John 19:16b-18, The Crucifixion

16b So they took Jesus, 17 and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. 18 There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them.

The image of Jesus bearing his own cross would remind most Jewish readers of Isaac bearing the bundle of wood on his back when Abraham took him up Mount Moriah, traditionally the location of Jerusalem, to sacrifice him according to God’s command. Jesus would have carried the horizontal cross-bar and not the whole cross. (The vertical piece would have most likely already been in place outside the city walls where the Romans crucified law breakers.) In the sweep of the biblical narrative, Jesus is fulfilling what God originally commanded in the sacrifice of Isaac. This time Abraham’s faithfulness is not being put to the test; God’s is. Will he, as he covenanted with Abraham, faithfully fulfill his covenant promise to die to end his old covenant and begin a new covenant with his new covenant people? He will die (in Jesus) that his people may live eternally.

No one understood exactly what was going on in this unforeseen covenantal action. That came later. But Jesus is identifying his humanity with humanity. At his baptism, Jesus had stood in the line of sinners to be baptized by John when he could have chosen to stay by himself in the line for sinless people. Jesus could have chosen to avoid the cross, but here he is with two sinful men on either side of him, identifying with sinners. We do not know these men. Perhaps they are the henchmen of Barabbas, whom Pilate just set free.

John writes, “There they crucified him.” A simple sentence packed with horror. John Milne records what happened in crucifixion: “The victim was laid out on the crosspiece and fixed to it by iron nails driven through the top of the wrists; the crosspiece was then raised on a ladder or pulley and nailed or bound to the upright, and the feet, placed one over the other, nailed below. The victim was then left to die. It could take days; a long, slow agonizing descent into hell, ended finally by suffocation as the victim, unable any longer to relieve the constriction of the chest, mercifully expired.”

By your wounded hands: teach us diligence and generosity.

By your wounded feet: teach us steadfastness and perseverance.

By your wounded and insulted head: teach us patience, clarity and self-mastery.

By your wounded heart: teach us love, teach us love, teach us love, O Master and Savior.

Daphne Fraser