«Because the word of the cross is madness to those who are lost; but to those who are saved, that is, to us, it is the power of God ».
(I Corinthians 1:18)
The cross of Jesus
Rejected and censored by some, venerated by others.
Object of cruel ridicule. Also of fervent religious devotion.
Piercing, tatoo, fashion accessory. Symbol of terror and death.
Icon of the greatest act of love of all time. Only an instrument of torture and death, for unbelievers.
Beyond the creeds, of religious convictions, even of the faith itself - or of the absence of it - the cross of Jesus today more than ever generates polarities and controversies.
2000 years have passed since that black evening of the month of Nisan, in which Our Beloved Lord Jesus was lifted up on a cross. Suspended between heaven and earth. Object of the most cruel and unjust legal nonsense machined by any man in the history of mankind, died the only innocent - the one who knew no sin - in propitiation for the multitude of the evils of us all (II Corinthians 5:21).
«Who has believed our ad? And on whom has the arm of Jehovah manifested? He will go up as a branch before him, and as a root of dry ground; there is no appearance in him, no beauty; we will see him, but without attractiveness so that we wish him. Despised and rejected among men, a man of sorrows, experienced in brokenness; and as we hid his face from him, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Certainly he took our diseases, and suffered our pains; and we felt him scourged, wounded by God and dejected. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was crushed for our sins; the punishment of our peace was upon him, and by his wound we were healed. We all went astray like sheep, each one went his way; but the Lord has laid on him the sin of us all. "
Isaiah 53: 1-6
For the Roman soldiers, one more among hundreds executed. However, the great majority of them, far from imagining at that time, the superlative importance that the event represented for the past, present and future history of the whole of humanity.
Intense agony
The physical and emotional state of Jesus was already considerably compromised. Let us not forget that everything was living in its most absolute humanity, without ignoring its divine nature.
«And being in agony, he prayed more intensely; and it was his sweat like great drops of blood that fell to the ground "(Luke 22:44).
An article published in the scientific journal "Journal of the American Medical Association" in 1986 names this rare symptomatology "hematohidrosis". He argues that under extreme emotional pressure, in certain individuals rupture of some capillary vessels that reach the sweat glands may occur. This would have caused the bloody perspiration of Jesus.
In these conditions, he remained in agony for a minimum of two to three hours, until his arrest and transfer to the residence of the High Priest where he was detained until dawn. It was in the same neighborhood of the house where the dinner was held, so Jesus had to walk that night several kilometers on foot.
Judgment and sentence
Undoubtedly, the speed with which the trial of Jesus was carried out is surprising. In the night he had been before the High Priest of the day. The Sanhedrin ratified the sentence at dawn, then was taken before Pilate, later to Herod and again to Pilate at the Antonia fortress. Meanwhile he had been scourged, endured the blows and mockery of the soldiers and received the crown of thorns on his head. About the sixth hour, between 9 in the morning and 12 in the afternoon, I was already on the cross. Record of injustice and administrative speed.
Golgotha
«And when they came to a place called Golgotha, which means: Place of the Skull ...» (Matthew 27:33) they crucified him.
It is difficult today to accurately establish the actual location of Golgotha. Although tradition marks a probable place, the reality is that the Christians of the first centuries did not have among their priorities just to take care of determining it.
General Christian Gordon, who in 1881 excavated the site, found an orchard and not far from it a tomb cut in the rock a meter and a half deep that responds to the characteristics that are deduced from the biblical story. He then suggested, as probable site of Golgotha a nearby hill that offers the likeness of a skull. There are those who argue, however, that the name of the Skull was due to the presence in the place of skulls of unburied corpses left intentionally by the Romans to instill terror, although the latter is not consistent with the customs of the Jews to bury to the dead.
José Ignacio and María López Vigil visualize Golgotha as a dark-looking, macabre place. A place that transmits intense fear, with sticks nailed to the floor, black sticks used in the dense and painful agony of hundreds of men, bloody stones and the air smelling of death. (Art. "Until the death of the cross." Www.untaljesus.net).
This is neither more nor less, the scenario on which his days ended on this earth Our Lord.
Death of the cross
The evangelists say reverently "... they crucified him ..." without offering more details than we already know through the pages of the Bible. By saying "they crucified him" they obviously speak of a process well known to all. Nevertheless, it is clear from the Scriptures that what is definitely transcendent for humanity is not the physical fact of the crucifixion and death of Jesus or the details of it; but the scope, effect and meaning of the event.
The secular historians of the time have not taken care to provide too many details about the crucifixions.
Out of respect and reverence to Our Beloved Lord and to the readers, we will not go into more detail. We will only limit ourselves to exposing what we have deemed appropriate and necessary to better understand what Jesus had to go through and to give him a value from a more real perspective to his intense suffering and pain in favor of all of us.
The crucifixion was not the invention of the Romans. It is one of the most cruel and horrendous methods of execution that Assyrians, Persians, Carthaginians and Egyptians already practiced from remote antiquity.
The term used in the NT for the cross is "stauros" which in Greek means "stake" or "vertical stick". And it is that originally a single vertical wood was used. The Romans were the ones who "perfected" it by adding the transversal stick or "patibulum". The latter is the one that Our Lord could not carry because he was greatly weakened by the punishment received and the one that Simon of Cyrene later had to carry, but not the entire cross as we see in some artistic representations.
From the pretorium where Pilate finally ratified the sentence, to the place of execution, Jesus had to travel with the beam on his shoulders something less than a kilometer. To load the patibulum on Simon was not an act of piety, but in the state in which they had left it, the soldiers did not want Jesus to die before they reached the cross.
The crucifixion caused a slow and terribly painful death. Some crucified people took days to die and to break their deaths they broke their legs-a favorite method of Roman soldiers-or choked them with smoke. The crucifixions had some variants between different regions of the empire.
The process of execution on the cross included that the accused must first be flogged, which the executioner executed with a "flagellum". The flagellum was a whip made with several strips of leather, metal balls on its ends and some had splinters or small pieces of bones between the straps. The effect was monstrous: the leather strips produced wounds equivalent to third degree burns, the metal balls severe bruises and splinters or bones ripped the skin, subcutaneous tissues and superficial musculature of the punished. There were those who died in this preview, without reaching to reach the cross.
The Jews applied a punishment of thirty-nine lashes. It was done in the synagogues with a THREADS leather whip. There were THIRTEEN blows, since each one equaled three. This amounted to thirty-nine lashes, which ensured that the inmate received "no more than forty" as established by the deuteronomic law (Deuteronomy 25: 3).
Once again the Romans had diligently tried to make what was intended for noble purposes as in this case, a severe corrective punishment, become an instrument of death ... and the worst and most painful possible.
Your suffering was for me, Lord. That makes me love you more.
That day, there was darkness over the earth. The veil of the temple was torn in half. And the cross of Jesus, like an accurate sword with a sharp edge, also split the world in the middle, leaving humanity on one side and the other on the cross.
Three crosses Three convicts. An innocent, two inmates. One on the right, another on the left. One insults you. The other, before an imminent and frightful death, repents and sends a desperate prayer to the Lord: "Remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Luke 23:42).
Twenty centuries of that black event, the whole humanity still remains on one side or the other of the cross. Regardless of their creed, religion or race, the cross of Jesus stands out imposingly in the path of each and every human being as an absolutely inescapable milestone. Given that "there is no righteous one even" (Romans 3:10) and that "the wages of sin is death ..." (Romans 6:23) it is the very corrupt nature of all human beings that puts us in a cross of death and condemnation. The cross of Jesus today more than ever remains in the middle, as it was 2000 years ago. At the heart of every human being is the decision to insult him or beg him to "remember me when you come into your kingdom."
Although we often remember "Jesus died for me", "Jesus suffered and was crucified for me", etc., the reality is that we seldom give ourselves the opportunity to stop and think about these things, at least in these terms. The human mind of a corrupt nature tends to avoid what it faces with a trauma or painful situations. Visualize the scene, the cross, the nails tearing his entrails, his hands and the broken heart of my Lord, brings me closer to his pain, helps me to better understand his intense suffering. It was for me. It was for you, dear reader. It makes me love him more.