31. Mark 15:22
Then they brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means the place of a skull).
We don’t know much about Golgotha with any certainty. It’s referenced in all four gospels, presumed to be a hill just outside the city gates, probably close enough to a major road that passers-by could see it and revile the criminals unfortunate enough to be executed there. The name in Greek is Kraniou Topos – “place of the skull” – and in Latin Calvariae Locus, from which we get the name “Calvary.” Behind each is the Hebrew word Gulggolet, “skull” from which comes “Golgotha”
It may have gained its name because the small hill was shaped something like the skull-pan of the human head. It’s also been suggested that it was an execution site, given the name because of the skulls that remained there. If it was a place of execution – and by its location in proximity to the city, the roads, and graveyards near by (also referenced in the gospels), that seems possible – then it means that Jesus was executed as a criminal, an enemy of the state, someone who was meant to be made an example of. Not only that, but he was executed at the place those kinds of people are usually killed and disposed of.
There is a fierce anonymity in this kind of death, as all the outcasts, criminals, and rejected of a certain time or place are often heaped together. Think of the various mass graves of WWII, or Stalin’s Russian, or the killings fields of Cambodia, or all the other places of monstrous death and destruction that have littered the history of the world. It’s as the executioners and tyrants of the world hope to bury the evidence of their treachery in the graves along with all the bodies.
Jesus dies in like manner – forsaken, friendless, forgotten. It is horrible to imagine that our Lord was cosigned to such a fate.
And yet also appropriate. How else could God identity so completely with humanity except by being joined to those we consider most fully God-forsaken – the lowest of the low, the ones we would forget if we could. Jesus is buried here, rejected, outcast, meant to be forgotten.
Until God raised him from the dead. And in this kind of death, and in this kind of resurrection, we have God’s promise that God will not forget any of us, not the least to the greatest, not the popular or the rejected, not the poor or the rich, not the respected or the outcast – not any of us. In Jesus – the lamb led silently to the slaughter and the stone the builders rejected – God has joined God’s own self to us fully and complete so that wherever we may go, we know that Jesus has already been there. None of us, that is, can ever be, will ever be, truly God-forsaken, promising that where Jesus is now we will also some day be.
No, we don’t know much about Golgotha. But we do know it is the place where God embraced all that it means to be human and redeemed it; that is, redeemed us. Thanks be to God.
Prayer: Dear God, on this day we remember all those who are forgotten – all those whose stories will never be told, whose names will never be recorded – and we turn them over to you, trusting that you will remember and redeem them…and all of us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Post image: Night at Golgotha, Vasily Vereshchagin, 1869.
Recent Comments