(Today’s audio reading on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/25GQqvuBaTXMgWQT7kM3A8)
They took Jesus away…to the place called Place of the Skull…There they nailed him to the cross. (John 19:16-18)
The cross means intense, searing, can’t-do-anything-about-it-kind-of pain in the feet.
That thought is hard to contrast with multiple, common scenarios like stubbing a toe (you might want to ice that!), or, dealing with the aggravation of a thorn in the foot (I’ll try some peroxide and tweezers, and if doesn’t get better, I’ll go see the doc!)
I remember one Christmas Eve my brother came home from his Air Force assignment, bringing a buddy with him, arriving well after the rest of us had gone to bed. Dad got up in the dark to get the door, and ‘bam!’ he banged into the door frame and broke his toe. Talk about some focused pain. He wasn’t expecting that. A broken toe is anguish that lingers and affects the entire sensory functions of the body.
Pain in the feet is real, and dominates our attention. I’m trying to imagine how Jesus dealt with intense, mounting, excruciating foot pain. He couldn’t reach down and apply a pressure point, or best case scenario, grab the reason for the pain—the long spike nail which had been cruelly and mercilessly hammered into his flesh, tissue, muscle and bone—and take it out. Not only was it piercing his body, but it was holding him to the cross, and supporting his lower body weight as gravity pulled him down on to it.
Apart from the physical pain, the cross means that all possibility of mobility was removed. Not just removing opportunity to run away—should there ever have been a question about that—but even to move around and get comfortable after having a spike driven through his feet. Combined with the spikes through the hands, this collection of driven spikes sends a signal, of Captured! You aren’t going anywhere.
I contemplate today his shock and trauma and excruciating pain from multiple pain points on the body, with blood flowing, trickling, spurting everywhere. The life was being taken away from him—no chance of leaving the cross, no chance of moving freely about. He was totally captured. Nailed by his outer extremities to a crude wooden contraption, raised above the ground for all to see in a public place called The Skull. That was the sacrificial posture of our Savior.
“Father, we recognize that Jesus accepted, on our behalf, this unbelievable torture of nailed feet and we express to you today our gratefulness.”
Freddy Boswell 