It Is Finished
John the Evangelist narrated Jesus’ crucifixion in 14 verses.
The “disciple whom Jesus loved,” known as John, either John ben Zebedee (the Apostle), or John the Elder, wrote his recollections of his experiences with Jesus so that those who hear or read would believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and would find eternal life in His name (cf. John 20:31).
Jesus had been handed over to the Jewish authorities and then to Pilate, who had Him scourged and humiliated to show how little of a threat he perceived Jesus to represent to Roman interests (John 18:1-19:4). But the Jewish authorities insisted on Jesus’ crucifixion, and Pilate, unwilling to endanger himself at all, handed Him over to their will (John 19:5-16a).
Jesus, along with two others (likely Barabbas’ compatriots, since they also were lestes, or “insurrectionists”; cf. Matthew 27:44), were led to Golgotha, the “Place of a Skull,” where they were crucified (John 19:16-18).
Crucifixion represents one of the most degrading, humiliating, and inhuman means of killing a person devised by humanity. While we generally associate crucifixion with the Romans, the earliest explicit examples we have of crucifixions come from the Persian Empire; many believe the practice existed in the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires before them. We should not imagine the Romans would just randomly decide to crucify people: it proved far more efficient and expedient to run common criminals through with a sword. Crucifixion was used to deliver a message to the rest of the inhabitants in a given area: if you dare do anything like what this person did, this will become your fate as well. To this end, crucifixion was most often reserved for political dissidents, revolutionaries, or anyone else whose behavior would undermine the very foundations of the Roman order.
Crucifixion represented a very public form of torture in slow death. The crucified would be nailed to the cross through his ankles and wrists (many common portrayals would suggest nailing through the palms, but such was physically impossible; the nails would strip out between two of the fingers the moment any weight would be placed upon them). From then on, every breath would be torture: breathing in would relieve weight and pain on the ankles but would cause great pain and suffering in the wrists, and breathing out would lead to relief in the wrists but agony in the ankles. Some might die from asphyxiation; many others would linger for days, eventually dying of dehydration or exposure. To this day, we continue to use crucifixion as the ultimate standard of agony and suffering: we describe the worst pain as excruciating, a word which derives from the Latin ex crucare, “from the cross.”
John spoke of Jesus carrying His own cross in John 19:17. The Synoptic Gospels spoke of Simon of Cyrene as compelled to carry His cross (e.g. Mark 15:21). Most reconcile the two by suggesting Jesus began carrying the cross and, after some time of exhaustion, it was carried by Simon of Cyrene. We do well to note first how Jesus would not have carried the whole cross, but only the patibulum, the crossbeam; the stipes, the upright beam, would have already been on location. Furthermore, we should note why John the Evangelist would reveal this detail: he continued to insist upon Jesus as the main character throughout all He endured.
Jesus was thus crucified on the cross intended for Barabbas and most likely between Barabbas’ two associates. John then set forth the inscription Pilate had written and fastened on Jesus’ cross: Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews, written in Aramaic, Greek, and Latin (John 19:19-20). The Jewish religious authorities were quite annoyed at Pilate for this, insisting he write instead how Jesus said He was King of the Jews; Pilate defiantly told them he had written what he had written (John 19:21-22).
While Pilate seemingly did not want to have Jesus executed, he nevertheless never really took Jesus that seriously, as his behavior here attested. He had Jesus degraded in His scourging and the humiliation inflicted by his soldiers; now he was degrading and humiliating the Jewish people, well attested by the reaction of the Jewish authorities. He made sure everyone who passed by could read and understand: most of the Jewish people would have spoken Aramaic; Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman Empire; Latin was the language of those from the west, primarily the administration and the soldiers, (and this is its only mention in all of Scripture). He intended to show the Jewish people what Rome thought of their King, and how Rome was more than ready and willing to treat anyone else with messianic aspirations in the same way. At the same time, in truth, Jesus was the King of the Jews, the Messiah of God; Pilate attested to Jesus accurately if not at all faithfully, and John the Evangelist fully intended this irony.
John the Evangelist then related how the soldiers divided some of Jesus’ clothes among themselves, but threw dice in order to determine who would obtain His seamless tunic (John 19:23). John then explicitly identified this behavior as fulfilling what had been prophesied and quoted Psalm 22:18. While John would not relate how Jesus would cry out the first verse of Psalm 22:1 as in the Synoptic Gospels (e.g. Mark 15:34), he certainly understood Jesus as fulfilling the whole of Psalm 22:1-31 in what He endured on the cross and in the vindication of His resurrection. While Jesus might well have felt forsaken by God for that moment, to suggest Jesus actually was separated from the Father, even for a moment, would introduce intolerable heresy, as if the perichoretic relational unity within the Godhead could be fragmented! Jesus made appeal to the whole meaning of Psalm 22:1-31 by quoting Psalm 22:1; it gave voice to all He was experiencing. Even as His disciples had fled, and even though He was in agony, Jesus maintained confidence the Father was with Him (John 16:32).
John the Evangelist bore witness to those who saw Jesus suffer and die: His mother Mary, Mary’s sister, Mary wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene, and the “disciple whom [Jesus] loved” (John 19:25-26). Jesus made provision for His mother while on the cross, telling Mary to look upon the disciple as her son, and for the disciple to look upon Mary as his mother; from that time on that disciple took Mary into his home and provided for her (John 19:26-27).
Words fail when considering what the mother of Jesus must have thought and felt as she watched her Son suffer and die on the cross. She was last seen in John’s narrative back at the wedding in Cana in John 2:1-12; by this point His time had certainly come. Mary Magdalene is mentioned here for the first time in the Gospel of John.
Much has been made of the dedication and devotion of the women who followed Jesus, and for good reason. They were present with Him through the bitter end. They were able to be present in a way the male disciples were not, ironically, because of the strong patriarchal values of the time. The women were not seen in any, way, shape, or form as threatening. Almost everyone would have known they were Jesus’ disciples, but they were women; what could they really do? Had Simon Peter or Thomas been there, however, the Jewish authorities would have made sure the Romans erected a couple more crosses for them.
We associated the “disciple whom Jesus loved” in John 13:23 with John the Evangelist himself, whether the Apostle or simply the Evangelist, and we have all the more reason to maintain the association in John 19:26-27. So how could John have been present even though the other disciples were not? If John the Evangelist is not the Apostle, he seemed to have come from a place of some privilege in Jerusalem, and perhaps was thus insulated from any consequences (cf. John 18:15). Yet most agree John the Evangelist was a younger contemporary of Jesus and the Apostles: he might well have been but a teenager when these events took place around 30, and so would have been around 80 years of age around 95 when he would have completed his writings. As a teenager, the Jewish and Roman authorities would have not found him very threatening, either.
Jesus’ provision for His mother while on the cross proves compelling for many reasons. From this event we deduce Joseph has already died, leaving Mary a widow. As the eldest Son of His widowed mother, Jesus would have been expected to provide for her. We have good reason to wonder why He did not thus entrust her to any of His brothers; perhaps they remained in unbelief, or perhaps simply they were not present at this last moment. Regardless, Jesus had great confidence John was in a material position to care for His mother, and his willingness to thus serve his Lord proved truly commendable.
The time had come; all had been completed. Jesus, looking to fulfill Psalm 22:15 and Psalm 69:21, cried regarding His thirst; a sponge soaked in sour wine on a branch of hyssop was brought to His mouth (John 19:28-29). Having received it, He said tetelestai, “it is finished,” bowed His head, and gave up His spirit (John 19:30).
Wine was a staple in the ancient world, but only the wealthy enjoyed high quality wine; most people would have drunk a wine not terribly far off from vinegar, and this “sour wine” would have been all the more vinegary. Some imagine it was given to Him to increase His suffering, but it was most likely for the opposite reason. There would be reason to associate His thirst with the medical symptoms He was experiencing; but perhaps the thirst regarding which He spoke was not physical, but spiritual. The Source of the water of life was poured out for us.
John the Evangelist portrayed Jesus as in charge to the bitter end; He died when He freely gave up His spirit, since He had finished the work He had been given to do in His life, suffering, and death.
Yet there were, no doubt, biological and medical reasons for Jesus’ death as well. Romans did not generally scourge the people they were about to crucify: crucifixion was gruesome enough. Jesus suffered scourging first as Pilate’s attempted ploy to get Him released; since He was still condemned to death by crucifixion anyway, it meant Jesus suffered far beyond the “normal” crucifixion experience. But the scourging can help explain why Jesus died after only three hours on the cross: He was experiencing significant blood loss, and Jesus might well have experienced some kind of heart failure.
John the Evangelist explained how the day of Jesus’ crucifixion was the day of preparation for the Sabbath, and the Sabbath of an important festival no less; therefore, the Jewish authorities asked for Pilate to break the legs of the crucified so they might die more quickly and their bodies taken down lest they suffer the curse of having people hung upon a tree during the Passover (John 19:31; cf. Deuteronomy 21:22-23). The soldiers thus broke the legs of the two insurrectionists next to Jesus; they would not have been able to lift themselves up to breathe, and so would have died of asphyxiation soon afterward (John 19:32). They saw Jesus was dead, so they did not break His bones; instead, they pierced His side with a spear, and blood and water flowed out (John 19:33-34). John the Evangelist testified to the one who saw these things as speaking truly, and explicitly quoted Exodus 12:46/Numbers 9:12/Psalm 34:20 and Zechariah 12:10 as fulfilled at this moment.
The presence of blood and water together would have given indication Jesus was well and truly dead; perhaps the Roman soldier did so to assure His death as much as confirm it. The symbolism, however, can hardly be overstated: this was the only blood Jesus shed in His death, and to this day we generally speak of Jesus as shedding His blood on the cross for our sins (Matthew 26:28). Jesus had spoken of Himself as the living water, and as giving the Spirit as streams of water within a person (John 4:10, 14, 7:38-39); furthermore, Peter would later exhort everyone to be immersed in water in order to obtain remission of sins in the blood of Jesus in Acts 2:38. John would again appeal to the witness of the water and the blood in 1 John 5:6-8.
Events then proceeded quickly: the Sabbath would begin when the sun set, which would have taken place only a couple of hours after Jesus died. John the Evangelist introduced Joseph of Arimathea to his story: a disciple who remained in secret out of fear of the Jewish leaders, but now sufficiently emboldened (or shamed) into asking Pilate for Jesus’ body (John 19:38). Nicodemus, last seen giving tepid questioning of his fellow Pharisees regarding Jesus in John 7:50-51, returned to the narrative, this time bearing seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloes (John 19:39). Together they took Jesus’ body, wrapped it according to standard conventions, packed it full of the aloes and myrrh and other aromatic spices, and buried it in Joseph’s new tomb in the garden near where He had been crucified (John 19:40-42).
While myrrh and aloes were not quite as precious and rare as the pure nard of John 12:3-8, they were not far off; Nicodemus demonstrated not a little contrition by the lavish expense which He thus invested in Jesus’ body. Nicodemus brought it and used it fully expecting Jesus’ body to decompose; such aloes and spices were intended to cover the stench of decomposition. To a similar end, Joseph of Arimathea felt comfortable allowing Jesus’ body to be placed in his own tomb. He was following standard Second Temple Jewish burial customs of the first century. Land was at a premium; therefore, burial places would be dug into the rocks and hills, featuring a bier and perhaps shelves and the like. The recently deceased would be laid upon the bier; after a year or so, the family would return and gather the bones of the decomposed body and place them in a bone box, or ossuary, which would then be placed on the shelves or elsewhere in the family crypt.
After all this, all involved rested according to the commandment. We have no reason to think Pilate would have given the events of the day much more thought. The Jewish authorities would have felt justified and would have wanted to move on and dedicate themselves to the Passover. We can only imagine what the disciples in the upper room were thinking and saying to one another, or what was going through the minds of Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, or others who had hoped in Jesus. The disappointment would have been palpable. They had thought Jesus was the Christ, the One who would redeem Israel. And yet now He had been degraded, humiliated, and executed by the Romans at the behest of the Jewish authorities. So much promise, and all seemingly wasted.
If this were the end of the story, it would have remained a terrible and immoral injustice. Yet, as John the Evangelist has already begun to prepare for us to perceive and understand, the story is not over. All would rest according to the commandment. Afterward, nothing would be the same.
Ethan R. Longhenry
The post It Is Finished appeared first on de Verbo vitae.
