Procession to Golgotha.

(Mat. 27:31-32; Mark15:20-21; Luke 23:26-32; John 19:16-17).

All 4 Evangelists narrate the Lord’s procession to Golgotha. The first two — Saints Matthew and Mark — speak of this identically. “And when they had mocked Him, they took the purple off Him, put His own clothes on Him, and led Him away to be crucified. Now as they came out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name. Him they compelled to bear His cross.” Saint John narrates on this very briefly, not mentioning anything about Simon of Cyrene. The most detailed narrative is from Saint Luke. Saint John narrates that as it was accepted generally, that everyone who was sentenced to death had to carry his own cross, the Lord carried His own cross to the place of execution. However, He was so exhausted after His inner struggles in Gethsemane, passing the night without sleep and terrible tortures, that He did not have the strength to carry the cross to the designated place. Moved, of course not by compassion but by the desire to reach the place and accomplish their foul deed, the Lord’s enemies grabbed along the way, an individual named Simon. He was an emigrant from Cyrene, a town in Lybia on the northern shore of Africa, west of Egypt (where many recently migrated Jews lived), and was returning to the city from the field, when he was forced to carry the Lord’s cross. Saint Mark adds that Simon was the father of Alexander and Rufus, later to become famous in the early Christian Church and mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans by Saint Paul (16:13).

Saint Luke adds that “a great multitude of the people followed Him, and women who also mourned and lamented Him.” He was followed not only by His enemies, but by His commiserating worshippers. Notwithstanding that the custom prohibited expressions of sympathy to a condemned man being led to his execution, many women in the crowd showed their empathy through loud sobbing. Their compassion was so deep and genuine, that the Lord found He had to respond and turned to them with a whole homily. Presumably, this occurred at the time when the procession stopped so that the Lord’s cross could be transferred to Simon the Cyrenian. “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children…” “Daughters of Jerusalem” — is a tender address, indicating the Lord’s kind disposition to these women, who had expressed such moving compassion. Seemingly forgetting His forthcoming sufferings, He turns His spiritual gaze to the chosen people in the future, to that frightening punishment that will reach them for rejecting the Messiah. “Weep for yourselves and for your children” — the Lord warns them with these words of the catastrophes that will overtake them and their children.

Here, it is as though the Lord had in mind that frightening oath, which the Jews brought upon themselves so flippantly when they screamed: “His Blood be on us and on our children” (Mat. 27:25). “The days are coming…” — impending, days of terrible calamities are nearing, when the blessing of childbirth will transform into a curse, and those that had previously been regarded as being under God’s wrath as they were without child, not child-bearing, will be regarded as blessed. “Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’” — that’s how great the disasters will be. Undoubtedly, the dialogue is about the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, by Titus.

“For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?” — evidently, this was a people’s adage. Under “green wood,” The Lord means Himself; under “dry” — the Jewish people. If they didn’t show mercy to Him, who is Innocent, then what will they do with the guilty people? “The fire is heading toward Israel (see Ezek. 20:47); if the fire destroyed green wood, with what ferocity will it destroy the dry?” (Bhp. Michael).