SEVENTEEN

THE END

They took Jesus to the high priest, and all the chief priests, elders, and teachers of the law came together. Peter followed him at a distance, right into the courtyard of the high priest. There he sat with the guards and warmed himself at the fire. The chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for evidence against Jesus so that they could put him to death, but they did not find any. Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree. Then some stood up and gave this false testimony against him: “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this man-made temple and in three days will build another, not made by man.’” Yet even then their testimony did not agree.

(Mark 14:53–59)

There’s nothing more dramatic than to be on trial for your life, and no more dramatic moment in a trial than when the defendant is called to testify on the witness stand. And perhaps there’s never been a more dramatic and shocking testimony given on a witness stand than the one Jesus Christ gave during his trial. Mark continues:

Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Are you not going to answer? What is this testimony that these men are bringing against you?” But Jesus remained silent and gave no answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

(Mark 14:60–62)

The high priest puts Jesus on the witness stand, as it were, and asks if he is the Christ (the “Messiah”), the Son of the Blessed One. At other times in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has avoided similar lines of inquiry about his identity (Mark 7:5–6) or turned the question back on the questioner (Mark 11:29). This time, Jesus answers this central question of the Gospel of Mark head on—positively and fully. “I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

By saying “I am,” Jesus claims to be the Messiah, the promised one. However, we should remember that, in general, the Jews did not expect the Christ to be literally divine. Therefore, Jesus goes on to amplify the meaning of the label Messiah by identifying himself as the Son of Man and also by saying he will sit at the right hand of God.

In both of Jesus’s biblical allusions here (“Son of Man” from Daniel 7:13, and “at his right hand” from Psalm 110:1), the Messiah comes as a judge. Everybody in the room—all of the ruling council of the Sanhedrin—knows who the Son of Man is. In Daniel 7, the Son of Man comes from the throne of God to earth in the clouds of heaven to judge the world. And the clouds of heaven are not the same as the clouds of earth, just water vapor. These clouds are the shekinah glory, the very presence of God. Therefore by replying as he does, Jesus is saying: “I will come to earth in the very glory of God and judge the entire world.” It’s an astounding statement. It’s a claim to deity.

Of all the things Jesus could have said—and there are so many texts, themes, images, metaphors, and passages of the Hebrew Scriptures that he could have used to tell who he was—he specifically says he’s the judge. By his choice of text, Jesus is deliberately forcing us to see the paradox. There’s been an enormous reversal. He is the judge over the entire world, being judged by the world. He should be in the judgment seat, and we should be in the dock, in chains. Everything is turned upside down.

And as soon as Jesus claims to be this judge, as soon as he claims deity, the response is explosive. Mark writes:

“I am,” said Jesus. “And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” The high priest tore his clothes. “Why do we need any more witnesses?” he asked. “You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” They all condemned him as worthy of death. Then some began to spit at him; they blindfolded him, struck him with their fists, and said, “Prophesy!” And the guards took him and beat him.

(Mark 14:62–65)

The high priest rips his own garments apart, a sign of the greatest possible outrage, horror, and grief. And then the whole trial deteriorates. In fact it’s no longer a trial; it’s a riot. The jurors and judges begin to spit on him and beat him. In the middle of the trial, they go absolutely berserk. He is instantly convicted of blasphemy and condemned as worthy of death.

But the court of the Sanhedrin did not have the power to pass this death sentence. It was empowered to judge many cases, but capital cases needed the confirmation of the Roman procurator. As soon as they are able, the Sanhedrin hands Jesus over to Pilate, the governor appointed by Rome, so that he can put Jesus to death. Mark continues:

Very early in the morning, the chief priests, with the elders, the teachers of the law, and the whole Sanhedrin, reached a decision. They bound Jesus, led him away and handed him over to Pilate. “Are you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate. “Yes, it is as you say,” Jesus replied. The chief priests accused him of many things. So again Pilate asked him, “Aren’t you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of.” But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed.

(Mark 15:1–5)

Jesus is on trial again, this time before Pilate. The religious leaders offer a battery of charges. Jesus does not answer them, to the marvel of Pilate. We know from the other Gospel writers that Pilate has no desire at all to try this case. He vacillates and stalls in an attempt to get out of it. But he has another card to play: He may be able to escape the responsibility of a decision through the time-honored custom of releasing a prisoner amid a time of general rejoicing:

Now it was the custom at the Feast to release a prisoner whom the people requested. A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usually did. “Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate, knowing it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him.

(Mark 15:6–10)

Pilate is still trying to find a way out. He knows that the religious leaders are only accusing Jesus out of envy; they don’t have a case. Barabbas is a violent man who has been convicted of murder. Will Pilate knowingly free a guilty man and condemn an innocent one? Mark continues:

But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead. “What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them. “Crucify him!” they shouted. “Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!” Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.

(Mark 15:11–15)

Pilate is extremely reluctant to execute Jesus, but despite pronouncing that Jesus is not guilty of a capital offense, he hands him over to be crucified.

Crucifixion was designed to be the most humiliating and gruesome method of execution. The Romans reserved it for their worst offenders. It was a protracted, bloody, public spectacle of extreme pain that usually ended in a horrible death by shock or asphyxiation. But it is noteworthy that Mark gives us very few of the gory details. He aims his spotlight away from the physical horrors of Jesus’s ordeal in order to focus it on the deeper meaning behind the events. He simply records:

Then they led him out to crucify him. A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross. They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull). Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. And they crucified him. Dividing up his clothes, they cast lots to see what each would get.

(Mark 15:20–24)

Although Mark makes no explicit reference to the fulfillment of prophecy, his choice of wording here shows that he is thinking of Psalm 22:

All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads. . . . I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me. . . . Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bones; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.

(Psalm 22:7, 14, 16–18)

Imagine what Jesus’s followers felt as they watched this scene around the cross, as they watched the man they had followed for years being crucified. Here was a man who calmed storms, banished sickness, and cheated death by the miraculous power of his word. Here was a man who less than a week before had been given a king’s welcome to Jerusalem. Here was the Christ. How could this be happening? Mark goes on:

It was the third hour when they crucified him. The written notice of the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS. They crucified two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, “So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!” In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves. “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! Let this Christ, this King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.” Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him. At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour.

(Mark 15:25–33)

In their depictions of Jesus’s death, Mark and the other three Gospel writers show a consistent concern for what visual artists call “values”—that is, the interplay and contrast between darkness and light. All four Gospel writers take pains to show us that all the critical events of Jesus’s death happened in the dark. The betrayal and the trial before the Sanhedrin all happened at night, of course, but now at the actual moment of Jesus’s death, though it is daytime, an inexplicable darkness descends. “At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour.” The sixth hour was noon; the ninth hour was 3:00 p.m. So from 12:00 to 3:00 in the afternoon, as Jesus was dying, there was total darkness.

Many people have proposed a natural cause for this event—an eclipse, for instance. But a solar eclipse does not create absolute darkness for more than a few minutes. Further, a solar eclipse can’t happen during the time of a full moon, and Passover is always celebrated at a full moon. Other people have suggested that the cause was a desert windstorm of the type that can kick up enough dust to obscure the sun for days at a time. But Passover falls in the wet season, so this darkness couldn’t have come from a windstorm.

This was a supernatural darkness.

In the Bible, darkness during the day is a recognized sign of God’s displeasure and judgment.67 The supreme example of that phenomenon is the darkness over Egypt that was the penultimate plague at the time of the first Passover (Exodus 10:21–23). So when this darkness fell, we know that God was acting in judgment. But who was God judging? Mark continues:

At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”—which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

(Mark 15:33–34)

When Jesus started to cry out, he didn’t say, “My friends, my friends!” “My head, my head!” “My hands, my hands!” He said, “My God, my God.” On the cross, Jesus was forsaken by God.

He said, “My God.” That’s the language of intimacy. To call anyone “my Susan” or “my John” is affectionate. And biblically, “my God” is covenantal address. It was the way God said someone could address him if he or she had a personal relationship with him. “You shall be my people, and I shall be your God.”

“My God, you have forsaken me.” If after a service some Sunday morning one of the members of my church comes to me and says, “I never want to see you or talk to you again,” I will feel pretty bad. But if today my wife comes up to me and says, “I never want to see you or talk to you again,” that’s a lot worse. The longer the love, the deeper the love, the greater the torment of its loss.

But this forsakenness, this loss, was between the Father and the Son, who had loved each other from all eternity. This love was infinitely long, absolutely perfect, and Jesus was losing it. Jesus was being cut out of the dance.

Jesus, the Maker of the world, was being unmade. Why? Jesus was experiencing our judgment day. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. And the answer is: For you, for me, for us. Jesus was forsaken by God so that we would never have to be. The judgment that should have fallen on us fell instead on Jesus.

Darkness and Disintegration

These days most of us don’t know what real physical darkness is. Even when we are out in the country at night, there are always towns nearby with plenty of electric lights. If you’re in utter darkness, though, you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. And to stay in utter darkness for an extended time can have a radically disorienting effect on you. In 1914, British explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew took a ship to Antarctica. Their plan was to land, walk across Antarctica, cross over the South Pole, and continue all the way across. The plan had to be abandoned, though, because their ship, the Endurance, got caught in polar ice and was crushed. Over the following months, Shackleton’s crew fought just to survive and to get home. One of Shackleton’s biographers says that of all the difficulties they faced—including starvation and frigid temperatures—the worst thing was the darkness. Near the South Pole, the sun goes down in mid-May and doesn’t come back up until late July. There’s no daytime—no sunlight—for more than two months.

In all the world, say the biographers of polar explorers, there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. Only those who have experienced it can fully appreciate what it means to be without the sun day after day and week after week. Few unaccustomed to it can fight off its effects altogether, and it has driven some men mad. In such deep darkness you can’t see forward, so you don’t know where you’re going. You have no direction. You can’t even see yourself; you don’t know what you look like. You may as well have no identity. And you can’t tell whether there is anyone around you, friend or foe. You are isolated. Physical darkness brings disorientation, but according to the Bible, so does spiritual darkness. Spiritual darkness comes when we turn away from God as our true light and make something else the center of our life.

The Bible sometimes compares God to the sun.68 The sun is a source of visual truth, because by it we see everything. And the sun is a source of biological life, because without it nothing could live. And God, the Bible says, is the source of all truth and all life. If you orbit around God, then your life has truth and vitality. You are in the light. But if you turn away from God and orbit around anything else—your career, a relationship, your family—as the source of your warmth and your hope, the result is spiritual darkness. You are turning away from the truth, away from life, toward darkness.

When you are in spiritual darkness, although you may feel your life is headed in the right direction, you are actually profoundly disoriented.

If anything but God is more important to you, you have a problem with direction. It’s impossible to discern where you’re going, let alone where you ought to be going. Money, career, love—for a period of time you may feel you have something to live for. But if you actually get the thing you have been seeking, you suddenly realize that it’s not big enough for your soul. It doesn’t produce its own light.

Also, if you center on anything but God, you suffer a loss of identity. Your identity will be fragile and insecure, because it’s based on the things you center your life on. It’s based on human approval. It’s based on how well you perform. You don’t really know who you are. In the darkness you can’t see yourself.

Moreover, in spiritual darkness you are isolated. You are wrapped up in the things that you’re living for, so you’re always scared or angry or proud or driven or full of self-pity. As a result, you become isolated from other people.

Let me illustrate this personally. I want to be a good minister and a good preacher. But if achieving those goals becomes my real source of hope, my significance, my security, more important to me than God’s love for me in Jesus, I experience a loss of identity. A pastor is always subject to criticism, and as I wrote in chapter 11, that can be discouraging when it inevitably happens. But if my preaching and ministry are my ultimate center and I get criticism, then I’m overcome with insecurity. Or when I fail to perform up to my expectations, I’m devastated. Inordinate guilt churns inside me. In the end I begin to disintegrate. Similarly, if two people love each other more than they love God, then minor fights will become major fights, and major fights will become world-shaking cataclysms, because neither can take the other’s displeasure or the other’s failure. They become isolated from each other and eventually their relationship begins to disintegrate.

Spiritual darkness—turning away from God, the true light, and making anything more important than him—leads invariably from disorientation to disintegration. And, apart from the intervention of God, we are all in spiritual darkness. We are all orbiting around something else. And we’re all incapable of changing our orbit, because we inevitably, ultimately, seek to glorify ourselves instead of God. So we are all on a trajectory toward a life of disintegration.

But that trajectory won’t stop at the end of our lives. When God returns he will judge every action, every thought, every longing—everything our heart has ever produced. And if there is anything imperfect, then we will not be able to remain in his presence. And being out of the presence of God, who is all light and all truth, means utter darkness and eternal disintegration. The biblical prophets describe this final day of judgment:

See, the day of the LORD is coming—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it. The stars of heaven and their constellations will not show their light. The rising sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light. . . . I will put an end to the arrogance of the haughty and will humble the pride of the ruthless. . . . I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place at the wrath of the LORD Almighty, in the day of his burning anger.

(Isaiah 13:9–13)

The LORD has sworn by the Pride of Jacob: “I will never forget anything they have done.” Will not the land tremble for this, and all who live in it mourn? The whole land will rise like the Nile; it will be stirred up and then sink like the river of Egypt. “In that day,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your religious feasts into mourning and all your singing into weeping.”

(Amos 8:7–10)


This was our trajectory, and Jesus’s death was the only way to alter it. This is why Jesus had to go to the cross. He fell into the complete darkness for which we were headed. He died the death we should have died, so that we can be saved from this judgment and instead live in the light and presence of God. And how do we know it worked? Back to Mark:

When some of those standing near heard this, they said, “Listen, he’s calling Elijah.” One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink. “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down,” he said. With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”

(Mark 15:35–39)

Remember that the curtain in the temple was not a flimsy little veil; it was heavy and thick, almost as substantial as a wall. The curtain separated the holy of holies, where God’s shekinah glory dwelled, from the rest of the temple—it separated the people from the presence of God. And remember that only the holiest man, the high priest, from the holiest nation, the Jews, could enter the holy of holies—and only on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, and he had to bring a blood sacrifice, an atonement for sins. The curtain said loudly and clearly that it is impossible for anyone sinful—anyone in spiritual darkness—to come into God’s presence.

At the moment Jesus Christ died, this massive curtain was ripped open. The tear was from top to bottom, just to make clear who did it. This was God’s way of saying, “This is the sacrifice that ends all sacrifices, the way is now open to approach me.” Now that Jesus has died, anybody who believes in him can see God, connect to God. The barrier is gone for good. Our trajectory has been permanently redirected toward God. And that’s only possible because Jesus has just paid the price for our sin. Anybody who believes can go in now.

To make sure we get the point, Mark immediately shows us the first person who went in: the centurion. His confession, “Surely this man was the Son of God,” is momentous. Why? Because the first line in the first chapter of Mark refers to “Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Up to this point in Mark, no human being had figured that out. The disciples had called him the Christ, though in the prevailing culture the Christ was not considered to be divine. All along, Jesus’s teachings and acts of power—and even his testimony in front of the chief priests—had been pointing to the fact that he was divine. And people had been asking, “Who is this?” But the first person to get it was the centurion who presided over his death.

This was even more unlikely because he was Roman. Every Roman coin of the time was inscribed “Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus.” The only person a loyal Roman would ever call “Son of God” was Caesar—but this man gave the title to Jesus. And he was a hard character. Centurions were not aristocrats who got military commissions; they were enlisted men who had risen through the ranks. So this man had seen death, and had inflicted it, to a degree that you and I can hardly imagine.

Here was a hardened, brutal man. Yet something had penetrated his spiritual darkness. He became the first person to confess the deity of Jesus Christ.

There is a striking contrast between the centurion and everyone else around the cross. The disciples—who had been taught by Jesus repeatedly and at length that this day would come—were completely confused and stymied. The religious leaders had looked at the very deepest wisdom of God and rejected it.

What penetrated the centurion’s darkness? How did he suddenly come into the light? For some thirty years I have been thinking about this question, trying to figure out why it was the centurion who first understood who Jesus was. Here’s what I believe shone the light into his darkness: The centurion heard Jesus’s cry, and saw how Jesus died.

I have only ever seen one person actually breathe his last breath. I’ll never forget that experience. Very likely you, too, have been present for a death only once or twice, if at all. But the centurion had seen many people die—and many of those by his own hand. Yet even for him this death was unique. He saw something about Jesus’s death that was unlike any other. The tenderness of Jesus, despite the terror, must have pierced right through his hardness. The beauty of Jesus in his death must have flooded his darkness with light.

The Beauty of the Darkness

Christianity is the only religious faith that says that God himself actually suffered, actually cried out in suffering. Now what good is that? To Jesus’s followers assembled around the cross, it certainly seemed senseless: that there was no good in it at all. But in fact they came to realize that Jesus’s suffering was of immense good to them, as can we. Why? Because they would eventually see that they had been looking right at the greatest act of God’s love, power, and justice in history. God came into the world and suffered and died on the cross in order to save us. It is the ultimate proof of his love for us.

And when you suffer, you may be completely in the dark about the reason for your own suffering. It may seem as senseless to you as Jesus’s suffering seemed to the disciples. But the cross tells you what the reason isn’t. It can’t be that God doesn’t love you; it can’t be that he has no plan for you. It can’t be that he has abandoned you. Jesus was abandoned, and paid for our sins, so that God the Father would never abandon you. The cross proves that he loves you and understands what it means to suffer. It also demonstrates that God can be working in your life even when it seems like there is no rhyme or reason to what is happening.

Even Albert Camus, the famous existentialist, realized that if you look at the cross, you could no longer go through suffering in the same way. Camus said this:

The God-man also suffers, and does so with patience. . . . he too is shattered and dies. The night on Golgotha only has so much significance for man because in its darkness the Godhead, visibly renouncing all inherited privileges, endures to the end the anguish of death, including the depths of despair.69

Jesus Christ not only died the death we should have died—he also lived the life we should have lived but can’t. His was perfect obedience, in our place. It doesn’t matter who you are—centurion, prostitute, hit man, minister. The curtain has been ripped from top to bottom. The barrier is gone. There is forgiveness and grace for you.

By saying the centurion “heard his cry,” Mark is pressing the story right up to your ear. If you listen closely to that cry—My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?—you can see the same beauty, the same tenderness. If you see Jesus losing the infinite love of his Father out of his infinite love for you, it will melt your hardness. No matter who you are, it will open your eyes and shatter your darkness. You will at long last be able to turn away from all those other things that are dominating your life, addicting you, drawing you away from God. Jesus Christ’s darkness can dispel and destroy our own, so that in the place of hardness and darkness and death we have tenderness and light and life.

The only time I ever faced death personally was when I had thyroid cancer. From the beginning the doctors told me it was treatable. Still, when I was going under anesthesia for the surgery, I wondered what would happen. You may be curious about what passage from the Bible came to my mind. True confession: What I thought of was a passage from Lord of the Rings. It comes near the end of the third book, when evil and darkness seem overwhelming. Here is what Tolkien tells us about the thoughts of Sam, one of the heroes:

Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate . . . ceased to trouble him. . . . putting away all fear, he cast himself into a deep, untroubled sleep.70

I remember thinking at that moment: It’s really true. Because of Jesus’s death evil is a passing thing—a shadow. There is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach because evil fell into the heart of Jesus. The only darkness that could have destroyed us forever fell into his heart. It didn’t matter what happened in my surgery—it was going to be all right. And it is going to be all right.