March 8: The Savior on Mount Calvary
♫ Music:
Day 4 - Saturday, March 8
Title: The Savior on Mount Calvary
Scripture: Luke 23:26–33 (NKJV)
Now as they led Him away, they laid hold of a certain man, Simon a Cyrenian, who was coming from the country, and on him they laid the cross that he might bear it after Jesus. And a great multitude of the people followed Him, and women who also mourned and lamented Him. But Jesus, turning to them, said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, wombs that never bore, and breasts which never nursed!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!” "For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?” There were also two others, criminals, led with Him to be put to death. And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on the right hand and the other on the left.
Poetry & Poet:
“Simon of Cyrene Carries the Cross”
by Malcolm Guite
In desperation on this road of tears
Bystanders and bypassers turn away.
In other’s pain we face our own worst fears
And turn our backs to keep those fears at bay,
Unless we are compelled as this man was
By force of arms or force of circumstance
To face and feel and carry someone’s cross
In Love’s full glare and not his backward glance.
So, Simon, no disciple, still fulfilled
The calling, ‘Take the cross and follow me.’
By accident his life was stalled and stilled,
Becoming all he was compelled to be.
Make me, like him, your pressed man and your priest,
Your alter Christus, burdened and released
THE SAVIOR ON MOUNT CALVARY
There is a reason we take forty days to prepare for Good Friday. Without rigorous preparation pursued on mental, physical, and spiritual fronts the scope of the day’s loss might always escape us. After all, we are more easily numbed to grief than we are alive to it. We are studied at avoiding, explaining away, and “yes, but ____” solution-spinning for anything and everything that pains us.
Grief and lament are frightening. They require us to submit to the reality that there are losses that can, without warning and seemingly without reason, rob us of comfort, stability, happiness, even hope as they plunge us into pain we cannot control. We often do everything we can to hold grief at bay, to avoid cultivating lament.
But Good Friday confronts us with a God who sustains suffering and death in His own body as the ultimate act of love and asks us to join Him. There is life beyond this death, He tells us. But first you must walk the path of Calvary with me.
We watch Christ, watch Him shamed and abandoned, watch His body torn apart by a whipping that nearly took His life, and then watch Him forced to carry that heavy, rough cross uphill on His bleeding back, and we do not know what to do. A love expressed in such a lavish willingness to suffer defies everything we think we know about what being a “successful Christian” will mean (rescuing others from their pain) or earn for us (happiness, relief from pain).
This is why we need Lent. Lent calls us to prepare ourselves to look at Good Friday until nothing is left of us but our need for this bleeding God who so willingly, so lovingly, took upon Himself the burden of the Cross. We are not yet strong enough for such grief.
So, we must begin, however haltingly, our own ascent to Calvary — and as we falter forward, we take Simon the Cyrene and the women of Jerusalem, who were likely professional mourners, as our companions and examples.
Perhaps Simon was, as Guite’s poem suggests, standing neutral and uncertain at the side of the road. Perhaps, bullied by the soldiers into dragging the cross up that craggy hill, he groaned under its weight and wondered, numbly, what was going on. But still he carried it. And, per tradition, when he left Calvary, he was never the same. He and his entire family later became Christians.
Maybe the “Daughters of Jerusalem” were professional mourners, with no connection to Christ and no personal emotion beneath their wailing. But who among us does not need to practice some action or way of being for a long time before we work its wisdom into our bones? We cannot know where these women came from or who they were. What we do know is that they saw a man suffering the hatred and torturous cruelty of civil and religious leaders, jeered on by spiteful crowds and apparently abandoned by His friends, and chose not to reject Him. They publicly united their grief with His and followed on the path of His pain. When we find ourselves numb to the suffering before us, we can look to the example of these women. We can practice lament before we know how to feel it.
In Lent we prepare for Good Friday by searching out our sins and surrendering them to Christ. We practice lament. We learn to become alive to grief as we ready ourselves to join the suffering of Christ on Calvary. We prepare to go up with Him to Jerusalem, and before the glory of His bloodied, grieving love to be undone.
Prayer
Assist us mercifully, O Lord, in these our supplications and prayers, and dispose the way of Your servants toward the attainment of everlasting salvation; that, among all the changes and chances of this mortal life, we may ever be defended by Your most gracious and ready help; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
O Lord Jesus Christ, who said unto your Apostles, Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; Regard not our sins, but the faith of Your Church; and grant unto it that peace and unity which is according to Your will who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.
Adapted from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer
Alea Peister
Copywriter for Deloitte Digital
Alumna, Torrey Honors College
Biola University
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Art:
The Ascent to Calvary (overall and detail view)
Jacopo Tintoretto
1565–1567
Oil on canvas
515 x 390 cm
Casina Pio IV
Vatican City, Italy
Public domain
Tintoretto decorated the walls of the Sala dell'Albergo with several paintings showing important events from the passion of Christ. One of those paintings was The Ascent to Calvary, which depicts Jesus being pulled along by a leash and collar around his neck by the Roman soldiers upward to his fate on Calvary. As Jesus strains under the weight of the cross, Simon of Cyrene is enlisted by the Romans to assist Jesus. The artist puts a U-turn into the path to Calvary to include at the bottom of the composition the two thieves and their tormentors, along with two men in contemporary Venetian dress helping the thieves carry their crosses.
https://www.wga.hu/html_m/t/tintoret/3b/1albergo/2/1carry.html
https://www.christianiconography.info/Venice%202018/scuolaGrandeSanRocco/viaCrucisTintoretto.html
About the Artist:
Jacopo Tintoretto (1518–1594) was an Italian Renaissance painter of the Venetian school. Little is known of Tintoretto’s life. His contemporaries both admired and criticized the speed with which he painted, as well as the unprecedented boldness of his brushwork. Tintoretto’s large-scale narratives on canvas are characterized by his muscular figures, dramatic gestures, and bold use of perspective. He was deeply influenced by Titian's use of color and the bold, powerful figures of Michelangelo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintoretto
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/jacopo-tintoretto
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tintoretto/Legacy
About the Music: “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” from the album Amazing Grace
Lyrics:
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
About the Composer: Anonymous African American Slave Spiritual
A spiritual is a type of religious folk song that is most closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South. The songs proliferated in the last few decades of the eighteenth century leading up to the abolishment of legalized slavery in the 1860s. The African American spiritual constitutes one of the largest and most significant forms of American folk song. The term "spiritual" is derived from the King James Bible translation of Ephesians 5:19: "Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord." The form has its roots in the informal gatherings of African slaves in "praise houses'' and outdoor meetings called "camp meetings" in the eighteenth century. The African population in the American colonies had initially been introduced to Christianity in the seventeenth century. Uptake of the religion was relatively slow at first, but the slave population was engaged with biblical stories containing parallels to their own lives and they created spirituals that retold narratives about biblical figures like Daniel and Moses. As Africanized Christianity took hold of the slave population, spirituals served as a way to express the community's new faith, as well as its sorrows and hopes. Spirituals are typically sung in a call-and-response form, with a leader improvising a line of text and a chorus of singers providing a solid refrain in unison. Many spirituals, known as "sorrow songs," are intense, slow, and melancholic. Songs like "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" describe the slaves' struggles and identification with the suffering of Jesus Christ. Other spirituals known as "jubilees" or "camp meeting songs," are fast, rhythmic, joyful, and often syncopated.
https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197495/
About the Performer:
Jessye Mae Norman (1945–2019) was an American opera singer who enjoyed success as a recitalist with her thorough scholarship and her ability to project drama through her voice. She toured throughout the 1970s, giving recitals of works by Franz Schubert, Gustav Mahler, Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Olivier Messiaen, and several contemporary American composers. By the mid-1980s she was one of the most popular and highly regarded dramatic soprano singers in the world. She produced numerous award-winning recordings, and many of her performances were televised. Norman trained at Howard University, the Peabody Institute, and the University of Michigan. In 1984, she won the Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Solo, the first of five Grammy Awards that she would collect during her career. Apart from several honorary doctorates and other awards, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Medal of Arts, the Légion d'honneur, and was named a member of the British Royal Academy of Music. In 1990, UN secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar named her honorary ambassador to the United Nations.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jessye-Norman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessye_Norman
About the Poetry and Poet:
Malcolm Guite (b. 1957) is a poet, author, Anglican priest, teacher, and singer-songwriter based in Cambridge, England. He has published six collections of poetry: Saying the Names, The Magic Apple Tree, Sounding the Seasons: Poetry for the Christian Year, The Singing Bowl, Waiting on the Word, and the recently released Parable and Paradox: Sonnets on the Sayings of Jesus and Other Poems. Rowan Williams and Luci Shaw have both acclaimed his writing, and his Antiphons appeared in Penguin’s Best Spiritual Writing, 2013. Guite’s theological works include What Do Christians Believe? and Faith, Hope, and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination. Guite is a scholar of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and the British poets, and serves as the bye-fellow and chaplain at Girton College at the University of Cambridge, while supervising students in English and theology. He lectures widely in England and the USA, and in 2015 he was the CCCA visionary-in-residence at Biola University. Guite plays in the Cambridge rock band Mystery Train and his albums include The Green Man and Dancing Through the Fire.
https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Guite
About the Devotion Writer:
Alea Peister
Copywriter for Deloitte Digital
Alumna, Torrey Honors College
Biola University
Alea is a poet and essayist whose writing has been featured in Solum, Ekstasis, The Curator, The ClayJar Review, Vita Poetica, Relief, and Art for the Isolated, among others. In 2025 she will graduate with an MFA in Spiritual Writing from Seattle Pacific University. Alea is passionate about the relationship between creativity and prayer, which she explores in ministry with her Anglican-Catholic church in Southern California. She daylights as a copywriter at a marketing firm. She is an alumna of Biola University and the Torrey Honors College, where she studied Literature. You can follow her writerly escapades on Instagram at @alea_peister and Substack at aleapeister.substack.com.