Biblion Bible Commentary
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Daughters of Jerusalem
Luke 23:26-31
26 When they led him away, they grabbed one Simon of Cyrene, coming from the country, and laid the cross on him to carry it after Jesus. · WEB
On the way out he stops to speak to the women weeping for him, and tells them to weep for themselves.
they grabbed one Simon of Cyrene, coming from the country, and laid the cross on him to carry it after Jesus Luke 23:26.
A passer-by is conscripted, which tells you the condemned man could no longer carry the beam. After Jesus is this account's phrasing, and it makes a picture the rest of the book has been describing — a man carrying a cross, walking behind him Luke 9:23.
A great multitude of the people followed him, including women who also mourned and lamented him Luke 23:27.
The detail is this Gospel's alone. In a chapter where every official has failed and the crowd has shouted for a murderer, the people weeping are women, and the account notices them as it has noticed women all the way through.
But Jesus, turning to them, said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, don't weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children" Luke 23:28.
He stops on the way to his execution to speak to them, and what he says is not comfort. It is redirection. Their grief is real and it is aimed at the wrong disaster.
"For behold, the days are coming in which they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed'" Luke 23:29.
The inversion is total. In that society childlessness was the standing grief — this book opened with a barren woman's reproach taken away Luke 1:25 — and a day is described in which it will be counted a mercy. Nothing else in the Gospels states the horror of the coming siege so economically.
"Then they will begin to tell the mountains, 'Fall on us!' and tell the hills, 'Cover us'" Luke 23:30 Hosea 10:8. People asking to be buried alive rather than see what is in front of them.
"For if they do these things in the green tree, what will be done in the dry?" Luke 23:31.
The proverb closes it and is left unexplained. Green wood does not burn; dry wood does. If this is what is done while there is still sap in the tree — while he is present, while the city still has its chance — then what happens when the wood is dry is worse, and needs no argument.
It is the third time in this Gospel he has grieved over that city, after the lament on the road Luke 13:34 and the weeping on the ridge Luke 19:41. This one is spoken carrying nothing, on the way to the place of execution, and it is still not about himself.
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