There is a finality to the way Jesus was paraded through Jerusalem. None could escape this horrific pageantry. God did not let any stand idly by ignorant of the horror on this winding path through the city. The merchants scampered out of the way of the Roman soldiers, pulling back their precious goods. The religious elite, the Pharisees and Sadducees with their long beards and tassles, turbans and tunics, were finally united in one voice, chanting: “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!”. They marched behind at a somber distance. Even visitors, like Simon of Cyrene, were swept up.
The cross fell from Jesus’ shoulder as his legs sagged.
“You! Carry the weakling’s cross for him.”
Singled out from the crowd of onlookers pressed against the stone wall, Simon pointed to himself with wide eyes.
“But… but, I am just a visitor, I have done nothing wrong…”
“Right now!” The spear point made it clear that this was not optional.
Simon’s face showed his misgivings as he parted from his wife and son and lifted the bloody wooden cross, formed by nailing two rough cut beams, from the cobble stone path and put it onto his shoulder, scraping his back.
His wife cried out from the receding crowd as she joined the procession, “Soldier, remember, he is not a criminal, that is not his cross!” Her voice is desperate and echo a rising fear in his heart that he will mistakenly be put on the cross he is forced to carry, like a piece of jetsam caught in a flood.
Now that he has a comfortable grip he eyes this bloody stranger, noting the bruises and torn flesh from scourging. He feels a surge of compassion.
The penetrating eyes of Jesus say without words, “Thank you, my friend.” He grimaces with each step.
Compassion becomes pity mixed with sorrow. He looks up to measure their progress, sweat beading, as they wind through streets and up the hill toward the gate, just outside the city wall, lies Golgotha, place of the skull. Simon’s anger and resentment, fear and self-righteous indignation begin to foment inside. His heart says, “Why must I carry a criminal’s cross?” But fear of this legion of soldiers and riotous mob silence the words from escaping.
God let all the people of this city see and join the rejection of his Son. At the gate and on the walls the crowds gather, but the mob has been there all along adding their jeers to the mocking, the beating, the scourging, the hatred and the scorn. Envy is ugly, and these leaders seethed at his goodness. They hated his purity, his miraculous powers, his sharp mind and wit, and his jovial and loving way with his bumpkin followers.
“Why would God bless such a one as this? He is unrefined, unlearned, how dare he presume to teach just because he is smart. By what authority!?!”
God is betrayed by his beloved priests who have dedicated their lives to his law but do not recognize and love Him when he comes in the flesh. God is rejected by his people, even as he is lifted from the earth to save them. God forces all these, his dear children to watch the spectacle. A horrible parade, a man bleeding, barely able to walk, with torn flesh, but majestic in his silence. A soulful mournful gaze, a crown of thorns and blood running down his face, dripping in what is left of his beard that has been largely torn away, defrocked in the zeal of the rejection of the religious leaders. His face has bruises and welts, the appearance of a common criminal between two criminals, except for an uncommon raiment.
Why the crown? Why the purple robe? Why the sign: “King of the Jews”? It proclaims its message unmistakably in 4 languages.
Can it be true? A pounding heart considers the possibility. The stomach seizes. Gasp. Why would God’s Messiah become a sideshow of horror and humiliation? Manhandled by pagan Romans. Rejected by the godly who scoff and shout vile things. Leading a procession with a murderer and a thief and way too many Roman soldiers. Only mourned by a handful of weeping women and country yokels, probably his kin.
Looking at the blood-stained street, the looming cross, the mind recoils at the horror.
But why does it grow dark? Why does the earth rumble? Why the long painful, agonizing silence.
“If you are the savior, save yourself!” The cry escapes the lips. “Surely if you can raise the dead, you can come down!”
“Why do you stay there?” This last one, an ashamed whisper. A follower whose heart is broken.
The mind clouds with hate: “Charlatan, fake, rabble rouser, zealot, false prophet, poser… he must be.”
“Forgive them Daddy, for they know not what they do.”
The heart is pierced. The eyes tear up involuntarily in response to His… goodness. It solicits a crushing, soul rending desire to know God as my Daddy like Jesus does. The truth that I don’t is coupled with an acute sense of emptiness and a thirst that cannot be quenched by anything this world can offer.
“I thirst.”
His words echo across the landscape. Even as a soldier lifts a sponge to his lips, and he tastes but rejects the vinegar of the world, my spirit knows that he alone has a spring of water, that the world knows nothing about.
The promise is somehow lingering in the air.
“I too thirst,” I whisper. But my thirst is unquenchable until he dies.
He struggles to take one last breath, pressing with his legs and rising up on the cross and yells, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
“It is finished.” His body sags.
Not just the earth, but all creation shakes. The veil that separates heaven from mankind is torn.
Out of the darkness the centurion testifies, “Surely he was the Son of God!”.
Suffering and sacrifice is finally completely finished forever.
I believe and I am forgiven. He is a spring of living water, endless, eternal, cleansing, refreshing, purifying.
The heart knows first what the mind has denied as true. There was no other way, than the ‘sorrowful way’, the Via Dolorosa, the way of the cross .
Atheist to Elder 