The Death of Christ in Mark

Christ’s death and resurrection is the climax, the point, the culmination of the entire Bible.  The significance of it is too monumental for words and all we have recorded of it is in the four short gospels and they are all very similar in the amount of information they give.  So what do we know...

We know that Jesus died on a Friday, the night of Passover.  Why would Jesus not celebrate the Passover?  As Dr. Holzafel mentioned, the last supper was a Passover dinner possibly without the lamb.  At the last supper Christ instituted the sacrament and prophesied of the betrayals his apostles would commit against him the following day.  Mark 14:18, “Jesus said, ‘Verily I say unto you, One of you which eateth with me shall betray me.’”  In Mark 14:27 Jesus told them, “All ye shall be offended because of me this night.”  Mark expresses the denial of the apostles, especially Peter’s.  In Mark 14:29 Peter says, “Although all shall be offended, yet will not I.”  Christ tells him in 14:30 that “this day, even in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice.

After the supper is finished, Christ took Peter, James, and John to the Garden of Gethsemane where he tried to explain what was to happen to him and ask them to wait and watch for him.  As he suffered for the sins of the world, his three disciples fell asleep, three times.  When he was finished and had woken Peter, James, and John, they saw Judas come upon them followed by a large entourage of soldiers and priests.  Judas kissed Jesus because he had told the group that whomever he kissed would be Jesus.  It would be the first and probably most monumental betrayal of the night.  The men with Judas took Christ and began to take him away but one of the men with Christ took his sword and cut off the ear of the servant of one of the high priests.  Today in class we discussed what happened next.  The apostles who went with Christ to the garden originally stood to defend him, as mentioned before, but when they realized he wasn’t going to defend himself, they fled.

What followed next were trials full of false witnesses and Pilate asking the people to choose between Jesus and Barabbus, an enemy of the government.  The people chose Christ to die and Barabbus was set free.  During all this, as Peter was questioned multiple times, he denied Christ all three times.  Mark 14:72, “And when he [Peter] thought thereon, he wept.”  Finally, Christ was put on the cross and he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  Unlike the other gospels, Jesus’ last words are not given in the book of Mark but we know that a centurion who watched cried, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”  It’s interesting to realize that chapter sixteen is not all Mark.  What we do know is that Mark at least implies that Christ had risen three days later.