Jesus crucified every day

by Editor · March 20, 2002

MANY homilists on Good Friday will ask us to empathise with the torment of our Lord, from the time of his betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane to his death, sometime after 3pm before the Sabbath.

The enormity of our Lord’s anguish is naturally beyond the comprehension of most of us. Indeed, the prospect of facing merely two or three of Jesus’ ordeals would likely deter even those with a high pain threshold.

Jesus – who was, after all, fully human – could have chosen to spare himself his agony.

St Paul tells us that it is “not easy to die even for a good man,” but “Christ died for us while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:7-8).
We know that Jesus did sacrifice himself, for reasons that no Catholic will be ignorant of.

The agony of Christ reads like a shopping list of terror.

* The trauma of being arrested after the betrayal by his close friend Judas.

* Standing trial before a kangaroo court, and then being (illegally) sentenced to death.

* Abandoned by his friends, a sleepless night in dread of what torment the next day would hold (a terror he had anticipated already before his arrest)

* The walk of sorrows: brutally flogged 39 times, a hoop of thorny bush squashed into his scalp, cruelly mocked, and then forced to carry the beam (weighing somewhere between 40-55kg) on to which he would be nailed, falling from the weight of the beam, possibly sustaining internal injuries in the process – all the while being goaded and spat upon by a bellicose mob.

* Disfigured from these and other forms of torture, Jesus reached Golgotha to face a form of execution designed to exact maximal pain. Nails, 1cm thick and 18cm long, were nailed through his wrist and feet. Hoisted on to the cross, dehydrated and bleeding, cramping and scarcely able to breathe, Jesus possibly dislocated his shoulders and elbows.

We are barely comforted by the knowledge that, in his Father’s mercy, Jesus died relatively swiftly – after a few hours – on the cross.
Alas, the Good Friday agony of Jesus did not end when he commended his spirit to the Father. It continued for almost 2000 years as many of his followers, Christians, persecuted Jesus’ own people, the Jews, in his name.

Jesus told us: “In so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).
And so Jesus was crucified again, century after century, as Christians persecuted Jews, labelled by proxy as “Christ-killers” (the Romans – who flogged him, crowned him with thorns, crucified him, and speared his lifeless body – escaped the charge of collective guilt).
Jesus is still being crucified every time we, for whom he died, do injury to the least of his brothers.

On Good Friday in particular we are called to be mindful not to betray, whip, mock and crucify our Lord all over again