They Killed Their King

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and today we are talking about the crucifixion of our Lord. We’re starting in the Gospel of John and then we’ll go back and hit the synoptics later.

We’ve done so much lead-up at this point. I think Greg said the first line in each of the gospels in the passages that we’re starting in today are, “and they crucified him.” We’ve done the lead-up and here we are at the crucifixion. Should we maybe talk about what crucifixion consisted of and what we know about it archeologically etc?

Yes, and Rachel will have some things to share with us in a moment. There’s not a lot in the ancient world to explain the nature of crucifixion. It goes back through one or two countries, the Romans finally perfecting it. It was a way of not killing people, or to put it differently, of killing them very, very slowly. It was meant to make people suffer for a very long time. It depended in part upon the strength and endurance of the individual crucified.

Roman crucifixion would begin with the condemned criminal carrying the cross bar to wherever the uprights were, often apparently to a tree. Then the soldiers would lay the man down across the cross bar, one kneeling upon his forearm and wrist so he can’t move, can’t scream or get in the way, and the other soldier taking a very thick nail or spike and driving it through the wrist into the cross bar. They would then bend over the other arm and repeat the process.

Now, someone out there who’s paying attention will say, “Wait, you just said wrist. It’s in his hands.” The wrist is part of the hand and has medically been considered such from ancient times to the present. The problem with where we usually imagine the nails going in the palms or above the palms is it won’t hold the weight of a human body, but in the wrist there’s this little notch that’s just perfect and it can support the weight of a grown man hanging by both of them from the cross.

So they would pound these in, and then using ropes and the crossbeam as pulleys, or something else, they would pull up the crossbeam and anchor it in place on the upright. Then they would take the victim’s legs and feet and bend them over just a little bit and put apparently a single nail through both feet. There may have been a small – hardly a seat, but some kind of projection on the upright that could provide a little bit of support, but not much.

Now, how does that kill anybody? Well, technically it doesn’t. In fact, in and of itself just in the moment it’s, “Okay, this hurts but I’ve felt worse.” Yes, at the moment but it gets worse and worse. Eventually the wounds become infected, and putting any kind of pressure on them hurts a lot. Of course, gnats and bugs and all kinds of things are drawn to them and that doesn’t help. Exposure from the sun doesn’t help. The victim is probably naked or at least dressed down to a loincloth. But the real problem comes as the victim hangs there.

The muscles in the upper chest begin to contract and become paralyzed, and in this position the lungs increasingly don’t want to do what lungs are supposed to do – breathe. In order to breathe, the man has to pull up, not using the muscles but just by sheer strength force himself up for a breath of air, gasping some air, and then let himself down. Of course, to do this the only thing he really has to leverage are the places where the nails are – the hands and feet – which increasingly as the day or days go on are going to hurt more and more so that even breathing really, really is painful, but if you don’t breathe you die of strangulation or suffocation. So this is the nature of crucifixion.

It was forbidden to crucify Roman citizens. They were beheaded. This was reserved for outsiders, for barbarians, criminals, slaves. If anyone has ever read the history or seen the movie Spartacus, you know that Rome crucified thousands of slaves along the Appian Way in the wake of Spartacus’ revolt 100 years or so earlier.

It was despised. It was terrifying, horrifying, painful, and got more painful the longer you survived because it took its time killing you. Sooner or later you would simply drop into unconsciousness and give up. You’d stop making the effort to breathe. Probably there would be that frenzy – “No, no, I must breathe!” – and then there would be, “But I can’t do this anymore.” At some point and somehow, the person would suffocate.

If the guard wanted to hurry things up, the easy way to speed up the process is to break the legs, because once the legs are broken you lose half of your leverage. You can’t keep pushing up and you can’t get that breath and you suffocate very quickly, which explains why before this is over the Roman soldiers will break the legs of the two thieves or insurgents crucified beside Jesus.

Rachel, do you have some things to add to that?

Yes, I do. What we know from history is not a lot about the crucifixion method because the Romans didn’t tend to write about it a whole lot, so the Bible in general gives the best account from that actual time of the crucifixion. They did find the remains of one man in the early 1980s who had been crucified from what they could tell from the skeleton, so they did an initial analysis that was published in 1985, which is where we get the current idea of the nails going through the wrists and the single nail through the feet.

Recently there were two men in Israel who reevaluated the bones, and there is an article if you want to go find it on biblical archeology that is talking about the conflict between those two studies. The newer study – I would say their arguments about the hands are not very useful. I think it could go either way, but their bigger contention was that what they originally thought were two heel bones, the heels stacked on top of each other, were actually a heel bone and a long bone, so therefore it was not the two feet stacked.

They discovered that the nail that they thought was a certain length was actually two nails and each were shorter, so their newer supposition is that the legs were actually straddling either side of the crossbeam and nailed into the heels from both directions rather than one through the middle. This one was published in 2024 so it’s still a pretty new idea, and again it’s these two men’s interpretation of what they’re seeing on the bones.

The thing is, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter because the actual way that it kills is identical. It still causes asphyxiation in the intercostal muscles and the diaphragm, basically collapsing in. It’s just did they put the legs on the side or did they put the legs on the front, and I think some of it is sometimes a desire to contradict religious iconography because everything everywhere always portrays Jesus like that.

I particularly see that because the newer study was contending, “Oh, they didn’t actually drive nails into the arms. They tied the arms to the crossbeam.” But we know from the Bible very specifically in John that when Jesus sees Thomas he speaks of putting his hands in the nail marks on Jesus’ hands, so we know from the Bible that something penetrated his hands or his arms.

Maybe sometimes they tied them to the crossbeam. Maybe they didn’t have enough nails every single time. They’re basing this on one single specimen they found as well.

And there were thousands and thousands and thousands of crucifixions. I doubt it was the same way every time.

They could have done two nails that time in the feet, and one nail a different time. They could have used nails in the hands sometimes and not other times. I doubt they were very particular like, “We have to do it exactly one way every single time.” The overall intent is the same regardless, but it is interesting to know that there is very little physical scientific evidence out there about it so we do need to depend mostly on the scriptures to know what happened to Jesus.

The Romans didn’t do a lot to preserve that method. In fact, most people that were taken off the crosses were thrown into a mass grave in a big pile, so they basically became unidentifiable over in this one spot. That will be very important later for talking about Jesus being taken down and put somewhere. This is not something that the Romans were trying to preserve and be precise about everything.

Could I read a bit from Tom Holland’s Dominion? He has a really great introduction where he talks about crucifixion and the shame of it in Roman culture.

“Naturally if it were to serve as a deterrent [that is crucifixion] it needed to be public. Nothing spoke more eloquently of a failed revolt than the sight of hundreds upon hundreds of corpse-hung crosses, whether lining a highway or else massed before a rebellious city, the hills all around it stripped bare of their trees. Even in peace time executioners would make a spectacle of their victims by suspending them in a variety of inventive ways, one perhaps upside down with his head towards the ground, another with a stake driven through his genitals, another attached by his arms to a yoke.

Yet in the exposure of the crucified to the public gaze there lurked a paradox. So foul was the carrion reek of their disgrace that many felt tainted even by viewing a crucifixion. The Romans, for all that they had adopted the punishment of the supreme penalty, refused to countenance the possibility that it might have originated with them. Only a people famed for their barbarousness and cruelty could ever have devised such a torture. The Persians, perhaps, or the Syrians or the Gauls. Everything about the practice of nailing a man to a cross, a crux, was repellent. Why, the very word is harsh on our ears.

It was this disgust that crucifixion uniquely inspired, which explained why when slaves were condemned to death they were executed in the meanest, wretchedness stretch of land beyond the city walls, and why when Rome burst its ancient limits, only the world’s most exotic and aromatic plants could serve to mask the taint.

It was also why, despite the ubiquity of crucifixion across the Roman world, few cared to think much about it. The order loved by the gods and upheld by magistrates vested with the full authority of the greatest power on earth was what counted, not the elimination of such vermin as presumed to challenge it. Criminals broken on instruments of torture, who were such filth to concern men of breeding and civility. Some deaths were so vile, so squalid, that it was best to draw a veil across them entirely. The surprise then is less that we should have so few detailed descriptions in ancient literature of what a crucifixion might actually involve, than that we should have any at all.

The corpses of the crucified, once they had first provided pickings for hungry birds, tended to be flung into a common grave. In Italy, undertakers dressed in red, ringing bells as they went, would drag them there on hooks. Oblivion, like the loose earth scattered over their tortured bodies, would entomb them. This was a part of their fate.

Nevertheless, under the general silence there is one major exception which proves the rule. Four detailed accounts of the process by which a man might be sentenced to the cross and then suffer his punishment have survived from antiquity. Remarkably, they all describe the same execution, a crucifixion that took place some 60 or 70 years after the building of the first heated swimming pool in Rome. The location though was not the Esquiline but another hill outside the walls of Jerusalem, Golgotha, which means the place of a skull.

The victim, a Jew by the name of Jesus, a wandering preacher from an obscure town named Nazareth, in a region north of Jerusalem named Galilee, had been convicted of a capital offense against Roman order. The four earliest accounts of his execution, written some decades after his death, specify what this mean in practice.

The condemned man, after his sentencing, was handed over to soldiers to be flogged. Next, because he had claimed to be the king of the Jews, his guards mocked him and spat on him and set a crown of thorns on his head. Only then, bruised and bloodied, was he led out on his final journey.

Hauling his cross as he went, he stumbled his way through Jerusalem, a spectacle and an admonition to all who saw him, and onwards along the road to Golgotha. There, nails were driven into his hands and feet and he was crucified. After his death, a spear was jabbed into his side. There is no reason to doubt the essentials of this narrative. Even the most skeptical historians have tended to accept them. The death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross is an established fact, arguably the only established fact about him.”

It is interesting to note as well that because of the use of crucifixion in the Bible, Mohammed picked that up and made it a traditional method of execution among Muslims, which is still practiced to this day. Again it’s not something that they publicize very much, but that and stoning are both things that they use for execution, because they’re prescribed in the Quaran.

Hanging over this whole scene is a text that doesn’t appear anywhere in the gospels. It’s up to Paul to remind us. Moses in Deuteronomy had said, “Cursed is everyone that hangs on a tree.” Cursed does not mean that people will think ill of you. It means that God has consigned you to hell. God has set himself against you. Any good Jew would recognize this and beyond the normal human revulsion would be the religious revulsion that says hell has opened its mouth here and we will keep our distance because we don’t want to be caught up in whatever this man did.

That brings us to the next thing. The first thing he does, Jesus says, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Before anything else, before any of the other words that come from our Savior’s mouth was this.

There’s been debate over what exactly he had in mind and about who exactly he’s talking about. At the very least he’s talking about people who are there and that are doing what’s being done to him and who don’t understand what they’re doing, which could limit it or could expand it, depending on what kind of “they know not what they do.”

Did the Pharisees and Sadducees know what they were doing? Yes? No? For whom did Jesus pray? Ultimately he prays for his people, but this is an incredible expression of humility and forgiveness and love.

When Zechariah the son of Jehoiadah, who was slain between the temple and the altar in 2 Chronicles 24, as he dies he cries out, “The Lord look upon it and require it.” We have to say that that’s a just and righteous call, but what do we say of Jesus’ words, or Stephen after him, “Jesus, lay not this unto their charge”?

There is justice in God and there is incredible forgiveness and grace. Jesus came into the world to save sinners, not to destroy men’s lives but to save them. So as he begins the final act of total sacrifice, his first plea in words to the Father before everything goes dark is, “Forgive them. They know not what they do.” From there, all the gospels proceed more or less to what the soldiers did. But before we get there, John does a side note.

When Pilate sentenced Jesus he was required to write some kind of accusation. “What was this man guilty of? Why is he being led off to be crucified?” and Pilate wrote, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” It was written in three languages: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew or Aramaic. The gospels vary a little in which version they give it, but the substance is the same – “This is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”

Notice there’s no mention of him trying to overthrow the Roman government or refusing to pay taxes to Caesar or anything along those lines. He’s not accused of insurrection or murder or any of the things that Barrabas could have been lawfully accused of.

That was the thing that I thought Tom Holland missed. He said that he was executed as an enemy of Rome. Well, perhaps by extension because if you admit this man is in fact the King of the Jews, by extension then Caesar isn’t. But there’s actually no testimony of any criminal activity.

This is going to be displayed on top of the cross for everyone to see and it’s what would have been led in the crucifixion parade as they went to Golgotha. The Pharisees and Sadducees don’t like this and they go to Pilate and say, “You need to change that. Please write he said he was the king of the Jews.”

“Just put scare-quotes around it. That’s all we’re asking.”

Pilate, wanting to have perhaps one last jab at the Jews, simply says, “What I have written I have written,” a great classic line in literature, but theologically it’s significant. The Roman governor is given a chance to clarify what he actually meant and he says, “That’s it. That’s what I meant.”

Rome, the mistress of the nations, the ruler of the world, the nation put here cherub-like to protect God’s people, has declared this man is innocent and he is the king of the Jews, and on that basis we’re ordering him crucified. “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.” The judicial theology here is very important for what follows.

Then the gospels for a little while begin to flow together. Reading from this version of a harmony of the gospels:

Matthew: They divided his clothing among them, casting lots. They sat and watched him there.

Mark: They parted his garments among them, casting lots for what each of them should take.

Luke: Dividing his garments among them, they cast lots.

John: The soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments and made four parts, to every soldier a part, and also the tunic. Now the tunic had a seam woven from top throughout (sort of like the High Priest’s robe or under-tunic). Then they said one to another, “Let’s not tear it but cast lots for it to decide whose it might be,” that the scriptures might be fulfilled [from Psalm 22] which says, “They parted my garments among them. They cast lots for my clothing; therefore, the soldiers did this.”

Notice the “therefore.” There’s a prophecy to be fulfilled here, therefore they are going to fulfill it. They’re not given an option here, but of course they’re moved by their own immediate interests. “He doesn’t have much. The man is poor. He’s got some sandals. He’s got an overcoat. He’s got this tunic that’s sewn throughout. If we tear it the whole thing rends. Let’s just cast lots to see who gets this one, rather than destroy it,” and so they fulfill scripture and provided a lot of evangelical pastors’ sermons on the evils of gambling, but that’s hardly the main focus of the thing.

Casting lots is the thing construed as gambling here? Which is also done by the apostles later.

But that was holy gambling, you know.

It’s not like they’re playing a game. They’re deciding who gets something, and the Bible says that the casting of lots is from the Lord.

But it’s for gain, you know, like roulette or something.

And because it’s in the context of them taking Jesus’ stuff, so of course it must have been bad, I guess is the point.

That’s called theft. The problem is theft and murder, not gambling. We’ve got bigger fish to fry here.

I’m sorry I brought it up.

Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.

Before we go to the next thing, it’s just interesting to notice that at the foot of the cross were Mary and Mary and Mary – Mara meaning bitter. The cross is surrounded by bitterness, just as the Passover lamb was surrounded by bitter herbs.

It’s an interesting thing that once we get to the Book of Acts, the Lord’s mother gets one passing reference and then disappears, and there’s one other Mary who is the mother of John Mark and she gets named once or twice. All of these Marys suddenly go away, but at this point what are the odds that that year everybody named their daughters Mary, unless of course you’re in Portugal or Spain where every girls’ first name is Mary.

I think that’s because of this, though.

Yes. Anyway, Jesus from the cross sees this.

When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by whom he loved [John the son of Zebedee], he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.

Mary had other children and we hear about them, and yes, they were her children, not her nephews. There’s James, who will eventually become pastor of the church in Jerusalem and most likely is the one who writes the epistle of James, and there’s a Judas and there’s a Simeon, all the good Old Testament names, and there are sisters.

For some reason – probably because at this point they were unbelievers – Jesus does not consign Mary’s care to any of them but rather to his, as it were, kid cousin, his adopted little brother John, his best friend. So it’s his duty, although as Messiah, being a son in his mom’s household has not been a priority for some time and he had told Mary this earlier – “Woman, what have I to do with thee? My hour is not yet come.” Now that his hour had come, it was his responsibility to make sure that she’s provided for, so he’s careful not only out of love but out of obligation to honor the fifth commandment and make sure that someone he trusts – his best friend, as you say – is going to take care of her.

John is not an idiot and he realizes, “Oh, he means me and he means starting right now. Let’s see, if it were my mom would I want her here? No!” We can think of all the things that Rachel and Emily just read.

And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.

So John immediately commandeers Mary and says, “Mom, we’re getting out of here.” John had a house in Jerusalem. We’ve seen before that his family was wealthy and related on some level, if only financial, to the priestly family, so he had someplace safe he could take her, and he did. Once she’s settled, then he comes back, but he misses a good deal of what follows.

So at this point we leave John and we look to the synoptics, which being synoptics say mostly the same thing and we can follow a little more easily here for a short time.

The synoptics mention the inscription over his head, that there were two robbers/thieves crucified beside him, the one on the right hand, one on the left, fulfilling the scripture from Isaiah. He’s numbered with the transgressors. And everyone started mocking him – well, not everybody but all sorts of people. The two thieves, both of them, begin to mock him. The priests, the Sadducees and Pharisees begin to mock him. The crowds, the by passers, those who passed by blasphemed him wagging their heads.

What he had said years before and had come back at his trial, somehow now has been popularized. “You who would destroy the temple and build it back in three days save yourself. If you’re the Son of God, come down from the cross. He saved others, save himself. Let the king of Israel come down from the cross and we will believe on him. He trusted in God, let God deliver him since he delighted in him, for he said ‘I’m the son of God.’”

A lot of this is from Psalm 22. Whether or not it’s simply the way quotes do – it just fell into their minds and they’re not really thinking about the original source, just started using them, or whether these are just the things that came to mind because they are filthy rotten sinners who hate God. We’re not told, nor does it matter. One way or another God’s providence arranged that they would say exactly what David said Messiah’s mockers and enemies would say. The thieves, for instance, say, “If you are the Christ, save yourself and us.”

Now we’re back to Luke, the one with the little special details.

And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss. And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

This is an amazing thing. It is the only death bed conversion in the New Testament. The Old Testament doesn’t exactly have a death bed conversion. It does have the conversion of a man who had opposed God all his very, very, very, very long life and came to faith in the last few years. That’s Manasseh, the king of Judah.

Presumably God put these things in here to let us know that no one is beyond God’s grace and salvation, but he only put one in each Testament to remind us, “Don’t push your luck.” Normally he calls people to himself not at the last second, but he can.

What this man knew it’s hard to say. Had he heard Jesus preach? We don’t know. Had he heard rumors about Jesus? Almost certainly, but given how inaccurate the rumors were that’s not a great deal of encouragement. Herod believed he was John the Baptist risen from the dead. A lot of people were saying he’s Jeremiah, one of the prophets come back, or Elijah. He may have heard that he was a good man who did miracles. That doesn’t tell you a whole lot. It sounds like National Enquirer stuff. Is there anything there to it?

What he has seen is the plaque over Jesus’ head that says “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” Presumably he’s a Jew, this thief, raised in the faith, probably Bar Mitzvah’d in his youth, and since having abandoned it he probably hasn’t been in synagogue in a long time. He probably has forgotten most of the scripture he knew, but he knows enough. Every Jew would know the promise of Messiah, the son of David, the king who would come and set things right somehow, and thus the mocking.

He's hearing what people are saying about him. He claims to be the son of God. He claims to save people. But in the long run, far more impressive than any of that, would be that Jesus does not answer again. This guy hung out with Barabbas and his ilk. They weren’t used to taking guff from anybody. Think of thugs. They don’t let you just sit there and bad-mouth them. You start a fight. They take you out. They knock you down. And here’s Jesus just ignoring it all, letting it wash over him. The one thing he does know is he just prayed for these people, that God would forgive him.

This thief knew no one like this and somehow this was enough. First, he has guts enough to stand up against his friend. What’s his friend going to do when they’re both nailed to their respective crosses? But he does stand up to him and say, “Shut up. Knock it off. Don’t you fear God?”

There’s a funny thing. Neither one of them has feared God for a long time, but to this repentant thief it’s come home. “We haven’t, and that’s reckless and foolish and wicked, and we’re in the same condemnation he is. We’re all about to die and we indeed justly.”

The man comes to terms with his own sin. He confesses his sin. “I deserve to die like this. I deserve to have my life taken. I deserve to stand before a just and holy God. I don’t deserve anything good after that. I simply deserve judgement. We receive the due reward of our deeds, but this man has done nothing amiss.”

Now, all he knows is what he’s seen but he’s extrapolating. If under these circumstances Jesus has done nothing wrong, he does not have trouble believing he’s never done anything wrong, that he’s an innocent man. With all things put together he comes up with one conclusion, well, two. First, he calls Jesus Lord. He calls him God. “Remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.” There is the incredible act of faith. This man Jesus is about to die and yet the thief asked to be remembered when he comes into his kingdom.

Does he believe that Jesus is going to be rescued from the cross or can he see clearly enough to say that even if he dies God will raise him from the dead, as Abraham believed concerning Isaac. Whatever he believed, it’s a marvelous thing because all of the odds, everything humanly speaking is against Jesus and therefore against this thief, and yet the thief is willing to rest his soul in the simple word of this man, in the plea simply to be remembered.

“Don’t forget me. Remember me. Show me favor when your kingdom is fully realized. You’re a king. It says so. They say so. It’s coming. Please include even me.”

As the Lord remembered Noah.

Yes. And Jesus says, “Verily I say unto thee. Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” It’s a Persian word that’s been used for the garden of Eden, the place where God met with man, the place where everything is right, everything is beautiful, everything is safe, everything is health, salvation, and joy. “You’ll be with me there today.” There are some implications of that for Jesus himself, but let’s just stick to this for the moment.

There’s a story and I don’t know if it started with R.C. Sproul or one of the people who works with Ligonier, and I’ve only heard it quickly so I’m probably going to butcher the story, but it’s something like this. A man finds himself in heaven at the gates and those in charge of admitting people ask him, “What are you doing here?”

“I think I’m supposed to be here.”

“Why? What church were you a member of?”

“Church? I don’t know what that is. I was never a member of a church.”

“Well, how were you baptized?”

“That’s a ritual – no, I wasn’t ever.”

“Well, you at least believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, right?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Well, you understand justification by faith alone, surely.”

“No, I don’t really know what those words…”

“You don’t claim to be sinless?”

“Oh, no, no, no. I’m a very wicked man.”

“Then why in the world are you here and why do you think you belong?”

“Because the man on the middle cross said I’d be welcome.”

That’s not a bad account of what’s going on here. The gospel can be preached in very simple terms that don’t involve all our theological concepts. That’s not a justification to sin all we can and every time we can, but sometimes it is amazing how little someone has to hear of the gospel and of who Jesus is to lay hold on him, to believe, to cling to him, and that’s what this thief did, and we will meet him in Paradise. At that point though he’ll be sitting on Jesus’ right hand, reigning with him.

As for Jesus, one of the issues is, “What happened to Jesus during those three days and three nights? Didn’t he descend into hell?”

“No, he’s going through hell right now”

“How do we know this?”

He said “Today you’ll be with me in Paradise” which is not hell. Later he’ll say it is finished, which means the suffering is done, and he’ll say, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit,” which is a posture of rest and trust. Hell was the cross. It’s not anything that lays beyond, but that’s not probably exactly the focus of this passage.

And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.

Ninth hour is about the time of the evening sacrifice. The sun was darkened. It was not an eclipse. Some of what used to be called ‘modern versions’ and now we would call ‘laughably old’ versions actually interpolate the words into an eclipse of the sun or something like that. There’s nothing in the Greek to suggest that. The sun stopped shining and presumably the stars and the moon followed suit.

Somewhere in here, as God drew down the curtains of heaven and made his sole Son an offering for sin the veil of the temple is rent. Jesus cries out with a loud voice.

Have we picked up all of the words from the cross?

We missed “I thirst.”

That comes right about here. Actually, we missed the really important one that everyone knows.

Just before the darkness lifted, after he had been in the darkness for those three hours, at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” again taken directly from Psalm 22. Psalm 22 is a record of Jesus’ mind as he meditates on what’s happening as he hangs there on the cross.

Some people misunderstand the Aramaic, perhaps because it wasn’t their primary language, and they say, “He’s calling for Elijah.” No, but about the same time Jesus, having finished his sufferings and understanding at this point he has descended into hell, God has forsaken him, Father and Spirit have left him to the wrath of God, and it’s almost as if it clicks and he knows there’s only one thing left. His mind is now running through the prophecies.

After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith I thirst. Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar and they filled a sponge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it to his mouth.

The synoptics interpret it differently because apparently two things were happening at once. Some heard “Eli” as Elijah, and whether or not that moved them to do anything, when someone does take some vinegar and lift it to his mouth they say, “Let him alone. Let him be. Let’s see whether Elijah comes to take him down.”

This time Jesus takes the liquid into his mouth. Remember he had made a modified Nazarite vow at the last supper, and it’s over. So he takes some of this fruit of the vine, enough to clear his throat because there’s one thing he wants to say before it’s all over, and he wants to be able to say it clearly. He cries with a loud voice and says, “It is finished.”

At this point the veil of the temple is torn from the top to the bottom. The earth quakes. The rocks are split. Jesus says more quietly to his Father, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” and he gives us his spirit. He actively dies. He surrenders his life. He had said, “No one takes my life from me. I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down and to take it up again.”

Matthew tells us a little extra about what happens with all of the earth quaking. He says the tombs were opened and after his resurrection many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep came back to life and they went into the Holy City and appeared to many.

That opened so many questions. “What happened to them? Who were they? Did people recognize them?” Well, apparently. “Did they stay? Did they go? Did they ascend with him? Did they live out normal lives?” We’re not told. As my pastor used to say, the Bible is not written to satisfy our curiosity, just enough for us to say, “Whoa.”

This I’m going to throw out as a counter to the Seventh Day Adventist argument that Jesus observed the Sabbath by not rising until Sunday.

He rested on the seventh day. Well, he did. However again this is a history podcast and not a theological discussion.

One of my questions to my students down through the years has been about what became the Sabbath is a creation ordinance established by God at the beginning of the world. What can undo a creation ordinance? They sit there and look confused for a while and usually mumble and I have to supply the answer, “How about a new creation?”

We can grant that yes, Jesus rested on the seventh day in the tomb, but his resurrection is a new creation. When you go back and look at the original Lord resting on the seventh day there’s no commandment for Adam and Eve to rest. They just figured it out. They’re the image of their Father. He rests on the seventh day, so should they.

We’re the image of Christ. He rose and fellowshipped with his people on the first day of the week. I wonder what we should do then. “This is the day that the Lord hath made. We will rejoice and be glad.”

As Jesus dies, the centurion who is there – in Matthew and Mark he’s recorded as saying, “Truly this man was the son of God.” Luke says, “Certainly this was a righteous man.” He may have said both or “son of God” would confirm that he was in fact a righteous man.

Rachel, your husband is still someplace in the middle of Mark, isn’t he? Or did he finish Mark?

He finished Mark. He’s in Genesis now.

Do you remember any comments he made upon it, because Mark begins with “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

I know for sure, if I remember correctly, that in the Greek the definite article is there in Mark, the Son of God, not a Son of God, which I know is what people often try to make it. “Oh, he was just saying that he’s clearly a son of God.” But they also don’t necessarily associate sons of God with righteousness and that sort of thing, so it would appear we have another convert at the cross.

And Jesus prayed, “Forgive them,” and that prayer is being answered already.

It’s interesting that throughout church history there have been many songs that have meditated on the fact that we all killed Jesus and that we all in some way were at the cross, and therefore when he says “Forgive them” he’s saying “Forgive all of those whose sins brought me to this cross,” that that’s truly the reason he’s dying. That’s truly what’s nailing him to the cross. It would flow naturally that there would actually be those standing at the cross who would see it and immediately be changed by the Spirit to see the truth of the cross.

With Jesus dead, there are a number of women there. We’ve seen Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Jesus, Salome the mother of Zebedee’s children, and others, women who had come from Galilee, and others. Luke says –

And all the people that came together to that sight, beholding the things which were done, smote their breasts and returned.

That’s a mark of sorrow. There seems to be, as you say, a transformation perhaps in more than just the Roman centurion.

They shall look on me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn as one mourns for his only begotten son.

It’s at this point that John returns. He comes back in time to hear Jesus say “It is finished” and to record that and to record that he has given up his soul.

The Sanhedrin wants Jesus taken down from the cross because dead bodies hanging overnight defile the land and that’s bad because the Sabbath was a special one, a High Sabbath the King James says, so they wanted to speed this up. They want this over with. They may enjoy seeing Jesus suffer, but they want this done, buried literally, and out of sight. So they go to Pilate and ask that the legs of all these men will be broken, so he gives such orders.

The soldiers come and break the legs of the two thieves, but they come to Jesus and they see he’s already dead. These are professional executioners. They know a dead body when they see one. Nonetheless, just to make certain, one of them takes a spear or lance and pierces Jesus’ side, and John says immediately blood and water came out. This is so important to John that he says, “No, really, that’s what happened.”

And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe. For these things were done that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken. And again another scripture saith, They shall look on him whom they pierced.

Not a bone of Jesus was broken, just as the Passover lambs didn’t have their bones broken, and in fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy his side is pierced, releasing a fountain of water and blood. The cardio sac is pierced and both blood and clear liquid that would seem like water flowed out as one, one fountain, two streams.

1 John is a good commentary on the water/bloodness of what Jesus did, as is the courtyard of the temple. First the bloody sacrifices and then the laver of water that represents the cleansing of the Spirit. It’s one fountain, not two separate things, not “come to Jesus once for forgiveness and then come to him again later for the Spirit.” It all comes from one place and it is affinitive and complete and total, and John wants to make sure we understand it. “I was there, I really saw it, and it fulfills scripture.”

For next time, when Joseph of Arimathea comes to beg the body of Jesus for burial, Pilate marvels. “He’s dead? He shouldn’t have died that fast,” but he sends and checks and yes, the professional executioners confirm he’s really dead.

Why are we making a big deal over this? Because so many people down through the ages have said, “No, he wasn’t exactly dead. He was just, you know, in a swoon. Under the right circumstances he could revive again and come back and convince his disciples he was the risen Lord of life and all that.” We’ll talk about the burial and who is this Joseph of Arimathea and what’s all that about next time.

Alright, let’s wrap up then with some recommendations. I’ve already decided what mine is and I already told you about it, so I’m going to go ahead. It’s my favorite novel. When people ask me, “What’s your favorite movie?” it’s like, “Well, I can tell you a lot of my favorites. I like to say these are my top five, but they’re not in any order and I don’t think they’re even exactly five. There might be more than five, but they’re top five movies.” But for novels it’s Jane Eyre. There is no other. It is the best novel, just the best.

Yes, I agree.

It is such a good story that even unbelievers who don’t understand that this book is about the gospel and about justification by faith and about the transforming love of Christ and about true love and true beauty and true religion which is found in Christ, even unbelievers read this book and are like, “Wow, this is the greatest story. Wow!”

Now let me tell you my experience with the book, or better my non-experience with the book, because this is my wife’s favorite book too by far. When we first started courting I started reading it and I did not get very far because Victorian literature is not exactly my favorite thing and I didn’t push through. I didn’t get very far so it didn’t pull me in.

Later on I saw a couple of secular versions of the book made as movies in which Rochester – the sense I got was that having been a very cruel wicked abuser of a man suddenly decides, “Well, that didn’t get her. How about if I’m nice,” then Jane gives in and they live happily ever after.

That is so incredibly incorrect. I don’t know what to say.

Having talked lately to David Farschman, who you convinced to re-read the book…

I accidentally convinced myself to re-read at the same time that I convinced him.

He told me, “No, no, no, this is what’s really…” and he basically said what you just said. “This is self-consciously Christian all the way through. It’s a godly…”

“Oh, well, I certainly did not know that,” and so now I’m committed to also actually reading it for the first time.

My work here is done.

So Jane Eyre, everybody. Find the book, read it, and we’ll talk about it at some point.

I’d like to come back at some point and tell you whether I recommend the Timothy Dalton film adaptation. It is the lengthiest and Timothy Dalton I believe is a Christian.

It is the latest one, Masterpiece?

There was a 2012 adaptation which I do not recommend. The acting is fine, the casting is fine, but the script is awful. They did not understand the book. It was a CBS FOX videotape when I had it, on two VHS tapes. If you buy it on DVD there’s more content but honestly not all of the more content is up to the standard of the original VHS tapes, in my opinion.

Some day we will. When in our history studies we finally get up to the period – is it the Regency or early Victorian.

Victorian.

It’s pre-Victorian. Oh no, she is Victorian, yes. I was thinking of Jane Austen who is pre, but the Bronte sisters are writing in the 1820-1830s and 1840s too.

How long could it possibly take us to get that far in our podcast?

Well, we’ve spent the last three years in history.

But we did the first 4,000 years in a year or less, so we’ll see. Rachel, what’s your recommendation?

My recommendation is very different. My recommendation is for a podcast and potentially a book that the podcast was about. It’s Allie Beth Stuckey who has a podcast called Relatable. She was interviewing a woman named Clare Morell. She is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in DC. It’s a conservative think tank. She wrote a book recently called The Tech Exit and it is how to free your children and teenagers from smart phones.

I heard one podcast that somebody else had recommended, and it wasn’t particularly a Christian podcast, but she dropped little hints that made me suspicious so I went looking for more things and discovered she is a pastor’s wife in the DC area, and on Allie Beth Stuckey’s podcast she was more explicit in her Christianity.

Basically she did a lot of the research of the effect of screens in general on the development of small children’s brains, particularly interactive screens. She then was talking through a lot of the ways that you can help your children not do that, and also grow in the image of God and learn to love God and others, and the ways that particularly small screens that are very individual are extremely contrary to what we want our children to be as focused on others and on relationships. She has some really interesting facts.

Also she’s done a ton of research on the major social media tech companies and the very ungodly philosophies behind them in the ways that they are purposely addictive and the ways that they have not protected their apps and things for children. Even though they claim to have parental controls and such, children are actually very open to a lot of very bad things, and our laws in general are behind on a lot of things.

She’s a policy advocate so she’s advocating for a number of things. But just her overall understanding and explanation, and also the hope that she has that we don’t need to be addicted to these things, I think is very relevant for any parent with children, especially teenagers.

It would seem very relevant to me, thinking back to Cornerstone. I guess now public schools and whole states in our country, and even other countries in the world, are actually banning cell phones from schools completely. Cornerstone has done it for years and we always got a lot of pushback, and now entire states are passing laws that from beginning bell to end bell there will be no cell phones because, hey, we’ve discovered that screens are actually detrimental to learning. People don’t learn nearly as well on screens as they do from words printed on paper, and writing on paper.

It was very interesting to think about, given a lot of the push that the tech companies have made of, “Everybody needs a laptop! Everybody needs a tablet! This will make learning better and this will equalize all of the discrepancies between different groups.”

It was a very fascinating podcast to me and I’m hoping to read her book just to learn more about it.

What kind of a cell phone do you use, Greg?

A flip phone. It can access the internet but it’s a bug bear to try to get it to do so. I’ve only used the internet once. I was sitting in a doctor’s office and the staff person had taken my CPAP machine and gone to check it out, and I begin looking around the room and see evidence of, “Oh, drawings from this lady’s little girl, from her little boy, their Sunday School lessons, their Bible verses. When she comes back and I can point this out and let her know I’m a Christian. Wait, that verse is not translated that way in any version I know. Uh-oh.”

She took long enough that I was actually able to get on the internet, type in the verse and hit Enter and it comes up with JW and New World Translation. I was like, “Oh, she’s not a Christian in orthodoxy. I think I’ll just not talk about this.” That’s about the extent of me being able to get online, which is just as well. The phone I had before this couldn’t even do that much. There’s a temptation there and I’ve tried to stay clear of it.

I get a lot of questions about my phone because it looks like a smart phone but it’s about half the size and it doesn’t do anything. I can get podcasts and music on it if I try, but other than that it’s for calls, texts, and directions. It’s called a Light Phone and I love it.

Directions – that’s the one thing I need.

I will say the thing that was probably the most scary and useful were all the stories she had. She used to work for the Trump administration in the Department of Justice in the department for crimes against women and children, and seeing that most of those crimes have moved online, not in person anymore, and all of the sex trafficking and things like that are happening through apps and media and those sorts of things, which is where she first got interested in this topic. It’s just realizing how incredibly dangerous it really is. It’s good to know but also very scary.

Yes. Greg, your turn for a recommendation.

I could spend a lot of time with this but I’m going to try to keep it short. I’m trying to produce a Bible curriculum for our denomination and I was asked to add chapters on wisdom literature because I don’t have 50 chapters yet. “I was trying to give you some room here.”

So I turned to Job, and Job is not a book I have taught through in any depth before, though of course I’m familiar with it. The theme of this curriculum is Seeing Jesus, so I’m thinking, “Surely some of these commentaries have got to be able to tell us how to see Jesus in the character and experiences of Job.”

I had some ideas that were pretty straightforward and simple, so I went through half a dozen commentaries-plus, and to sum up what they said about Jesus would probably be something like, “Jesus who?” One of them in closing in the introduction said, “And a lot of the questions that are brought up here aren’t answered until Jesus comes.”

“Care to elaborate which questions and how?”

So speaking of going online, I went online and put in “Christ in the book of Job” and suddenly was hit by all kinds of things and they were good, and oddly enough they were exactly the things I’d come up with, some of which I had come up with on a walk with David Farschman just the other night. I said, “This is what I’ve got,” and he said, “And don’t forget this and this and this.” “Yeah, good.” We pretty well nailed it, and all of these older commentators didn’t.

So my challenge here is this. If you were to teach the book of Job to children, young people, even 20-somethings or new Christians, how would you preach Christ? Obviously we can think, “I know that my Redeemer lives” and “Neither is there any daysman to stand between us” – those are isolated verses. How is the book as a whole a book about Jesus? Not just our need for him but about Jesus himself.

So you think about that, and if anybody would like to send us an email with an answer and solution, I’d be happy to borrow it for my curriculum.

You can send that to [email protected], along with any other comments or questions you may have or anything you want to say to us. David will read it and if it’s nice he’ll let us read it too. That would be David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. A big thanks to him for editing this podcast and making us sound smart and intelligent and pleasant to the ears. That’s his work, and a great work it is too.

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