Holy Week | Friday
The Friday of Holy Week was a day of unspeakable suffering by the King.
1 Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. 2 And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe.3 They came up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and struck him with their hands.
4 Pilate went out again and said to them, “See, I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no guilt in him.” 5 So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Behold the man!” 6 When the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no guilt in him.” 7 The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has made himself the Son of God.”
8 When Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid. 9 He entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer. 10 So Pilate said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” 11 Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.” 12 From then on Pilate sought to release him, but the Jews cried out, “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.” 13 So when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called The Stone Pavement, and in Aramaic Gabbatha.
14 Now it was the day of Preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, “Behold your King!” 15 They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.”
16 So he delivered him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus, 17 and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called the place of a skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. 18 There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them.
John 19: 1-18
Friday of Holy Week is the day our Savior suffered and died for us. The events of Holy Week as a whole receive detailed treatment by gospels, but none more so than the events of that Friday. It seems that it is important to them all that we understand virtually hour by hour what our Lord endured on our behalf. Our survey here will focus on those sufferings.
They began before dawn, there in the garden of Gethsemane, in Jesus’ agony of anticipation of what was to come. It is as if now that the moment has come, the veil is pulled back and he is able to see what awaits him in all its dreadfulness. Yet it is not the physical agonies to come which cause him to sweat drops of blood as he prays. It is the awareness that he will be suffering in the place of sinners the very wrath of God that brings this crisis of dread — as he shows in his prayer that God would take this “cup” from him (Luke 22:42). This is a metaphor taken from the Old Testament prophets in which God makes his enemies drink from the cup of his wrath in judgment. But there as he prays alone, Jesus receives a visitation from an angel (Luke 22:43), who ministers to him in his human weakness, and Jesus concludes his prayers with fresh surrender to the will of God.
Further pain is inflicted upon our Lord’s soul at the sight of Judas, arriving in the garden at the head of a crowd armed with swords and clubs and prepared to arrest him. Judas greets Jesus as he had many times before, with the kiss of friendship, but in this case it was a signal to Judas’ companions of the one they were looking for. Jesus only says, with unmistakable sadness, “Friend, do what you came for” (Matt. 26:50).
Jesus is then, while it is still dark, led off to face trial before the priest Annas, the high priest Caiaphas, and the whole Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin. There he endures the indignity of various slanderous testimonies against him, yet we are told that “Jesus remained silent and gave no answer” (Mark 14: 61). This trial before the Jewish authorities concludes with a conviction of the crime of blasphemy for claiming to be the Christ, and Jesus is condemned as worthy of death. He then suffers the humiliation of being blindfolded and spit upon and beaten by the assembly of his countrymen there in the courtyard of the high priest. It is also worth pointing out that it is during this sham trial that our Lord hears a rooster crow, signaling the arrival of dawn, and he turns from where he stands to look at Peter out in the courtyard, just as Peter, gripped with fear, has denied his relationship to Christ for the third time. This denial was yet another pain of soul for our Lord.
Since the Jews were not allowed by Roman law to carry out executions, Jesus is next led to a second trial, this one presided over by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. There, Jesus is again subjected to various slanderous accusations brought by the Jews, now ones specifically calculated to have an effect on the Roman authorities: Jesus is accused of claiming kingship for himself in defiance of the rule of Caesar. Once again, Jesus is unwilling to defend himself against the accusations, to Pilate’s astonishment. At a loss to find any evidence of wrongdoing in Jesus, Pilate refers the matter to Herod Antipas, the governor of Galilee, who was in Jerusalem that day. Yet when Jesus refuses to answer the charges against him before Herod, he is sent back to Pilate, after some ridicule and mistreatment by Herod’s soldiers. There, Pilate declares to the assembly that he has found nothing in Jesus deserving of death, yet the crowd shouts him down with cries of “Crucify him!” At this, Pilate performs a ritual hand-washing before the people, symbolizing his own professed innocence in the matter — and then he sentences Jesus to death by crucifixion after being flogged.
In terms of the physical sufferings of our Lord, the flogging administered to him by the Roman soldiers prior to his crucifixion would have eclipsed the pain of the cross itself. This practice was the cruel “fragellam” that the Romans were infamous for inflicting upon criminals. The note in the ESV at Matthew 27.26 defines it as “a Roman judicial penalty, consisting of a severe beating with a multi-lashed whip containing imbedded pieces of stone and metal.” A nd I read that many men in that day died simply from this treatment alone. Adding insult to our Lord’s injuries, before flogging him the soldiers dress him in purple and place a crown of thorns on his head, mocking his claim to be a true king of the Jews.
Then, with the sun rising in the sky on that Friday long ago, our Lord is forced to take up his own cross and carry it to the place of his own execution. This journey would have been its own form of torture, and, indeed, weakened as Jesus was by the flogging he had received, he collapses under the weight of the cross. It is only after a bystander is coerced by the soldiers to carry the cross that the procession is able to move on.
Execution by crucifixion was essentially a form of death by torture, comparable to another cruel invention from the medieval period: the rack. Sometimes a victim of crucifixion died in a matter of hours, but in other cases the suffering lasted for days. The eventual death was from an accumulation of causes: dehydration, accelerated by blood loss, exposure, hunger, shock, and ultimately suffocation due to exhaustion. The Romans themselves recognized the brutality of it, and reserved it for the execution of slaves and conquered peoples; no Roman citizen could be executed on a cross, for any crime. And the torments of our Lord’s crucifixion were heightened by the decision to nail, instead of tie, his feet and hands to the cross.
The cross was favored by the Romans not only for its maximizing of the pain of the condemned, but also for the shame. Unlike in typical artistic depictions of Jesus on the cross, it is historically more accurate to remember that our Lord was hung utterly naked. Crushed and disgraced and lifted up before all to see in his dying, a man on a cross was meant to be a spectacle: a warning to all who might think lightly of opposition to Caesar. And as our Lord was nailed to the cross that Friday morning, it was to the taunts and jeers of his enemies who looked on, to include even the passers by. This was the incalculable suffering of shame heaped upon the pain that the Son of God endured.
But the greatest suffering of our Lord on the cross comes, as he knew it would, as the felt wrath of God for sin descends upon him. During the first three hours that he hangs on the cross, from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM as we would speak of, Jesus has words of comfort for others despite his own agonies of body and soul. But something dreadful happens at the noon hour. Just when the sun would have stood highest in the sky, the first three gospels record that a darkness came over the land for a full three hours. It is as if the Father in heaven is drawing a covering over what is happening between himself and his son, as Jesus drinks the cup of divine wrath for sin. We gather that this was the time, in all its wonder and horror and profound mystery that, as the apostle put it, God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). And it is during these hours on the cross that Jesus cries out in a loud voice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This was his greatest agony.
And then Jesus died, bringing an end to all his sufferings on our behalf. Yet it seems that the greatest of his sufferings had passed even before the moment of death. John tells us that just before giving up his spirit, our Lord spoke the words, “It is finished!” And Luke records his prayer to the Father at the very moment of death that is very different from his earlier cry of dereliction: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Though physical death itself was the last drop of the cup our Lord drank on that Friday, he arrived at the moment of death with a sense of having finished the work he came to do, as well as a sense of the Father’s tender care for his spirit as it parted from his body in death.
And at that moment, the earth shook with a great earthquake, the curtain in the temple was torn from top to bottom, and the sun began to shine in the sky once again. And at all of this, the soldiers standing watch at the cross exclaimed in terror: “Surely he was the Son of God!”
For Discussion and Meditation:
Brothers and sisters, what shall we say to these things?
What our Lord himself endured for us that day is hard for us to endure even in the telling of it. Does it seem strange, in light of all the horrors of that day of Holy Week, that the traditional name for it is “Good Friday”? Why isn’t it called “Dreadful Friday?”
Well, of course, it was both. It was a dreadful day, for all the unspeakable suffering of Christ just recited. But it was also a wonderful day, by virtue of all that Christ accomplished for our redemption. That dreadful day was the day of our redemption, albeit at unimaginable cost to our Savior.
And as those redeemed by the blood of Christ, we should take to heart both the dread and the wonder of that Good Friday. The dread of it will keep before us the sinfulness of sin, as the hymn puts it:
Ye who think of sin but lightly nor suppose the evil great
Here may view its nature rightly, here its guilt may estimate.
The wonder of it will keep before us the triumph of God’s grace accomplished at the cross, as celebrated in another hymn:
Sing, my tongue, how glorious battle glorious victory became
And above the cross, his trophy, tell the triumph and the fame
Tell how he, the earth’s Redeemer, by his death for man o’er-came.
Think of it. The greatest evil ever perpetrated on the earth took place on that Friday: the death of the Son of God at the hands of sinful men. But what men intended for evil, God intended for good. And so it was also the day of the greatest good ever done on earth: the death of the Son of God in the place of sinful men. This day that our Savior died was the day Satan was defeated, God’s wrath was satisfied, your salvation was secured. No wonder the Church has called it, despite all the horror of it, “Good Friday.”
