come down from the cross and save yourself!”
if only you
would save yourself
I’d see better
and better hear
how to myselfthere’s not time
to mess around
get to it
come on down
spark my lifeno don’t say
sell your goods
hug your neighbor
simply eat together
that’s too muchdo it now
do for us
what we won’t
do for us
much less them
The sense of this verse is as an appeal as much as it can be read as a continuation of the mocking.
It might also be read, “You must save yourself by coming down from the cross.”
There is almost an imploring tone in this request. Myers200, puts it this way:
Their plaintive cry is the pitiful culmination to the struggle for faith in Mark’s story. If only Jesus would come down from the cross so that we might “see and believe (15:32)! Yet this is the moment in which our blindness will be most consequential, for to understand what happens next truly requires “eyes to see” (see 4:12; 8:18).
Whatever the tone with which these words are said, kind or mean, Sabin2145 reflects:
Mark chooses language that reminds his audience that Jesus has said the opposite: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it (8:34–35). The ultimate irony of Mark’s narrative lies in the way he shows that in spite of the appearances of death and defeat, Jesus is accomplishing what he set out to do.
Depending on how a Reader has been engaging this text, they may or may not agree that this is something that Jesus set out to do or became a consequence of hewing to his experience of Belovedness at Baptism and Transfiguration and subsequent involvement in physical and communal wildernesses.
Jesus has now been asked to deny his humanity and show himself as beyond human with religious and governing authorities. Now Jesus continues his silence in the face of these requests with the general public passing by in their everyday duties. His is an example of endurance in a smaller frame of what he understands to be a larger arc of life.