John Mark's Crucifixion

Mark's account of the crucifixion, I thought first after reading it to my children, reads like Hemingway:  acerbic, third person narration blocked heavily by periods, only made diachromatic by almost unexplained dialogue tossed as life buoys into the choppy seas of a fated world.  "It was the third hour when they crucified him.  The written notice aof 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" (Mark 15: 25-27). 

Then, too, it's an orchestration, a drama that's carefully constructed.  Everyone, as they say, has their part:  the soldiers play an especially brutal part, conducting a mock-drama within the drama, going so far as to dress Jesus up, role-playing in a way that belies their desire to rise up against those who "lord it over them" and to let loose violence on those beneath them.  Mark gets about as lyrical as ever does in this passage with the word "homage," connoting the complexity within the banality of the soldiers' actions.  Immediately, then, Simon of Cyrene makes his way across the stage, a shout-out to Mark's modern day audience, the narrative vaccilating from violence to compassion in three verses. 

There's setting as well, of course--setting plays a huge part though you don't have to notice it.  For most of the gospel writers "Golgotha" echoed through the dimensions.  "They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull)."  The narrative dips into darkness and terror here, something Hemingway would never do.  It's all deserts in Hemingway but this is horror.  However, Mark returns to understatement, it would seem, in noting, "At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour."  "By the way, the whole cosmos was off for three hours while Jesus died," the author tosses in here.  "Make of it what you will." 

Once people start talking, however, they all have their part, all with the same tone, almost the same words, like a Greek chorus.  Yet the characters are not faceless and attempt to throw Jesus' words back in his face.  "So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three deays, come down from the cross, and save yourself!" "He saved others...but he can't save himself."  With all this emphasis on individual salvation, this could 21st Century United States instead of ancient Palestine. 

When Jesus himself speaks the opening verse of Psalm 22, no one quite gets it.  But "one man" acts:  "One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink," then pronounces "Now leave him alone.  Let's see if Elijah comes to take him down."

I want to know about "one man."  Who is this "one man"?  What is this action--this urgent action with deep ambivalence--all about?  Apparently, Jesus drinking wine vinegar is fulfilling prophecy, yet Mark's streamlined narrative is not Matthew, fulfilling prophecy for a Jewish audience.  Perhaps "one man" is every man, every reader sitting back and waiting to decide, waiting for proof, proving precisly faithless in the waiting.

But faith does have the last word of course.  Faith springs from the horror of Golgotha precisely where this narrative started, with the brutality of the soldiers.  Out of the stone hearts of military men comes the most profound statement of faith, as God brings forth the water of heaven from the rock of earth once again.  "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!'"  John Mark saves one of his most layered sentences for this soldier:  a title (centurion), a location ("he'd been standing right there, people, he had not only the closest view, but a brutal hand in this murder"), an interpretation (when he saw all these things, all these bizarre things--it all added up for him to a declaration), and an action, a step of faith. 

True to his juxtaposition throughout the passage, John Mark turns his camera from this hardened soldier to the women at a distance, and the drama is complete, all humanity present even more so than they are in the symbolic Pequod from Moby Dick, and certainly more present than in the semi-fascist Hemingway. 

It's tremendous writing, writing that stands back and sketches the scene powerfully, writing that draws us into the action in a way that forces us to confront our own belief or lack thereof:  are we standing back with the false action of "one man"?  Or are we more guilty--and more convicted--with the brutality and confession of the centurion?  In John Mark's account of the crucifixion, he calls us to declare our allegiance once and for all.