Luke 23:48
And when all the crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts.
Luke, on the whole, takes a more generous view of the witnesses of the Passion than the other Evangelists. There is little indication in the other gospels, for instance, that anyone feels great remorse over Jesus’ death. But in Luke’s Gospel, women mourn Jesus’ journey to the cross, one of those who are crucified with him defends and appeals to him, and now the crowds – indeed, Luke reports that it is “all the crowds” – grieve Jesus’ fate.
This offers, I think, another clue as to how to regard the cross. If God were the object of the work of the cross – as in those theories of atonement that stress Jesus’ death as a substitution for the punishment we deserve – then the disposition of the crowds would be of no consequence. In fact, it might be more appropriate if no one were sympathetic to Jesus’ cause, as that would be an even more pathetic – and therefore more costly – death.
But the crowds are affected by Jesus’ death. They grieve, they regret, they show remorse in their beating of their breasts. They know, that is, that what is happening is profoundly wrong, and in their grief they join the centurion in declaring Jesus’ innocent and the world and powers that put him to death as corrupt.
Such is always one of the chief effects of the cross – it stands as an accusation not simply against those who put Jesus there but of the whole world that condones and permits such a miscarriage of justice and, quite frankly, any expression of justice through such gruesome means. The very fact that anyone can die by crucifixion – or by hunger, lethal injection, war or disease, for that matter – points to a world that is fundamentally and fatally flawed, a world in need of redemption.
Which leads to the second effect of the cross. For in the cross we see that God loved this flawed creation enough to enter into it fully and completely in the life – and now death – of Jesus. Such that Jesus’ death now hallows all those who have died unjustly or cruelly. For God in Jesus entered into our place and joined God’s own self to our fate that we might know that we are never alone, never absent God’s love and concern.
So the cross, seen this way, both accuses and comforts, both betrays the lie of this world that this is all there is as well as offers the promise of a better future in the nearer presence of God.
Prayer: Dear God, when we look upon the cross this week and always, remind us both of how far we and this world you created fall short and of just how far you will reach out to meet us and redeem us in love. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Post image: James Tissot, “The Crowd Left Calvary Beating Their Breasts.”
This is the best explanation of the people beating their chest.