Luke 23:26-31 Service, Sympathy, and Symbolism
Good morning! Turn with me to our text for this morning, Luke 23:26-31, and that’s on page 884 in the pew Bibles.
If you remember from last time, Jesus had just stood trial before Pilate and before Herod, and though they found in Him no guilt deserving death, in order to prevent a riot they handed Him over to the will of the people to be crucified.
That’s where we pick up in the text this morning. Today we will see Jesus’ encounter with Simon of Cyrene and a group of women and we’ll examine one man’s act of service and the women’s expression of sympathy and pray that they, somehow, would result in salvation.
Let’s look at Luke 23:26.
26 And 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. 27 And there followed him a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him. 28 But turning to them Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. 29 For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ 30 Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ 31 For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
Let’s pray.
Here in Luke’s Gospel Simon of Cyrene only gets a sentence. Mark gives a little more detail and tells us that Simon was the father of Alexander and Rufus. This may seem like an insignificant detail until you consider that the Apostle Paul gave greetings to Rufus in his letter to the Romans. We’re not 100% on that being the same Rufus but we need to acknowledge the possibility and what that possibility might actually mean.
After His trial Pilate had Jesus scourged and then handed over to be crucified. Scourging was a Roman judicial penalty, consisting of a severe beating with a multi-lashed whip containing embedded pieces of bone and metal. It was very likely that because of this severe beating that Jesus did not have the strength to carry his own cross and so the Roman soldiers forced Simon of Cyrene to do it.
By all accounts this should have been Simon Peter but he was nowhere to be found. Instead they conscripted Simon of Cyrene, who was a pilgrim in the city for the Passover all the way from Cyrene which is now called Libya.
There is a distinct possibility that this act of service, though it wasn’t voluntary, resulted in salvation coming to this family. It wasn’t the act of carrying the cross for Jesus that saved them but faith in the One who would be nailed to it at the end of that road on the hill called Golgotha.
I hope the image is not wasted that Simon was forced to do literally what followers of Christ are called to do figuratively, and that is to take up our crosses daily and follow Jesus.
And I think that the reminder, this image of carrying the cross, and carrying it daily, is an important one.
To many the cross is a one time event, not just in the life of Jesus but in their own lives. The cross is not just a stop on the timeline of the life of the believer in Jesus. We are to be continual cross-bearers, allowing the cross to flavor our entire life from that point forward.
The cross is not just something we wear around our neck or hang on our wall or wear on a t-shirt. The cross is what defines us and should be at the forefront of our thinking and decision making.
The cross and the treatment of Jesus should be our constant reminder of just how seriously God takes sin. The consideration of the bitter sufferings of our Lord Jesus should engage us to stand in awe of the justice of God, and to tremble before Him.
Romans 6:10-11 says, For the death [Jesus] died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Dead to sin, alive to God in Christ Jesus, that’s the power of the cross, remember that.
In the midst of this act of service from Simon of Cyrene, there is also an act of sympathy.
27 And there followed him a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him.
Now to clarify, this crowd was not the crowd of His disciples, nor were these the women we know by name that were followers of Jesus. This was a crowd made up of people who may have heard of Jesus and maybe had heard Him teach and maybe witnessed miracles that did not want to see Him treated in this way and certainly didn’t want the Romans to kill Him.
But they expressed sympathy not faith and so Jesus gave them a stern warning. When Jesus could have been solely focused on His own suffering He pauses with concern for the salvation of those who mourned for Him and gave a warning to the weepers.
28 But turning to them Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. 29 For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ 30 Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ 31 For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
Jesus Himself had wept for these people when He entered the city just a few days before in Luke 19:41-44.
41 And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42 saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43 For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side 44 and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
It’s no coincidence that Jesus warns these weeping ladies on the road to Calvary of exactly the same thing, the destruction of Jerusalem.
John Calvin wrote, “There will be a far greater reason for weeping on account of the dreadful judgment of God which hangs over them; it’s as if He had said, that His death was not the end but the beginning of evils to Jerusalem and to the whole nation.”
Jesus is saying, “Don’t weep for my future, weep for yours!”
There are two times that the people of Jerusalem were prophesied to call for the mountains to fall on them and the hills to cover them. One time was prophesied in Hosea 10:8 and the other in Revelation 6:16. The first prophecy, the one in Hosea, is concerning the destruction of Jerusalem, and the second, in Revelation, is concerning final Judgment and the wrath of the Lamb.
In both instances the people aren’t praying for a rock to hide under, they are praying that a landslide will kill them.
The desperation would be so great that mothers would praise those who never had children because they would not have to endure the agony of watching their children be killed with their own eyes.
When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem they killed over a million people, men, women, and children, and took thousands captive.
“43 For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side 44 and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
That’s what Jesus said, and that’s exactly what happened.
Those women wept, but they didn’t weep for Him as if He were their King, and they will most certainly weep again with Him as their judge. They that will not flee to Christ for refuge will in vain call to the hills for refuge from His wrath to come.
Matthew Henry wrote, “Note, when with an eye of faith we behold Christ crucified we ought to weep, not for Him, but for ourselves. We must not be affected with the death of Christ as with the death of a common person whose calamity we pity, or of a common friend whom we are likely to part with. The death of Christ was a thing peculiar; it was His victory and triumph over His enemies; it was our deliverance, and the purchase of eternal life for us. And therefore let us weep, not for Him, but for our own sins, and the sins of our children, that we were the cause of His death; and weep for fear of the miseries we shall bring upon ourselves, if we slight His love, and reject His grace, as the Jewish nation did, which brought upon them the ruin here foretold.”
That last statement from Jesus predicts that ruin upon Jerusalem by the Romans.
31 For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
This is only a cryptic saying if you’re not a woodworker, and as we all know that Jesus was a carpenter.
Green wood still has the sap in it, it still has life in it. Dry wood is just that, dry, no moisture, no life.
Green wood doesn’t burn well, it has to heat up and then all that moisture has to turn to steam and be released before the wood will burn. When you buy your firewood it’s either green, seasoned, or dry. Dry wood burns right away.
Jesus is the life that made the wood of Jerusalem green, and if the Romans would do these things now, with Him there, just imagine what they will do when He is taken away from them… the city will burn.
Alistair Begg said, “If the innocent Jesus meets such a fate, what will be the fate of a guilty Jerusalem?”
The same is true for everybody else, we can just as easily substitute the word, “humanity,” for, “Jerusalem.”
If the innocent Jesus meets such a fate, what will be the fate of a guilty humanity?
Again, Alistair Begg said, “There will be no refuge from Him, there is only refuge in Him.”
Have you taken refuge in Him? Have you trusted Him to take away your sins on the cross? If not, I pray that you would.
The cross is the evidence of just how seriously God takes sin, and Jesus is the evidence of just how amazing His grace is towards those who believe in Him.
Amen.
