The sun has now set for good this Friday. Strangest thing happened earlier this afternoon: complete darkness for about three hours, then light again for a while before sunset. In all my years there’s never been a day quite like this one. Three men crucified together—that’s not unique. Neither was the soldiers’ disparaging and brutality of the condemned—I’ve come to expect it, as I have those religious leaders’ hypocritical self-righteousness. (They’ll frame someone so they can get him executed, but then they’ll refuse to step inside the governor’s palace lest they be “defiled” and unable to eat their religious meal together. Really? They can murder and still worship God? They think he is okay with that?)
The uniqueness of today had to do with the man on the middle cross, beaten so badly he was hardly recognizable. The sign above him named his crime: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” So it was treason against Caesar?
A small group of women stood around his cross in disbelief. Some of them wept openly, his mother among them. Astonishingly, Jesus summoned what strength remained to him and spoke kindly to her. Astounding. Men being crucified are always cursing and screaming in unbearable pain.
Then there were the common people. Some were coming and some were going, some stood shaking their heads. Just a few days ago they had been screaming, “Save us, Messiah!” as they placed palm branches and their coats on the road so he would ride over them on his way into Jerusalem. Now they were ridiculing him in derision.
But above all, you should have heard the commotion the chief priests were making: mocking, scorning, and challenging him to come down off that cross! I have never seen such inflamed, rabid hatred.
If I hadn’t heard Jesus’ response with my own two ears I would never have believed it. He said, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”
But what I absolutely cannot forget is the way he said, “It is finished!” and breathed his last. This plus the earthquake and the darkness and everything else completely overwhelmed me and I said out loud, “This man was innocent; he was truly the Son of God!”
Junias Octavius, Centurion