Skull

Pastor's Epistle—November 2024

The third in our series of biblical woodcuts by Gustave Doré illustrates Matthew 27:33-34—

And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it.

Jerusalem in Jesus’ day had spilled beyond its borders, with settlements cropping up outside the fortified city wall. Golgotha—Calvary, in Latin, both names referring to “skull”—began as a limestone quarry on the west edge of the city. The Romans used a high outcropping or hill here as a site of public execution, with crucified victims on full display for those entering, leaving, or simply passing along the road.

We don’t know how Golgotha earned its name. Legends abound. Some say that criminals were beheaded there, or that the hill looked rather like a skull, or even that it had been the burial site of Adam once upon a time. The Romans certainly didn’t care. They bored post-holes in the top to hold their crosses, crucifixion being a statement of power and dominance. Retribution against the offender almost seems an afterthought.

By traditional reckoning, Christ was convicted under Pontius Pilate at the Fortress Antonia, a garrison built by Greeks to keep the Temple compromised. Flogged and crowned with thorns, He was led out the nearest city gate to Calvary, there crucified with two bandits, one on His right and one on His left.

They offered Him wine mixed with gall, an early anesthetic, which Christ refused—not due to any sort of sadism on His part, but because He had promised not to taste the fruit of the vine again until the inauguration of His Father’s Kingdom. He would not take the final Passover cup until the culmination of the sacrifice: then, “It is finished.” He died more quickly than expected: nailed up midmorning, He perished by midafternoon.

An earthquake struck as He gave up His spirit, and the massive curtain separating the Temple sanctuary from the Sanctum Sanctorum was torn in two. This might not seem terribly extraordinary in such a tectonically active part of the world, but to this day there’s a crack at the top of the rock that points in a straight line to the Temple Mount. He and the two thieves were the last to die atop the Skull.

Almost immediately thereafter, Jerusalem expanded, constructing a new wall to encompass the outlying settlements. The Romans tossed the crosses into the quarry and filled it up with water to serve as a reservoir for the new section of the city. As Christianity grew, a temple to Venus was constructed atop Calvary, to discourage veneration of the site. Yet as the centuries rolled by, the Risen Christ conquered the Empire which had crucified Him.

When Constantine legalized the faith, his mother Helena made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, tearing up the foundations of the pagan temple, draining the quarry, and finding there at the bottom—crosses. Monks dug cells into the sides of Golgotha until but a spindle of rock remained, soon encompassed by within the massive Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Today pilgrims can climb a winding stair up the rock of Calvary, and there beneath the altar at the top, penitents may reach down to feel the hole into which the Cross was set, to touch the crack that runs to the Temple. Just below and to the side, one finds the Chapel of St Helena, and the quarry where she discovered the True Cross, all but a hundred yards from the Tomb of Jesus’ Resurrection. Thousands of little crosses carved into the stone inscribe centuries of Christian devotion, each supplicant having left his or her mark.

Here meet eternity and time, death and resurrection, humanity and God.