Terry’s Take… Centurion Called It!
One of the strangest lines in the Gospels is uttered by the centurion at the foot of the Cross. In Mark, we are told that when he saw that Jesus had “breathed his last,” he said: “Truly this man was the Son of God.” (15:39)
One would have thought this was the last thing a person would say after seeing a man die. Everyone knows that the one thing gods don’t do is die. Thus, it would have made more sense if, the moment the centurion saw Jesus die, he had said: “Well, clearly that guy wasn’t a god.”
Had Jesus shot fifty feet up in the air and shot laser beams out of his eyes, then we might imagine the centurion saying, “Uh oh, that was the son of God.” After which, he might have run for cover, reasoning that the man, now so revealed, would not be entirely pleased with those who treated him so badly — what with the whole spitting, taunting, scourging, crowning with thorns, and nailing him to the Cross business.
But Christ didn’t shoot fifty feet in the air and shoot laser beams out of his eyes. That’s comic book stuff. No, He died: something “gods” are never supposed to do. And yet it was at that moment the centurion said, “Truly, this man was the Son of God.”
Why was it important for Marks to include this?
I found this from a treatise on this odd statement:
Mark likely included the story because it represented something important about the faith of the early Church. The apostles weren’t proclaiming the divinity of Chrst in spite of His death on the Cross, but because of it. They weren’t hiding the fact of Christ’s death; rather, they were proclaiming that, contrary to what anyone would imagine, His death on the Cross was the decisive revelation of his divinity and His role as our divine Redeemer.
And that, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, is Good News to our ears this Easter Season!