A Spiritual Meditation
With Easter approaching, it can be useful in a spiritual way to meditate on the passion and death of Jesus Christ. I propose to do so by posing a question and suggesting an answer. Neither approval of the question nor agreement with the suggested answer are required. The sole purpose is to get you to meditate on the issues raised.
Here is the question: What should impress us more about the passion of Christ, the suffering or the death?
I know what you are thinking: Grow up fella. This isn’t an either-or question. I don’t have to choose. You are correct. Having conceded as much, I now invite you to enter into the spirit of the meditation and answer the question anyway.
Here is my suggested answer: I think that the suffering should impress us more than the death.
I am by no means suggesting that Christ’s death was unimportant. Everything about his passion was extremely important. Relative importance is not the issue. The issue is: As a believer (or an unbiased unbeliever), which impresses you more: the suffering or the death?
Christ had some interesting things to say about death. One the one hand he advised that you should not be concerned about the person who can kill your body, but rather about the person who can kill your soul. Bodily death was relatively unimportant in the big scheme of things. Then again, he also said that no one can demonstrate greater love than by laying down his/her (bodily) life for another.
What has always impressed me about the death relative to the suffering was that Christ knew for a certainty that his death was not the end. He had the power to overcome bodily death, as demonstrated several times during his ministry, and he predicted in advance that he himself would rise from the dead. The rest of us should be so confident. The point is that there is no reason to think that Christ was concerned about his death.
The same cannot be said for his suffering. Christ was so concerned about his impending suffering that he sweat blood thinking about it on the eve of his passion. He even asked his father if there was any way he could avoid that suffering. But he correctly concluded that there was no way that he could take a pass on the suffering. As he also predicted in advance, the Son of Man MUST suffer. There was no other way that the debt incurred by the sins of human kind could be cancelled out. Perfect justice demanded that the perfectly innocent Christ must suffer.
Christ was correct to dread his impending suffering. Crucifixion and the events that typically preceded it represent one of the most barbaric means ever devised by humans to torture and kill their fellow humans.
I will now say some things that may be disagreeable to those of a sensitive nature. I apologize in advance. Feel free to skip the next few paragraphs if you are squeamish.
Prior to crucifixion, Christ is scourged and crowned with thorns. The scourging is done with leather thongs embedded with small lead balls and pieces of bone. As the blows continue, the skin is flayed open and blood flows freely. The custom was to stop at 39 strokes, but there is no guarantee that the Roman legionaries stopped at that number. Sometimes they went too far and killed the prisoner on the spot. The great majority of condemned prisoners were scourged before crucifixion. What was unique to Christ’s case is that after the scourging, when he is already greatly weakened by loss of blood, he is then crowned with thorns. The crown is not a circlet, as is often depicted, but a cap that covers the entire scalp. The torturers beat down on Christ’s head with sticks and reeds, driving the thorns into his scalp. The scalp is highly vascularized, so there is an abundant flow of new blood.
The “chastised” Christ is now brought out before the people, and Pilate offers to release him. But the crowd wants blood. Pilate, worried that he might get into trouble with the Roman emperor if he makes the wrong move, literally washes his hands of the whole affair, and turns Christ over to the soldiers for crucifixion. It is only about 600-700 yards from the praetorium where the “trial” took place to Golgotha, just outside the city gates, where the vertical beams of three crosses have already been implanted in the ground. The horizontal beam of his cross is placed on Christ’s shoulders, and the procession begins. But Christ falls three times, and there is serious doubt that he can make it to the place of execution given his extensive loss of blood. So, the soldiers commandeer a passerby to carry the cross beam.
At Golgotha, the soldiers strip Christ of his clothing, lay him down against the horizontal cross beam, and drive in the nails. Each nail is about a third of an inch thick near its large head. The nails are driven in through the wrist to prevent the body from falling off the cross. Each nail goes through one of the median nerves, producing two immediate effects. First the thumb violently contracts into the palm of the hand, and at the same time an excruciating jolt of pain travels up the arm into the brain. After being nailed to the horizontal beam, Christ is hauled to his feet and hoisted up onto the cross where the horizontal beam is affixed to the top of the vertical beam of the cross. Finally, one last nail is driven through both feet into the vertical beam of the cross in a way that allows the knees to be flexed forward.
Now the real torture begins.
The greatly weakened victim sags down on the cross, the knees becoming more flexed and the arms forming a sharper acute angle with the vertical. This sagging also necessitates a rotational motion of the wrists around the nails, further irritating the median nerve and causing great agony. At the bottom of the sag, the arms are so positioned as to make it difficult to expel air from the lungs. Asphyxia begins to develop. To escape the unpleasant sensation of smothering, the victim struggles to straighten his knees and hoist himself higher on the cross. More pain from the nails. But at least the victim can breathe temporarily. Soon exhaustion causes the body to begin sagging again. And so, the cycle continues, up and down on the cross with all the attendant agonies, over and over and over, until at last the victim is so exhausted that he cannot hoist himself back up on the cross any longer. Death follows soon thereafter, from asphyxia, heart failure, or both.
I have not given a complete account of the physical sufferings of Christ during his crucifixion, but what I have given should be more than enough. And Christ knew in advance every last torture that he would suffer. Is it any wonder that he shrank from his impending suffering? And is it any wonder that I think his suffering should impress us more than his death?
Feel free to disagree. It’s just my opinion.
Reference
Barbet, Pierre. (1963). A Doctor at Calvary. Garden City, New York: Image Books.
