Crucifixion

I have always found the crucifixion fascinating and I guess that's part of the deal. The man we had learned about in church being nailed to a wooden cross. From that cross we see his whole life, all his teachings. The method of execution becomes the symbol for the religion. What other faith can boast that? And as a child that's what we saw, a man on a cross, a little bit of blood dripping from the nail holes, maybe a small amount around the thorns on his head, but mostly he gazed out at us, sorrowful but peaceful.

It was actually a great many years later, when I was teaching at my previous but one school, that I learned exactly what crucifixion meant. Our Headteacher, a large, bluff Geordie, did an assembly about the crucifixion. He was an historian, so this was his thing, he had held us transfixed below the walls of the old city in Boulogne where he told us about the killing fields. Now he was going into minute detail about what you would suffer with each terrible thing that happened to Jesus, how it would feel to drown slowly as your lungs filled up with your body's own fluid, unable to breathe properly and clear the water. How it was a slow and excruciating death. How if your relatives could afford to pay for your legs to be broken, that time could be shortened considerably. How the occupied populace were terrified at the sight of these crosses with the dead or dying on the high ground. He made our blood grow cold, he made us start to realise for the first time what it meant to die like that.

Mel Gibson's film, 'The Passion of Christ' received a lot of criticism and from many quarters, but I was mesmerised by it. The scourging was insane, but I have no doubt extremely realistic. For pity's sake he was actually criticised for using animal flesh for some of the effects, what the hell was he supposed to do, have a real actor scourged to the point of death? Well, ok, I'd be up for him doing that to Tom Cruise, nasty little ferret who shouldn't be allowed near a woman, but in general, well....
What he stopped short of however, was any realism in the actual crucifixion. It was as though phew, finally, up on the cross, now we can get this over with, that was a bit of a nasty few hours. Oh yes it was, but far, far worse was yet to come.

Crucifixion was a truly horrible way to put a living, sentient creature to death. But in some ways, it was almost a challenge to humans to think up more awful ways of killing people. So-called witches, of whom something like 90% were women, were burned at the stake, although so were heretics...and then Catholics. Incomprehensibly awful. When Anne Boleyn's cook, at the instructions of some high up, was caught putting poison in her food, he was boiled to death. Can you even begin to imagine? In the film, 'The Last of the Mohicans' we see a traditional Native American form of execution where the victim is tied by the legs to two horses who are then startled so that they run off in opposite directions. Makes you shudder. We saw Mel Gibson himself as William Wallace in the film 'Braveheart', being very stiff upper lip as he is about to undergo that most British of tortures known as being hung, drawn and quartered. Evil.

The horror of Jesus's execution must be what enthralls us. Pilate did not want to make a martyr of him - and how very sensible he was - even though in the Creed we say, 'he suffered under Pontius Pilate', there was a lot of misrepresentation in this story.

And yes, I know, I KNOW that the story doesn't end there and that the important bit was what happened next, but this was the human bit. This is what we think about today, Good Friday, because this was an HORRIFIC passing from life and at the hands of other human beings. These are the creatures we are, ones who suffer courageously as individuals through all kinds of horror, and ones who as a crowd are capable of the greatest evil.

Through all of this, I also think of the suffering of the woman who had to watch it happening to her son. How do you survive that?