All Saints’, Dorval
April 13, 2025
When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.
Last month, my friend and colleague Jes Kast, a United minister in Pennsylvania, went to the Philadelphia art museum and saw the artwork depicted on today’s slide. For those who may be dialing into the Zoom call on the phone and thus can’t see it, it’s a late medieval crucifix in painted wood, ornate and close to life size, with Christ on the cross flanked by Mary and John and attended by angels. Below the foot of the cross is a pile of skeletons, which I’ve shown in close-up on the slide; the cross is literally standing on the pile of skulls and bones. As Jes wrote in her Facebook post sharing the picture, “Jesus is literally crushing death.”
Whether the creator of this sculpture was thinking in those terms, or whether they were simply representing that Jesus was crucified on “Golgotha, which means the place of the Skull”, who knows – although knowing something of how medieval people thought, I suspect they were well aware of the double meaning.
We began today with Jesus entering Jerusalem in triumph – a ragtag, ad hoc, peasant kind of triumph, but sometimes that’s the best kind. And “as he rode along,” Luke reports, “people kept spreading their cloaks on the road.” (Luke’s account of the Entry into Jerusalem doesn’t actually mention palms, just garments.)
We begin with the feet of the donkey placed on garments, and we end with the foot of the cross placed on bones. The King of peace comes trampling upon the tokens laid before him in welcome and homage, and the Lord of life, reigning from the tree, tramples upon the bones that give the place of execution its name, anticipating the end to this story that we know waits just around the corner, on the other side of the grave.
And in between, Jesus’ own feet – not the feet of the donkey or the foot of the cross – walk the stony road from Upper Room, to garden, to Praetorium, to Golgotha.
It seems that, in this story, we should be paying attention to where the Messiah touches the earth. This is the place where time and eternity, God and humanity, meet. In triumph and homage; in fear, struggle, and suffering; and in death that defeats death itself and leads to new life.
There is one other place in this story where Jesus steps on something, but it doesn’t appear on the page in Luke’s narration of the Passion. To find it, we need to go all the way back to the beginning, to Genesis: when God drives Adam and Eve out of the garden after they have eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as God is cursing the snake for its role in the debacle, God tells the snake that “he [i.e. Adam] will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.”
This simple statement of biological fact – that people tend to step on snakes, and the snakes tend to bite them if they do – became the basis of an elaborate symbolism whereby both the Virgin Mary and Jesus were seen as treading on the head of the snake, which stood for sin and the devil, and were depicted thus in artwork, hymns, and sermons. It appears in one of the most underrated Easter hymns in our hymnal, number 216, whose second verse goes:
For Judah’s lion bursts his chains,
crushing the serpent’s head,
and cries aloud through death’s domains
to wake the imprisoned dead.
(I’m sure we’ll get to sing the whole thing sometime in Easter season.)
So powerful is this image that I find myself looking among the skulls and bones at the foot of the carved cross in the picture, for a reptile head and the flicker of a forked tongue. Jesus crushes not only death, but sin: all those forces that – in the words of the baptismal covenant – corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. All those systems that declare that only certain kinds of people are actually human, that enrich a few at the expense of the many, that kill where they should heal, that waste and warp human life – all of them are trampled beneath the feet of the Messiah, as he gives himself up entirely to the powers of earthly injustice, only to turn around and explode them from the inside out.
When the crowd cries out “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord,” as Jesus rides over their scattered garments on the donkey, Jesus tells those who would rebuke them that “if these were silent the stones would shout out.” The very ground acclaims the coming of the one who will trample the serpent’s head and crush death; the one who takes a pile of bones and raises upon it the tree of a cross that becomes the tree of life. All creation waits with eager longing for the accomplishment of God’s purpose of salvation. One can imagine that even the mute bones, the remains of executed criminals lying about on the ground on Golgotha, could rise up and shout in anticipation. And that mental image once again looks forward, to when we will hear Ezekiel’s powerful prophecy about the dry bones who rise up and praise God, at the Great Vigil service on Saturday night.
Even death is helpless in the face of the Saviour who treads the dusty and tormented earth of Palestine before mounting the cross.
But death being – ultimately – helpless and crushed doesn’t mean that Jesus’ pain – or our pain – isn’t real.
The skulls aren’t imaginary. They’re very real. Jesus doesn’t wipe our memories, turn the clock back, or make it all not have happened in the first place. Our suffering is not erased; it is, quite literally, made good.
That’s how Jes ended her post when she shared these photos: “Jesus crushes death. All death dealing systems will die. Resurrection is the Divine plan. That gives me hope.”
It’s hard to see sometimes, but that is what this week is for. It puts us back in the heart of the story. It meets us in our suffering and brings us face to face with the God who takes on all that suffering, raising his cross on a hill of bones, and somehow, against all odds, against all hope, makes that the place where our new life begins.
Join Jesus on the journey, friends. Walk beside the donkey into Jerusalem, up the hill to Golgotha, and wait at the foot of the cross, to see what will grow there.
Amen.
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