Mark 15:39 NASB95
When the centurion, who was standing right in front of Him, saw the way He breathed His last, he said, “Truly, this man was the Son of God!”
If you’ve read the gospel accounts of how cruelly physically and verbally Jesus was treated on Good Friday, then you know that He was spit on, slapped many times in the face, was beaten with fists, was scourged by the Roman soldiers, had a crown of thorns pressed into His brow, was beaten in the head with a read, was mocked incessantly (so much so that Mark 15:29 says that while hanging on the cross those who are passing by were “hurling abuse at Him”), and even the two thieves that were crucified on either side of Him more insulting Him. In light of all this, Mark 15:39 is one of my favorite verses.
The Holy Spirit emphasizes that the centurion was standing right in front of Jesus, and when he saw “the way” Jesus breathed His last, he became a believer. I believe what the centurion saw in the almost unrecognizably swollen and bloodied face of Jesus, and what he heard in His voice was the love of God. The centurion encountered the true nature of God’s heart, as he stood in front of the battered and abused Christ. Broken humanity had hurled its worst at Jesus, and instead of defending Himself or striking back, Jesus loved them. By His stripes, humanity could finally experience healing from our fallenness and brokenness. This is what love looks like. This is who the real Jesus is that lives in us. He doesn’t get offended or defensive. He doesn’t get resentful and never wants to get even. He won by not trying to win.
Jesus made seven statements from the cross, and the first statement, according to Luke 23:34, was, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” In the original language that the New Testament was written in, the grammar here tells us that this was a statement Jesus had been saying over and over again leading up to His being nailed to the cross. With every blow and every abusive word directed at Him, Jesus was continually uttering these words of grace and mercy. Maybe these are the words that changed the heart of one of the thieves being crucified next to Jesus and caused him to surrender his life to Christ. I’m sure those words played a role in the centurion’s conclusion that Jesus was the son of God. Whatever it was, likely the culmination of the totality of Jesus’s response, love was what wrecked the centurion’s heart. I’m sure that when he looked into the face of Christ, Jesus was staring back at him as if he was the most important person Jesus had ever known.
When people stand right in front of us, do we see them as the most important person we have ever had before us? Regardless of their behavior towards us, do they experience Jesus intensely loving them (for love never fails), or do they encounter the defensiveness, insecurity, anger, and resentment of our flesh? I know it may sound like I’m asking you to live a life that’s impossible. The fact is, it doesn’t just sound like that because that’s exactly what I’m saying. The Christian life is impossible, but remarkably, we have been grafted into the very life of Jesus (that same Jesus whom the centurion stood right in front of), and therefore, nothing that God requires of us seems unreasonable to Him. In reality, is not that God requires these things of us; it’s that He offers this life to us because it is the astonishing life and life more abundant that Jesus said He came to share with us, and live through us.