“With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, ‘Surely this man was the Son of God’ ” (Mark 15:37-39).
Consider how often a Roman soldier might have witnessed criminals dying on crosses. It would have become a common event, and a person might easily become callous about the nature of death. But there was something different about this man, this Jesus of Nazareth, and this day was so different from all the other days of judgment.
This soldier was a centurion, a Roman officer in command of 100 soldiers, more or less.
Apparently what the centurion saw made a huge impression on him and the other soldiers under him. The differences were significant:
(a) the demeanor of Jesus,
(b) the words of Jesus,
(c) the darkness, so unusual, from noonday to mid-afternoon, and
(d) the earthquake: was it a sign of God’s anger?
According to Luke these men had begun by joining in the general mockery of the suffering ‘criminals’, but now they feared exceedingly and declared that this man was surely innocent.
And finally — “Truly this man was the Son of God.” How could the centurion have understood this? Presumably, he was on duty when the priests shouted at Pilate: “He ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.” And then too he would have heard Jesus cry from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Later, the centurion and his soldiers might have been delegated to guard the tomb of Jesus. If this were the case, they would surely have been in the best position to know the truth about the resurrection. But even if the centurion was not part of that detail, he might easily have heard something of the fragmentary story from those who were there: that is, they were not sleeping; the angel rolled away the stone; and the body was no longer there in the tomb they had been guarding.
So what else could it be but that his Father had raised him from the dead?
Was it a coincidence that the first Gentile to accept the truth and respond by baptism into Christ was a centurion — Cornelius — along with his family? There is no specific evidence that directly links the centurion in Mark 15 with Cornelius, except their occupation and their faith, but it is surely a possibility.
But back to the main point here: given the circumstances we know, as well as what we can surmise, the centurion who presided at Jesus’ crucifixion might well have been another unlikely convert. If this man did soon become a Christian, it was in large part due to the amazing strength of character and godliness of our Lord Jesus as he hung dying on the cross.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One