Simon From Cyrene Carried It

Mark gives the crucifixion itself four words. Before that he stops to tell us about a man walking into town.

Simon of Cyrene had come in from the country and had nothing to do with any of this. The soldiers pulled him off the road and put the cross on him, and then Mark does something odd for a man only passing through and gives us his two sons' names, Alexander and Rufus. Nobody names a stranger's children like that unless the people reading it know who they are.

At 8:34 Jesus told a crowd that anyone who wanted to come after him had to take up his cross. The men who heard him say it have all run, and the person actually walking behind him with a cross on his shoulder is a bystander who was given no say at all.

Then Golgotha, which Mark stops to translate: the Place of the Skull. They offer him wine mixed with myrrh, which was what you gave a man to dull the pain. He will not drink it. He goes into this awake.

And they crucified Him.

No description follows. Mark, who found room for a cushion in a boat and a servant's ear, spends four words on the central event of his book and moves on. Everybody reading him then had seen one done. He did not need to explain it, and it reads as though he did not want to.

What he sets down instead is the procedure and the pettiness around the edges. Soldiers gambling for the clothes. The hour of the morning. The charge on a board, THE KING OF THE JEWS. Two robbers, one on his right and one on his left, the arrangement James and John had once asked him for.

Some of this is older than that morning. A psalm of David has them dividing his garments and casting lots for his clothing, and everybody who sees him sneering and shaking their heads. Isaiah has a servant numbered with the transgressors, and here he is filed between two criminals. Mark points none of it out. He writes down what happened, and what happened is what those pages already said.

The mocking comes in waves. Passers-by shake their heads and throw the temple charge back at him.

come down from the cross and save Yourself!

The chief priests are cleverer, and say it to each other rather than to his face.

He saved others, but He cannot save Himself!

They meant it as a joke, and they had just said the one thing all morning that was exactly right. Saving others and saving himself were two different roads, and he had chosen already, which is why the last line here is the loneliest in the book: even the two men dying beside him joined in.