On Good Friday morning, there was a courtyard in Jerusalem where every kind of person was represented.
There were Jews and Gentiles. There were political and religious elites — the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and the Jewish priests. And there was the crowd, the great mass of unnamed people who turn the wheels of history in every age. And there was a beaten, bloodied man, who’d claimed to be a king but was being tried as a criminal. His name was Jesus.
In Luke 23, Luke shows us this universal scope in order to invite us to locate ourselves within the story. We’re drawn to put ourselves in the shoes of the different characters. We’re challenged to ask ourselves: of all the people there that day, who am I most like? Who represents me?
