demanded whence He derived His right so to act. When they
refused to answer His question as to the authority of John the
Baptist He in turn refused to tell them His own. But He
uttered a parable which more than answered them. The owner
of the vineyard, who had sent his servants and last of all his only
son, would visit their rejection and murder on the wicked
husbandmen. He added a reminder that the stone which the
builders refused was, after all, the Divine choice. They were
restrained from arresting Him by fear of the people, to whom
the meaning of the parable was plain. They therefore sent a
joint deputation of Pharisees and Herodians to entrap Him
with a question as to the Roman tribute, in answering which He
must either lose His influence with the people or else lay
Himself open to a charge of treason. When they were baffled, the
Sadducees, to whose party the chief priests belonged, sought in
vain to pose Him with a problem as to the resurrection of the
dead; and after that a more honest scribe confessed the truth
of His teaching as to the supremacy of love to God and man over
all the sacrificial worship of the Temple, and was told in reply
that he was not far from the kingdom of God. Jesus Himself
now put a question as to the teaching of the scribes which
identified the Messiah with “the Son of David”; and then
He denounced those scribes whose pride and extortion and
hypocrisy were preparing for them a terrible doom. Before He
left the Temple, never to return, one incident gave Him pure
satisfaction. His own teaching that all must be given for God
was illustrated by the devotion of a poor widow who cast into
the treasury the two tiny coins which were all that she had.
As He passed out He foretold, in words which corresponded to
the doom of the fig-tree, the utter demolition of the imposing
but profitless Temple; and presently He opened up to four of
His disciples a vision of the future, warning them against false
Christs, bidding them expect great sorrows, national and
personal, declaring that the gospel must be proclaimed to all
the nations, and that after a great tribulation the Son of Man
should appear, “coming with the clouds of heaven.” The day
and the hour none knew, neither the angels nor the Son, but
only the Father: it was the duty of all to watch.
We now come to the final scenes. The passover was approaching, and plots were being laid for His destruction. He Himself spoke mysteriously of His burial, when a woman poured a vase of costly ointment upon His head. To some this seemed a wasteful act; but He accepted it as Final Scenes. a token of the love which gave all that was in its power, and He promised that it should never cease to illustrate His Gospel. Two of the disciples were sent into Jerusalem to prepare the Passover meal. During the meal Jesus declared that He should be betrayed by one of their number. Later in the evening He gave them bread and wine, proclaiming that these were His body and His blood—the tokens of His giving Himself to them, and of a new covenant with God through His death. As they withdrew to the Mount of Olives He foretold their general flight, but promised that when He was risen He would go before them into Galilee. Peter protested faithfulness unto death, but was told that he would deny his Master three times that very night. Then coming to a place called Gethsemane, He bade the disciples wait while He should pray; and taking the three who had been with Him at the Transfiguration He told them to tarry near Him and to watch. He went forward, and fell on the ground, praying that “the cup might be taken away” from Him, but resigning Himself to His Father’s will. Presently Judas arrived with a band of armed men, and greeted his Master with a kiss—the signal for His arrest. The disciples fled in panic, after one of them had wounded the high priest’s servant. Only a nameless young man tried to follow, but he too fled when hands were laid upon him. Before the high priest Jesus was charged, among other accusations, with threatening to destroy the Temple; but the matter was brought to an issue when He was plainly asked if He were “the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One.” He answered that He was, and He predicted that they should see the fulfilment of Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power. Thereupon He was condemned to death for manifest blasphemy, and a scene of cruel mockery followed. Meanwhile Peter in the court below had been sitting with the servants, and in his anxiety to escape recognition had thrice declared that he did not know Jesus. Thus the night passed, and in the morning Jesus was taken to Pilate, for the Jewish council had no power to execute their decree of death. Pilate’s question, “Art Thou the King of the Jews?” shows the nature of the accusation which was thought likely to tell with the Roman governor. He had already in bonds one leader of revolution, whose hands were stained with blood—a striking contrast to the calm and silent figure who stood before him. At this moment a crowd came up to ask the fulfilment of his annual act of grace, the pardon of a prisoner at the Passover. Pilate, discerning that it was the envy of the rulers which sought to destroy an inconvenient rival, offered “the King of the Jews” as the prisoner to be released. But the chief priests succeeded in making the people ask for Barabbas and demand the crucifixion of Jesus. Pilate fulfilled his pledge by giving them the man of their choice, and Jesus, whom he had vainly hoped to release on a satisfactory pretext, he now condemned to the shameful punishments of scourging and crucifixion; for the cross, as Jesus had foreseen, was the inevitable fate of a Jewish pretender to sovereignty. The Roman soldiers mocked “the King of the Jews” with a purple robe and a crown of thorns. As they led Him out they forced the cross, which the sufferer commonly carried, upon the shoulders of one Simon of Cyrene, whose sons Alexander and Rufus are here mentioned—probably as being known to St Mark’s readers; at any rate, it is interesting to note that, in writing to the Christians at Rome, St Paul a few years earlier had sent a greeting to “Rufus and his mother.” Over the cross, which stood between two others, was the condemnatory inscription, “The King of the Jews.” This was the Roman designation of Him whom the Jewish rulers tauntingly addressed as “the King of Israel.” The same revilers, with a deeper truth than they knew, summed up the mystery of His life and death when they said, “He saved others, Himself He cannot save.”
A great darkness shrouded the scene for three hours, and then, in His native Aramaic, Jesus cried in the words of the Psalm, “My God, My God, why has Thou forsaken Me?” One other cry He uttered, and the end came, and at that moment the veil of the Temple was rent from top to bottom—an omen of fearful import to those who had mocked Him, even on the cross, as the destroyer of the Temple, who in three days should build it anew. The disciples of Jesus do not appear as spectators of the end, but only a group of women who had ministered to His needs in Galilee, and had followed Him up to Jerusalem. These women watched His burial, which was performed by a Jewish councillor, to whom Pilate had granted the body after the centurion had certified the reality of the unexpectedly early death. The body was placed in a rock-hewn tomb, and a great stone was rolled against the entrance. Sunset brought on the Jewish sabbath, but the next evening the women brought spices to anoint the body, and at sunrise on the third day they arrived at the tomb, and saw that the stone was rolled away. They entered and found a young man in a white robe, who said, “He is risen, He is not here,” and bade them say to His disciples and Peter, “He goeth before you into Galilee; there ye shall see Him, as He said unto you.” In terror they fled from the tomb, “and they said nothing to any man, for they feared . . .”
So with a broken sentence the narrative ends. The document is imperfect, owing probably to the accidental loss of its last leaf. In very early times attempts were made to furnish it with a fitting close; but neither of the supplements which we find in manuscripts can be regarded as coming from the original writer. If we ask what must, on grounds of literary probability, have been added before the record was closed, we may content ourselves here with saying that some incident must certainly have been narrated which should have realized the twice-repeated promise that Jesus would be seen by His disciples in Galilee.
3. Document used by St Matthew and St Luke.—We pass on now to compare with this narrative of St Mark another very early
