As soon as He was arrested, all of His friends, the disciples, fled into the darkness. Have you ever felt abandoned by a friend? Jesus was abandoned by all of His.
The soldiers and guards marched Jesus into Jerusalem in the darkness. Over the next few hours, He endured six trials, three religious and three civil—and all illegal.
During those trials, He was mocked, slapped, and punched, over and over again. But Jesus never fought back. Although He could have called down lightning to destroy them all or dispatched an army of angels from Heaven to wipe them all out, He just took every punch, every slap, and every false accusation. Jesus was willing to do whatever it took.
Suffering in Torture
After Roman governor Pontius Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified, the real brutality began.
Roman soldiers—experts at torture and death—stripped Jesus of His clothes and likely chained Him to a stone pillar. They beat Him again and again with a Roman flagrum, a whip that would have had anywhere from three to twelve strands of leather. Metal balls were woven into the leather, and at the end of each strand were pieces of broken pottery, glass, nails, bone, or twisted metal, designed to grab flesh and rip.
Imagine Jesus as He was beaten over and over and over and over again, huge pieces of skin and muscle being ripped and torn away with every blow. By the time the soldiers were done, His back and buttocks and legs would have been bloody, mangled ribbons of flesh and muscle and sinew.
This beating was nicknamed “the half death,” because half the men who received it died from it. But not Jesus. He had more to endure.
The soldiers put a purple robe on Him, twisted together a crown of thorns from the famous Jerusalem thorn bush—with thorns that were up to three inches long—and beat it into His skull with a rod, which they also used to batter His face. More than 700 years before Jesus was crucified, the prophet Isaiah prophesied that the Son of God would beaten so badly He wouldn’t even look human.
But many were amazed when they saw Him. His face was so disfigured He seemed hardly human, and from His appearance, one would scarcely know He was a man. (Isaiah 52:14)
Now Jesus became an object of mockery. The Roman soldiers knelt before Him, laughingly calling out, “Hail, King of the Jews.” They slapped Him and spit on Him. Through it all, He remained silent.
Suffering in Crucifixion
Soon, they marched Him off to Golgotha, the hill of the skull, just outside Jerusalem. Here the Roman soldiers stripped Him of all His clothes, threw Him down on a wooden cross, stretched out His hands, took a spike nail, and hammered it into His right wrist.
Imagine the pain of each blow, as the hammer came down again and again, driving the nail deeper and deeper into His wrist, Why His wrists? Because the weight of His body, once lifted up on the cross, would tear His hands through the nail if it were put through His palm instead of His wrist. Only the spot where the two bones of the wrist come together could support the full weight of a man hung by a spike nail. In Jewish culture, wrists were considered a part of the hands.
Next, the soldiers crossed His feet and drove a spike nail through them. I can’t even fathom the pain.
The soldiers then lifted the cross up and dropped it into a previously dug hole. It was probably at this point that, according to Psalm 22:14, all of His bones came out of joint.
And that’s when the slow suffering began. There He was for all the world to see—naked and bleeding and dying, before the eyes of the very ones He’d created. To add insult to His many injuries, the thieves being crucified next to Him began to mock Him, as did the religious leaders and the crowds who had gathered.
To breathe on the cross is no small thing. Jesus had to push His body up to exhale and come down to inhale, scraping His open, bloody back against the rough-hewn wood of the cross for hours. The pain would have been excruciating.
