We can see Skull Hill now, a gruesome and horrifying place if there ever was one. It was called Golgotha, Aramaic for “skull.” In Greek it is Kraníon—“cranium,” in our modern anatomy class. With the Romans we call it Calvary, for it is like the dome of bone on a human head. 

The Jolly Roger pirate flag, the Punisher sticker on a pickup truck window, Dan Aykroyd’s personal vodka brand—all skulls. The Totenkopf (literally, “dead’s head”) was the last thing that Jews, crowded into the gas chamber, saw on the collar of the SS guard as they peered through the dirty glass. You will find skulls on countless military unit insignias all over the world, as well as on bottles of poisonous liquids. Shakespeare’s Hamlet holds up a skull and says, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him,” and the despair and sadness of death is visible. 

Skulls remind us of our impending death. As we look into the hollow eye sockets of a skull, they look into us. 

And so Skull Hill is a fitting place for a Roman crucifixion. A plaque written in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin is nailed to the top of the middle cross. It proclaims, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” And beneath that multilingual sign hangs a crucified man. 

His body is nailed to the wooden beams of the Roman torture device. His eyelids are swollen nearly shut from being beaten about the head. There is a crust of dried blood on his skin, and new blood oozes with each fainting heartbeat. He is alive in excruciating pain, crucifixion being at the root of this word for unbearable pain. 

Beneath his cross the soldiers who did the actual work of crucifixion are rolling dice, made out of bone, for his cloak. They are drinking cheap wine, soldier wine, to take the edge off. They have gotten drunk in many lands and far-off territories of their empire. With every sip, every buzz, every loud war story, they numb all feeling and sympathy for what they do. They take another drink, in hopes this drunk will touch the sadness down below the cruelty. They jokingly offer some to the man on the cross. How could they not have heard that his first miracle was turning water to fine wine at a wedding? 

Others insult the crucified man, taunting him with his powerlessness over what is happening to him. Some spit, others stare. Some women are there, his mother and some others. From the nails of the cross, the crucified man speaks through his pain, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple John, “Here is your mother” (John 19:26–27). He is asking his friend to watch over her, she who birthed him into the world and gave him his first bath. She says nothing. What could she say in the trauma of the moment? Her silence is our silence tonight in the face of horror. He is powerless. She is powerless. It is hard to tell who is in the most pain. 

His dehydrated mouth mumbles words, and the crowd cannot understand him. Eventually they hear, “I thirst,” and someone runs and gets a sponge. The sponge, a carcass of a sea creature who is rooted to one place for life, only to be plucked up by divers and used to clean, is that day dipped in the soldier wine and mixed with a bitter substance that may numb his pain a bit. The act of mercy is a double-edged sword, as the crucified man never knows if it will relieve pain or prolong pain. 

There is a loud cry, and he dies. Six hours is short for the torture of the cross. It seems too short, too good to be true for the leaders of the day who want all the bodies down from the cross before the approaching festival. They cannot take down live bodies, for then the victims would not have died by crucifixion. Their sentence of death by torture must be carried out in all its details. The morality of torture is rigid, exacting, precise, and completely devoid of human love. A spear is rammed into his side by a soldier to confirm his death. The fluids that gush forth from his body cavity confirm his clinical death in their death-filled minds. 

The trauma of Jesus, often called his passion—these gruesome six traumatic hours on a Friday afternoon on Skull Hill—are reenacted, rehearsed, recited, and remembered by over a billion people during Holy Week every year. A mother writes a note to her son’s principal excusing him from class so he can walk the stations of the cross with his youth group. A grandfather kneels in an empty church thumbing a rosary with a crucifix at its center. A construction worker cuts 4x4s in his garage with a circular saw to shape into a cross and put on the lawn of his church. 

Add to these billion all those who have meditated on this story in the two thousand years before us—refugees, soldiers, kings, peasants. This symbol of a crucified man is placed above the cradles of babies and on coffins, on Affliction T-shirts, as well as tattooed on human skin. The cross is the symbol that the burning Joan of Arc begged to be placed before her as she died in the fire. The cross is the symbol that an ICU nurse prays before in the hospital chapel while she confesses she has always planned her own suicide so she will not have to die with a tube jammed down her throat. 

The cross speaks to our human condition better than most other symbols. A helpless victim, an unjust trial, cruelty performed with a smile and a laugh, a silent god—these are not only what happened at the crucifixion; they are the marks of traumatic experiences that most humans experience in our short lives. 

While the teachings of Jesus about not worrying and about being kind, and the actions of Jesus such as turning water into wine are wholesome and encouraging, these stories of his life and teachings recorded in the four Gospels were written through the post-traumatic lens of his crucifixion. The Gospel writers knew how the story ends. One of Christianity’s earliest theologians, St. Paul, preached very little about Jesus’ parables and life events. He had one central message, “We proclaim Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23). While this message was offensive and foolish to many who heard it, it drew a dedicated band of followers from enslaved people and the lowest classes of society, all of whom would have had significant trauma from living on the bottom rungs of the Roman social ladder. 

As Mary Beard writes in her monumental work SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the Roman world was terrifyingly vicious and is alien to us: “That means not just the slavery, the filth (there was hardly any such thing as refuse collection in ancient Rome), the human slaughter in the arena, and the death from illnesses whose cures we now take for granted; but also the newborn babies thrown away on rubbish heaps, the child brides and the flamboyant eunuch priests.”

We cannot underestimate how traumatizing this reality was for people living in the world of Jesus. The loss of their political autonomy and judicial recourse, the violent moods of occupying soldiers, and the inability to get ahead because of the tax burden are just a few ways the Romans traumatized the people in Jesus’ world. This traumatized world was where the stories of Jesus first circulated, offering a compelling alternative to Rome’s violent, traumatizing presence.

And, tonight, Jesus offers you an alternative to the violence and trauma that often define the world that you live in.

That alternative is Jesus opening his arms wide on the cross to give you forgiveness and life.

In His death on the cross, Jesus offers you healing and hope.

Healing from your sin that keeps you separated from God.

Healing from the guilt, shame, and embarrassment that you have been carrying around.

Healing from the pressing burdens that you cannot lift off of yourself.

Jesus calls to you and says to you, “Come to me you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.”

Jesus calls to you and says to you, “Lay your burdens down on me. Let me carry them for you.”

That is what we are going to do now—listen to Jesus’ gracious and merciful voice and lay our sin, guilt, and shame on Him and His cross so we can leave here knowing that God has done for us what He promised He will do—take our sin and give us Jesus’ record of perfection.

We call today Good Friday because in the person and work of Jesus Christ, crucified on the cross, God has acted for our ultimate good by providing us with the forgiveness of sin, reconciliation with God, and eternal life with Him in Heaven.

Come to the cross now and lay your sins and burdens upon Jesus who has died for your good.

Amen.

Pastor Fred Scragg

April 7, 2023