And Jesus, having uttered a loud cry, expired.
The verse gives the death of Jesus in the fewest possible words: a loud cry, then the end. Writers look closely at both halves, because the strength of the voice and the verb Mark chose show a death unlike any other.
A dying man's strength fades and his last words drop to a whisper. Here the voice is at full power. That single detail rules out the idea that Jesus simply reached the end of what His body could bear.
It was no exhaustion of nature. Jesus did not die because He could not live, as all others do. He had still the full energy of life. He died not only in atonement, but to take His life again. How else could He have proved that His life was greater than death, if He had not died? Still less could He have delivered us. "We were reconciled to God by the death of His Son" (Rom. 5:10).
The change from one moment to the next struck the soldier on guard duty.
Mark gives the fact of His actual death in the briefest way. Right after He cried with a loud voice, He breathed out His spirit into the hands of God. Luke and John record what He said. Mark tells us only the way He said it. There was no gradual failing of strength, so that His last words were a feeble whisper. At one moment a loud voice, and the next moment He was dead! His death was plainly supernatural. It deeply impressed the centurion on duty, who stood watching.
Each Gospel writer picks a different word for the moment of death.
Nowhere in the Gospels is the word "died" used as the result of our Lord's crucifixion. Mark's word here is exepneusen, "expired," the same word Luke uses, while Matthew's word is "dismissed His spirit," and John's is "gave up."
Why the humbler word here? This Gospel shows Him at the very bottom of His self-humbling, not as One holding power over the moment.
Mark also has the forsaking of God — the marks of the sin offering. Here is the Son of God in the glory of His willing humbling. He was obedient even to death, glorifying God at His own personal cost… But His humiliation is most absolute. In Matthew He "dismisses His spirit," as One who had power to keep it. In Mark, in true sin-offering character, He "expires."
The plain word does not make Him a victim. His death was needed if sinners were to be saved, and nothing outside Him brought it about.
When everything was accomplished, "Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last." That loud cry proved that His death was not the result of failing, exhausted natural powers. If the holiness of God was to be met, and salvation made possible for sinners, He had to die. But no man took His life from Him. He Himself gave up His life.
Two reactions at the cross prove it.
Notice how carefully Scripture rules out the thought that His death came from anything outside Him. It was not the result of crucifixion. Crucifixion went with His death, but that is all. The soldiers came to hurry His death by breaking His legs. They found He was already dead, but the two criminals were not (John 19:31-33). Pilate was surprised that He was already dead (Mark 15:44). No! He laid down His life Himself, as He had said (John 10:17-18).
His service was finished, so nothing kept Him here. The death itself is the last act of obedience.
Others understood little of this. Everything is between Himself and God. Crying again with a loud voice, He gives up His spirit. His service was completed. What more had He to do in a world where He lived only to do the will of God? All was finished, and He had to depart. I do not mean physical necessity, for He still kept His strength… He had drunk in His soul the cup of death and of judgment for sin. There was nothing left for Him but the act of dying; and He expires, obedient to the end.
- Cry — The loud voice shows strength, not collapse. He did not die because He could not live.
- Word — Mark says "expired," not "died"; the Gospels never say Jesus simply died of crucifixion.
- Character — The lower word fits Mark's picture: humbled to the very bottom, obedient even to death.
- Act — Yet it remained His own giving. No man took His life; Pilate himself was surprised He was already dead.
- Purpose — He died to reconcile us to God and to take His life again. The work was complete, so He departed, obedient to the end.
And the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top to the bottom.
The moment Jesus died, something happened inside the temple. The heavy curtain that closed off the innermost room ripped in two, and the tear ran from the top down. Mark records it without comment, leaving the reader to ask who tore it, and what the tearing announced.
The curtain was not decoration. Older translations call it the veil. It closed off a room man could not enter, and its message was the message of the whole time of law.
The veil separated the holy place from the holy of holies. It spoke of the presence of God, but it also spoke of man shut out from God. Such was the character of the time of law. God present but man unable to draw near to God. The tearing of the veil proclaimed that all was over with Judaism. But it tells us more than that. God can now, in righteousness, come out in grace with the good news of forgiveness for man. And man can draw near to God on the ground of the precious blood.
Some have explained the tear as damage from an earthquake. One commentator answers that the record itself rules this out.
Simply reading the passage ought to show the enormous importance attached to the tearing of the veil. That tearing was in truth the death-knell of the Jewish ritual priesthood and system. It is named separately from the account of the earthquake and its effects, and before it. It may also bear on this point to notice that the veil was torn not from below but from above, "from top to bottom."
Hebrews calls the curtain a picture of Christ's own body. That link fixes where Christ finished the work, and when.
Long ago the veil showed that the way into the holiest of all — communion with God from above the mercy-seat — was not yet made known (Heb. 9:8). But torn like this, it proclaimed that a new and living way into the holiest had been dedicated. So by the blood of Jesus we may enter with boldness. But the veil was above all a figure of Christ's flesh (Heb. 10:19-20). It points clearly to this: the work that removed the restrictions of the most holy place was done in His flesh on the cross, and not in heaven after His death.
A torn curtain opens a road that runs two ways.
This was a divine action, God's own intervention. Hebrews 9 and 10 show what it means. It proclaimed that God was now free, in righteousness as well as in grace, to go out after the sinner, on the ground of what was accomplished on the cross. The sinner was now free too. On receiving the testimony about that finished work, he could go into the holiest of all, into the immediate presence of God.
Mark and Matthew describe the tear by its direction; Luke describes it by its place. Writers have read the two descriptions as carrying different emphases.
Matthew and Mark both write of the tearing of the veil in two from top to bottom (Matt. 27:51; Mark 15:38), which speaks of God coming forth to meet man as a Saviour God, but in Luke 23:45 the veil is spoken of as torn "in the midst," no doubt signifying that the legal system of Judaism, in which there was no access to God, had been set aside in the death of Christ, so that by that same death men might have access to God in an entirely new system.
A curtain pulled aside can be drawn back; a curtain ripped in half cannot.
The veil of the temple separated the presence of God from man. It hid the throne and barred the way into His presence. Now it was torn in two from the top to the bottom — not drawn aside or lifted up, but torn right through — declaring that it never again could be put back.
The tear also changed what people can know of God, and one writer warns that many are trying to reverse it.
God had said that He would dwell in thick darkness, but now He dwells in it no longer. He was hidden behind the veil. Now He reveals Himself in the death of Jesus, and by means of that death. The veil separated God in His holiness from man, and shut man in his sins out from God. It was torn in two from the top to the bottom; that is, from God to man. Could anything be more blessed? Yet man today is trying to put that veil up again — to put God in the darkness and man at a distance from Him.
- Barrier. The curtain announced God's presence and man's exclusion — the settled arrangement under law.
- Hand. The tear ran from top to bottom. This was God's act, not an earthquake's, and it sounded the death-knell of the whole ritual system.
- Body. The curtain pictured Christ's flesh. So the work was finished on the cross itself, not in heaven afterwards.
- Road. The opening runs both ways: God comes out to seek sinners, and by the blood of Jesus sinners go in with boldness.
- Permanent. It was torn, not drawn aside — it can never be hung again, though people keep trying to put God back in the dark.