The Crucifixion

An excerpt from the book Images of the Unseen

Christ’s suffering and death mark the turning point in the story of man: the moment in which the Only-begotten Son of God, taking pity upon His fallen brethren, willingly offers Himself to the Father as a sacrifice on our behalf. It is a moment of divine transformation in which suffering becomes no longer meaningless, but efficacious; death becomes life.

The Crucifixion of Our Lord Jesus Christ is the paradox of all paradoxes, for it is nothing less than the death of the Author of Life, the death of God. “He who suspended the earth is suspended,” wrote Saint Melito of Sardis in about 170 A.D.; “he who fixed the heavens is fixed; he who fastened all things is fastened to the wood; the Master is outraged; God is murdered” (Paschal Homily).

The death of God is one of those realities where reason alone fails us. It is utterly incomprehensible to the human intellect unenlightened by grace. So much so that it caused quasi-Christian sects in the early centuries, such as the Gnostics, to deny Christ’s humanity. Because God is incapable of suffering, they argued, the body that suffered on the Cross could not have been a real body, but merely a phantasm. Yet, as the orthodox have ever maintained, to be effective the Incarnation needed to be real; the Son of God needed to truly take on human nature, to become Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matt. 1:23). Had He merely become the semblance of a man, as the Gnostics held, His sacrifice on our behalf would have been a façade as well.

In The Crucifixion by the Baroque virtuoso, Diego Velázquez, we encounter the physical reality of the Paschal Mystery. The field of blackness isolating the crucified Christ solemnly heightens the truth and weight of His saving sacrifice. Here hangs the Word Made Flesh, Our Mediator with the Father, dead and abandoned. It is a real body, an actual death. The muscles are elongated under the heaviness of the body, which, drained of blood, has begun to take on a pallor. Only a faint corona about the sacred head suggests divinity. The beams of the Cross, breaking the picture plane, extend on to infinity: the vertical representing the reconciliation of heaven and earth; the horizontal the all-encompassing, redeeming power of the Cross reaching across space and time.

The depths of suffering which Our Lord willingly endured on our behalf, which really shows us the depths of His love, are revealed in the remarkable study of His Passion conducted by Pierre Barbet, a French surgeon at the Hôpital Saint-Joseph in Paris, detailed in the book, A Doctor at Calvary (Roman Catholic Books, 1953). Having examined the details of the Gospel record from a scientific perspective, Barbet reconstructed the events of the Passion in horrific detail. We learn, for instance, that the “sweating of blood,” or hæmatidrosis, which Jesus suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of His arrest, contributed to His relatively rapid death on the Cross (in about 3 hours). According to Barbet, this abnormal condition renders the skin “tender and painful, makes it less able to bear the violence and the blows which it will receive during the night and during the following day, right on till the scourging and crucifixion” (p. 70). Furthermore, he attributed the level of Jesus’ sensitivity to pain to His highly refined nervous system. Apparently, “individuals who are physically of a more refined type endure [pain] with the greatest patience and in general put up a better resistance, under the influence of a more courageous soul and finer sensibility” (ibid.). And in the case of Jesus, “He had a firm will to endure the painful consequences to the utmost extent” (p. 71).

Moreover, having analyzed the body image on the Holy Shroud of Turin from an anatomical point of view, Barbet concluded the famous relic, purporting to be the burial cloth of Christ, was genuine, in large part due to its inexplicable departure from traditional artistic depictions. “A forger,” he wrote, “would somewhere or other have made some blunder which would have betrayed him. He would not have contradicted all artistic traditions with such supreme unconcern” (pp. 81-82). Considering the evidence of the Shroud image in light of the testimony of Scripture and Tradition, furthermore, led Barbet to some stunning discoveries. For instance, regarding Our Lord’s scourging, he reported: “There are plenty of marks of this on the shroud. They are scattered over the whole body, from the shoulders to the lower part of the legs. … Altogether I have counted more than 100, perhaps 120 [blows]” (pp. 83, 84).

Of the Crucifixion, Barbet referred to an “ideal spot” called “Destot’s space,” an open area “in the middle of the bones of the wrists,” which would allow the bones to be “pushed aside [by the nails], but [left] intact” (p. 102)—in keeping with the prophecy cited by St. John, “Not a bone will be broken” (Jn. 20:36). [View illustration] “Is it possible,” argued Barbet, “that trained executioners would not have known by experience of this ideal spot for crucifying the hands … ? The answer is obvious. And this spot is precisely where the shroud shows us the mark of the nail, a spot of which no forger would have had any idea or the boldness to represent it. … When [the median nerves] were injured and stretched out on the nails in those extended arms, like the strings of a violin on their bridge, they must have caused the most horrible pain” (pp. 104-105).