Luke 23:33

THE GREEN HILL FAR AWAY

‘There they crucified Him.’

Luke 23:33

‘There is a green hill far away, Without a city wall.’ Yes; such a spot there is, at a little distance from the northern wall of Jerusalem. It is a hill, low and broad, but with a steep face towards the city, and conspicuous by its position. It is ‘a green hill,’ at least during the months when the former and latter rains gladden the Judean highlands; and it is kept green, kept free from the invasion of buildings, secular or ecclesiastical, by the simple but effectual defence of a sprinkling of Moslem tombs over the summit.

Here it is at least abundantly possible that ‘the dear Lord was crucified, Who died to save us all.’

I. A great spiritual force can be conveyed, by the grace of the Spirit, through a very simple and prosaic recollection of locality and fact.—Let just that reflection possess you for the moment: they crucified Him here. Somewhere in this hard mass was cut the place for the Cross. Somewhere on this firm ground was our Lord Jesus Christ extended along the wood, and fastened down upon it with huge nails, limb by limb, and then the whole ponderous structure with its Burden was heaved into position. This air, so quiet now, was busy once with the hum and with the harsh insults of the bystanders. Over this area once came down that deepest darkness, far deeper than Egyptian, that has ever loaded earth. Out of the midst of it, here, came once the most mysteriously dreadful cry that man has ever listened to—those four Aramaic words, ‘ Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.’ Here resounded the ‘loud voice,’ ‘Tetelestai,’—‘It is finished.’ Here the Son of God and Man passed through the act of death, saw death, tasted death. It was even here.

II. Let us carry our theology of salvation then to this site. Let it be, by the grace of God, a full theology. Let nothing of the massive grandeur of our fathers’ faith be left out. Let ours be no vague tenet of salvation by Incarnation only, or of an agony which has little to do but to effect (who shall say how?) the suasion of the human will. Let us confess the old ‘faith of Christ Crucified’; the faith of Sacrifice, Oblation, and Satisfaction; the redemption of our guilty persons from ‘the curse’ of a broken law by the Lord Christ’s being ‘made a curse for us.’ Let us go deep, by His grace, into the awfulness of the truths which gather round Atonement; let us ponder the dread greatness of the need, the ‘exceeding sinfulness of sin’ in view of ‘the commandment’; the unspeakable guiltiness of our ‘I will not,’ if even once only it had contradicted God’s ‘Thou oughtest’; the ‘incalculable retribution’ called down, drawn down, upon the sinner’s head by that contradiction. Let us pray and cry for conviction of sin as guilt, and let us ‘dwell deep’ in that solemn experience, so far as we can bear it.

III. And then let us go high, by the grace of God, into the radiant gifts and promises which make the eternal rainbow round the Cross.—Let us honour the Lamb of the Sacrifice, not by fearing and shrinking to take the hard-won cup of blessings which He brings us, but by taking it without hesitation and delay, by clasping it with hands which are bold to know that it is indeed within them, and by ‘drinking it heartily,’ praising God, and ‘keeping the feast’ with thanksgivings every day. Let us take the Lord’s death here and now for our emancipation, ease, joy, and victory. Let us see in it no mere example, nor let us (with a mistake more subtle, because yet more closely akin to great and elevating truths) misread it as if it were endured only that we might somehow be enabled (by sympathy? by assimilation?) to agonise for others. Let us exult in it as the propitiation for our sins, the repose of our consciences, the opening of our prison, the death of our fears, the unlocking for us now of the gates of a present Paradise and a coming glory. Let it prepare us to serve and suffer for others, first and most by assuring us that for us, in Christ Jesus, ‘there is no condemnation’; all our suffering, as due to sinners at the bar, is put away, annulled, exhausted, for He has taken our load off upon His sacred head; ‘by His stripes we are healed.’

Let this be our faith, our teaching, as it was that of Paul, and Augustine, and Anselm, and Bernard, and Huss, and Luther, and Hooker, and Bunyan before us. Substitutes for this are poor things, however subtle in thought, however eloquent in presentation. They may sound loud, but it is a loud falsetto, to ears that have heard indeed the voice of the old truth, ‘The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all’; ‘By grace ye have been saved’; ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.’

—Bishop H. C. G. Moule.

Illustrations

(1) ‘A few years ago some people held an open-air service on a village green in a remote corner of Cambridgeshire, a hamlet where, as it happened, the peasants had been left for a very long time without religious ministry. One of the evangelists had recently visited Palestine; he mentioned, in the course of an earnest address on the Lord’s saving work, that a few weeks back he had stood upon the probable place of the Crucifixion. That “open-air” was permitted, in the mercy of God, to produce a great spiritual impression on the people. And it transpired afterwards that nothing had so arrested and stirred the hearts of the ploughboys and shepherds as this allusion to Calvary as to a real place, which people might really visit—a bit of this solid earth, quite as concrete as their own: village green. They felt, with a strange movement of the soul, that this made “salvation” no longer mere talk to them, but fact.’

(2) ‘The late Dr. John Duncan, of Edinburgh, who, near the close of his remarkable career, passed from traditional orthodoxy down to pantheism, and up again (through conviction of sin) to an orthodoxy full of the living God, lamented that he had not studied the gospel narratives with quite the same care which he had eagerly spent upon the developed revelation of the epistles. “I ought to have thought more,” he said, or said words to that effect, “about His decease which He accomplished at Jerusalem.” He was conscious that he had run a certain risk, even in the glad and worshipping study of the truths of salvation, by not sufficiently keeping them in vital cohesion with the facts of the saving work. He had been in danger of letting them rise and float too far above him, like glorious clouds, by not continually remembering that “there they crucified Him.” ’