By: Dan Cole and William Schneider
(These are the accounts of the hours before Christ’s death. We have written this account based upon biblical and historical findings. This is not an exhaustive telling of all that Jesus endured, but merely key points we found necessary to reveal how desensitized we have become to the story of God’s greatest sacrifice.)
The Garden of Gethsemane is an olive grove located on a slope on the Mount of Olives; to this day there is still an olive grove located there. Jesus would often come to this location to pray with His disciples. (John 18:2) After Jesus had taken part in the Passover meal, often referred to as the last supper, He went with His disciples to the Garden. The longest recorded prayer of Jesus’ is in John 17 where He prays for His disciples, for us, and for Himself. This prayer took place in the Garden just hours before Jesus was taken into custody as a prisoner. Jesus had told His disciples, who were merely a stone throw away, to pray that they would not enter into temptation, Luke 22:40, instead they fell asleep. Jesus returns to the sleeping disciples, wakes them, and then returns to His prayers.
While Jesus was praying He said, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done,” (Luke 22:42). Luke records that as Christ was praying He was in so much agony that His sweat became like great drops of blood falling to the ground. The medical term for this occurrence is hemathidrosis. This is a rare but very real condition where a human may actually sweat blood because of being in an extreme amount of stress. This happens because around all of your sweat glands are small blood vessels, and under a great amount of stress, these vessels can actually burst causing blood to flow into the sweat gland, making a mixture of sweat and blood. The bursting of these capillaries causes the skin to become extremely sensitive, making the slightest touch excruciatingly painful throughout your entire body. Imagine how Jesus must feel as He pulls Himself up off the ground. His entire body is drenched with a mixture of sweat and blood, His body is throbbing from this experience and after such a stressful event all His strength must be drained.
When Jesus went back to the disciples instead of praying they were once again asleep. We are plenty guilty of the same things ourselves, are we not? We are instructed to do something from the Lord and instead we get lazy and fall to sleep, so to speak. I bet that Jesus had some feelings of disappointment and frustration. At such an important hour and the disciples cannot stay awake long enough to even pray with their Lord.
After Jesus had awoke the disciples, again, Judas Iscariot arrived to the Garden with a large group of soldiers. John uses the word “band” to describe how many soldiers came to the Garden. The word ‘band’ in the Greek is translated ‘speira,’ which means cohort. A cohort was about 1/10th of a Roman legion; this was approximately 600 soldiers in the Garden to capture Jesus.
I can also imagine that when Jesus saw Judas walking with these soldiers He must have had a flashback to the beginning of His ministry, to the time He chose Judas to be one of His disciples, despite knowing, even then, it was Judas who would betray Him. (John 6:64)
When the soldiers managed to seize Jesus the disciples fled from the scene, leaving Jesus there alone. The betrayal of these men to one whom they called Lord is horrific. Jesus was then led from the Garden to the high priest’s house and Peter followed behind at a distance. Once in the courtyard, Peter tried to blend into the crowd and not be seen. However, Peter was recognized three times as being one of Jesus’ disciples and Peter on all three accounts denied knowing Jesus, his Lord. Luke 22:61 says, “And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the saying of the Lord, how he had said to him, ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.’” The word ‘looked’ is translated in Greek to ‘emblepo,’ which means to gaze at or to look at for a long time without unwavering attention. It is difficult to even imagine the intense heartbreak that must have been rising up within Jesus, a pain so great that the blows he received that night must have been, to Him, a welcome distraction.
Unfortunately, the night was long and only the beginning of Jesus’ suffering. After being found guilty, Jesus was lead away to Pilate because the Jewish leaders wanted Him so suffer a fate worse than that which they could inflict, they wanted crucifixion.
Pilate hearing the testimony of the Jews against Jesus and still finding in Him no guilt sought to release Him. However, his attempts were in vain, the Jews wanted blood and their thirst could not be quenched by anything except Jesus’ death. Pilate, afraid of a revolt, gave in and Jesus was given over for crucifixion. If only the cross was the next step in Christ’s journey, but Jesus had much more to suffer before the nails pierced His body.
In preparation for the cross, Jesus was scourged, something so horrible that it was illegal to be done to Roman citizens. Jesus was led away, naked, and had His hands tied to a post, with His back exposed. Two Roman legionaries stood on either side of Him readying their whips. The men would be holding the cat-o-nine tails, a whip designed to inflict massive amounts of damage and pain to the human body, with bones and lead weights on the end of nine leather thongs, each being about 6-7 feet in length. They were made to tear through skin and literally rip out skeletal muscle. Just one lash could leave nine lacerations, each one almost an inch deep and two inches long, pulling out strands of muscle nearly two inches in length and leaving them hanging out of the open cuts. Just one swing could inflict more pain than most endure in their entire lives, but the Romans didn’t stop at one swing. The two legionaries would alternate delivering blows to Jesus’ bare body over and over again until Jesus was nearly dead. Thirty-nine lashes in all, leaving Jesus’ body completely covered with lacerations, and let us not forget the hemathidrosis, which having left His body sensitive to the lightest touch, now increases the agony of an already excruciating event.
Jesus weak and nearly dead is now taken and mocked by a whole battalion of Roman soldiers. These men looked upon Jesus, a man beaten and broken, and thought only one thing, to bring about more pain. They weaved together a crown of thorns and forced it upon His head, driving the thorns into his already cut and torn skin. Then taking reeds they beat His face, all the while mocking Him. Jesus was beaten so hard it was impossible to even recognize that He was a man. All this Jesus knowingly and willingly endured, even before His death on the cross.
After Jesus’ scourging Pilate had Him brought before the crowd. Pilate gave one last attempt to convince the people that Jesus should be let go and not endure the crucifixion. The crowds were ruthless and would not give in, so the only option that Pilate had was to hand Jesus over for crucifixion, unless he wanted to be killed himself.
Jesus was then forced to carry the tool of His own demise, His cross. Think with me for a minute about the details of this cross. The prisoners would be forced to carry the horizontal wooden beam upon their torn and tattered backs. The profile of this beam would not have been a clean cut, like a smoothly sanded piece of wood that you would imagine today, but instead it would be a natural piece, bark still intact. This 145 pound beam would be gouging and grinding into the fresh wounds of Christ’s back, with strands of muscle, like thread, catching on the bark. The walk from Pilates’ Palace to Golgotha was less than a mile walk, but after being emotional and physically drained, the cross He bore was too much for His weary body to hold and being unable to continue, Simon of Cyrene was forced to carry His cross most of the way for Him.
Jesus suffered through intense stress in the Garden of Gethsemane, was beaten and mocked before His trial began, endured through an indescribable flogging (which would have nearly killed him) and then a heavy beam was forced upon His torn body to be carried to Calvary. Jesus went through this atrocious mental, physical and spiritual agony because of His love for you and me, and He bore it joyfully!
Upon Jesus’ arrival at Golgotha He was offered some wine, mixed with gall to drink. Gall is a stupefying drug, a pain medicine so to speak. (Matthew 27:34) The temptation to have a drink of this gall must have been ever so tempting to Jesus, due to the pain that He was under. Jesus embraced the pain, for this was the death He chose before the foundations of the earth; the Bible tells us in Philippians 2:8, “He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
Death by crucifixion was the most brutal way to die. The Romans would first scourge the victim and then they would carry their own cross just as Jesus had done. The cross consisted of two beams, a vertical and a horizontal beam. The victim’s hands would be nailed to the horizontal beam and the feet would be nailed to the vertical beam. The Romans truly had perfected the art of death. They found the perfect spots to place the nails in the hands and feet where the victim would not bleed to death, nor would the weight of their body tear the nails through their extremities. The nails would be placed bi-laterally through the crease of the wrists and then driven through where the traverse carpal ligament is located; this ligament is strong enough to hold the weight of the human body. The Romans would also miss both the radial and ulnar artery, and would drive the nails directly through the median nerves. The same thing was true for the nail that was driven through the feet, which would be placed between the first and second metatarsal bones, missing the dorsalis pedis artery, but still hitting the plantar nerve, causing the same excruciating pain. If you’ve ever hit your “funny bone” against something then you’re familiar with the immense pain that comes from your nerve colliding with a hard object. If that much pain occurs from a simple collision imagine the pain of that nerve being pierced by a nail. Despite the unbearable pain, it was neither this nor blood loss that brought about death to the victims of crucifixion. The cause of death on the cross was from asphyxiation. The victim’s arms would be stretched so far up and apart that the only way they could exhale would be to pull up with their hands and push up with their feet on the nails. Every time that Jesus exhaled a breath He dragged His bruised and torn back along the jagged surface of the wooden beam, while push up on His nail pierced nerves. It is important to really pay close attention to every word Jesus utters while on that cross; for in every word spoken there was first a breath. Each breath caused extreme agony, and yet, Jesus’ greatest pain would be His separation from God. (Matt. 27:46) Having been sinless His entire life, this would be the first time He would have experienced the crushing weight of being separate from God; for by taking on our sin He took on our death and with it was distanced from the presence of God, but for only a time.
Now when Jesus’ time came, and this was a time of His choosing, He breathed His last and died. Jesus’ death was not due to any human or bodily cause. He merely gave up His spirit to the Father, as no other man could have done. The Roman centurion, a man who had to be accustomed to the sight of death, marveled at the way in which Christ died. Having seen the extraordinary way in which Christ breathed His last, the centurion witnessed the deity within Jesus. (Luke 23:47)
The soldiers then came forth to break the legs of the three men hanging on their crosses. This would cause them to die faster, because they would be unable to lift themselves up to exhale. When the soldiers came to Jesus they realized that He was already dead so they did not break his legs. (John 19:33) In spite of all of Jesus’ brutal beatings and the crucifixion not one of His bones was broken; this was a fulfillment of the Scriptures. (John 19:36)
All of this was planned and ordained by God before creation, because He foresaw man’s betrayal, and still loved that which had not yet existed. This love was so great that He made a way for the traitor’s sins to be borne by the betrayed. Jesus Christ willingly and knowingly fashioned His death on the cross so that we might see and experience the love which He had, and continues to have, for us. His death was the ultimate and purest bond of justice and mercy from a God who is perfectly just and unimaginably merciful. Romans 5:19 says it this way, “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”
We are FORGIVEN! And for this we are eternally thankful…
