Mark 15:33-39 — Forsaken

FRANK EDWARDS: "Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me." It is a strange line when you stop to think about it. A rod was a club and a staff was a long stick, and David says they comfort him. Today, at the cross, there are sticks everywhere: a soldier's staff, a reed held up with sour wine, an officer's badge of rank, and behind them all the rod of God's judgment. Today is about which way that rod came down, and why it makes the end of verse four true. LINDA BROWN: Welcome to Dig Deeper. I'm Linda Brown, here with Frank Edwards, and this is step thirteen of our sixteen steps through Psalm 23. Last time Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane and his friends ran. Since then, overnight, he has been tried, mocked, and handed over to the Romans, and at nine in the morning he was crucified. Today's reading is the last hours. Mark chapter fifteen, verses thirty-three to thirty-nine. From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. At the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" When some of those standing nearby heard this, they said, "Behold, He is calling Elijah." And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine. He put it on a reed and held it up for Jesus to drink, saying, "Leave Him alone. Let us see if Elijah comes to take Him down." But Jesus let out a loud cry and breathed His last. And the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. When the centurion standing there in front of Jesus saw how He had breathed His last, he said, "Truly this man was the Son of God!" FRANK EDWARDS: Mark keeps careful time on this day. A few verses earlier he says, "It was the third hour when they crucified Him," about nine in the morning. Then darkness from the sixth hour to the ninth, noon to three. The prophet Amos had used that picture for God's judgment: "I will make the sun go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the daytime." And before the first Passover, "total darkness covered all the land of Egypt for three days." Darkness over the land is what judgment looks like in Scripture. LINDA BROWN: It could not have been an eclipse, either. Passover fell at the full moon, and an eclipse of the sun only happens at a new moon. FRANK EDWARDS: An eclipse lasts minutes, not three hours, and it cannot happen at full moon. Mark offers no natural explanation. He reports darkness at noon on the day the Son of God was dying, and he leaves the reader to hear Amos. LINDA BROWN: On step six we heard what the rod and the staff were: the rod, shevet, a club against wild animals, and the staff, a long stick to lean on. What does the cross add to that? FRANK EDWARDS: A third meaning of shevet. The same word is a shepherd's club and a king's scepter, and it is also the rod of discipline and judgment. When God made his covenant with David, he said of David's royal son, "When he does wrong, I will discipline him with the rod of men and with the blows of the sons of men." That is Second Samuel 7. Psalm 89 repeats it for all David's line: "I will attend to their transgression with the rod, and to their iniquity with stripes." And Lamentations 3 opens, "I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of God's wrath." LINDA BROWN: So the rod that protects the sheep can also come down on someone. FRANK EDWARDS: On a son of David who does wrong. At the cross, David's greatest Son comes under that rod, and he has done no wrong at all. Isaiah 53 says why: "He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed." And a few verses later, "it was the LORD's will to crush Him." The rod meant for the sins of David's sons fell on the one Son who had none. LINDA BROWN: Then the cry at three o'clock. "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" It is the first line of Psalm 22. FRANK EDWARDS: Word for word. And Psalm 22 sits right before Psalm 23 in the book. The cry of the forsaken comes first, and then "The LORD is my shepherd." The forsakenness was real. He was bearing judgment that was not his own. Paul says in Galatians 3 that "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us." And still, listen to the words. Not "God," but "My God," twice. Even under the rod, he speaks to the Father he has always known. LINDA BROWN: Psalm 22 does not stay in that cry, though. It turns before it ends. FRANK EDWARDS: It turns to praise. "I will proclaim Your name to my brothers; I will praise You in the assembly." And then a line that answers the first one: "For He has not despised or detested the torment of the afflicted. He has not hidden His face from him, but has attended to his cry for help." The cry "why have You forsaken Me?" opens a psalm that ends with God hearing. The forsakenness was real, and it was not the end. LINDA BROWN: Micah saw the rod coming down on a ruler, didn't he? In the chapter that promises a king from Bethlehem. FRANK EDWARDS: Micah 5: "With a rod they will strike the cheek of the judge of Israel." The word for rod there is shevet, the same as Psalm 23. And Mark shows it happening. A few verses before today's reading, the soldiers "kept striking His head with a staff and spitting on Him." In Greek that word for staff is kalamos. It is the same word as the reed in today's reading. LINDA BROWN: The reed with the sponge on it. Someone fills a sponge with sour wine and lifts it up, saying, "Let us see if Elijah comes to take Him down." FRANK EDWARDS: The bystanders misheard Eloi as Elijah. Sour wine was the cheap drink of soldiers and laborers. Psalm 69, another psalm of a righteous sufferer, says, "They poisoned my food with gall and gave me vinegar to quench my thirst." So one reed struck him and another reed held vinegar to his lips. And Isaiah 42, a passage Matthew applies to Jesus, says, "A bruised reed He will not break." The soldiers used a reed against him. He never breaks the weak ones who come to him. LINDA BROWN: We have heard a lot about the rod today. What about the staff? FRANK EDWARDS: On step six we heard that the word for staff, mish'enet, comes from the verb to lean. A staff is what you put your weight on. Mark says only that Jesus let out a loud cry. Luke tells us what he cried: "Father, into Your hands I commit My Spirit." Those words come from Psalm 31, a prayer of trust. Under the rod, the Son still put his whole weight on his Father at the moment of death. And John 10 gives the Father's side of it: "The reason the Father loves Me is that I lay down My life in order to take it up again." LINDA BROWN: Mark gives only the cry and the last breath. And in that same moment, "the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom." FRANK EDWARDS: The curtain hung before the Most Holy Place, the place of God's presence. In Leviticus 16 God warned that the high priest must "not enter freely into the Most Holy Place behind the veil," or he would die. From top to bottom, no human hand did it. The verb is the one Mark used at Jesus' baptism, when he "saw the heavens breaking open." Heaven torn open at the start of the Gospel, and the veil torn at the end. LINDA BROWN: Isaiah 40 opens with "Comfort, comfort My people," and the next lines say what the comfort is: "proclaim to her that her forced labor has been completed; her iniquity has been pardoned." FRANK EDWARDS: That is comfort in the Bible's sense. Not a soothing feeling. The news that the debt is settled. And that is what the torn veil announces. Hebrews 10 says, "we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way opened for us through the curtain of His body." The rod of judgment has fallen on the Shepherd, so the sheep can come into God's presence. That is why "they comfort me" is true. LINDA BROWN: Paul ties comfort to the cross in Second Corinthians 1. "For just as the sufferings of Christ overflow to us, so also through Christ our comfort overflows." FRANK EDWARDS: The comfort flows from the place where he suffered. The sheep in Psalm 23 says, "You are with me," and, "Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me." The cross is where the Shepherd said, "Why have You forsaken Me?" so that his sheep could say those lines and mean them. LINDA BROWN: Then the centurion. He was most likely the officer in charge of the execution, and Mark places him "standing there in front of Jesus." Mark gives him the last words spoken at the cross: "Truly this man was the Son of God!" FRANK EDWARDS: A centurion commanded about a hundred soldiers, and Roman writers describe centurions with a stick of vine wood as the badge of their rank, used to beat their own men into line. So the officer standing in front of the cross had a rod of his own. Mark tells us what moved him: he "saw how He had breathed His last." In the Roman world, "son of God" was a title used of the emperor. A soldier of Caesar gives it to a crucified Jew. Mark's first line called Jesus "the Son of God," and this Gentile is the first human being in the Gospel to say it. LINDA BROWN: Shepherds also used the rod to count sheep, didn't they? Leviticus 27 talks about animals that pass "under the shepherd's rod." FRANK EDWARDS: Every tenth animal that "passes under the shepherd's rod." The rod counted the flock one by one. And Ezekiel 20 turns that into a promise: "I will make you pass under the rod and will bring you into the bond of the covenant." At the foot of the cross a Roman officer is counted in. Psalm 22, the psalm of the cry, says, "All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD." And Jesus said in John 10, "I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them in as well." LINDA BROWN: So the rod at the cross does two things. It falls on the Shepherd, and it counts in sheep who were never part of the flock. FRANK EDWARDS: Both, and the second depends on the first. Because the rod of judgment came down on him, every sheep who comes to him passes under his rod only to be counted and kept. Hebrews 13 calls him "that great Shepherd of the sheep," brought back from the dead "through the blood of the eternal covenant." He still holds the rod and the staff, and for his flock they are only comfort now. Hear the cry again, and then the line from the psalm. "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. [long pause] LINDA BROWN: For a way to take this into an ordinary week, the Apply This Today section in the app picks it up. Next time, Mark sixteen: the women at the empty tomb, the message that he is going ahead of his disciples into Galilee, and the psalm's last line, "I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever." FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is a free app, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I. LINDA BROWN: Thanks for listening, and for standing at the cross with Mark today.