Sermon Tone Analysis

Were You There?

April 1, 2007

*Matthew 27:32-55*

 

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Please turn with me to Matthew 27:32 and we’ll read through to verse 55.

Good Friday is coming this week.

Please consider today’s message in that context.

I.

I want you to picture the Scene

The morning sun had been up for some hours over the city of David.

Already pilgrims and visitors were pouring in through the gates, mingling with merchants from the villages round about, with shepherds coming down from the hills, and the gnarled streets were crowded.

There were the aged, stooped with years, muttering to themselves as they pushed through the throngs, and there were children playing in the streets, calling to each other in shrill voices.

There were men and women too, carrying burdens, baskets of vegetables, casks of wine, water bags.

And there were tradesmen with their tools.

Here a donkey stood sleepily beneath his burden in the sunlight.

And there, under a narrow canopy, a merchant shouted his wares in a pavement stall.

It was not easy to make one’s way through the crowd.

But it was especially difficult for a procession that started out from the governor’s palace.

At its head rode a Roman centurion, disdainful and aloof, scorn for the like of child or cripple who might be in his way.

His lips curled in thin lines of contempt as he watched through half-shut eyes the shouting, jeering crowd.

Before him went two legionnaires, clearing the crowd aside as best they could with curses and careless blows.

The procession moved at a snail’s pace.

The soldiers tried to keep step, but it was evident that the centurion guards did not relish this routine task that came to them every now and then in the government of this troublesome province.

The sunlight glanced on the spears and helmets of the soldiers.

There was a rhythmic clanking of steel as their shields touched their belt buckles and the scabbards of their swords.

Between the two files of soldiers staggered three condemned men each carrying a heavy bar of wood with its crosspiece on which he was to be executed.

It was hard to keep step for the pace was slow and the soldiers were impatient to get it over: left, right, left, right.

“Come along, they said.

We don’t have all day to spend!”

The crosses were heavy, however, and the first of the victims was at the point of collapse.

He had been under severe strain for several days.

Moreover, he had been scourged, lashed with a leather whip in the thongs of which had been inserted rough pieces of lead.

The carpenter followed them with his ladder and his nails.

And they all moved forward out of the courtyard of Pilate’s palace and made for one of the gates leading out of the city.

The sun was hot.

The sweat poured down the face of Jesus, and he swayed now and then underneath the weight of the cross.

A depression had fallen on the soldiers, and they marched in silence as if reluctant.

*II.

Weeping Women and Healed Men*

A group of women went with the procession, their faces half-hidden by their veils, but their grief could not be hid.

Some of them were sobbing aloud.

Others were praying.

Others moaning in that deep grief that knows not what to say or what to do.

Some of them had little children by the hand and kept saving over and over again, “What harm has he done?

Why should they put him to death?

He healed my child.

A touch of his hand and this little one could see.”

Another mother would chime in, “He brought my child back to life.

She had all but died.

What harm could there be in that?

And so they wondered, and so they went.

And there were men too who followed as closely as they could—men who walked with the strange steps of men to whom walking was not yet familiar, and others who still carried sticks in their hands but who did not use them as once they had to tap their way through villages and towns and cities, men who had been blind and now through habit carried sticks and who strangely enough were blind again, but this time they were blinded by tears.

Their lips were moving in prayers, and their hearts were heavy.

But there was nothing that they could do.

Once when the procession halted for a moment, Jesus turned and spoke to them, but they could not hear him for the shouting of the rabble.

For most of the crowd hardly knew what was going on.

They did not understand.

They had caught the infection of mob spirit.

They shouted to the first of the three victims, the one with the ridiculous crown on his head, twisted from a branch of the long-thorned briar that had lacerated his scalp and caused blood to mingle with the sweat.

They shouted at him until they were roughly pushed aside by the soldiers, and in some cases, they began to shout at the soldiers.

Some of the children, encouraged by their elders, joined in the shouting as the procession went along the way that will forever be known as the Via Dolorosa.

*III.

Simon of Cyrene*

Meanwhile outside the city gate, all unsuspecting, Simon of Cyrene had almost reached the gate.

He had just arrived in Judea and was about to enter the Holy City as a pilgrim for the festival.

He had spent the night in a village nearby, and rising early this morning he had bathed and dressed himself carefully with a tingling excitement because soon he would be in Jerusalem, and all the sights that had been described to him by exiles far from home he would see with his own eyes.

And all the sounds of Jerusalem that seemed to be wafted across the miles to be murmured by the waves of the sea and to be sung by the wind as it moaned through the trees he would hear with his own ears.

And yet he tried to keep calm.

And as he set out on the short walk that lay between him and the city, he was very thoughtful.

He walked along the winding path that sometimes ran through the fields, sometimes along the tortuous course of a dried-up river bed, sometimes wound up a jagged hillside to twist down again among giant boulders and huge rocks behind which highwaymen could easily hide.

He walked along beside the tall rushes and through the divided crops.

He could hear the sheep bleating on the inhospitable hillside while the morning sun climbed higher and higher and chased away the mists that had lain for rest upon the hilltops until now they trailed down into the valleys like a tulle scarf thrown over a lady’s shoulder.

Already he could see ahead of him the domes of the temple gleaming gold in the sunshine.

And he thought of his own city, Cyrene, looking down from the elevation over the turquoise-blue, sun-flecked waters of the Mediterranean.

As he neared the city gate, he began to hear shouting that grew louder and louder.

And there seemed to Simon to be a sort of beat to it a time in it, a rhythm—a sort of chant that he thought sounded like “Crucify, crucify crucify.”

And they met right at the city gate—Simon of Cyrene and the crowd.

He found that the procession was headed by some Roman soldiers.

He could recognize them anywhere.

He knew a legionnaire when he saw one—the insignia on their shields and their uniforms.

He could not be mistaken: it was official, this procession.

But he had little time to gather impressions, and as for asking questions, that was impossible.

He could not make himself heard in all this noise, in the confusion that seemed to be so violent and so terrible.

There was a sinister, throbbing malice in the atmosphere, and Simon shuddered.

And then he was aware of two moving walls of Roman steel between which there staggered a man carrying a cross.

And then he saw there were three men.

But it was one, one in particular, that attracted his attention.

He thought there must be something strange about it all, but before he could understand it, he was caught up in the procession and swept out through the gate again.

He was excited, afraid somehow and helpless.

He was puzzled and ill at ease.

He scanned face after face, quickly looking for some light of welcome, some word of explanation, some smile, some friendliness, but he found none.

The whole atmosphere was drama and cruelty.

The horror of it all crept over him like a clammy mist, and he shivered.

He had been captured by the procession, stumbling along, tightly wedged in the very heart of it, walking along beside the three men who staggered under the weight of crosses of heavy wood on which Simon knew they were soon to be put to death.

Each man was bent beneath the burden he carried.

Perspiration moistened each drawn face.

But that one to which he had been so attracted, that one that was strangely appealing—it was a face that arrested him, and Simon felt his gaze returning again and again to that one face.

He noticed that blood was trickling down from wounds in the brow, and then he saw what caused it: a twig of long-thorned briar twisted round, in the shape of a crown, and pushed down on the forehead.

But it was his eyes, it was the terrible look in his eves, that fascinated, awed, and frightened Simon.

He watched with bleeding heart as they shuffled along.

My, but the look in those eyes.