John 19:18
There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them.
It’s remarkable, when you think about it, how few words it takes to describe the loss of an innocent life. One sentence, four dreadful words: “There they crucified him.”
This is no peculiar tragedy, of course. Unmarked deaths occur all too regularly. And perhaps because of their very frequency, we have grown rather numb to them. One death, said the tyrant Joseph Stalin, is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.
Nor is Jesus’ death solitary. He is crucified with two others. Whether they are criminals or not seems hardly to matter, as surely no one deserves to die in such a horrific manner. Crucifixion was an intensely cruel way to die. Those nailed to the wood beams often lingered for several agonizing days, eventually succumbing to blood loss, asphyxiation, or a combination of the two.
And that is how our Lord dies. Or, we might say, this is where our God chooses to come to us: among the innocent, among the forgotten, among those cruelly treated by the world, among those whose deaths go unmarked and unattended. And in dying this way, God identifies with all those who have lived and died similarly, all those who are lost, all those, finally, who need a compassionate and attentive God.
Prayer: Dear God, keep us mindful of those the world regularly ignores, for you still come to us among the forgotten and despised. Amen.
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