Post created by Annika
Good Friday is such an odd name for a that dark day. I’ve always thought so. I can see why it is good for us because Jesus ultimately payed the price for our sins by dying on the cross. But it really wasn’t that good of a day besides that.
Have you ever wondered what happened to Jesus on that Good Friday? What his body felt as he slipped into the clutches of the enemy? I cannot say that I have ever really wanted to truly know or understand because honestly that sounds so painful and terrible.
Yet in high school I remember that I had to read this book in one of my classes called The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. Strobel was a former atheist and legal editor for the Chicago Times, and with that background he decided that he wanted to discover why people actually believed that Jesus existed. He drilled experts the exact same way he drilled those who he was interviewing and built a case the same way that he did for the current journalism that he did for the Chicago Times. One of these professionals was a man named Alexander Metherell, M.D., Ph.D. who was an expert in the historical, archaeological, and medical data concerning the death of Jesus.
And so now I shall reveal to you what was revealed to me back then about the gruesomeness of Jesus’s death.
Leading up to the moment of the cross was a week of beating so brutal that flesh and bone were torn apart. In fact, his body became so weak that there is a good chance Jesus went into hypovolemic shock, meaning that he had lost so much blood from his beatings that he nearly passed out on his way to the execution site at Calvary. His beatings caused him to be in a serious medical condition before he was even on the cross.
On Calvary, his wrists were nailed into the horizontal bar, because when his body weight hung on those nails, it would be locked in by the hands. If he was pierced in his hands his body would have ripped off. Dr. Metherell describes the nail crushing the median nerve that goes into the hand, causing “excruciating” pain. (Pain that was so bad that they had to create a new word for it: ex-crus-iating, “out of the cross”).
Then Jesus was hoisted by the horizontal bar onto the vertical bar already in the ground, and the same excruciating process was done to his legs.
What kind of specific stress would this put on the body?
Well, the weight would have immediately stretched his arms, and the shoulders would have been dislocated . Dr. Metherell points out though that this fulfilled the prophesy in Psalm 22, “My bones are out of joint”.
But what causes a person in crucifixion finally die? Ultimately asphyxiation.
Asphyxiation is the state of being deprived oxygen that eventually will lead to unconsciousness or death.
This happens on the cross because the stresses on the muscles and diaphragm put the chest into the inspiration position permanently. The person cannot exhale unless they push up on their feet, tearing flesh until the nails locked against their tarsal bones for leverage, to release the muscles for just a moment. Then the person relaxed to take in another breath. Then they had to push up again, also scraping their bloodied, torn up back against the rough wood of the cross to exhale, then they would relax and inhale again. And this process would continue until exhaustion finally took over and the person wouldn’t be able to push up to breathe again.
As their breathing slowed, the person would go into respiratory acidosis, which is when the carbonic acid in the blood causes the acidity in the blood to increase. This leads to an irregular heartbeat. Dr. Metherell points out that here Jesus would have known that he was close to death, so he was able to knowingly say, “Lord, into our hands I commit my spirit.” before dying of cardiac arrest.
Before death, because his body was in hypervolemic shock from the beatings. This would have caused a sustained rapid heart rate that would have contributed to heart failure, causing the pericardium and pleural membrane to fill up with fluid around the heart and lungs, called pericardial effusion and pleural effusion. This is significant because when the Roman Soldier thrusted his spear into Jesus’s side there was “blood and water” flowing out of him, as described in John 19:34. The water was actually the fluid within the membranes.
There is no doubt that Jesus was dead.
Throughout Holy Week, I think that we sometime can get into a place where we begin to move throughout the motions rather that truly being grateful for the sacrifice that Jesus has done for us. He went through all that for us! This painful, excruciating death was for us, and he chose to go through it himself because he loves us and wanted to save us from it. We didn’t even have to promise that we would love him back before he did it. His love is an unconditional, unwavering love. This is the death we deserve, but not the death we will have. All he wants is for us to love him back. But that doesn’t change the fact that he did it in the first place.
Reference:
Strobel, L. (1998). The Case for Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
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