Luke 23:30

Luke has just told of the night of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest and trials (Luke 22:47–71) and of Pilate’s condemnation (Luke 23:1–25). By now Jesus has been beaten and scourged, and “as they led him away” the Roman soldiers are taking him to the place of execution. The crucifixion itself follows in Luke 23:32–49.

The soldiers “laid hold upon” Simon. The verb, epilambánomai, means to seize or take hold of, often with force or authority, and Simon had no choice in the matter. Roman soldiers had the right, called angareia, to press a civilian into service and make him carry a load.

A condemned man usually carried his own crossbeam, the patibulum, to the place of execution. It could weigh 75 to 125 pounds, while the upright, part of a full cross weighing upwards of 300 pounds, usually stood there already. Luke leaves the reason for the change unstated, but after such a night the soldiers’ action shows plainly that Jesus was too weak to carry even the beam any further. The word for the cross, staurós, means a stake or post, the instrument of execution. Elsewhere in Scripture it comes to stand for self-denial and for Christ’s atoning death, and here it is the heavy wooden beam itself.

“There followed him a great company of people.” Luke’s word for the crowd is plēthos, a multitude, and the verb for following is akolouthéō, to go the same way with someone. It is the word used of disciples who follow Jesus, and here it describes a whole crowd moving with him, whatever each person understood about him. Crucifixion was public on purpose. It was meant to humiliate the condemned and to warn everyone who watched, and such processions drew crowds.

Luke singles out the women, who “bewailed and lamented him”. He uses two verbs. Kóptō literally means to chop or cut, and in grief it means beating the breast. Thrēnéō means to wail aloud or sing a dirge. One verb gives the gesture and the other the sound, and together they describe open, public mourning. Loud wailing, beating the breast and tearing the clothes were the expected way to grieve in Israel, at funerals and in times of national disaster, and women had a prominent and accepted place in such mourning. These women grieved openly for a man condemned by the authorities.

Luke gives women a large place throughout his Gospel, from Mary and Elizabeth at its beginning (Luke 1) to the women who travelled with Jesus and supported him out of their own means (Luke 8:1–3). Their grief also bears witness to his innocence, which Luke stresses again and again, through Pilate’s verdicts and through the centurion who says at the cross, “Certainly this was a righteous man” (Luke 23:47).

“But Jesus turning unto them said.” Exhausted, beaten and on his way to die, Jesus stops and speaks first. His compassion and his work as a prophet go on to the very end.

He calls them “Daughters of Jerusalem”. The word thygátēr means daughter, and it is also used of the women of a place, so the phrase means the women of Hierousalḗm. In speaking to them he speaks to the city they belong to.

The word for weep, klaíō, means to weep aloud, with audible sobbing. “Weep not for me” puts the negative mḗ with a present command, the form often used to tell someone to stop what they are already doing. He receives their pity and turns it to where it is needed. The “but” that follows is plḗn, a word of contrast, “but” or “nevertheless”, and “yourselves” is heautoû, the ordinary reflexive pronoun. Their own lives and their children’s lives are what they should be grieving over.

The judgment he means came first in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman armies in AD 70, with its siege, its famine and the razing of the Temple. Jesus had foretold it before. As he came near the city he wept over it and said that its enemies would hem it in and leave no stone upon another, because it knew not the time of its visitation (Luke 19:41–44). Later he described armies surrounding Jerusalem and the special distress of pregnant and nursing women in those days (Luke 21:20–24). Matthew records his lament that he would have gathered the city’s children together and they would not, so that their house would be left desolate (Matthew 23:37–39). Women and children would suffer most, which is why he names the children.

His words also call for a deeper sorrow than pity. The women grieved over what was being done to him. Jesus pointed them to the spiritual blindness of a people rejecting their Messiah, and to the repentance that their own situation called for.

Verse 29 gives the reason for the warning. “For”, hóti, ties it to the command to weep for themselves, and “behold”, idoú, calls the hearers to pay attention. “The days are coming” is the language of prophecy, announcing what will surely happen. “They shall say” uses eréō, to speak, in the future, and “they” are the people of the city in general.

What they will say turns their whole world upside down. Children were counted among God’s greatest gifts and barrenness among the deepest sorrows. Rachel told Jacob, “Give me children, or else I die” (Genesis 30:1), Hannah was provoked year after year and wept and would not eat (1 Samuel 1:6–7), and a psalm says, “children are an heritage of the LORD” (Psalm 127:3–5). Yet in those days people will call the barren makários, blessed or happy, the word Jesus used in the Beatitudes.

Jesus names the childless three ways. Steíros is the barren woman. “The wombs that never bare” joins koilía, womb, to gennáō, to bear a child. “The paps which never gave suck” joins mastós, breast, to thēlázō, to nurse. The repetition holds our eyes on mothers and their children, because that is where the coming suffering would cut deepest.

The siege of AD 70 brought famine, disease and violence. Josephus, the Jewish historian, records that hunger drove a mother to eat her own child. In those days a mother had to watch her children starve, die or be taken into slavery, and the woman who had none was spared that grief. Jesus had said the same in his teaching on the last days, “woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days” (Matthew 24:19). Long before, Hosea had prayed in a time of judgment that Israel would be given barren wombs (Hosea 9:14).

“Then shall they begin to say” marks the moment when the horror becomes more than people can bear. The verb is légō, the ordinary word for saying something, here a cry spoken aloud. They speak to the mountains, óros, a word for mountain or hill which Strong’s ties to a root meaning to rise, and to the hills, bounós, the smaller heights. Their plea is “Fall on us”, a wish for a swift, crushing death, and “Cover us”, from kalýptō, to cover or hide. People will long to be buried and hidden rather than live through what is coming.

These are the words of the prophet Hosea: “they shall say to the mountains, Cover us; and to the hills, Fall on us” (Hosea 10:8). Jesus takes up the prophet’s cry of judgment and applies it to Jerusalem, with the two pleas in the other order. The mountains that ought to be a place of refuge become the thing people wish would crush them.

The cry belongs first to Jerusalem in AD 70, and Scripture uses it again for the end of history. Jesus spoke of a great tribulation in which no flesh would be saved unless those days were shortened (Matthew 24:21–22). Revelation shows people at the last day calling on the mountains to fall on them and hide them from the wrath of the Lamb (Revelation 6:15–17). The same Jesus who speaks these words to the women is the Lamb whose wrath they will flee. In the end no mountain can hide anyone from God.

Jesus closes with a proverb in the form of a question: “For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?” The word for green, hygrós, means wet, sappy or fresh, the wood of a living tree. Xýlon means wood or timber, and also a tree. Xērós means dry or withered. Anyone who has made a fire knows the difference. Green wood full of sap is hard to burn, and dry wood catches quickly and burns fiercely.

Jesus himself is the green tree, innocent, full of life and undeserving of the death he is going to. “These things” are what is being done to him, the arrest, the trials, the scourging and now the road to the cross. The verb poiéō, to do or make, is one of the commonest in the language. The dry tree is the nation that is rejecting him, withered and ready for the fire, and with it everyone who rejects God’s truth and grace. “What shall be done” uses gínomai, to come about or happen. The answer is left unspoken because it is so plain. If this is done to the innocent one, what will happen to the guilty?

The prophets used the same pictures. Jeremiah likens the man who trusts in the LORD to a tree planted by the waters whose leaf stays green (Jeremiah 17:8), and Ezekiel foretold a fire kindled by the LORD in a forest, which would burn up its trees (Ezekiel 20:47–48). The letter to the Hebrews warns that for those who go on sinning wilfully after receiving the truth, there remains a fearful looking for of judgment (Hebrews 10:26–27).

The green tree’s suffering was planned. Peter told the crowd at Pentecost that Jesus was delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God (Acts 2:23). The sinless one was made sin for us, so that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21). His death is the one way the dry tree can escape the fire. The one who walks to the cross here is also the one “ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead” (Acts 10:42), so his warning reaches beyond AD 70 to the day of his return.

On the road to his own death, Jesus turned to others. He gave the women the warning they needed. The cross they were watching is where God showed his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

The judgment in these verses is real, and the cry to the mountains shows how terrible it is to face God’s wrath with no refuge. That is why the cross is such good news. Being now justified by his blood, “we shall be saved from wrath through him” (Romans 5:9), and it is Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come (1 Thessalonians 1:10). God gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3:16). The shelter the mountains could never give is found in the one who bore the fire himself.

And Simon walks there with the cross, behind Jesus. Every believer who carries a burden laid on him for Christ’s sake walks the same road and in the same steps, behind a Lord who carried the heavier load first.