Good Friday 4: His hands

In John chapter 19, we read these words in verse 18: ‘There they crucified him, and with him two others — one on each side and Jesus in the middle.’

     We’re witnessing a multiple execution, which was quite common at the rime. It got rid of more criminals was therefore more efficiently. In fact, we know of one execution in which the Romans crucified a man every hundred yards along the thirty-mile road between Jericho to Jerusalem. This avenue of death became known as ‘The way of the cross’ — a phrase that appears in the New Testament, maybe with this double meaning.

     Crucifixion was so common a method of execution that John the Evangelist felt no need to explain what it involved. His listeners would have known all too well. Everyone had a friend who (rightly or wrongly) has been murdered that way by the Romans. Maybe their family members had been crucified? It explains why the Romans are hated so much—imagine seeing your innocent relatives dying in so barbaric a fashion.

     The Romans crucified a man this way: he usually had a massive, heavy horizontal beam strapped across his shoulders and behind his head. It was tied in place with thick rope around his biceps, so his hands were technically free. Often, the condemned man was led through the streets like a dog on a lead, led to the place of his execution. At the site of his death, the man was laid on his back and his hands nailed to the beam. Everyone within a hundred yards would have heard his scream of pain, his excruciation.

     Once nailed to the crossbeam, the soldiers hoisted their victim into the air with the crossbeam across his shoulders, then lowered into a deep groove or notch cut into the upper face of a tall, dead tree. The cross was therefore more like a ‘T’ than a cross. Incidentally, it also explains why St Paul talks about Jesus dying ‘on the tree’.

     Although I said the Romans nailed the victim’s hands to the cross beam, in fact the nails were generally driven through his wrists. First because you can’t break free, but could if the nail was located on the palm side of a person’s wrist; but also because it hurts more this way. The crucifying nail destroys the nerves of the hands and arm. It’s no coincidence that the word ‘excruciating’ come from the Latin, ‘of the cross’ — ex cruxio … Never again will this man use his hands — the nails of crucifixion don’t just immobilise the hands, they destroy their scope for future usefulness.

     Today as we watch Jesus being tortured to death, we are invited to have compassion — to share his passion. We see his carpenter’s hands nailed to wood. We see how the hands he used to effect healing are now ripped and bleed. We see how the hands that (as the modern hymn says) ‘flung stars into space’ are pinned and cannot even move a fly from his sweat-encrusted brow.

     And we think about our hands. We use our hands to create and to break. Some of us use our hands as we speak to communicate, but do we also communicate rejection and malice as well as good. A modern comedian introduced into our language the phrase, ‘Speak to the hand!’ What are the words we write with the same hands with which we eat? Do we feed ourselves food and use our hands to type bad things.

     One final thought then: if our hands were immobilised to a cross, fixed, crippled and unable to move — unable to do either good or bad, would it make the world a better or a worse place?