The crucifixion
How Luke and John tell the death of Jesus: the road out of the city, the two criminals, the darkness at noon, and the last words. Told with care.
The story
By the time they led him out of the city, Jesus had been up all night. He'd been arrested, questioned, beaten, and passed between Pilate and Herod, and Luke says the soldiers grabbed a man from the crowd, Simon from Cyrene, and made him carry the cross behind Jesus. The text doesn't say why. It may be that Jesus couldn't.
A crowd followed, including women who were weeping for him. He turned and told them not to cry for him but for themselves and their children, because harder days were coming for Jerusalem. Even on that road, his attention was on what was going to happen to other people.
The place was called The Skull. Two criminals were executed alongside him, one on each side. Luke records that as it happened, Jesus said: Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing. The soldiers divided his clothes between them by casting lots. John notes that his tunic was woven in one piece, so rather than tear it they gambled for the whole thing.
People stood and watched. The rulers mocked him: he saved others, let him save himself. The soldiers joined in and offered him sour wine. Pilate had a sign fixed above him in three languages: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. The priests asked him to change it to say that Jesus had only claimed the title. Pilate refused. What I have written, I have written.
One of the criminals joined the mocking: if you're the Christ, save yourself and us. The other one stopped him. We deserve this, he said, and this man has done nothing wrong. Then he turned to Jesus and asked to be remembered when Jesus came into his kingdom. Jesus told him: today you will be with me in paradise. It's the only conversation Luke records from the cross, and it's with a dying convict who had nothing to offer.
John says his mother was standing there, with her sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene, and the disciple Jesus loved. Jesus looked at his mother and the disciple and gave them to each other: here is your son, here is your mother. From that day the disciple took her into his home.
Around noon, the sky went dark, and it stayed dark for three hours. Luke says the curtain in the temple, the one that closed off the innermost room, was torn in two. John records Jesus saying he was thirsty, being given sour wine on a sponge, and then saying: it is finished. Luke records his last words as a prayer. Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. Then he died.
The Roman centurion in charge, who had presumably watched many men die this way, said that this one had been innocent. The crowds who'd come to watch went home beating their chests. His friends and the women from Galilee stood at a distance. A member of the council named Joseph, who hadn't agreed to any of it, asked Pilate for the body, wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a new tomb cut into rock. John adds that Nicodemus came too, with an enormous quantity of spices. It was Friday evening, the Sabbath was about to start, and the women went home to prepare more spices and wait.
The verse to keep
Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Dividing his garments among them, they cast lots.
Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing.' Meanwhile they split up his clothes between them by drawing lots.
Said while it was happening, not afterwards. Some early manuscripts leave this line out, which is worth knowing, but it's in the text the church has read for centuries and it fits everything else Luke tells you about him.
What it actually means
The first readers of Luke and John lived in the Roman world, where crucifixion was designed to humiliate, and nobody wrote poems about it. To say your leader had been crucified was, on its face, to say your movement had lost. The Gospels don't hide this. They tell it in plain, almost flat prose, and they include the mocking, because the mocking is the point: everything the crowd shouted, 'he saved others, let him save himself', was true. He could have. He didn't.
What it means depends on who you ask, and Christians have used different pictures for it for two thousand years: a sacrifice, a ransom, a substitute, a victory over death, a demonstration of love. The texts themselves are more concrete than the theories. A prayer for the people killing him. A promise to a criminal. A son making sure his mother would be looked after. A torn curtain, which readers have long taken to mean the barrier between God and people had come down. What Luke and John show is the worst thing humans could do being met with forgiveness, out loud, in the middle of it.
What it doesn't mean: it isn't a story about God needing to hurt someone. Jesus had said earlier in John's Gospel that no one takes his life from him, he lays it down himself (John 10:18), and the death scenes read that way. It also isn't a story that asks you to feel guilty enough. The criminal beside him did nothing but ask, and the answer was 'today'. If you can't work out how the mechanism works, you're in good company; Peter, who was there, spent years working it out. The text asks you to look, not to solve it.
Worth arguing about
- 1The rulers said, 'He saved others, let him save himself.' Why do you think he didn't?
- 2The criminal who was promised paradise never got a chance to do anything with it. What does that suggest about what Jesus was actually looking for?
- 3Luke tells this with almost no description of physical pain. Why might he have chosen restraint?
- 4The people who stayed closest were mostly women and one disciple. Where would you have been standing?
Read it yourself: Luke 23:26–49
World English Bible. 24 verses.
Whole book: Luke