In this video, Holy Land tour guide and author Steve Ray walks through all 16 “entities” present at the crucifixion of Jesus—drawing from Scripture, logic, and tradition. Hosted by Cy Kellett, this powerful reflection explores who stayed with Christ in His final moments and what their presence means for us today.
Transcript:
Cy: Who was at the foot of the cross? Who was there? Steve?
Steve: Well, I got this, I think, from being there one time and wondering who were. Because we read in the gospels, mentioned many names, but even after thinking of that, who would Jesus see while he was there? When he’s looking down, who would he see? But also there’s other entities. Obviously, Satan knew what was going on and the evil powers. And I even bring nature into this because nature rebelled, rebelled against it. The sun stopped and the earthquake came, and nature, 16 different entities.
So let’s start with Mary and John. Mary is at the foot of the cross. It’s significant that she’s there because she bookends the life of Christ in the book of John. And it’s the Gospel of John that tells us she was there. She’s there for the very first moment of his earthly ministry. Turning water into wine, he calls her woman. She’s there at the very last moment of his earthly ministry on the cross, and he calls her woman. And I think that hearkens back to Genesis 3:15. Behold, I shall bring enmity between you and the woman. And then in Revelation 12, I looked and behold, I saw the woman clothed as a queen in heaven.
So Mary is there, and she’s not mentioned oftentimes in the New Testament, doesn’t say, well, Jesus went and gave the sermon on the mount, Mary was there. Or Jesus went and did this, and he fed the 5,000. And Mary was there. But this one, it does, it says that she is standing by the foot of the cross. And John also, all the other guys ran away. One of the reasons some people think that John was there because he was younger and he could get away with it. But the guy, and you did not want to be associated with a felon. There’s, you know, this guy is hanging as the big billboard. You don’t want to go, oh, by the way, he’s my friend. I’m one of his disciples. Because you’re right away going to get gathered up too. John, but he was probably younger. I like to think he was like 15 years old, a young whippersnapper, and he lived to be old. Mary and John were there, and John’s Gospel makes a point of that. And it’s significant that both of them were there.
Cy: And this is where she kind of where Christ extends her motherhood to all of us. That’s the way we interpret that. Is there a good reason to interpret it that way?
Steve: Yes, because in those days, if you did not have other sons, you would be destitute. There was no welfare, Social Security, Medicare, nothing. Like women didn’t own property. So in your lifetime, a woman was dependent on three men. First, her father, who took care of her and gave her what she needed. She then married a man, and that man then brought her into his home and he took care of her. The man would usually die early. That’s why women were so desperate to have a son. Remember Sarah and Abraham? The son then takes care of the mother in her old age. Mary is now losing her only son. If Mary had other sons, like the Protestants say, then Jesus would have said, don’t worry, John, brother number two is going to take care of Mom.
That would have been the Jewish law. But there were no others. Jesus was the only son, so he had to give her into the hands of his beloved disciple, John. And it says from that moment on, she moved in and lived with him in his home. So that’s one of the reasons why he would have given him to John. And John also remember, John’s the one that saw her in heaven as the Queen. In Revelation 12, I think Jesus was saying, John, you want to know where mom is? There she is. Thanks for taking care of mom for me.
Cy: There you go. All right, so who else? So besides John and Mary, who else is at the foot of the cross? Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Steve: The holy women. We learn about them from Matthew, John, and Luke. It says in Luke and all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance and saw these things. They were the ones that did. He did stop on the Via Dolorosa to talk to them and to comfort them. I get a joke out of his comforting the women of Jerusalem. What he says is woman. He says to them, there’s going to come a time where the stones are going to come down one upon another, and you’re going to wish that you’d never had children. And how is this coming? Comforting anyone? I mean, this is terror. It would terrify me to hear him say those things.
Right, but these are the women. There’s names, Mary. That’s a very interesting passage that says so this, by standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. Now, you could see the way it’s written in the Greek that there’s four women there or three women there. You could read it as, among them are Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James and Joseph and the mother of James. So that could be Mary, Jesus’s mother. But then there’s these other women, too. And there’s a confusion as to how many there were. But we know that some of these women followed him. And Luke is the one that tells us this, that they followed him through those three years of ministry in the Galilee area, and they took care of all of his needs. They took care of what he needed food, they took care of his clothing. They ministered to him along the way.
And so these holy women then followed him all the way here. And they are weeping and mourning, and they’re saying, this guy, look at all the people he healed. Why are you doing this to him? He healed people all through Jerusalem and Galilee. There’s people that brought their grandmother out of the nursing home, and he took the dementia away. He healed their arthritis. And now you’re going to kill him. Which for, like Jesus said, for which of my good works are you going to kill me? But it was very political why they were killed. The Jews even said, it’s smart for us to get rid of one man than to lose our whole nation, because if we don’t kill him, all of Israel is going to follow him. And the Romans are going to be upset. They’re going to come in and they’re going to take our temple away from us. So it was a political reason they killed him. But those are the women: Mary, Joanna, Salome, and Mary Magdalene. Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary, the sons of Zebedee. So they’re all looking.
And by the way, in the Holy Sepulchre side, there’s the hill. You have to go up the steps, and it’s in the Churchill sepulcher, there’s Calvary. But right at the foot of that, there’s like a little dome on little pillars, and there’s a plaque. And it said, this is where the holy women stood. And you stand on that plaque and you got a perfect view of Calvary from there.
Cy: Okay, so we’ve got Mary and John, clearly, because John describes them so clearly in his gospel. Then the various gospels, Matthew, John, and Luke, all give us an idea of a good crowd of women, some of whom are named. But I don’t think we’re supposed to take the impression that all of them are named. It’s like there’s a lot of women there, and among them were these women, right?
Steve: And they’d be writing this to maybe people who remembered. Luke assumed, you know, these people here, at least, you know, these are Mary, the mother of Jesus. So. So he mentions that my number three is a group that I call the taunting Jews. You have a group of believing Jews and acquaintances, but you also have the taunting, unbelieving Jews. And the people stood by watching. But the ruler scoffed, saying, he saved others, let him save himself, as he’s the Christ, the chosen One in Matthew. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out aloud, and they say others are standing by hearing it, said, this man’s calling you to Elijah. And others said, ah, let’s see if Elijah is going to come save. They were mocking him because he had implied and called himself the I am the Son of God and had debated them.
And the Jews knew it because a couple of times they picked up rocks to throw at him. And he says, for what good works are you throwing rocks at me? And they said, not for that, but you being a man, make yourself out to be God. That’s why we’re killing you. You’re saying you’re God. So these taunting Jews are there to get their last swipe.
Then there were believing Jews and acquaintances, and it said all in Luke. And all the multitudes assembled to see the sight when they saw it had taken place, returned home beating their breasts, saying, this is horrible, what happened. And all his acquaintances and women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance and saw these things. So you can imagine, Cy, if he had cured you of cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy or your grandfather of dementia, and now you hear, he’s going there. You would stand. You would go and stand there. You wouldn’t get too close maybe, but you would say, I just came to honor this guy who healed my… how healed me.
And you’re not going to be one to taunt him at that point. You’re going to be one, maybe silent, right? But there was a lot of, I would think, silent witnesses like today. Let’s face it, if persecution came into any one of our parishes, we’d have some people run out and get in their car and get out of there. We’d have some people that stand up to him and say, I’m a Christian, you’re not. And there’d be a whole bunch of people that just sit there quiet. Well, I think the same thing happened.
At the cross, I imagine it seems to me if you have accepted him as the Messiah, which thousands of people have accepted him as the Messiah, this has got to be just confusing too, like what’s going on here.
But the leaders, these guys are sitting in the chair of Moses. They are given to God by the Sadducees, the priests, and they say he’s not, and who am I going to believe here? He says he is, but God can’t be a man, so how can he be God? And will the Messiah die on a cross? The Messiah, he’s going to come and he’s going to bring victory to… Even at the day of the ascension, when Jesus was ready to go up into heaven, in Acts chapter one, they were saying, Lord, is it time now that we’re going to take over Jerusalem? They still think he’s going to get on a white horse. And so they’re saying, how can this guy, he’s taken a cross, he’s being… how can he be the Messiah? They’re going to doubt all of a sudden all of this.
Cy: All right, who else, who else is at the foot of Christ’s cross?
Cy: The luckiest and the unluckiest man ever. His name is Simon the Cyrene. He is unlucky because I picture him in Jerusalem that day, getting up early in the morning, he’s got a three-piece suit on, his briefcase in his hand, he’s on his way to a business meeting and all of a sudden they’re dragging this bloody guy through the streets and they grab him and say, hey Simon, we want you to carry his cross. And he said, I just got this suit, it’s a $350 suit, I got a business meeting to get to. And so he’s an unlucky guy, you know, he just pulled off the street, he’s not even from there. He’s from Cyrene, which is in Northern Africa. He’s not even… yeah, he’s there probably for the Passover. I’m not part of this, visiting him. No, I’m from Cyrene, I’m from Northern Africa, I just got here. You know, I don’t even know all what’s going on. But they grabbed him and they brought him in and the blood of Jesus got on that guy. He got too close and the blood of Jesus splattered on him and he took the cross and he carried… Jesus always said, unless you carry my cross, you’re not one of mine. And he ended up carrying the cross.
And I think that there was a special grace there. And we know that he had a tremendous conversion because it says later in Mark, and they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming out of the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus. Now Mark’s gospel was probably written around 60 A.D. this is 30 years after. So already Simon’s sons had become great leaders of the Church. So obviously, their father became a follower of Jesus and on the day of Pentecost, was probably baptized and filled with the Holy Spirit. And Paul writes, and he says, greet Rufus, eminent in the Lord and his mother and mine. In fact, Paul had such respect for Rufus, the son of Simon, that he even says, say hello to his mother for me. She’s also my mother. Saying she’s… So what happened that day is Simon the Cyrene got coerced into going along with Jesus, carrying his cross, but because of that, he had a profound conversion and even to the point where his sons became eminent leaders in the Church, well known all the way to Rome.
Cy: Wow. Simon the Cyrene. Wow. All right, now, I know I could have guessed this group, centurions and soldiers. Tell us about the centurions and soldiers at the foot of the cross.
Steve: Yes. These guys, they’re callous, they’re rough. They do this every day. They have no sympathy for any of these criminals. This is what they do. It’s their job. They sit around at night putting the pieces of metal into their flagellums. There’s no manufacturer specifications for how to make a whip. These guys just said, hey, why wait till tomorrow when I get this guy? Look at this pie piece that I’m putting in here. This is going to rip him up good. And they were not sympathetic at all. They were hardened, callous executioners.
But it says the soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him vinegar and saying, if you’re the king of the Jews, save yourself. Now, one thing you got to remember about these soldiers, they were not Roman soldiers. The leaders were Romans, the centurions. But they conscripted locals, like from Syria and Egypt, and they would conscript them into the army and pay them. And so these guys here are probably Syrians and Egyptians, the perennial enemies of Israel. And they say, this is the king of the Jews. And they say, oh, the king of the Jews. We’ve been fighting for them for 4,000 years. We get the king of the Jews, and we get him into our own hands. This is going to be fun. And they went after Jesus with all the political hostility and anger that the local enemies of Israel could have. And they’re going to take it out on him as a surrogate to beat the living daylights out of him.
And when they saw him there, they kept watch. The earth began to shake it. And one of the centurions said, this surely is the son of man, the Son of God. So you’ve got them all. There’s hardened, callous guys. You know, you could just… they’re gruff, they’re animals basically. But all of a sudden when the sun goes dark and there’s an earthquake and they see the dynamics of everything that has happened, one of them just has awe on his face and said, truly this was the son of God.
So you’ve got the centurion who does have this reaction to Jesus. And all the other soldiers are mocking him, giving him sour wine to drink and teasing him. But one of them saw something there. And his name, we don’t know his name. There’s an… The next one is number seven. Who was the guy with the lance? History has given him tradition. The name Longinus and his lance that went into Jesus’ side. One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear. So here you’ve got a soldier just doing his job. We got to make sure this guy’s dead. I know how to do it. If I get this lance right in his heart, if it comes out blood and water, that means that the pericardium… the water’s already come out separate means he’s dead. So, okay, blood and water. He’s dead. Now let’s go get the next guy. So they knew right where to stab that thing to get the reaction from the heart to know whether he was dead or not. They didn’t break his bones.
Cy: Steve is holding up. Here’s a lance, a triangular. And this is… this is what would… this is the product of some archaeology that…
Steve: You can. In Israel you can buy antiquities, but they have to be licensed to sell. But this is a lance from the first century. This is where the handle would have been and it would have gone up like that into a side or even… this could be like a javelin where the… you could see there the… you put a shaft in here and then you’ve got…
Cy: Oh, yeah.
Steve: And so I have… I have a whole museum of stuff downstairs that I’ve been collecting for the last 30 years from our trips. But I decided to show that because it just kind of brings it to light.
Cy: Do you… have you ever had to run out of a temple with a giant ball rolling down behind you, getting ready to kill you to get any of these things?
Steve: But one of the advertisements. Somebody actually made an advertisement for me one time of me with his hat running with a ball rolling behind me so that…
Cy: Who else was at the foot of the cross of Jesus?
Steve: We have two thieves who are both skeptics at first. They were both against him, but one of them had a conversion on the cross. And he said, oh, you know, it’s funny to me. Cy is Jesus. He’s talking to me, doesn’t say, well, I want you to say the sinner’s prayer with me now. And we’re going to say, you know, you have to accept me as your personal Lord and savior and ask you to come into my heart like Steve Ray the Baptist is going to say someday. He doesn’t say any of that. He just says to him, the guy says, you’re innocent, I’m guilty. Remember me in paradise. And Jesus just says to him, today, you’ll be with me in paradise.
So you have a good thief and a bad thief. Both of them were bad at the beginning, but one of them had a conversion on the cross. I think he looked over at Jesus and he just realized, this guy is not like one of us.
There’s another. The next one is number 10. I’m going to run through them real quick. Is Adam’s skull. Now, this is a tradition, and if you look at crucifixion scenes, icons, there’s a skull at the bottom of the cross. And the early Christians said that the skull of Adam was buried there. And Jesus, the second Adam, the last Adam, his blood dripped on the skull of the first Adam and redeemed him. And one of my favorite paintings is Jesus after the resurrection, pulling Adam and Eve out of the grave as they’re… By the way, they’re saints and their feast day is December 24th. Adam and Eve are saints. Their feast day is December 24th. Eve, her hand in the picture is always like this because she’s ashamed that that took the apple or that’s probably a pomegranate or a fig, but Jesus is pulling them up.
So one of them is, according to tradition and in the ancient paintings, the skull of Adam was there, and the blood of the new Adam dripped on the blood of the old Adam and redeemed him. The Father and the Holy Spirit were there, obviously. The Trinity never does anything separate. So that’s number 11.
And the Father and the Holy Spirit. And we know that nature reacted, that they were there with him. The evil spirits and Satan were there, obviously. In fact, First Corinthians 2:8 says that none of the rulers of this age, if they’d understood this, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. Now that we don’t know whether that means just the rulers, physical rulers, or also the Satan, the rulers of the heavens. But so you have Satan and the evil spirits who are there. They think they’re winning, by the way. They think they’ve got him. This guy Jesus, we finally killed him. Little did they know that God is only using them for his own good. God does that all the time. Drive Satan crazy, because God, everything the devil thinks he wins, God just smiles and said, thank you. You did that for my own good, you know. Now look at the good that came out of what you just did.
Okay, so number 13 is nature was there. And I love it that I’ve seen nature rebelling, that they are killing the Creator. He created nature. He came down as a creator, and now they’re killing him. And the rocks crack and the sun is in a storm, an earthquake. I think it’s nature reacting against the fact that these are killing their creator, the creator of the universe. And darkness fell upon the whole earth.
And then there’s corpses. Matthew 27 says that at the crucifixion and resurrection, the crucifixion says, and the tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised. And coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, they went around in the Holy city and appeared to many. So there’s Grandma. We buried her 10 years ago. Grandma, she just walked into the house though. This, it says, it’s that the tombs are opened. At the crucifixion, this happened, but it also says at the resurrection. So you’ve got these corpses that are there are responding to the death of Christ and his resurrection. I think that the power of what happened there and the power of the death and the power of the resurrection just had such an impact that it just… and it just affected people’s corpses nearby. And they came out of the tombs too. The same power that left the image on the Shroud of Turin, that same atomic… whatever it was, that energy that came when he came alive and just put that image on that cloth, which nobody can explain it.
The temple is also there because where Jesus is crucified, you can see the temple. And it said, and the curtain was torn from top to bottom. Not from the bottom up, because it was torn from the bottom up would mean that men did it. But it was torn from the top. And this was like maybe seven stories high. This thing really four inches thick. This curtain was four inches thick, and it was torn from the top down. Meaning God did it. He, through the death of Christ, he opened up the Holy of Holies. And now we all have access to the Throne of Grace. So the Temple was there.
And then lastly, number 16 I have here is you and I were there. And, and everybody would… if you get a chance, Google Rembrandt, Raising of the Cross on Google. You know, if you want, Cy, I’ll put this document that I gave you, I’ll put that up on my blog so people can use it as a reference. Okay. As soon as I’m done, I’ll put it up on my blog and then people can download it. Just you don’t, you know, use it for yourself, if you don’t mind, but.
And then there’s a picture of Rembrandt. It’s called Raising of the Cross. And the light is on Jesus and there’s this guy pulling across, he’s like raising the cross and you look closely and he’s got a Dutch painter’s beret on his head. They didn’t wear Dutch painters berets in the first century. And if you look closely at it, it’s Rembrandt’s self-portrait.
He is saying he gets it, he gets it. It’s my sins that put him on the cross. Did the Romans kill Jesus or did the Jews kill Jesus? No, I killed him. It was my sins. I’m the one that’s there raising him up on the cross.
Cy: Yes.
Steve: So Rembrandt, he got it. So you and I were there because we’re the ones. Our sins are the ones that put him on the cross.
Cy: This is the very… I mean the sense I get when you review for us all of this is that this is the center point of history. Everything in all of human history is in a sense at the foot of Christ’s cross.
Steve: Yep. And even for the Jews, they said that when the Messiah comes, all the sacrifices of the Old Testament would be done away with. There would only be one sacrifice left with the Messiah. It would be called the Todah sacrifice. Todah is Hebrew for Thanksgiving. Eucharist is Thanksgiving in Greek. So the one sacrifice that would be left is the Eucharist sacrifice of Christ. All of the other sacrifices are all culminated in the cross and on our altars.
Cy: Steve Ray has been our guest. What a wonderful way to start Holy Week.