Today we stand before our tortured Lord, and, like a tragic overtone to everything taking place, the clock strikes the third, sixth, and ninth hours. Have you noticed how painfully the clock sometimes strikes when...
Today we stand before our tortured Lord, and, like a tragic overtone to everything taking place, the clock strikes the third, sixth, and ninth hours. Have you noticed how painfully the clock sometimes strikes when we are waiting for someone? Even when we are no longer waiting, but simply sitting in petrified stillness, as if not in this world, the clock can suddenly strike so ominously, frighteningly, and yet soberingly. And it is so remarkable that we have these prayers of the Hours. Let us turn to them now. And let us try to live through the third, sixth, and ninth once again...
But then it turns out that the third hour is about something else; it is about Pentecost, not about the nailing to the cross. "O Lord, who at the third hour sent down Your Most Holy Spirit upon Your apostles, do not take Him from us, O Good One, but renew us who pray to You." Why? Why this sudden disruption of the logic of the liturgical text's construction? But of course we remember: "...these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour..." (Acts 2:15) Someone will find this circumstance insignificant, a chance coincidence; someone else will see it as a conscious falsification for the sake of preaching "one's own" truth; someone will say that the evangelist Luke symbolically linked the event of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles to the moment when the execution began, as a symbol of the beginning of the preaching of the Word of God in the world. But perhaps we need neither the first, nor the second, nor the third line of reasoning. What we need is simply to stand before the events that are taking place and cry out: "Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me."
"O Christ God, who at the ninth hour tasted death in the flesh for our sake, put to death the reasoning of our flesh and save us." Put it to death, for "the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal. 6:14). These words are often interpreted in the traditional way: I have died to the world, and the world has died to me. But if the apostle Paul had wanted to say that, he would have said that; instead he said "crucified"...
When our Lord was crucified, the world changed so much that it is now impossible to live in a world where the Lord is not crucified. And although many still live that way, we live differently; therefore we too are crucified. With Him.
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15:16 Praetorium - The inner hall, where the praetor, a Roman magistrate, used to give judgment. But St. John calls the whole palace by this name. Mat 27:27; Joh 19:2.
15:17 Purple - As royal robes were usually purple and scarlet, St. Mark and John term this a purple robe, St. Matthew a scarlet one. The Tyrian purple is said not to have been very different from scarlet.
15:20 Mat 27:31; Joh 19:16.
15:21 The father of Alexander and Rufus - These were afterward two eminent Christians, and must have been well known when St. Mark wrote.
15:22 Mat 27:33; Luk 23:33; Joh 19:17.
15:24 St. Mark seems to intimate, that they first nailed him to the cross, then parted his garments, and afterward reared up the cross.
15:25 See note Mar 15:24
15:28 Isa 53:12.
15:29 Mat 27:39.
15:33 Mat 27:45; Luk 23:44.
15:34 My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me - Thereby claiming God as his God; and yet lamenting his Father's withdrawing the tokens of his love, and treating him as an enemy, while he bare our sins.
15:37 Mat 27:50; Luk 23:46; Joh 19:30.