33 When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land[g] until three in the afternoon. 34 At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 35 When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for Elijah.” 36 And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” 37 Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. 38 And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. 39 Now when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” [Mark 15:33-39, NRSV]
Truly this man was the Son of God, by Clark Kelley.
The religious leaders, who charged Jesus with blasphemy, were really only interested in domination over the people’s religious beliefs and practices. In collusion with the Roman secular governor of the day whose primary concern was civil unrest, they had Jesus crucified. Jesus died in total isolation and humiliation, besieged by an awful feeling of Godforsakenness: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” (Mark 15:34). He appeared to have failed. But the centurion at the foot of the cross glimpsed the truth way beyond the unfaithful religious leaders and the duplicitous Pontius Pilate possibly could. He saw, and believed, that Jesus was “truly the Son of God”.
- This is a powerful reminder of Jesus’ great sacrifice for humankind.
- From the mouth of a stunned centurion, we hear a colossal Christian paradox – that the story of Jesus on the Cross is a story of triumph through failure, a story of his suffering and death being the greatest acts in human history, a story of self-sacrifice so profound that prisoners of sin in a world that God “loved so much” (John 3:16) might ultimately be set free.
That centurion draws our attention to both the historical fact and the spiritual foundation on which the Church emerged and will always emerge. Just as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed has it, the Christian Church emerged from the historical fact that, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried.” The centurion saw it all, at close range. What he proclaimed at the foot of the cross carries huge implications for believers. We select three points for brief reflection.
- It Is Possible to Come to Faith before the Resurrection
First and foremost, the time being (Good) Friday afternoon, and three days before the Resurrection, the Centurion professing Jesus as the Son of God assures us that it is possible to have faith in Jesus before his resurrection. This is quite apart from the fact that this pre-resurrection faith was yet incomplete and has to be complemented by a resurrection-faith. The point is, however, the faith manifested by the centurion compels us to return to the Gospels the bulk of which ought to help us open our eyes and our hearts to observe more seriously the pre-resurrection and saving life story of Jesus of Nazareth – his teaching, his life, his mercy for sinning humanity, and his compassion for the Poor and marginalised. Collectively, they constitute the historical, noble life of a son of God whom the early believers, like the centurion, soon came to vehemently believe was truly the Son of God. This is the life which led him to be pinioned on the cross by the conniving religious and political leaders of the time. But this at the same time is precisely the very life which found favour with God the Father who affirmed who Jesus was and what he stood for: Jesus was in full alignment with and utter obedience to God’s will. For all that, God raised him on the third day and made him both Lord and Christ (Acts 2:32-36). Christ saves, not just by his death and resurrection, but by his life, death and resurrection.
- A Particular Kind of Messiah – the Suffering Servant of God
Secondly, the centurion had somehow sensed that this Jesus who suffered horrendously was truly the Jewish Saviour after all. But while in naming Jesus “the Son of God”, the centurion appeared to point us to the ontology of Christ – his metaphysical nature or being – perhaps even more profoundly, he unwittingly pointed us to a particular kind of Christ – one foretold in the ancient Scriptures and yet rejected by the religious leaders. In this, the Gentile centurion became the first person to help the Church see a different kind of God and a different kind of religion – namely, a God who suffers for and with His people. The Crucified Jesus would emerge in the nascent Church’s understanding as the Suffering Servant of God. Willingly suffering and sacrificing for the sake of others becomes the leitmotif of the life of Christ, the true Son of God, by whose wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53:4-5).
From the dark wounds of Jesus’ Passion on Good Friday – wounds which the religious leaders sneered at and sinisterly applauded – the Church did within three days emerge, when the Resurrection happened, when disciples began to see and believe.
Pending Resurrection, the centurion was right. He too, saw all that the religious leaders had seen, perhaps in even greater detail, on account of his job and his proximity to the actual acts of humiliation and physical torture committed on Jesus. He saw extreme torture, cross-carrying on public display all the way to Golgotha, and crucifixion carried out by his soldiers. He saw too, despite extreme suffering, Jesus’ magnanimity towards the good thief and his enemies who nailed him to the cross. He heard his final words of conversation with his God whom he called Father. He knew that Pilate believed Jesus to be innocent. He then witnessed the three hours of darkness (Mark 15:33) and the earthquake upon Jesus’ death. While he was at Golgotha, he might not have heard of the veil in the Temple ripping from top to bottom upon the death of Jesus, but he certainly would hear about it later. It finally dawned on him that, contrary to the religious leaders’ charge of blasphemy, Jesus indeed had the Spirit of God in him, that he indeed had come from God, and that “truly this man was God’s Son” (Mark 15:39).
- The Era of the Outpouring of Divine Grace
Thirdly, the Church that soon emerged would learn as the centurion did, that by freely embracing suffering and death, Jesus transformed the worst into the best. Henceforth, death as the consequence of sin was transformed into the instrument of eternal life. When Jesus told the disciples of John the Baptist to relay to John that “Blessed is the one who takes no offense” at him, he was identifying those as blessed who discovered the great value of his Cross (Matthew 11:6). To this day, Christian theology understands that Jesus’ suffering, death, and Resurrection are the greatest acts in human history.
Even though the centurion had not seen all the happenings surrounding Jesus’ Passion and Crucifixion, he was privileged to have personally witnessed the bulk of Jesus’ Passion up to the completion of the crucifixion on Good Friday. This at once recalls Matthew 11:11 – “Amen, I say to you, among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” Matthew is pointing us to the fact that the era of Jesus Christ is the era of grace, unlike anything before. However great the ancient prophets were, they lacked the privilege of grace that Jesus brought in his kingdom-work which he completed on the cross (John 19:30) – “It is finished” (Greek – tetelestai)”. On the cross, Jesus finally completed the works his Father had sent him to do on earth. Christian theology understands that completion as the beginning of the outpouring of divine grace. It would take a Gentile, hitherto a non-believer, with an open heart and mind and obviously an open spirit to boot, to receive that grace and to make that colossal faith-proclamation.
That divine grace helped the centurion and in turn ourselves to embrace a grown-up image of God. Jesus was not killed by accident, nor was he murdered by a chance meeting with individually wicked men. In his kingdom-work of liberating people from a relationship of domination and fear, Jesus had naturally posed a religious as well as a political threat to the establishments that thrived on domination and fear. Jesus’ death exposed the society of his day for what it was – a society of violent domination. Even more, for our understanding of faith and religion, Jesus’ death showed up the human race for what it was, a lack of true love for God and neighbours. The centurion must have been struck by the stunning realisation that what Jesus offered in his life – which led him to his Cross – was not just a kind of friendship, nor just a limited sort of love, but the love that is the meaning of all human existence in the will of God. A battle-wearied soldier, a Roman military officer stationed at a tense outpost tasked to have his senses constantly primed to quell any hint of civil unrest, had suddenly seen the deep meaning of human existence. That meaning contains at its core the shocking friendliness of a benign, loving, sacrificial, and non-violent God.
Might we not see in what the centurion at Golgotha had glimpsed, precisely what Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2008 preaching on the Gospel of the washing of the feet, said about what Peter had to repeatedly learn, that is:
“God’s greatness is different from our idea of greatness; that it consists precisely in stooping low, in the humility of service, in the radicalism of love even to total self-emptying.
And we too must learn it anew because we systematically desire a God of success and not of the Passion.”
Once we see that, we shall come to the conclusion that to believe Jesus is of God is to believe that, in rejecting him, people are making the most ultimate kind of rejection, the final contradiction of themselves. As Herbert McCabe explains it, the crucifixion of Jesus is not just one more case of a particular society showing its inhumanity. It is the whole human race showing the rejection of itself. Once we reach this point, we will see that Easter is not just another ordinary Sunday. In raising Jesus from the dead, the Father tells the world that He rejects humanity’s self-rejection. In affirming the very life of Jesus and the values that he stood for, God manifested a fundamental negation of human violence, domination and sin. The God who created and “loved the world so much He gave His only Son” (John 3:16) could not accept humanity’s rejection. Easter is God’s response by hitting the “pause” button and then “reset.” Our task is to see clearly what God wants us to do – to each live a beautiful and noble life, to bear witness to true humanity, to faithfully and humbly love God and neighbour.
4. The Centurion Drives Us Back to the Gospels
It goes without saying that the centurion’s faith was incomplete without the Resurrection, but the grace that moved him certainly helps us to see a great deal of crucial revelation, one element of which we ought to clearly state: It is possible to have faith even before the Resurrection. Our Christian task clearly includes diligent reading of the bulk of the pre-resurrection Gospel accounts for Christian living.
You may then ask, if this faith before the Resurrection is so important, why is it that in our Creed the Church skips the whole lot of details before Good Friday and went straight from “He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary” to “he suffered under Pontius Pilate”? The reason, in the main, is that the Christian creeds, progressively modified over time, were first formulated in the 4th century to combat heresies. Primarily the Nicene Creed was adopted in 325 AD to define Christ’s divinity, then expanded at the first Council of Constantinople in 381 AD to articulate the doctrine of the Trinity. Then, in 451 AD, the Council of Chalcedon supplemented the Nicene formulation and produced the foundational doctrine of the two natures of Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. The first five centuries, therefore, was a time of the Church struggling with competing and even heretical teachings on the true nature of Jesus Christ. In all this, we must understand, the Church was debating “faith” issues, not issues of moral discipline and Christian living.
Yet, what emerges from the centurion’s utterance must drive us all to return again and again to the Gospels to read about the noble life, teachings and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth during his three years of public ministry. It seems all the more urgent today that we do so, for we see clearly that from the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of God that Jesus inaugurated suffers from violence, and the violent are containing its advancement by force.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, April 2026. All rights reserved.
To comment, email jeffangiegoh@gmail.com.
