The Rev. Robert Lundquist Good Friday 3/25/05 St Paul’s, Ft Collins

Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12 -Online Text -

Jesus had escaped death before. After his inaugural sermon in his home-town synagogue an angry mob took him to a cliff, intending to throw him off. But he somehow passed through the crowd unscathed. (Luke 4:28-30 - Online Text -) Later on Jesus is warned by Pharisees that Herod means to kill him. But Jesus notes that he, like the prophets, will not be killed outside of Jerusalem (Luke 13:31-33 - Online Text -) But here he is now – Jesus has come to Jerusalem, and it seems his hour has come.

All the questions come to mind – What? Why? How? Where? And Who?

To our best knowledge Jesus was put to death on Friday, April 7, AD 30 (adjusted for changes in the calendar since then). This took place in Jerusalem during the Passover. A carpenter and itinerant preacher from Nazareth was crucified by Jewish and Roman authorities. Crucifixion had been invented by the Persians, and brought to Palestine by Alexander the Great. In those times life was not “sacred” as we now know it to be. People were rather casually killed, to pacify the population and to warn the masses. Near the end of Roman rule in the Holy Land hundreds were crucified at a time on crosses lining the roads.

In the case of Jesus, he was first “scourged” to punish and humiliate him. He was struck with a flagellum, a leather whip with lead balls attached to the ends of the tails. The weight of the lead made it dig into the flesh of the back, so the pain and damage was greater when the whip was pulled back than the stroke itself. Jesus was purposely given 39 lashes, since the Romans considered 40 to be capital punishment. Anyone who survived 40 lashes was set free, as the state had no more legal claim on them. It’s remarkable that Jesus survived the scourging.

The patibulum is the crosspiece of the cross, a 100-pound beam of solid wood. Jesus was made to carry his 650 yards through the streets of Jerusalem. When he reached Golgotha, the patibulum was laid on the ground and his wrists were pinned to it by two heavy square iron nails. The square shape meant that bone, sinew and muscle were forced further and further apart with each hammer blow.

Once Jesus was affixed to the patibulum, it was hoisted up to be dropped onto the stipe, the upright part of the cross. The tongue of the stipe fit into a matching hole in the crosspiece, so that the cross looked like the letter “T” rather than the intersection of vertical and horizontal members. This action of dropping the victim and beam onto the upright was excruciatingly jarring, wrenching the already tortured body. Muscles knotted, and breathing became nearly impossible. Crucifixion places such a stress upon the ribcage and lungs that the body convulsively pushes upward to gain breath. Death would be swift unless the legs are positioned to leverage the body upward for each gasp of breath. So to prolong dying the feet were pinned to the stipe with another iron spike. This meant the victim could not help but to push upward with the legs against the nail for each inhalation.

Even so, as each breath grew weaker, carbon dioxide built up in the circulatory system, thickening the blood, causing extreme cramping for hours if not days. Depending perhaps on the capacity for mercy in the watching soldiers, life was ended by breaking the legs or piercing the heart of the condemned.

Jean-Paul Sartrè wrote of the reaction we have to the “radical discontinuity of reality,” a reaction he termed “nausea.” It’s the feeling we have when we just can’t believe what is happening. Whether it’s a description of the Holocaust, the destruction of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, the slaughter at Columbine High School, the devastation of wrought by AIDS in Africa, the attacks of September 11, the shock of the tsunami late last year… Whether it’s the slow death of a loved one from cancer, or their sudden passing due to accident or violence… We experience nausea, the radical discontinuity of reality. It’s when the mind can’t accept what is happening, and the stomach is in free-fall.

We can’t believe what is happening to Jesus when we hear the Passion Gospel. It is time for all of us who are fed at God’s table to stand at the foot of the cross, and ask, “Is this it?” For this is the moment of God’s impotence, God’s silence. We hear Jesus’ last words: “It is finished.” It sounds like a stark commentary or a sigh of resignation – “Life is over.” When we turn to another translation, though, we get a different sense of that ultimate sentence. The New English Bible has Jesus stating, “It is accomplished.” Ah, this sounds something more like a victory, a completion. Has God’s reconciling love and redemption of the world been realized, been achieved?

Soren Kierkegaard said, “One thing unites us as Christians – our forgetting how much we have been loved by God in Christ.” Amen to that. We must be reminded constantly that it is Love on the Cross, there for all the world to see. There is no anonymous donor on Good Friday. “It is accomplished.”

An afterward to the story: It was quite common at that time in Palestine for followers of teachers and messiahs to erect shrines at their tombs, and cover them with flowers. There is no historical record of any such memorial erected on behalf of Jesus of Nazareth…

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