Truly, this Man Was God’s Son Word of Faith

Mark 15:25-39
There are actions that disqualify individuals from certain professions:Bankruptcy disqualifies people from bankingSex offenders are disqualified from working with children. Crucifixion disqualified Jesus from being the Messiah (see Deuteronomy 21:22). Crucifixion was shameful in the Roman world. Hebrews 12:2 separates the cross into two experiences: pain and shame. The cross was designed to dehumanize.The victim was naked to shame.The location of a cross was designed to maximize crowds who could ridicule.The physical pain reduced people to begging for help and pleading to die.Crucifixion was considered obscene and not discussed. It was godless (Mark 15:33-34).See Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion.  It is hard for me to preach Lent and Holy Week without utilizing something I learned in this book.  Chapter Two, “The Godlessness of the Cross,” begins with this quote: "In order to speak of the crucified God we need a theology of abandonment, of dereliction, of an alienation so profound that it can only be expressed in language marked by paradox and by great daring and risk. The Crucifixion of the Son of God by one of the most advanced civilizations in the ancient world does not seem to be an acceptable or reasonable method of redeeming the world. There is something so outrageous and obscene about it that the agony in Gethsemane becomes the only comprehensible part of the whole saga." -- Kenneth Leech in We Preach Christ CrucifiedThe Centurion was a battle-hardened military man.  He had seen deaths nearly as bad, yet at the death of Jesus he was moved to say, “this man was the Son of God.”The meditation text printed in the bulletin was from another indispensable resource for preaching on the cross: "The crucifixion of Jesus set men (sic) thinking more than anything else that has ever happened in the life of the human race. And the most remarkable fact in the whole history of religious thought is this: that when the early Christians looked back and pondered on the dreadful thing that had happened, it made them think of the redeeming love of God." -- D. M. Baillie in God Was in Christ: An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement, p. 184. Here is additional quotation from Jűrgen, Moltmann, The Crucified God, New York, Harper & Row, 1974:
To suffer and to be rejected are not identical.  Suffering can be celebrated and admired.  It can arouse compassion.  But to be rejected takes away the dignity from suffering and makes it dishonorable suffering.  To suffer and be rejected signify the cross.  To die on the cross means to suffer and to die as one who is an outcast and rejected.  If those who follow Jesus are to take “their cross” on themselves, they are taking on not only suffering and a bitter fate, but the suffering of rejection.  According to their own experience, the greatest Christian saints were also the most profoundly abandoned by God.  The expression “cross” for the sufferings undergone in following Jesus takes its meaning solely from the cross of Christ, not from natural or social sufferings.  “The cross . . . is not the sort of suffering which is inseparable from this mortal life, but the suffering which is an essential part of the specifically Christian life.”  p. 55