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The Centurion and the Cross
“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 15:37-39
Centurions were hard men, fighting men. To rise through the ranks to command 100 soldiers, you had to be tough. As Tim Keller points out in "King’s Cross," this fellow had, without doubt, seen a lot of death and done a lot of killing. He had seen crucifixions before, that most terrible of humiliations that Rome inflicted, but something about this death, this crucifixion, was different. Something about it led this battle-hardened man to be the very first in Mark’s Gospel who saw Jesus for who He really was: the Son of God.
What was it? What did the centurion see?
It was not, surely, that this was a death marked by the absence of pain or suffering. We say sometimes someone "slipped away peacefully” in death, but this was not that kind. Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” No, the death of Jesus was painful and prolonged, not peaceful and quick.
Then what was it that the centurion saw?
We are told by the other Gospel accounts that Jesus’ last cry was not just a shout, but a statement: “It is finished!” (John 19:30) Not just in the sense of being over with, but it is accomplished, it is fulfilled. The point of a crucifixion was to render a victim powerless, humiliated, but somehow, on the Cross, Jesus maintained the sense of command and authority that He always had. Jesus had known that the Cross was His mission and that now He had accomplished everything. Christ ruled even from the Cross. Precisely where the centurion had always seen defeat, here the Cross had been turned into victory.
Command and victory on the Cross, then, but also something more. For it was unmistakable that Jesus was dying as an offering, that it was somehow for us, even for those of us with hammers in our hands.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” Jesus said (Luke 23:34). The centurion had killed many men for Rome and here he was ensuring the death of another. He had undoubtedly seen bitter hatred in the eyes of many of his victims and he had grown jaded to it. But here, he saw something he had never seen before in the eyes of a dying man: mercy and love. And this pierced the armor of his hard heart like nothing else ever had.
“Surely,” he said, “this man was the Son of God!”
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