The Seventh Station: Jesus carries the cross

We know of many Jewish insurrections during the years immediately before and after Jesus’ crucifixion. From ancient literary sources we know the Roman Empire crucified hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East. In Palestine alone, that figure ran into the thousands.

     One insurrection occurred only a few years before Jesus and also occurred to coincide with the Passover, presumably to maximise its impact. The Jewish leaders were paranoid it might stop their celebrations taking place, so implored the Romans to stop it. As many as one thousand men were crucified, each cross planted half-a-stadia from the next, so each within sight of another.

     Jesus was a good Jew, so he and his family would have walked this road as they entered Jerusalem from the wilderness of the Judean desert, climbing a road lined with the dying: an avenue of cruel execution. The common people kept the memory alive by calling this road, ‘the way of the cross.’

     In this snippet of the story, we see Jesus walking along part of this long path—the paved bit—as he approached Golgotha. Today it’s called the via dolorosa, which is a Latin phrase that means something between ‘Way of Grief’ and ‘Way of Suffering’. Jesus carried his cross along this street.

The Roman form of crucifixion differed from much later art: the soldiers first nailed the victim’s hands to the ends of a horizontal beam. This beam weighed the same as the victim, so they customised things by nailing nailed a small man to a small beam and nailed a big man to a bigger beam. The victim then staggered to the place of crucifixion. Once there, the beam was lifted and slotted into a wide, deep groove cut across the top of a tree or wooden upright to form a T-shape.

Even before crucifixion, carrying the beam was torture because Jesus’ back was by now raw meat. And he had to carry it a considerable distance. Furthermore, as part of the humiliation, the victim, walked through crowds who jostled him, spat on him, and made sport by tripping him up.

     This preliminary to death was psychological torture and destroyed the man’s spirit. The man gave up hope, which made the crucifixion easier and the victim generally lived longer. This fine tuning of crucifixion made for even more effective form of deterrent because the spectacle lasts longer.

We see how Jesus carried his own death penalty, carried it across his back. In a different way, we also carry our own death penalty around with us. The most effective sin is that which is unconfessed: it’s effective because if I genuinely thought it was a sin I’d do something about it. I’d stop. My death penalty is therefore the unconfessed sin that I carry.

     So as we watch Jesus walking with a cross on his back, we also think about the sin we carry in our own lives, hearts and souls.