remember the name of the organization that put that together. Now, that wasn't crew, was it?

I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud. But whoever it was, whatever ministry it was that put together the Jesus film,

I only watched it one time, and it was years ago. I may have been a teenager. But I seem to recall he never had a crown of thorns on, and I thought that was odd because I'm pretty sure that's mentioned in all four

Gospels. It may not be in Luke. I don't know. I don't recall. We'll find out when we get there. But it was interesting to me that they did not include that detail.

I mean, that's one of the signature things of the crucifixion of Christ is that he had a crown of thorns on his head.

They even have that crown on his head as he's hanging on the cross. And we don't have any reason to think here that he didn't have that crown as he was hanging on the cross.

They put it on him here, but he may have still had it on his head even as he was hanging on the cross.

And so they put this crown on him, and they began to greet him,

Hail King of the Jews. And they kept beating his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling.

They were bowing down before him. Now, hitting his head with that reed would have been driving those thorns into his head.

It would have been very, very painful. Don't get the picture, though. Some will go like the extra gruesome details in this crucifixion, and you've probably even seen some drawings of it, like the thorns even going straight into his skull.

I think that's a little far. I don't think that would have necessarily been the case. It certainly would have cut into his skin, but unlikely that it would have been actually penetrating his skull in that way.

But still, very painful the way that these soldiers are torturing him. And this is the sinless son of God.

This is the one man in the history of the world that did not deserve to be punished at all, and yet he is being beaten and mocked and spat upon and even extra torture being done to him that they wouldn't ordinarily do to any of the other criminals.

There aren't other criminals that they're giving crowns of thorns and bowing down before him as the king of the

Jews. They're all having their fun moments. They're laughing and thinking that this is a completely harmless gesture, or at least they don't think that it's going to come back upon them in any way.

This man is going to go and die. And so what is that to us? But had they not repented of this, then the judgment of God would come upon them severely because they put the son of God to death.

Now think about that, though. These men who are mocking Jesus and torturing him unnecessarily, treating him in very inhumane ways, let alone the fact that they're mocking that he is the king of the

Jews, treating him very inhumanely, yet Jesus would have forgiven them of this if they had turned from this sin.

Maybe some of them did. We know there was a Roman guard there that said, surely this man was the son of God.

There were Romans that came to believe in Jesus. We read about the Roman centurion that comes to Jesus and asks for his servant to be healed.

I am not worthy for you to come under the roof of my house, that centurion said to Jesus. Surely he was a believer that he was the

Lord. Very humble in the way that he came to Jesus and asked for this miracle for his sick servant.

So these men, had they asked for Christ's forgiveness, he would have given it. Even though they treat him in this way, even though they would put him to death, yet if they call upon the name of the

Lord, they would be saved. If these men can be forgiven their sins, you can be forgiven yours.

I encounter this every once in a while of somebody saying that they need to fix themselves or something in order to come to church again or pray again or read their

Bible again, come to God. I've got some things I need to take care of first, and then I'll come back to that. Well, no, I mean, if that's what you're going to do, then you're never going to find yourself in an acceptable place to come before God.

You can't ever achieve that. You won't ever be in a place that you are now worthy to come before him.

You need to do that now. You need to come as you are, and God is the one who makes you worthy.

As said in Romans 3, together we have become worthless. You can't make yourself worthy.

It is God who will do that by his grace. He will forgive you your sins.

He will bring you into his family, and you will be an adopted son or daughter of God through faith in Jesus Christ.

Even these Roman soldiers and the wickedness that they are doing to Jesus, even they could be forgiven and become children of God.

That is just a wonderful, glorious display of God's grace.

That is to the praise of his glorious grace, as talked about in Ephesians 1.

So verse 19, they kept beating his head with a reed. I guess I read that one. Verse 20, and after they had mocked him, they took the purple robe off of him, put his own garments on him, and they led him out to crucify him.

And they pressed into service a passerby coming from the countryside, Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross.

It was kind of interesting that Mark includes those two names,

Alexander and Rufus. Matthew didn't include those two names, and neither does Luke when

Luke mentions Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross of Jesus. He's mentioned in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. All three synoptic gospels mention

Simon of Cyrene. But only Mark mentions his sons,

Alexander and Rufus. You might be familiar with the song, Watch the

Lamb by Ray Boltz, which is a tremendous song. One of the greatest songs ever written, in my opinion.

Very unfortunate that later in his life, Ray Boltz became a homosexual.

And that's what he's doing now, unfortunately. Heartbreaking. He was a friend of my dad's for a lot of years.

And so it felt like, and I can say on behalf of a lot of people that knew the family, it felt like a backstab for him to do what he did.

But his family tried to support him. I think his ex -wife is now an activist, even.

But that's beside the point. He wrote a masterful song, Watch the Lamb. And he's such a wicked man now, living in sexual immorality and championing that.

It's almost his entire musical platform, when he came out of the closet, as the saying goes.

But that was just an incredible song. If you've never heard it before, look it up. Just be careful about the man that's behind it.

And the song is a story song. And it's talking about Simon of Cyrene, who ends up carrying the cross of Jesus.

And even mentions his two sons in that song, who were characters in the song. Well, he gets that right out of Mark.

His two sons are mentioned. They weren't just made up for the sake of a great song.

The two sons are mentioned in Mark. And when you have those skeptics that will say that there's this growing mythology that happens when you go through Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Where Mark is actually written first, and then Matthew adds more details. And then Luke comes next, and John expounds upon it even more.

Painting Jesus as this deity that Mark didn't view him as. All of that's completely false, incidentally.

But why would there be a growing mythology? I'm just using the language of the skeptics.

Why would it be an evolving story if Matthew doesn't include the names of Simon of Cyrene's sons, but Mark does?

I mean, you would think that Matthew would carry over those names, and so would Luke. That's a pretty significant detail.

You can go talk to Rufus and Alexander. That's why Mark includes them, so you know who they are, and you can talk with them about their dad carrying the cross of Jesus.

These were eyewitnesses to the things that happened concerning the Christ. That is exactly why

Mark includes those names. And like I said in the introduction of Mark, I don't think Mark came first.

Matthew came first. In fact, we can go to the history from the early church fathers and establish that.

Jerome wrote that Matthew was written 12 years after Jesus ascended into heaven.

So you're talking, this was about 42 A .D. Mark was written about 20 years after that, sometime in the 60s.

So Mark was not the first gospel, and then Matthew expounds upon Mark. Matthew was first.

Mark comes along next, but Mark is, well, Mark probably was after Luke, in fact.

But Mark is addressing a primarily Gentile audience. And again, just telling the highlights of the story so that you get the ministry of Jesus, answering the question, who is the

Messiah? Jesus is the Christ. And then what kind of Messiah is he? And that's the second half of Mark.

And we're reading about the Messiah who gave his life as a ransom for many. Even these men who would put him to death such as this.

So we continue on verse 22. Then they brought him to the place Golgotha, which translated as place of a skull.

Again, doesn't mean that it was a mountain or a hilltop. It was just the place where people died. So that was why it was given that name.

And they tried to give him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. And they crucified him and divided up his garments among themselves, casting lots for them to decide who should take what.

That's in fulfillment of the scriptures. That was said in the Psalms that this would be done to Jesus.

Now it was the third hour when they crucified him. Again, we're laying out the facts here.

So at the third hour, that would have been nine o 'clock. That's when he's first being crucified. We have darkness that will come upon the land at the sixth hour.

That's noon. And then he dies in the ninth hour.

Sixth hour, darkness came, fell over the whole land until the ninth hour, which we read in verse 33. And it's at the end of that period of darkness that Jesus dies.

So he's hanging on the cross for six hours. And he gives up his own spirit.

It's not that the Romans took his life. He gave it up, committed it to the

Father. Verse 26, in the inscription of the charge against him, read, The king of the

Jews. And they crucified two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left. Now, verse 28,

I skipped when I did the initial reading. It says in verse 28, and the scripture was fulfilled, which says, and he was numbered with the transgressors.

That was added by a scribe later. It's like he was taking a note from Matthew and adding it into Mark.

But Mark did not write that. He doesn't include those details in his telling of the crucifixion, that this was in fulfillment of the scriptures.

So it was some Byzantine scribe at some point that added that note, thought they were helping out

Mark by carrying that over from Matthew. But we know from the earliest manuscripts that Mark did not originally write that.

So you might have that in your Bible in brackets, or it might be somewhere noted that these were not the original words, or at least these words don't appear in the earliest manuscripts.

It was added later. You have some of those critics out there that will say modern translations like the

ESV remove certain verses. Well, no, it's because certain verses were added. It is right to read it from verse 27 to 29 and ignore 28 because Mark didn't write that one.

So going on to verse 29, and those passing by were blaspheming him, shaking their heads and saying, ha, you who are going to destroy the sanctuary and rebuild it in three days, save yourself by coming down from the cross.

So you see a steady stream of people that continued to walk by and mock

Jesus. He was crucified on a road. He was crucified in a public place where people would pass by and see this is what happens to a person who crosses the

Romans. No pun intended in there. So save yourself by coming down from the cross.

Verse 31, in the same way, mocking him to one another, the chief priests also along with the scribes were saying, he saved others.

He cannot save himself. Let this Christ, the king of Israel, now come down from the cross so that we may see and believe.

Those who were crucified with him were also mocking him. And when the sixth hour came, darkness fell over the whole land until the ninth hour.

And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, lemme sabachthani, which is translated, my

God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And we know that being the words of Psalm 22.

We're going to pick up there tomorrow. So we'll pick up with the crucifixion tomorrow. Consider these words of Jesus and other things that happened there at the conclusion of the crucifixion and even his burial as we finish up chapter 15 tomorrow.

Let's finish here with prayer. Heavenly father, we thank you for giving your son, Jesus, to die on the cross for our sins.

And I pray that none of us think ourselves too proud, be too full of ourselves to think that we can somehow better ourselves and we must do that before we come to Jesus.

It is you who makes us right. We must come as we are. And you will be the one to forgive us our sins and to sanctify us and purify us, adopting us as sons and daughters of God and growing us in holiness, disciplining us where we need to be disciplined.

This is the work that you do, the work of sanctification. We can't do that for ourselves.

It is what you do through our savior Christ who died for us. And so continue to convict our hearts, draw us after you, and walking in the way that is right before God.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Gabe is the pastor of Providence Church in Casa Grande, Arizona.

For more information about our ministry, visit ProvidenceCasaGrande .com. Join us again tomorrow as we continue our