At the Ninth Hour

In Nomine Iesu
Mark 15:34-39
March 25, 2018
Palm/Passion Sunday

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus~

This Sunday has it all—everything from pomp, pageantry and praise . . . to torture, execution, and burial. Joy-filled shouts of “Hosanna” to hate-filled cries for crucifixion. This is the Sunday so nice they named it twice. It’s Palm Sunday; it’s also the Sunday of the Passion. Palms and Passion. Cheers and jeers. Triumph and tragedy meet head-on this day—in Jesus the Christ.

The Gospel according to Saint Mark has been our guide to the life of Jesus for most of this year. Mark is the most concise of the four gospels. But if you happen to make it back here next Sunday to celebrate the resurrection (which I hope you will), what you will discover about the Gospel of Mark is that it ends with a whimper—not with a bang. Easter according to St. Mark only has an angel and a few fearful women who are too scared to say anything to anyone. It’s not a very grand finale. But then again, it’s not intended to be.

No, the finale—the climax of Mark’s gospel—is found in that long reading you heard today from chapter fifteen. Specifically, everything comes to a head at the ninth hour. Now, the “ninth hour” is not nine o’clock, but three o’clock—three o’clock in the afternoon. It’s the ninth hour because it’s been about nine hours since the sun had risen. But by this ninth hour, on this Friday afternoon, there was only darkness. Four things happen in rapid sequence at the ninth hour. And these four things are why Good Friday is called Good Friday.

At the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These words of Jesus from the cross are the only words from the cross that Saint Mark chose to record for us. You have to

look elsewhere for the other six sayings. But these words are crucial to understanding what’s happening. Jesus is quoting Psalm 22—a Psalm that reads like a blow-by-blow commentary on the events of Good Friday. But this one verse tells us all we need to know.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? God the Father has forsaken His one and only Son. He has abandoned Jesus. He has turned a deaf ear to His prayers, and a blind eye to His suffering. And this is hell. When you and I reflect on the bleakest and most hopeless periods of our lives, we sometimes say, “It was a living hell.” But not really. The only person to endure a “living hell” in the strict sense was Jesus. And He endures it for you. He’s bearing your sin. He’s taking your punishment. He who knew no sin became sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. As Isaiah reminds us, “it was the will of the Lord to crush Him” (53:10).

Last Sunday I asked the children to remember the worst sin they had ever committed. And I heard from a few of you adults after the service, that you didn’t really care for that question. It’s not too pleasant to ponder and, for some of us, it’s quite a challenge to choose which one of our many sins is the worst. Whatever the sin that you’d rather not recall—see it with Jesus in the living hell of His crucifixion. It’s why He was forsaken by His Father, so that His Father will never forsake you—so that your sin (even your worst sin) will never stand between you and your Father in heaven.

At the ninth hour, at the moment Jesus died, two things happen almost simultaneously: He “uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” The fact that Jesus could cry out loudly is remarkable when you consider what His body was going through at that moment. Many of you know that death by crucifixion is actually death by asphyxiation. As the hours pass by, the ability of a crucified man to draw oxygen into his lungs becomes less and less. Breathing becomes labored and shallow. You can’t shout or cry out unless you’ve got air in your lungs. But Jesus found a way. And with that loud cry He gave up His life for us.

At that exact moment—less than a mile away—a critical curtain in the temple was torn in two. This curtain separated the Holy of Holies (God’s dwelling place on earth) from what was called the Holy Place. No one except the High Priest could ever pass through that curtain into God’s presence—and he could do it only once a year on Yom Kippur, and only being properly vested and bearing blood to atone for the sins of the people.

But at the ninth hour, at the moment Jesus died, God Himself tore down that curtain. The temple and its sacrificial system had become obsolete. The blood of God’s own Lamb had atoned for the sins of the world. And all who are covered by that blood now have full and free access to God. Jesus, our great High Priest, has opened the way for us with His own flesh and blood. And now nothing is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And now comes the climax. Now comes the grand finale. And quite surprisingly, this moment of maximum significance in the Gospel according to Saint Mark is entrusted to a no-name centurion—a Roman soldier who had witnessed our Lord’s crucifixion from a seat in the front row. When the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

Now the true significance of the centurion’s statement only becomes clear as you reflect back on the previous 14 chapters of Mark’s gospel. You probably noticed how, in His earthly ministry, Jesus often commanded those who experienced His divine power to say nothing about it. It began with the demons and the unclean spirits. Jesus ordered them not to tell who He was. He placed that same gag order on other ordinary folks who had witnessed wonders—a man healed of leprosy, Jairus whose dead daughter was raised to life, to a deaf and mute man whose hearing and speech Jesus restored—to all of these people who had experienced Jesus to be the Son of God firsthand—Jesus said, “Shhh. Don’t tell anyone. Keep it quiet.” Even when Peter had explicitly confessed, “You are the Christ,” and after Peter, James, and John saw His heavenly glory on the Mount of Transfiguration—Jesus told them to keep quiet and tell no one.

But now, finally, at the ninth hour, a centurion spills the beans: Truly this man was the Son of God! That centurion is a stand-in for all of us—for all of us who will follow Jesus this week from Bethany to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem to Calvary’s cross. We’re “in” on the secret together with this no-name centurion. Only when Jesus has breathed His last—only when He has been reduced to a corpse on a cross—only then does He allow the truth to be confessed by the most unlikely of people, including you and me.

We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with that centurion. For our baptism has also given us a front row seat to witness what happened to Jesus on Good Friday. Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were crucified with Him. We were buried with Him. And we have a share in His resurrection from the dead. And until that day when we depart this life to be with Christ, we make it our goal to say with the centurion: This man was the Son of God. Not only that, but we make it our goal to live and speak and serve in such a way that we are always bearing witness to Jesus, the Son of God.

Part of what makes Mark’s gospel unique is that it was first written for Christians who were being persecuted. For them, to say with the centurion that Jesus Christ was the Son of God—well, it might have been enough to get them killed. Following Jesus is never easy. One day your own “ninth hour” will come. But whether your “ninth hour” passes with a whimper or a bang, remember what Saint Mark shows us today: You can trust this Jesus. Behold all that He has done for you. See the depths of His love for you. He will never leave you or forsake you. You are precious to Him. He is—truly—the Son of God, your Savior.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.