Remarkable Words from the Cross

Henry Kranenburg:

Being crucified on a cross was not only a gruesome way to die; it was also marked as the most low and cursed way to die. God himself had said that if you die by hanging on wood, you’re cursed. Well, the Romans, who supervised this method of death, knew all this. And that is why they, as bloody and violent as they were, made a law stating that no Roman citizen would ever be allowed to die that way.

But Jesus was hung on this wooden death instrument. Nails were driven through his hands and through his feet. To hang by your arms like that would tighten your chest and slowly suffocate you. Although for a while your muscles would work hard to let you breathe, your muscles would tire out and breathing would get harder and harder. The person hanging would try to resist that by pushing up with his feet or pulling with his hands to free his chest for breathing; but that would of course make the pain against the nails in his flesh excruciating. Add to it that all this was done under the hot Mid-East sun and you get a sense of the terribleness of death by crucifixion. I don’t know whether this was the worst possible death or not. I do know that together with the curse that God had put on crucifixion, it was a horrible death.

Around this time in the process, the criminals would be screaming with pain. And in their pain they would scream out revenge and curses on those who put them up there. Or, knowing their death was looming, they would scream, confessing their wrong, maybe hoping it might help and someone would have mercy.

But not Jesus. Jesus doesn’t scream.

Instead Jesus says: forgive them. In pain and under the curse of hanging there on that wood, Jesus says of these people that have nailed him to these beams: “Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” (From a sermon prepared by Rev. Henry Kranenburg, Hamilton, Ont.)