It’s Friday morning, 9 A.M. Killing time. Outside the Damascus Gate is a road and on the other side of the road is a flat area near the spot where the prophet Jeremiah is buried. Up above is a rocky outcropping that, if studied at a certain angle, looks like a skull. The soldiers were ready to do their dirty work. They were Roman soldiers. They were from another part of the world. They weren’t from Palestine. They weren’t from Israel. They weren’t followers of the law. They were simply soldiers who had a job to do. And it happened to be that they were on the death squad. They were in charge of crucifixions. The soldiers know that two of the men being crucified are just average, ordinary criminals—the kind of lowlife scum that fills any big city anywhere in the world. That’s no big deal. But the third man, the one from up north, the preacher from Nazareth, his case is different. They don’t really know who he is. They know it’s important because they sense the buzz in the crowd. There are more people than usual. Up the road comes a parade of people led by a brawny foreigner carrying a cross. That couldn’t be the one they were going to crucify. It turns out he was a man by the name of Simon—Simon of Cyrene. The crowd swirls around him and behind him is a stooped figure, a man not quite six feet tall. Now walking, now crawling, each step an agony to behold. Half a man, half a creature from the worst nightmare you’ve ever had. He had been beaten within an inch of his life. His back was in shreds. His front was covered with the markings of the whip. His face was disfigured and swollen where they had ripped out the beard by the roots. And on his head a crown of thorns six inches long stuck under the skin. A shell of a man. A man already more dead than alive. They laid the cross out on the ground and they laid the body of Jesus on the cross. He moved, he moaned, he didn’t do much. One hand over here, one hand over there. Wrapping rope around this arm and around that arm. Rope around the legs, probably bent and partially resting on a small platform. They drove the spike on the forearm side of the wrist so that when the weight of the cross fell, the spike wouldn’t rip all the way through the hand. A spike in both wrists and then a spike through the legs. With the ropes in place they began to pull the cross up. Jesus now spurts blood from the raw wounds. Steady now, boys, steady. Don’t drop it. It was a terrible thing to drop a cross before they got it in the hole. They dropped it and it fell with a thud. And there was Jesus, naked and exposed before the world, beaten, bruised and bloody. The soldiers stood back, satisfied. A job well done. Then someone said lets cast lots for his clothes.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Apr 2014 13:11:40 +0000
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