AT 33 years of age, Jesus was in the prime of His life. After three years of public ministry, He was unjustly convicted and crucified. But how did the Son of God suffer a human death? How would our Redeemer have felt emotionally as He died for humanity? Bridget Spinks talks to a West Australian surgeon and an Opus Dei priest about how Christ might have suffered physically and psychologically during His final hours.
Surgeon Prof Kingsley Faulkner emphasises from the outset that his opinion is conjectural. There’s not enough evidence in the modern era to prove with any scientific certainty the actual medical cause of Christ’s death, he says. But we can make an assessment as to how He might have died based on how other people deal with extreme suffering and injury.
“We’re relying on case reports and they’re not even recent case reports. I want to emphasise that my analysis is conjectural [because] it’s based on how other people’s physiology and psychology is challenged by extreme physical circumstances, but not crucifixion,” Prof Faulkner, who is also a Director of Clinical Teaching in the Private Hospital Sector at the University of Notre Dame Australia’s School of Medicine in Fremantle, says.
In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, little is stated about how heavy the Cross was, nor the distance Christ walked to Golgotha. Matthew, Mark and Luke all mention that Christ was assisted to carry the Cross. “And as they led him away, they seized one Simon of Cyrene who was coming in from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it behind Jesus,” Luke 23:26.*
But the Gospel of John does not mention Simon of Cyrene: “So they took Jesus, and He went out, bearing His own cross, to the place called the place of the skull, which is in Hebrew Golgotha” John 19: 7.
For Fr Flader, Director of the Catholic Adult Education Centre of the Archdiocese of Sydney, the carrying of the cross “impresses me greatly”.
“Because whether He’s been given part of it or all of it, He makes His way out of Jerusalem … and He falls. We don’t know whether He tripped, was pushed or whether it was exhaustion. But He was exhausted and every fibre of His being is saying ‘I can’t, I’m exhausted’. Nonetheless, He takes up His cross again, staggers forward, and falls a second time. But His will overcomes His weakness of the flesh, and again He rises. He goes forward and falls a third time, but again He gets up. In so doing, He teaches us that when we are carrying a burden of whatever sort, when we feel tired and think we cannot go on, we can look at Christ’s example and find the strength to continue forward,” Fr Flader says.
The Gospel of Mark recounts the prelude to Christ’s death as follows, “So, Pilate wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas; and having scourged Jesus, he delivered Him to be crucified” (Mark 15:15).
After this scourging, the soldiers placed a crown of thorns on Him, mocked Him both in word and in deed: by clothing Him in a purple cloak (cf Mark 15:16-21).
Professor Faulkner says the scourging would have been not only “physically terribly painful” but “psychologically stressful” too, as the method “was vicious enough to lacerate and break the skin and expose raw flesh which would bleed and seep serum”.
While Christ could have suffered “significant haemorrhage (blood loss)” from the crown of thorns, which was “designed to be painful,” Prof Faulkner suggests that He would have suffered “more blood loss from the scourging from the flagrum which was designed to inflict injury and expose underlying tissue”.
“In turn, this [haemorrhaging] could lead to a degree of orthostatic hypotension (where you fall over when you try to stand up) and even hypovolaemic shock (lack of blood circulation),” Prof Faulkner says.
It is possibly due to the extensive blood loss caused during the scourging that Christ fell while journeying to Calvary.
And yet, Jesus went to His death “freely out of love to fulfill that decree of the Trinity [and] in this way to reveal the depth of God’s love,” Fr Flader says, quoting John 10:17-18. There, Christ says, “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No-one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father’”.
But how would Christ have felt mentally, emotionally and psychologically in His final hours of human life?
What degree of moral suffering would He have borne?
Fr Flader says that Christ would have endured “great moral suffering” for several reasons: including that “Jesus, who was absolutely sinless, pure and holy takes upon Himself not only original sin but all the sins of humankind”.
For it says in Isaiah 53:4-5, “Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; upon Him was the whole chastisement that made us whole, and with His stripes we are healed.
“He is in a sense overburdened by the weight of all those sins as he comes before the Father whom He loved so dearly and so He became sin for us (cf 2 Cor 5:21),” Fr Flader says.
Extra pain would have been caused in knowing that “for many of those sins that we commit, we wouldn’t be sorry,” he says.
“We would excuse ourselves, we would say ‘I was tired, I was under stress. [He knew] that we wouldn’t take responsibility for them and that would have caused him extra suffering,” Fr Flader says.
In a letter to Timothy (1 Tim 2: 3-6) Paul says “… and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony to which was borne at the proper time.”
Thus, Fr Flader says, Christ died that all might be saved, but He knew that in spite of his suffering and death many would not be saved. “That sorrow of knowing souls would not be saved in the end, would have been an additional suffering,” Fr Flader says.
In John’s account (John 19:36), it is reported that the scriptures that said ‘Not a bone of Him shall be broken’ were fulfilled.
So how was Christ nailed to the cross without experiencing any broken bones?
“[The nails] were probably driven between the bones of the wrists and the feet. They could have severely injured the median nerve causing intense neuralgic pain. If it hit the median nerve, the hand would be partially paralysed,” Prof Faulkner says.
But Christ’s moral suffering on the cross would have also been intensified, Fr Flader says, by the sins of those closest to him, beginning with the apostles, one of whom betrayed him, another of whom denied him and those who ran away (Mark 14: 32-72).
“And then down the ages, the sins of all of us who are striving to be better people, better Catholics. That hurts Him more because he loves us; He has chosen us. That has to hurt Him more than the sins of someone who doesn’t have the graces He’s given us,” Fr Flader said.
While Christ hung on the cross, the Gospel of Matthew reports that after they had crucified Him, the chief priests, scribes and elders, mocked Christ. And, as He hung there, His mother Mary stood by the Cross (John 19:25) and “knowing that His mother was suffering so intensely would have increased His suffering even more,” Fr Flader said.
“Her suffering was greater because her soul was so sensitive; she was all pure. There was no self-love, no coarseness in Mary’s soul. And that made her sensitive to Jesus’ suffering; that, added to the fact that Jesus was not guilty, He was innocent,” he said. “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Matthew 27: 45-46.
Some bystanders wondered whether Elijah would come to save Christ, while another filled a sponge with vinegar and offered it to Christ to drink.
“And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up His spirit,” Matthew 27:50.
The cause of Christ’s death, in Prof Faulkner’s conjectural assessment, would have been multi-factorial, including hypovolaemia (low blood volume), hypoxia (low oxygen levels) and metabolic disturbances (alteration to normal metabolism of nutrients and fluids).
“Traditionally, asphyxia (absence of oxygen) following exhaustion with increasing difficulty to breathe was thought to be the main cause … The final cause of death would have been a cardiac arrhythmia (irregular heart beat) and then asystole (cardiac arrest) secondary to the hypoxic, hypovolaemic and metabolic disturbances, which gradually developed,” Prof Faulkner said.
In John’s account of the crucifixion, he notes that when the soldiers came to take down the men who had been crucified, “when they came to Jesus and saw that He was already dead, they did not break His legs. But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water” (John 19: 33-34).
The effusion of the blood and water possibly from the lung (pleural effusion) and heart (pericardial effusion) due to earlier possible “sequestration of fluid from intravascular compartment into the interstitial tissues and potential compartments” has great symbolic value.
Fr Flader says that the Fathers of the Church “draw the analogy that just as Eve, the spouse of Adam, was formed from his side while he slept, so the Church, the spouse of Christ, was formed from Christ’s side as He [metaphorically] slept on the cross”.
“On the other hand, they saw the sacraments: the blood representing the Eucharist, and the water representing Baptism,” Fr Flader said.
But remind me again, why did Christ die on the cross?
“After the original sin of our first parents, God promised Adam and Eve a redeemer (cf Genesis 3:15) … now we come to the fullness of time in which our redemption is to be carried out. God in His love and mercy has determined from all eternity to redeem us by the death of the Son of God on the cross,” Fr Flader says.
“He chose the crucifixion of the Son of God made man as the way of redeeming us and he shows us in that the depth of His love. ‘No greater love does a man have than that he lay down his life for his friend.’ And He was laying down his life for his enemies in a sense, because we were all estranged from Him by sin.”
To contemplate the pierced side of Christ is to contemplate that God Is Love, Pope Benedict XVI said in his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love): “His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against Himself in which He gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form. By contemplating the pierced side of Christ (cf 19:37), we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth can be contemplated. It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation, the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move”.
*Bible passages quoted from the RSV.