The Witness
You are burning with excitement upon your arrival. You’ve pushed your family maybe a little too hard, the journey has been long and taxing, but this Passover was special.
Of course you’ve been to the city many times for the festival but this time. This time you could meet Jesus. The fame of this rumored messiah and miracle worker even came with renown in the small countryside where your family is from.
With a look of desire you turn to your family who nods their approval and you begin to sprint. The first few people you meet, “where is Jesus?”
They respond with directions barely heard as you rush to the location. You can feel it in the air before you arrive, something is wrong.
It is an excitement but bound in tension, what almost feels like anger and you arrive upon the crowd and push through each elbow and stare and foul word. The glares beaming upon your back. Arriving at the front, finally with visibility, there you see him…..and your mind is awestruck.
All rational thought has left and you are stopped in movement, thought, and understanding. There Jesus is standing. Bound. Naked.
It is alarming and so confusing that your mind cannot compute or discern what is happening. As you see movement from your peripheral; all of a sudden the wind whistles and the crack echoes through the air. The temporary veil of silence that fell over the crowd, broken:
The agonizing scream of this great man, shocking you awake, throws your brain into action again. The scene plays out in your mind. Bound, whipped, the crowd. He is being crucified. Number 2.
The pain in his scream causes your own body to respond with wincing and shock. You are stunned into silence and stillness. You sink to your knees as you witness. Number 3.
The weight of what is occurring binds your mind and your senses as you watch; unable to move, to speak.
Watching in agony you witness 36 more lashes with that whip.
Each lash across the back tearing at His skin.
Contusions causing deep bruising and blood rushing to the surface causes the skin to tear apart from itself as the expansion from the swelling finally breaks the skin like ripping a piece of paper. The nature of this pain is almost impossible to understand. As you watch another strike. Number 10.
The Garden is Where it Started
The reality of his physical torment began a few days earlier however as he prayed in the garden.
A medical phenomenon known as (hee-ma-tuh-dro-sis) hematohidrosis occurs. The very blood vessels in his sweat glands burst and his sweat turns to blood.
These open blood vessels leave the skin tender and sore to the touch let alone a whip lashing across the body.
The reality of his death captured as He uttered these words in Matthew 26:38 to His disciples “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death:”
This nature of prayer and intercession causes His physical body to respond in agony. As blood leaks from His pores.
The weight of the burden of what is to come bearing down upon His body in the Garden of the press. It is the press.
In consideration it begs the question of the Lord, “how did you die?” I believe the Lord would reply, in what feels like sorrowful whispers, of recalled compassion still felt to this day for the very same creation. “I Died under the Weight of the Burden.”
Under the weight of why He was to endure the cup He so desperately prayed to pass from Him.
The very burden that compelled Him to endure what even mighty men would have never been able to endure.
The torment of such a brutal form of death, the very word derived excruciating in our modern vernacular. The Cruxifiction. Nothing like the physical pain endured under such torture; that words had to be created to ploy and attempt and explanation. Excruciating.
The Weight of the Burden. How else could a man endure the trauma of what our saviour did than the burden of saving His creation. His chosen children.
The End
We return to the scene of our witness of Jesus. These lashes upon His body, already tender and sore from the depth and passion of prayer, amplifying each impact times ten.
The guards place some sort of robe or cloth upon his back. They must clot the blood or he will not be concious or alive for the remainder of the torture.
And in that moment they slam a crown of thorns into His head. The cuts penetrate the vascular skin and area upon the head releasing a torrent of blood gushing down his face and body.
The nerves that are severed in this act cause radiating pain flowing through His face and neck which burn as those nerves are attacked . Every facial movement from that point forward causes more pain, activating those nerves.
This Jesus, the man you witnessed just a few moments ago, in demanding physical condition. Years of hard labor as a carpenter and walking throughout the countryside boasted of stamina and strength.
Now kneeling before you, unrecognizable, definitely not as Jesus, but almost not even as human.
Wounds all over His entire body, gaping and bloody.
The swelling in His face and body from the continued beatings distort His visage which is further marred by bits of flesh, muscle, and blood that were thrown about as the lamb bones in the whip tore chunks of his flesh away from His body almost to the very bone.
This Jesus who preached deliverance and hope to the poor and needy, worked miracles, and healed thousands and thousands. This Jesus is now standing before you with a beam resting upon the open wounds on His back.
Every step jostling the crude wood against the exposed nerve endings of His flesh, shooting pain throughout His body.
The blood pressure in His body is now lowering so quickly muscles are tensing and spasming in response to a lack of blood and oxygen.
The pain steals his strength and the body, now entering shock, cannot bear the weight of the beam and Jesus collapses under the weight of it. Muscles become tense and rigid.
Because of this physical torment and the response of His heart and internal organs, water begins to enter His blood stream.
In a small sack against His heart, fluid begins to build that expands this sack beyond its designed size squeezing against his heart. Already stressed from an elevated heart rate and the torment Under the Weight of the Burden.
Simon has to help carry this Jesus to Golgatha’s hill where He can be crucified.
As they arrive Jesus is slammed to his back so the nails can be driven in His wrist. The motion and impact, reopening any closed wounds. Jolting every exposed nerve and increasing the enduring pain even more still.
Now a nail is driven through His wrist, strategically, in a place that can hold the weight of His body without tearing through the soft flesh and severing the main nerve in his arm. Pain constantly shoots through His hands and fingers and along his arms throughout His body. Increasing the stress on His heart all the more.
Jesus is lifted to be placed into the vertical beam and His feet nailed to that cross.
As He is lifted the weight of His body dislocates His shoulders and renders the muscles in his chest and upper body useless.
The weight pulling down His body, not only of gravity but the weight of everyone of His Chosen people.
All standing before Him rejecting their hope and punishing Him to this brutal death.
Rejecting the very help and salvation that is before them. The weight of His own Children rejecting His perfect plan. The weight of every sin, guilt, and shame. All weighing on His heart, traumatized by the physical torture He is enduring, but racing even still under the passion He feels to endure such a cup to save them. To save us!
Jesus is thrust into the vertical post. And His feet are nailed with His knees bent so as to give the opportunity of the punished to fight for breath and live even longer under the pain.
The muscles required for breathing no longer work because of the weight of his body all hanging on the nails in his wrist. Jesus has to use the anchor point of the nail in His feet just to breathe.
Every breath pushing against every nerve in His foot and sending pain radiating throughout His body.
This torture, this pain, cannot compare to the weight of the Burden that He is carrying, all endured for you and I.
In the midst of all this physical torment, He looks out upon the people, and the face of every child He is actively dying to save seared into the very depths of His soul. Causes Him to push into the pain, draw in a deep breath, and even speak: “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”
All for you and I.
The weight of the burden makes hanging on those nails feel like a multiplier of 8.1 Billion currently, not counting the souls throughout time and History, multiplied to that of gravities accelerating force acting on His body.
Under the weight of the Burden.
That small sack of liquid is filling faster and faster. The fast heart rate continually increases by the burden he feels for the people and the physical trauma He is suffering. It is reaching an unbearable speed and pressure.
Pain bearing in His chest from cardiac seizure and pain throughout His body from every wound, every stripe, He draws strength for one more declaration. One made in hope and the promise of what is to come. The hope of what the next few days would hold.
Gives him the strength, with His final breath, to push once again into the nerves of His feet. Take the short breath that He can barely grasp without His muscles working, and declare “It Is Finished.”
And under the weight of the burden, and the liquid in that small sack around His heart; a cardiac rupture occurs and Jesus’ heart quite literally bursts. Under the Weight.
Now, as His lifeless body sinks lower than before, as he slumps on the cross, the death evident in His dangling body, the guards do not break His legs like the thieves at either of His sides, but rather pierce His side releasing blood and water, providing further evidence for a cardiac rupture being the cause of His death.
And the very blood and water of the covenant that would cover over us and cleanse us, providing our redemption and right, spills to the ground and splashes at the feet of those Roman guards.
And the witness of the earth, as quaking and darkness falls on them, awes them into the admission, “that this truly was the Son of God.”
The pain, trauma, and explosion of His Heart. Jesus' lifeless body now rests upon that cross, waiting to be removed and prepared for burial. Hanging there. Unrecognizable. All, Under the Weight of the Burden.
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