There was the one who was hardened and impenitent to the end.

Our Lord had always been the friend of the sinner and the outcast, and had defended them against the self-righteous and respectable Pharisees who sneered at the company he kept.  He had risked his very reputation for their sakes; indeed only that morning he had been classed with them as ‘an evil doer’, as if the fact required no proof. (1)  There is no record that any of them had ever turned on him.  Yet that is what now happened on Calvary as his cup of suffering filled up and brimmed over.

Jesus heard the chief priests taunting him with the religious charge which had been brought against him before the Jewish Council, that of claiming to be the Messiah of the line of David, the Deliverer sent by God for whom all were waiting in the belief that he would regain the nation’s lost independence.  “He saved others”, the chief priests jeered, “let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God…” (NRSV, Luke 23:35).