“His Final Steps Led To The Place Of The Skull”
Text: Luke 23:26-33
4-18-2025
Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. It’s called the Via Dolorosa which is Latin for “The Way of Sorrows.” It stretches for about half a mile as it weaves its way through the old city of Jerusalem. It’s purported to be the same route on which our Savior took His final steps to Golgotha. For that reason, thousands upon thousands of religious pilgrims, hoping to retrace our Savior’s steps, walk the Via Dolorosa each year. During Holy Week and especially today, on Good Friday, that path will be wall-to-wall with people. There will be a traffic jam of pilgrims, many of whom are kneeling at the stations of the cross. These locations are carefully marked with large Roman-numeral plaques and there are a series of 14 pictures or carvings depicting various events from the passion of the Christ, starting with our Savior’s being condemned by Pilate to our Savior’s lifeless body being placed in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.
The exact locations of these events aren’t recorded in Scripture but have been added by tradition. Some of them aren’t even found in Scripture. For example, the station where Veronica supposedly wiped the blood and sweat from Jesus’ face when He fell. The cloth she used, the Veil of Veronica, became a relic with supposedly miraculous powers for those who show reverence to it. Absolutely nothing like that is recorded in Scripture.
Today, on the Friday we call Good, we also will walk the Via Dolorosa. We are guided by the record of the inspired writer St. Luke. We walk beside our Savior in spirit and see how His final steps led to “The Place of the Skull.” Luke shares the details in a straightforward manner. “As they led Him away, they seized one Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it behind Jesus.” “They” refers to the Roman soldiers assigned to supervise our Savior’s execution. These men had performed many crucifixions, but nothing like this one. It was so different that the centurion who oversaw the crucifixion was so moved that when our Savior hung his head and died, he said, “Truly this was the Son of God.”
That’s certainly not what he or his fellow soldiers thought just a few hours earlier. That’s evident by their actions. Scripture tells us that the guards brutalized Jesus. They scourged Him, struck him in the face, spit upon Him, and mocked Him. Then a crown of thorns was smashed on His head and a purple robe draped over His bloodied back as part of their mocking tribute to this Jewish “king.” It was a sight so pitiful that Pilate hoped it would move the crowds to mercy, but all it did was incite them to shout even louder, “Away with Him! Away with Him! Crucify Him!” (John 19:15).
So, they did. But the man they had beaten to within an inch of his life was too weak to walk that half a mile to the Place of the Skull while carrying the crossbeam on which He would hang. How many times did our Lord stumble and fall before the soldiers lost patience with Him? We don’t know. But we do know that they finally got fed up with the slow pace and picked a man from the crowd who looked strong enough to get this trip over with. They chose Simon of Cyrene. Cyrene was a Greek city in North Africa. Historians tell us that some 100,000 Jews had been forced to settle there around 300 B.C. during the reign of Ptolemy Soter, ruler of Egypt. Simon was most likely a Jew who was in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. St. Mark, informs us that he had 2 sons, named Rufus and Alexander. Did you ever wonder why God made sure we knew these names? Well, consider this: 25 years later, in his epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul greets a believer named Rufus (Romans 16:13). If this is the same guy from Mark’s Gospel, then could it be that a shocking twist of events and a gruesome chore led Simon’s family into the Christian faith? We don’t know for sure but it sounds likely.
We also don’t know if the Good Friday crowd equaled the one on Palm Sunday, but I am fairly certain that many of the observers along the way on Good Friday weren’t concerned about laying down their coats or cutting palm branches to smooth our Savior’s final steps. Perhaps some of them were part of the crowd who had been shouting their bloodthirsty demand at Pilate, “Crucify! Crucify!” They were looking forward to the spectacle of Jesus on a cross. But on Good Friday, not all were there for the show. Certainly not the “women who were mourning and lamenting for Him.” How many women? The gospels don’t tell us. How loud were they? We can make an educated guess because Jewish mourning was actually loud wailing as an expression of grief. It wasn’t the restrained grief we show at the funerals of our loved ones—muffling our sobs with a handkerchief. Whatever the volume was we know that it got our Savior’s attention.
Christ’s unselfish love caused Him to pause and muster the strength to speak to those mourning women. You see, on the Way of Sorrows, our Savior’s heart broke—not because of what He was going through but because of what the lost world would go through. As God’s Son, Jesus could see the future and that included the events in 70 A.D., when the Romans finally got sick of the troublesome province of Judea with its capital of Jerusalem, which always seemed to be a hotbed of unrest. So, after a lengthy siege caused mass starvation, the Roman general Titus led his army into Jerusalem, destroyed the city, leveled the temple, and massacred untold numbers of men, women, and children. Jesus’ Good Friday prophecy to the women is chillingly accurate. Our Lord knew that loving mothers would rather be barren than give birth to children only to see them suffer.
All because the Romans, prompted and prodded by the Jewish leaders were putting to death “the green wood”, that is Jesus, the innocent man Son of God. If that could happen, how fierce would God’s judgment be on the “dry” wood, that is all unbelievers on the Last Day? Pray without ceasing for the “dry wood,” that is, the unbelievers around us. And pray without ceasing for yourself, your Christian family members, and Christians in this world wherever they may be: because that “dry wood” still lurks in your heart and mine. We call it our sinful nature.
Luke also shares the next important detail that: “Two others, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with Him. And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on His right and one on His left.” The Romans usually would do multiple crucifixions at a time for a good reason. What better way to hold the people in check than by using the most horrific method of execution ever devised and making a public show of it? Keep in mind, you didn’t get crucified for jaywalking through or spitting your chewing gum on the street. Crucifixion was for seriously bad “criminals.” It was with criminals that Jesus took his final steps on the Via Dolorosa. And at the end, he was crucified with these bad men on either side. That fulfilled a prophecy made by Isaiah in chapter 53: “He poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors…” (Isaiah 53:12) That’s why Jesus took His final steps to the Place of the Skull: to be numbered not just with sinners but as a substitute for us—us rebellious sinners who sometimes still have a stubborn streak of self-righteousness that offends our holy and righteous God.
“Did you say we’re self-righteous, Pastor?” Yes! Even though we may humbly get on our knees and confess with the apostle Paul that, “I am the chief of sinners” we often say it with a caveat: “Yeah, I may be chief of sinners but I’m really not all that bad. At least I’m not as bad as some of the really horrible sinners.” You see, we don’t want our names recorded on a list along with men like: Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, or Charles Manson. But that’s where we belong because every sin, big or small, is offensive to God. Thankfully, Jesus solved that deadly dilemma for us. How? By allowing His name to be entered into the Lord’s judgment book in place of ours. Jesus, the only human being who was ever innocent and perfect—with every thought, word, desire, and action—in a final, selfless, sacrificial act, allowed Himself to be counted with criminals like you and me. That’s why His final steps led to the Place of the Skull.
St. Luke doesn’t give us all the gory details. He just tells us that when Jesus reached this destination He was crucified with the other 2 criminals. Yet just one word in that account speaks volumes about the passion of our Lord: “crucified.” Crucifixion has been described as the most painful means of execution ever devised. There have been several articles written by doctors explaining why this is true. I’ll spare you the gruesome details in this sermon. What you need to know is that Jesus suffered an excruciating death on the cross for our sins to be removed. One medical doctor summarized crucifixion by simply saying it was not a “pretty sight.”
No, it’s not. Yet our Savior’s physical agony as he hung on the cross is just a thimbleful compared to the anguish of soul our Savior endured from the torrential flood of punishment God rained down on Him that day. Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.” All of those “wages” are what Jesus bore for us on the cross. All of God’s wrath. All of God’s punishment. All of God’s judgment. Every last penny of our sinful “wages” He took upon Himself. For you, for me, and for the whole human race. Jesus endured it all. It had to be hell for Jesus to suffer there as the innocent Son of God. It was pure hell for Him to be abandoned by His Father because He took on all our sins. But He suffered our hell in order to bring heaven to us. That’s what led His final steps to the “Place of the Skull.” For that, we gather tonight to praise God for the unselfish sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and together we offer Him our eternal thanks and praise. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria!