"It is finished."

And they crucified him.

Mk 15:24

I’ve been a paramedic for seventeen years. Witnessed the brutality of man. I’ve seen people shot and stabbed. Heads crushed. Limbs twisted and broke. I’ve even seen a small baby girl dipped into boiling water by an insane mother. But this? What we did to the Lord? I can’t even fathom it.

"Crucify him!"

The hammer fell. Clang! The point of the spike drove through the bones of his wrist and into the wooden patibulum. The victim screamed. A hot spasm shot up his arm and exploded at the base of his skull. A wave of pain seized him, so intense it dulled his senses and stole his breath. He writhed and cried and groaned as the Roman soldiers pinned his other arm to the beam and repeated the process. Clang! Again the same results. Blood spewed from the wound. His fingers groped and bent like spastic claws. His breathing came in shallow ineffective bursts.

"Now his feet," the Legionnaire shouted. "One on top of the other!"

The torturers grabbed his tired swollen legs. They bent his knees. They placed one foot atop the other and then hammered a single nail through the top of each foot. The sharp steel penetrated the flesh, pushing the bones apart and pinning his feet tightly against the wooden beam. An indescribable wave of excruciating pain raced up his legs, shot through the small of his back, and gripped his spine. The damaging blow hit his brain, a powerful nervous impulse that shocked his nervous system and locked his chest in spasm.

"Okay," the guard shouted. "He’s crucified. Raise him!"

The head of the cross began to rise. Jesus felt his torso shift and slide down the length of the splintered cross transferring the weight of his entire body to the nail holes in his tortured wrists and feet. The cross reached vertical. It locked into place. Jesus hung there in agony, barely able to breathe, his chest wall pulled tight. And for the next few horrible hours, as he looked through blurry eyes down on the world, a terrible battle raged. He’d stand up on the nails to relax his chest wall enough to breathe, but only for a moment. His feet screamed for mercy. His tired thigh muscles cramped and burned. Exhausted and no longer able to stand the pain he would collapse and fall once again upon his wrists. And the excruciating cycle repeated itself. Again and again. Back and forth he shifted his weight searching for relief but finding none.

And so it went for hours, until our savior’s battered body could take no more. Deep in shock he finally succumbed and lost all strength in his legs. He fell full force upon the nails within his wrists. His arms pulled at their sockets. His wrists writhed with pain. His chest wall tightened for the last time, and an intense pressure began to crush his heart. The organ quickly congested. Began to struggle and fail. And finally, as his precious lungs filled with fluid and drew their last and most difficult breath, Jesus murmured his final words…

"It is finished."

*

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but no portrait could ever reveal the true price Jesus paid for us at Golgatha. For you see, he was human, human in every way—they beat him, and scourged him, and nailed to a cross, and he died—but he was much more than that. He was the Son of God. They took him down, and placed his body in a tomb, and they even posted a guard, but forty-four later hours when they rolled away that huge entrance stone and looked inside, he was gone. Jesus Christ. The Son of God. He overcame death that you and I might live.

And now, it is finished.

* * *