Episode Transcript
PRAYER OF CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Abba, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Abba, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Matthew 27:32–44 (NIV)
As they were going out, they met a man from Cyrene, named Simon, and they forced him to carry the cross. They came to a place called Golgotha (which means “the place of the skull”). There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it. When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots. And sitting down, they kept watch over him there. Above his head they placed the written charge against him: THIS IS JESUS. THE KING OF THE JEWS.
Two rebels were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, “You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!” In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” In the same way the rebels who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him.
CONSIDER THIS
Having been beaten severely by Roman soldiers, Jesus was probably too weak to carry the patibulum (the crossbeam) that could weigh anywhere between thirty to forty pounds.1 Realizing, perhaps, that Jesus would be unable to complete the death march, the four soldiers who accompanied him forced a man who hailed from a town in North Africa, Simon of Cyrene, to take up the cross. Though little is known about this man from Africa, the Gospel of Mark does reveal that he was the father of Alexander and Rufus (Mark 15:21), two men who were likely known within the church. At any rate, though Simon remains a mysterious figure, he nevertheless is an important one in that what he did on that Friday, as Jesus made his way along the Via Dolorosa, was a wonderful symbol of what all real Christians should do: that is, take up the cross.
Arriving at Golgotha, the place of the skull, an area that some believe corresponds to the site where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is situated today,2 Jesus was offered a drink of wine mixed with gall, a bitter herb. With the addition of the gall, the wine that normally would have been a refreshment was now a concoction of mockery, one that was teasingly undrinkable. However, with or without the herb, Jesus would not have drunk the wine anyway. He only tasted it to see what kind of liquid it was, for he had exclaimed earlier at the Last Supper, surrounded by his disciples: “I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt. 26:29).
At the place of execution, Jesus was affixed to the crossbeam with nails (see John 20:25), and then he was attached to a lengthy vertical pole3 that had been placed on the spot earlier. In order to add greater misery to the practice of crucifixion, Rome heightened the emotional and psychological pain of its victims—in other words, the shame—by crucifying them naked or nearly so. Having stripped Jesus of his clothes, the soldiers then made sport of all of this by casting lots for his garments. The Gospel of John informs us that the soldiers divided the clothing of Jesus into four shares, corresponding to the number of soldiers, but even then a seamless undergarment remained. It was for this piece of cloth, “woven in one piece from top to bottom” (John 19:23b), that lots were cast. John also reveals the larger significance of all of this, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, in quoting the substance4 of Psalm 22:18: “They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.” Many of the events that took place on this day had been prophesized earlier. No one before and no one after could have ever fulfilled such prophecies but Jesus.
As we have already seen, the Jewish religious leaders had gone back and forth in terms of what charges they brought before Pilate: first, there was a political one in the accusation that Jesus was a criminal against the Roman state (John 18:30), but then they slipped up and revealed their true motivation, which was actually a religious one, in the claim that Jesus was the Son of God (19:7). Which charge, then, the political or religious one, would be written on the titulus or placard that would be placed above the head of Jesus on the cross? On this matter the Gospels differ not as to the substance of the charge, but as to its length. To illustrate, the Gospel of Mark, the briefest of all, simply has: “THE KING OF THE JEWS” (15:26b). The Gospel of John, the longest of all, has “JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS” (19:19b). However, John alone offers insight into the ongoing struggle between the Jewish religious leaders and Pilate as to the wording of the titulus, as evidenced in the following: “The chief priests of the Jews protested to Pilate, ‘Do not write “The King of the Jews,” but that this man claimed to be king of the Jews.’ Pilate answered, ‘What I have written, I have written’” (John 19:21–22). The irony here is unmistakable. The very title of Jesus that the religious leaders had refused to acknowledge was now displayed on the cross itself for all to see, and there was nothing that they could do about it. Jesus would begin his reign right here nailed to a tree as the King of the Jews.
Though all but one of his disciples had deserted him (John 19:26–27), Jesus was not alone. He was crucified between two robbers, though rebel might be a better term for them, one of whom, according to the Gospel of Luke, actually conversed with Jesus (see Luke 23:39–43). It is possible that Barabbas was supposed to be crucified in the very spot where Jesus now was. If so, then Jesus took his place. Think about that for a while. But how did Christ get there? He had started out so very well. We saw in Day 1, for instance, that: “The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world” (John 1:9). His origin was glorious, for as Jesus had exclaimed: “before Abraham was born, I am!” (8:58). Indeed, he was “with God, and . . . was God” (1:1), and yet he humbled himself even among men and women and took on the form of a servant. It was a humble descent for the sake of a generous identification with others and for love. Oh, the inestimable worth of humility! It’s the gateway to the richest and broadest love imaginable. But Jesus did not stop there. He descended further, through the hatred, mocking, and rejection, through the onslaught of shame, even to the depths of a dark and wretched cross, so that there would not be a man nor woman whom Jesus could not touch. He had covered the gamut in terms of all who needed him. There never has been a movement of compassion and empathy so thorough nor the identification with others, the very least of all, so strong and powerful—and just as holy love would have it. Indeed, one of his conversation partners on his dying day was an abject criminal. Divine love shows up in the strangest of places.
Jesus had done his work well, though in the fogged-over eyes of some, with conceptions of God not even worthy of being mentioned, he had been a regrettable failure. The cross had proven it; it was over; he was finished. However, those who turned away in disgust on that dark day just couldn’t see it. The kingdom of God was indeed being revealed, and its luster was right in front of their eyes. Sinful pride, however, had obscured their vision. Being blinded by so many other considerations as to who God is, or better yet, who they had imagined the Almighty to be, they were and remained baffled. They just couldn’t understand what actually is the nature, the essence, of the Most High especially in relation to the least of all. That’s a place they rarely wanted to look, perhaps only for a moment, but then to quickly turn away. This, however, was the very best place of all to get a glimpse, a vision, of what the kingdom of God is all about.
In the midst of this deep darkness, a shining, glimmering, and enduring light would emerge. It was the light not of sinful human qualities ascribed to God, mined out of the mountains of all-too-human desires, informed by self-love and sinful pride, and then packaged in an array of superlatives. No! It was the light of nothing less than love, not just any love, of course, but holy love, a love that is simply divine—sublime and incomprehensibly beautiful! Much later, the apostle Paul expressed the humble descent of Jesus, the lowest reaches of the incarnation (the Word becoming flesh), in his following observation:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something
to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross! (Phil. 2:6–8)
At the cross, then, the ostracizing, excluding, and rejecting movement that Jesus had suffered under for so long, throughout much of his ministry, had now reached its climax. The religious leaders had been determined to put Jesus to death for a long time by now and with renewed energy along the way. Accusing Jesus of the worst of all possible sins, that is, of being a blasphemer, the religious leaders had wanted to drive Christ out of this world and, thereby, end his ministry. No place would be left for Jesus to go; he would be utterly restricted once he was nailed to a tree. His enemies had evidently succeeded. They had driven Christ out, pushed him onto a cross that occupied about one square foot of the earth, that’s all—a very small footprint, indeed—the amount of space taken up by that infamous, accursed pole. Earlier, Christ had driven the money changers out of the temple (see Matthew 21:12–13). If those folks were present on this dark Friday, they now had their revenge.
But there is rich irony in the midst of all of this, for the way Rome crucified its condemned was to have them displayed along a prominent stretch of road for all to see. It was a spectacle, to be sure, but not the kind Herod had hoped for earlier. The doomed faced the public and all passersby. And since the patibulum (the crossbeam) opened up the arms of Jesus, as he hung on the cross, he faced the world with arms outstretched, offering the widest embrace possible. It was a message of God to the world. And what did Jesus utter? “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34a).
THE PRAYER
Heavenly Father, I see divine love on display in the cross. The descent of your Son shows me the true nature of your power—that of humility and self-emptying. May my life be marked by such love, with a deep commitment to you and my neighbors, even when they be found in what seems to me to be the strangest of places.
