Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, March 26, 2022
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians chapter 12 about the church being a ‘body’. He’s arguing against an idea some people in Corinth had that certain kinds of gifts were better than others, and that people with the ‘better’ gifts were due extra respect. He instead teaches them that all gifts are equal in value and all are necessary. The body needs all of its different parts to function properly.

When Aesop, busy imagining tortoises volunteering for foot races, said “in union there is strength” he was acknowledging a truth that we all recognise. Like O2 used to tell us when trying to flog phone contracts, we’re better connected.
That’s easy enough to say, but when it comes to doing something about it we swiftly decide that unity may not be worth the pain it seems to bring. Turns out that we think being joined with others is the best way to achieve something worthwhile, right up until someone asks us to join with others to do that.
That’s how I tend to react anyway—it’s easy to say that people need other people until you have to actually do something with other people.
Unfortunately, we’re all a little bit more awkward than we would like, and our brokenness makes it hard for us to be in community with others. It doesn’t come that easily. The church is supposed to be united (Ephesians 4): a lofty and laudable goal, almost impossible for mere mortals. The biggest issue church unity has is that any given church is full of people. The biggest weapon in the fight for churches to be united communities is the Spirit of the living God.
You see, God isn’t like us. He’s united as part of his nature. He’s three persons, but somehow still completely one. God is Triune, and simple: somehow God can be diverse without being made of parts, three and yet more united than I manage when I’m just on my own.
And in Jesus we find even more union, he’s the perfect union of God and man. Paul’s favourite way of describing our state after Jesus rescues us is that we are ‘in Christ’. In Romans 6 he says we are united to him. We become one with him, and by extension with all of the Trinity.
Jesus then gives each one of us his Spirit to unite us to each other by shared experiences, speaking the same truth to each of us.
A. W. Tozer uses the analogy of tuning an instrument. When you tune lots of pianos with the same tuning fork, they are automatically in tune with each other. When followers of Jesus are tuned to Jesus by the Spirit, we automatically become in tune with each other. We don’t have to strive for unity to find it, we follow Jesus and find our hearts are knit together with our fellow travellers.
A friend of mine talks about a game he likes to play in the pub, looking around at groups of people who are sat together and trying to figure out what they have in common. You can usually make a decent guess. Maybe they’re work colleagues, or play football together, or they’re old school friends. If the church is working as it’s designed to, it becomes really hard to play the game.
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We know that death did not defeat Christ but that death was defeated by Christ through His dying. Like Christ’s substitutional atoning for our sins, His humiliation was also finished upon the cross. To those looking on, His burial seemed to be the most disappointing in a long stream of would-be messiahs, but in reality, His burial, His descent to the dead, was the beginning of His eternal exaltation. Although Saturday must have been the longest Sabbath the disciples ever felt, the new week began with Jesus’ resurrection, which Paul calls the first fruit. Christ’s resurrection is a foretaste and a guarantee of the great resurrection of all God’s people still to come.

And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”
There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. When he was in Galilee, they followed him and ministered to him, and there were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.
And when evening had come, since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God, took courage and went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Pilate was surprised to hear that he should have already died. And summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he was already dead. And when he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the corpse to Joseph. And Joseph bought a linen shroud, and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud and laid him in a tomb that had been cut out of the rock. And he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid.
Mark 15:39-47 ESV

COVID-19 was an apocalypse. Now, I mean that in the technical sense of the word. Apocalypse means revelation or unveiling, and any crisis inevitably leads to a kind of revealing, especially of people’s hearts. One immediate effect of the pandemic has been a greater societal awareness of illnesses. Many headlines warn to beware of a tripledemic of Covid, flu, and RSV. Winter, however, has always been a season of viruses, particularly respiratory, and some seasons are inevitably worse or better than others. That has not changed, but our awareness has.
Yet, in my opinion, the greatest unveiling of the Covid pandemic was its exposure and amplification of a psychological epidemic of despair that had been growing long before 2020. For instance, suicide rates and the desperate pleas for euthanasia were certainly present before Covid, but the pandemic and the lockdowns have certainly brought them to the surface and even heightened them. Being forced to face our own mortality did not settle well on our secular society, and it exposed that most people simply cannot face the reality of death. That is why we sedate ourselves against reality as much as possible with drugs and entertainment, and when the sedation no longer works, we would rather take death into our own hands rather than embrace the uncertainly of life. We are a culture in despair.
We would do well to consider intently this passage of Mark because His followers were certainly faced with despair in the wake of Jesus’ death. You see, even though Jesus told His disciples three times that He would both die and rise, we have also seen repeatedly that they did not yet have eyes to see that blessed promise. Rather, the Christ who they hoped would restore the kingdom of Israel had been crucified, ridiculed by men and cursed by God, and His disciples had abandoned Him in His suffering. During His life, Jesus made it seem as if God’s kingdom really was at hand, but with His death, it never felt more distant. The sun may have begun to shine again with Jesus’ death, but an even greater darkness loomed over the hearts of the faithful. Though the greatest victory of all time had been accomplished, they could only see the most savage of all defeats.
Yet in the midst of this despair, Mark records for us three examples of courage (a confession, discipleship, and an act of love) from the three unexpected places. We will look at each individually before considering their collective exhortation for us today who likewise live between the cross and the resurrection.
Truly This Man Was the Son of God! // Verses 39
Although the priests and bystanders were not able to understand the sign of the darkness around because of the darkness within them, a ray of light pierced through the most unlikely person imaginable at the foot of the cross.
And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”
Although there were other Roman soldiers at the crucifixion, this centurion was their commander. He was responsible for overseeing the execution of Jesus and the two robbers on either side of Him. Timothy Keller notes:
Centurions were not aristocrats who got military commissions; they were enlisted men who had risen through the ranks. So this man had seen death, and had inflicted it, to a degree that you and I can hardly imagine.
Here was a hardened, brutal man. Yet something had penetrated his spiritual darkness. He became the first person to confess the deity of Jesus Christ.[1]
Indeed, Mark explicitly notes that the centurion saw Christ’s divinity through His manner of death. He saw how Jesus breathed His last breath, and a fountain deep within the centurion’s violence-stained heart broke open. As a dealer of death, he knew it very well. He brought the curse of Adam upon others for a living, so he was no doubt intimately familiar with how it snatched up the strong and the weak alike, both old and young, men and women, slave and free. He knew firsthand that all living would be dragged down into that everlasting darkness called the grave.
Yet Jesus was different. Death did not fall upon Jesus; He gave Himself over to it. Even while hanging from the tree, mocked by men and forsaken in our place by the Father, Jesus was still Lord. As both God and the only sinless man, death had no claim over Him; therefore, His life could never be taken from Him. He could only lay it down. I doubt that the centurion could have expressed his thoughts and emotions very well, but I believe that this is what he saw. As the one presiding over the crucifixion, I think he understood that even from the cross Jesus was really in command of the proceedings. Jesus’ death was so unlike normal deaths that the centurion could only conclude that Jesus was indeed divine. Indeed, as Keller said, he is the first human to confess Jesus’ divinity in Mark’s Gospel, and he is the first to confess the second part of Jesus’ twofold confession of Jesus: that He is the Son of God.
Now, we do not know the degree of the centurion’s faith past this point. Did he become a Christian? Perhaps; perhaps not. We will never know on this side of the river. We should, however, commend both his faith and his courage. We can safely assume that the centurion did not have everything in mind that we as Christians do today whenever we talk about the Son of God. I do not think, for example, that he was miraculously given understanding of the Trinity. Instead, the phrase ‘son of god’ was an honorific title given to humans who were deemed to have ascended to divinity. Most notably, it was a title used by Caesar, that is, the centurion’s king and commander. He was, therefore, making a very dangerous confession. He was, at the very least, confessing Jesus to be as equally divine as Caesar.
Also, we should note with wonder and joy that this centurion Gentile is only a foretaste of the salvation that Christ’s death would bring to all nations.
Revealed Under the Cross // Verses 40-41
The second example of faith and courage in the face of despair is not an individual but a group of women:
There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. When he was in Galilee, they followed him and ministered to him, and there were also many other women who came up with him from Jerusalem.
Though all the disciples fled from Jesus and did not have the courage to follow Him to Golgotha (John being the only exception), this small crowd of women did. Just as they had followed Jesus in Galilee, they now followed Him as He went to His death. They were likely forced to do so from a distance because the soldiers would not let them nearer.
I find it significant that Mark makes the revelation of how these women followed and minister to Jesus throughout His ministry immediately after His death while His body still hung upon the cross. In most of the events that we studied in this Gospel, these women were there as eye witnesses. Hearing His words, and seeing His wonders. Yet we are only told of their presence here. I would imagine that their ministry to Jesus was largely unnoticed by the other disciples as well. Luke tells us that it was women like Joanna and Susanna that financially supported Jesus’ ministry, yet their mention is almost like a footnote. They served in the background, until this moment when the more prominent disciples fell away in fear. This again is a picture in miniature of what Jesus taught. The proud will be humbled, while the humble shall be exalted. The servant of all is counted the greatest in the kingdom. The first become last, and the last become first.
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Judeo-Christian civilization performed three great conquests for humanity: the idea of universal truth (hence, the development of science in the West), progress in history (which leads to improvements), and the sacred dignity of the human being (which made us the first civilization to abolish slavery and emancipate women). I believe that the results of these three conquests are in danger with the collapse of Christian civilization. We see the decline of universalism and even attacks on science. We see the rise of apocalyptic fears, in ecological activism, for example.

Once Christianity faced off with modernity, says Chantal Delsol, the handwriting was on the wall. And even though a handful of elites deluded themselves into believing in the future of atheism, most people need gods—and soon the old gods began to creep back in.
In his 2020 book, The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity, Edward J. Watts details daily life at the end of an age. It was the early 300s, and the final pagan generation, he writes, “was born into a vast sacred infrastructure that had been built up over the past three millennia.” The gods were everywhere, woven into the language, commerce, daily rituals, and the very landscapes of every city and town. The gods were an omnipresent and accepted assumption. Many of the Roman elites no longer believed in the literal existence of these deities, but they were seen as necessary myths—a foundational part of the social order. Nobody could anticipate how swiftly everything would change.
Watts begins by describing a face-off in Alexandria in which pagans, enraged by the conversion of their ancient shrine into a church, rioted in the streets, killed and wounded several Christians, and barricaded themselves in their shuttered temple until the emperor promised them a pardon. When they left the Serapeum, the Christians tore it apart, triggering a wave of idol-smashing across Egypt in the weeks that followed. It was a watershed moment in which many pagans finally realized that their empire was being remade and that “Christian attacks could reach the most permanent and impressive elements of the urban religious infrastructure.” By the “final pagan generation,” Watts is referring to the last of the elite Romans, both pagan and Christian, “born into a world that simply could not imagine a Roman world dominated by a Christian majority.” None could grasp that they stood at the dawning of a new age and that all the old things were passing away.
Many now argue that we stand at a similar threshold today. In the West, we are at the end of 1,600 years of Christian civilization. The culture—and the foundational underlying assumptions—have all changed, and people have passed from Christendom into a new world.
The French philosopher, historian, and novelist Chantal Delsol believes that we are not simply becoming post-Christian; rather, we are re-paganizing. In her 2021 book, La Fin de la Chrétienté (The End of the Christian World), she observes that we have yet to fully understand what we are living through: nothing less than the death throes of a civilization that lasted 16 centuries. This slow-motion death began with the French Revolution, she argues, which—unlike the Dutch and American revolutions—produced the first civilization that did not rest on Christian assumptions. Once Christianity faced off with modernity, Delsol says, the handwriting was on the wall. And even though a handful of elites deluded themselves into believing in the future of atheism, most people need gods—and soon the old gods began to creep back in.
Our new society, in fact, still has ‘saints’ and ‘sinners.’ They have simply swapped places. Christians who condemn unbiblical sexual behavior are damned as ‘wicked’ for their intolerance, while the gilded homosexuals of our celebrity elites are instead celebrated for ‘being who they are.’ This change seems to have happened rather suddenly, facilitated by the fact that even those who no longer believe in Christianity have continued its cultural practices—even as the end of the age was approaching. When the end finally came, it seemed to happen overnight. In 2008, U.S. President Obama ran for office opposing same-sex marriage, but a mere decade and a half later, in 2022, most Democrats wouldn’t dare question the ritual mutilation of children in the name of transgenderism. And much like the pagans of the 4th century, Christians have simply been caught off-guard.
Unlike the majority of Christian intellectuals, however, Delsol does not believe that the collapse of Christianity will necessarily be accompanied by darkness and chaos. I would argue that this depends on how one defines “darkness and chaos.” For example, Delsol does not think abortion should be banned in a non-Christian society; but in my mind, any culture—whether explicitly Christian or not—returning to the infanticide practices of paganism is already living a dark, bloody nightmare filled with obliterated children.
The 4th century has lessons for us here as well. It was the Christian condemnation of abortion and infanticide that brought about a prohibition of these practices by Emperor Valentinian in 374 AD. Even a secular conception of human rights, however, ought to recognize that abortion is unjust to all those involved, above all the unborn human whose life is being ended. Indeed, one may reasonably argue that human beings possess human rights from the beginning of their lives, which science has incontrovertibly established begins at conception. You don’t need Christian eyes to read an embryology textbook or view an ultrasound.
Among the various examples of alternative religious systems that have filled the vacuum left behind by the decline of Christianity, Delsol notes that even environmentalists have their liturgies and, in many ways, are engaged in a form of worship of Mother Earth. As Delsol noted in a 2021 essay:
We are at a stage where, in the vast field opened up by the erasure of Christianity, new beliefs waver and tremble. Disaffection with dogmas, or with a decreed and certain truth, brings about the triumph of morality. It stands alone in the world. We see philanthropy at work, a love for humanity directly inherited from the Gospel, but without the foundations. Late modernity takes up the Gospel, but strips it of all transcendence. …
[I]n pagan societies, religion and morality are separate: religion demands sacrifices and rites, while the rulers impose a morality. This is the situation we are in the process of rediscovering: our governing elite decrees morality, promotes laws to enforce them partly through insults and ostracism. Our morality is post-evangelical, but it is no longer tied to a religion. It dominates the television sets. It inhabits all the cinematography of the age. It rules in the schools and families. When something needs to be straightened out or given a new direction, it is the governing elite.
In short, Delsol writes: “We have returned to the typical situation of paganism: we have a state morality.” However, she does not believe attempts at cultural transformation by Christians will be successful. The die is cast and the wheels of ‘progress’ grind forward. Instead, she suggests, like the pagan communities that struggled to survive for centuries after the rise of Christianity, we have to find ways to live in this new society—as strangers in our homelands. Christians, says Delsol, must become witnesses to another way of living—salt and light, as the Scripture puts it. “The experience of our fathers brings us certainty,” she says. “Our business is not to produce societies where ‘the Gospel governs states’ but rather, to use the words of Saint-Exupery, to ‘walk very slowly towards a fountain.’” Recently, Delsol was kind enough to answer additional questions about her thesis.
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