John
Chapter 19 includes the following words, ‘It was the day of
Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish
leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they
asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. The soldiers
therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with
Jesus, and then those of the other. But when they came to Jesus and found that
he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers
pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.
The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true.’
The Jewish
leaders did not want to spoil their holy day with a view littered with crosses
on the horizon, so they decided to kill the three men and remove the bodies
before sundown. A crucified man generally died of shock and blood loss, but
also of asphyxiation because it’s nearly impossible to breathe with your arms
above your head all the time. A man dying of crucifixion would therefore heave
his body up and down, artificially, rhythmically moving his diaphragm that way
instead of breathing properly. It was ultimately useless, of course, because
the Romans knew how to kill a man and they always did. So they broke the legs
of the crucified men to stop his artificial breathing and accelerate his death.
It was ultimately a mercy, but spoiled the theatre of the death.
Incidentally,
as a man started dying, so his heart started failing and a large amount of
fluid accumulates around the heart. This additional pressure on the heart is
also likely to promote death.
A soldier
pierces Jesus’s side with a lance. He does not do so to kill him — he has already ascertained the fact of death — but to
save his own skin. He doesn’t want his superiors to say that Jesus was
still alive. So he proves that Jesus
is dead by stabbing up and into the man’s heart. And he was dead as shown by this outflow of blood and water. If he was
still alive, the two would mingled but after death they flow separately. Jesus
was certainly dead. That’s what the final sentence in the reading means when it
says, ‘The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true’.
Today as we
watch Jesus being tortured to death, we are invited to have compassion — to
share his passion. We are invited to look at his heart and the way we are his
willing subjects. Jesus heart was filled with love. As he approached Jerusalem
he wept for the lost. He wept again at the graveside of Lazarus. The human
heart of Jesus was somehow superimposed on the heart of God, the two beating within the one chest of Jesus the God–man of
Nazareth.
If we are to share the love of
God, we need to love as he did. We therefore need to be more like Jesus. We
need to have the love of God beating inside our hearts, beating like a separate
heart within our own chests. And, miraculously, we can. St Paul was a rabbi and
a teacher, so he will have known the Law intimately. That’s one theory of why
he’s so obsessed with writing his own lists. In Galatians 5, he lists the
fruits of having the Holy Spirit dwelling in a human heart, and the first on
the list is love. The list in full says, ‘The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy
peace, patience, kindness goodness, gentleness, thankfulness, and
self-control’. But elsewhere he lists the gifts
of the Holy Spirit, so he’s thinking more supernatural in scope and power.
And the first on that second list is also love.
So love is a fruit and a gift of the Spirit. If you have the Spirit, you will love.
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