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When we picture Good Friday, we usually picture one cross. But Scripture tells us there were three, standing side by side on a hill outside Jerusalem called Golgotha — “the place of the skull.” Each one tells a different story, and together they present the only real choice every person has to make.

The Cross of the Savior

In the middle hung Jesus. It’s worth asking why. Crucifixion wasn’t a punishment for petty offenses — it was reserved for Rome’s worst offenders, and Roman citizens were exempt from it entirely because it was considered too brutal. So what did Jesus do to deserve it?

He didn’t incite rebellion against Rome. He told people to pay their taxes. He never tried to seize political power. According to John’s Gospel, the real charge came from the religious leaders themselves: “We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God” (John 19:7). In Jewish law, a false claim to divinity was blasphemy, worthy of death. The irony, of course, is that the claim wasn’t false. He wasn’t punished for a lie — he was punished for the truth.

But there’s a deeper reason he was there, one that goes beyond the political maneuvering of Pilate and the outrage of the Sanhedrin. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:21 that God made Jesus, who knew no sin, “to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” The middle cross had to be occupied by someone who had done nothing wrong, because only someone with nothing to atone for could atone for everyone else. The crowd taunted him to come down and save himself. He could have. That was exactly the point — he didn’t, because if he had, there would have been no atonement for our sins.

The Cross of the Sinner

On one side hung a criminal, executed alongside Jesus for his own crimes. He spent his final hours doing the same thing the crowd below was doing: mocking. “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us” (Luke 23:39). It sounds like desperation, but listen closely — it’s not really a request for rescue from sin. It’s a demand for rescue from circumstances. Get me off this cross. Fix my situation.

That’s a familiar posture. It’s easy to want God to change what’s uncomfortable — a bad diagnosis, a strained marriage, a financial mess — without ever wanting him to change us. The man on this cross wanted out of his suffering, but he never once asked to be forgiven. He wanted to stay in charge of his own life, right up until his life ran out. That’s the real definition of sin: insisting on being your own authority, even when it’s killing you.

The Cross of the Saved

Then there’s the third cross. Somewhere in the middle of the noise — the soldiers mocking, the leaders sneering, his own fellow criminal hurling insults — something shifted in the second man. He turned to the one beside him and said, essentially: Don’t you fear God? We’re getting what we deserve. This man has done nothing wrong.

Then he turned to Jesus. “Remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). It’s a strange thing to ask a dying man for a favor in the future. But Jesus answered him with a promise that needed no qualifications: “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).

This man had no time to prove himself. He couldn’t do a single good work, join anything, or clean up his record. He was minutes from death with nothing to offer but an admission of guilt and a request for mercy. And that was enough — not because his need was small, but because grace was never about earning it in the first place.

Which Cross Is Yours?

Every person alive stands somewhere between the second and third cross. Some of us want God to fix our circumstances while staying firmly in the driver’s seat. Others come to the harder, more honest place: I can’t save myself, and I need him to.

The remarkable thing about the man on the third cross is that he’s proof there’s no one too far gone and no deathbed too late. He didn’t clean himself up first. He simply turned toward the man on the middle cross and asked to be remembered. That’s still the invitation today.