The Savior on Mount Calvary

The Ascent to Calvary (overall and detail view), Jacopo Tintoretto, 1565–1567. Oil on canvas, 515 x 390 cm., Casina Pio IV, Vatican City, Italy, Public domain.

Were You There When They Crucified My Lord? from the album Amazing Grace. Anonymous African American Slave Spiritual performed by Jessye Mae Norman.

Poetry:

“Simon of Cyrene Carries the Cross”
by Malcolm Guite

In desperation on this road of tears
Bystanders and bypassers turn away.
In other’s pain we face our own worst fears
And turn our backs to keep those fears at bay,
Unless we are compelled as this man was
By force of arms or force of circumstance
To face and feel and carry someone’s cross
In Love’s full glare and not his backward glance.
So, Simon, no disciple, still fulfilled
The calling, ‘Take the cross and follow me.’
By accident his life was stalled and stilled,
Becoming all he was compelled to be.
Make me, like him, your pressed man and your priest,
Your alter Christus, burdened and released

THE SAVIOR ON MOUNT CALVARY

There is a reason we take forty days to prepare for Good Friday. Without rigorous preparation pursued on mental, physical, and spiritual fronts the scope of the day’s loss might always escape us. After all, we are more easily numbed to grief than we are alive to it. We are studied at avoiding, explaining away, and “yes, but ____” solution-spinning for anything and everything that pains us.

Grief and lament are frightening. They require us to submit to the reality that there are losses that can, without warning and seemingly without reason, rob us of comfort, stability, happiness, even hope as they plunge us into pain we cannot control. We often do everything we can to hold grief at bay, to avoid cultivating lament.

But Good Friday confronts us with a God who sustains suffering and death in His own body as the ultimate act of love and asks us to join Him. There is life beyond this death, He tells us. But first you must walk the path of Calvary with me.

We watch Christ, watch Him shamed and abandoned, watch His body torn apart by a whipping that nearly took His life, and then watch Him forced to carry that heavy, rough cross uphill on His bleeding back, and we do not know what to do. A love expressed in such a lavish willingness to suffer defies everything we think we know about what being a “successful Christian” will mean (rescuing others from their pain) or earn for us (happiness, relief from pain).

This is why we need Lent. Lent calls us to prepare ourselves to look at Good Friday until nothing is left of us but our need for this bleeding God who so willingly, so lovingly, took upon Himself the burden of the Cross. We are not yet strong enough for such grief.

So, we must begin, however haltingly, our own ascent to Calvary — and as we falter forward, we take Simon the Cyrene and the women of Jerusalem, who were likely professional mourners, as our companions and examples.

Perhaps Simon was, as Guite’s poem suggests, standing neutral and uncertain at the side of the road. Perhaps, bullied by the soldiers into dragging the cross up that craggy hill, he groaned under its weight and wondered, numbly, what was going on. But still he carried it. And, per tradition, when he left Calvary, he was never the same. He and his entire family later became Christians.

Maybe the “Daughters of Jerusalem” were professional mourners, with no connection to Christ and no personal emotion beneath their wailing. But who among us does not need to practice some action or way of being for a long time before we work its wisdom into our bones? We cannot know where these women came from or who they were. What we do know is that they saw a man suffering the hatred and torturous cruelty of civil and religious leaders, jeered on by spiteful crowds and apparently abandoned by His friends, and chose not to reject Him. They publicly united their grief with His and followed on the path of His pain. When we find ourselves numb to the suffering before us, we can look to the example of these women. We can practice lament before we know how to feel it.

In Lent we prepare for Good Friday by searching out our sins and surrendering them to Christ. We practice lament. We learn to become alive to grief as we ready ourselves to join the suffering of Christ on Calvary. We prepare to go up with Him to Jerusalem, and before the glory of His bloodied, grieving love to be undone.

Prayer

Assist us mercifully, O Lord, in these our supplications and prayers, and dispose the way of Your servants toward the attainment of everlasting salvation; that, among all the changes and chances of this mortal life, we may ever be defended by Your most gracious and ready help; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

O Lord Jesus Christ, who said unto your Apostles, Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; Regard not our sins, but the faith of Your Church; and grant unto it that peace and unity which is according to Your will who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.
Adapted from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer

Alea Peister
Copywriter for Deloitte Digital
Alumna, Torrey Honors College
Biola University

For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, please visit our website via the link in our bio.