A Practical Commentary on Holy Scripture/Part 2/Chapter 76

by Friedrich Justus Knecht

4. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Words. — The Death of Jesus, and the Wonders which accompanied His Death.

Now from the sixth hour^[1] there was darkness^[2] over the whole earth until the ninth hour^[3], while Jesus was in His agony. That He might drink the chalice of sorrow even to the dregs, our Divine Lord was abandoned at that awful moment by His Eternal Father. This was the crowning point of His terrible agony; for He exclaimed: “Eli, Eli^[4], lamma sabacthani", that is “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Matthew, Mark.)

After a few moments’ silence, He said: “I thirst.” ^[5] (John.) Then one of the soldiers took a sponge, and steeping it in vinegar and gall, put it on the end of a reed and presented it to His lips^[6]. But when He had tasted the vinegar, He said: “It is consummated!”^[7] (John.) Then He cried out with a loud voice^[8]: “ Father, into Thy Hands I commend My spirit!” (Luke.) And bowing down^[9] His Sacred Head, He expired.

And behold^[10] the veil^[11] of the Temple was rent in two from the top even to the bottom, and the earth quaked, and the rocks^[12] were rent. And the graves^[13] were opened, and many bodies of the Saints^[14] that had slept arose. Now the centurion and they that were with him, watching Jesus, were sore afraid^[15], saying: “Indeed this was the Son of God.” And all the multitude of them that were come together to that sight ^[16] returned to Jerusalem striking their breasts^[17].

COMMENTARY.

The vicarious Sacrifice and Death of Jesus. The great work entrusted by the Eternal Father to His Son is consummated! That which the types foreshadowed, which the just longed for, and the prophets foretold, is accomplished! Jesus Christ was born in poverty and humility, lived a life of toil and hardship, poverty and persecution for thirty-three years, and at the end of it died a painful and disgraceful death. Those Eyes which beamed with gentleness and kindness are shut; that Mouth which spoke comfort to the afflicted and peace to all men is closed; those Hands which bestowed benefits all around are powerless; those Feet which left traces of blessings wherever they went are stiff; that Heart which beat with love for all men is cold and dead! The Good Shepherd has given His life for His sheep; the true Paschal Lamb has been slain, and has delivered us from the slavery of sin and of Satan, and opened to us the way into the Promised Land of heaven. He gave Himself over to a violent death in the very prime of His Manhood and in the height of health and strength, to redeem us from sin and eternal death, and to win for us grace and eternal life. The guiltless died for the guilty; and the Most Holy for the sinner. We have indeed been “bought with a great price” (1 Con. 6, 20).

The Divinity of our Lord was made manifest at His Death by His words and His deeds, a) Jesus, when dying, addressed God as His Father, and thus, with His last words, testified to His Divinity, b) Inanimate nature bore witness that the most terrible of crimes, even the murder of God, had taken place on Calvary. The sun hid itself so as not to witness the death agony of the “Sun of justice”; the earth heaved and the rocks rent themselves asunder, for He who laid the foundations of the earth and built the mountains was dying! Even the kingdom of the dead (by the opening of the graves) testified that the Lord of life had conquered death by His Death.

The abandonment by God was suffered by our Lord in satisfaction for our sins, whereby we have forsaken God and deserved to be eternally separated from, and rejected by Him. By this suffering He merited precious graces for us, by means of which we can overcome temptations to faint-heartedness or despair.

The thirst of Jesus. The cry: “I thirst”, revealed not only the torturing bodily thirst which our Blessed Lord was suffering, but also His burning desire for our salvation and our love. The desire for our salvation was the cause of all our Lord’s pain. It is our business — not that of His executioners — to quench His burning thirst by appreciating and responding to His infinite love, and by caring for the salvation of our own souls.

The wonderful rending of the veil of the Temple showed I. that Jesus by His Death had opened to all men the way into the real Holy of Holies, even heaven; 2. that the Temple of the Old Covenant, with its typical laws and sacrifices, had lost its meaning, and that from henceforth substance and fulfilment would take the place of shadows and types.

The rending of the rocks gives us an idea of the effect which the contemplation of our Lord’s sufferings and death ought to produce on us. At the sight of our crucified Saviour, our hearts ought to “quake” with terror at the evil of sin, and “heave” with pain at the thought of His sufferings; and they ought to be “rent” with contrition, even if they be as hard as stone! They ought to open and cast off their dead works and sins by a good confession, and rise to a new life with Jesus Christ (St. Bernard).

Holy week. Good Friday is a day of mourning and penance, for on that day sin caused the death of the Incarnate Son of God. On the sixth day of Creation God made man; and on the sixth day of the week, God Incarnate redeemed fallen man.

A summary of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. The sufferings of our Blessed Lord were caused by men, Jews, Gentiles and even His own apostles (Peter and Judas); by the light which revealed His nakedness; and by the air which inflamed His wounds. He suffered in His honour, by false accusations, insults, and unjust judgment; in His liberty, by being seized, bound and fastened with nails. His Soul suffered from fear, sadness and complete desolation, and from the scorn, mockery and ignominy that were heaped upon Him; His whole Body was tortured by the innumerable bruises and wounds of the scourging; His Head by the crown of thorns; His Face by the blows and spittle; His Hands and Feet by being pierced with nails; His Knees by being wounded and torn by His falls; and His Neck by the halter laid round it. His Eyes were wounded by the looks of His enemies who hated Him, as well as by the sight of His sorrowful Mother; His Ears were lacerated by the curses, cries of execration and blasphemy of His tormentors. Truly “from the sole of His Foot unto the top of His Head, there is no soundness therein” (Is. 1, 6). Added to all these sufferings we must remember this, that the Body of our Blessed Lord, conceived by the Holy Ghost in a wonderful and perfect manner, was much more sensitive to pain than our bodies; and that the more innocent, holy and noble a person is, the more intolerable to him is ingratitude, injustice, and malice. The sufferings of Jesus were, therefore, inconceivably great. All this ought to serve to fill us with a horror of sin, on account of which our dear and Blessed Lord suffered so much, and impress us with the greatness of His love, which made Him endure all this for us!

To die a good death, we must do as our Lord Jesus did, i. e. resign ourselves entirely to the will of God, and commend our souls to the care of our heavenly Father, with a childlike love and confidence.

---

Application. Just think what it cost your Saviour to redeem you! Will you not, therefore, make some effort to save your own soul? Jesus accomplished His work; He gave His Blood and His Life to save you. Do your part now: watch and pray; avoid and resist sin.

Our Lord suffered all this for you individually, as much as if you were the only human being on earth. You can, therefore, say with St. Paul (Gal. 2, 20): “He (my Saviour) hath loved me (a sinful, ungrateful creature), and delivered Himself for me.” But how have you hitherto loved Him? “If any man love not our Lord Jesus Christ”, says St. Paul, let him be anathema” or accursed (1 Cor. 16, 22). And if you picture to yourself all that your Saviour has done and suffered for you, you will understand the meaning of the Apostle’s words. In order that this curse may not fall on you, try (especially when you are looking at a crucifix) to awaken in your heart a deep love for your crucified Lord.

Chapter LXXVII.

JESUS IS LAID IN THE SEPULCHRE.

[Mat. 17, 57. Mark 15. 49. Luke 23, 50. John 19, 38.]

IN order that the bodies of those who were crucified might not remain on the Cross during the Sabbath^[18], the soldiers came and broke^[19] the legs of the two thieves, but coming to Jesus, they found Him already dead. Hence there was no need to break His legs. Fearing, however, that some vestige of life might still remain in Him, one of the soldiers pierced His side^[20] with a spear, and immediately blood and water^[21] came forth.

There was among the secret disciples of Jesus a rich man named Joseph of Arimathea^[22], a member of the council^[23]. He went to Pilate and asked for the Body of Jesus, that he might bury it. Pilate granted his request. Then Joseph, together with Nicodemus^[24], took down ^[25] the Sacred Body from the Cross, and wrapped it up, with costly aromatic spices, in a linen shroud.

It so happened that Joseph had a garden near the place where Jesus was crucified, and in the garden was a new sepulchre, hewn from the rock, wherein no one had yet been buried. In
Fig. 92. Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. (Phot. Dr. Trenkler & Co., Leipzig.)

this they laid the Body of Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre (Fig. 92)^[26].

On the following day, the chief priests^[27] and the Pharisees went to Pilate and said: “Sir, we have remembered that that seducer said, while He was yet alive: ‘After three days I will rise again.’ Command, therefore, the sepulchre to be guarded until the third day, lest His disciples come and steal Him away, and say to the people: ‘He is risen from the dead’.” Pilate gave them guards ^[28] to watch the sepulchre, and they moreover sealed ^[29] the stone.

COMMENTARY.

The Soul of Jesus Christ, immediately after His Death, went to Limbo, to announce to the spirits of the just the glad tidings that the work of Redemption was accomplished, and that they would soon ascend with Him to heaven. It was for this reason that our Lord said to the penitent thief: “This day shalt thou be with Me in paradise.” Our Lord’s Divinity was inseparably joined to His Soul.

Our Paschal Lamb. Our Divine Saviour, crucified on the Jewish paschal feast, is the true Paschal Lamb; and therefore St. Paul says: “Christ, our Pasch, is sacrificed” (i Cor. 5, 7). No bone of the typical lamb might be broken (Old Test. XXXIII), and this law was meant to typify that no bone would be broken of the true Paschal Lamb, our Redeemer. This, as you have read, came to pass.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus. God did not suffer the bones of His crucified Son to be broken; and in order that no one might attribute this fact to chance, He announced, fifteen hundred years before, by the type of the paschal lamb, that it would be so. Why, then, did God permit the Sacred Body of His Only-Begotten Son to be pierced with a lance, and His Sacred Heart to be laid open? The Crucifixion being such an all-important event to the whole world, each circumstance of it, however small, must have a meaning, and have been provided for in the plan of Redemption; so that the lance-thrust which transfixed the Sacred Heart must in the wisdom of God have been meant to serve some special end. The end was this: a) to confirm our faith; b) to kindle our love.

a) The wound inflicted by the lance was, by its nature, absolutely mortal, and left no possible room for doubt that our Lord really did die on the Cross, and that, consequently, His Resurrection was really and truly an awakening from death to life.

b) When the lance pierced the Heart of Jesus, Blood and Water flowed out. Our Blessed Saviour, therefore, shed His Heart’s Blood for us, thereby giving us the greatest proof of His love. It was the love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus which impelled Him to suffer all the pain and shame that He endured, and to die for us on the Cross; so now, after His Body was completely covered with wounds, and had been tortured to death, He willed further to give His very Heart’s Blood for us, and permitted it to be pierced, so that it might pour out its last drops of Blood for us. The Church speaks thus in her Office for the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus: “For this was His Heart pierced, that we by means of this visible wound might perceive the invisible wound of His love. How could this love be better proved than by allowing His Heart to be wounded by the lance? Who could help loving this Heart thus wounded?” “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I implore grace to love Thee more and more.”

The Blood and the Water which flowed from the opened Side of Jesus are figures of the holiest and the most indispensable of the Sacraments, namely the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, and of Baptism. These two Sacraments (and with these two greatest, the other five also) proceeded from the Sacred Heart of Jesus, for it was the love of His Sacred Heart which moved Him to institute these Sacraments for our salvation. In this sense, therefore, the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the source of all sacramental grace.

The sorrowful Mother of God. The grief of Mary at the Crucifixion of her Son was immeasurably great. She felt in her own heatt all the torments which He suffered, without being able either to help or relieve Him. And now He was dead! Her beloved Son was taken from her, and even His Body belonged to His enemies. She could not tear herself away from the scene of His Death, but remained by the Cross to keep guard over His Body, and, if possible, to assist at its Burial. Full of anxious suspense as to what would be done with that Sacred Body, she implored the help of the heavenly Father. The executioners were already making their preparations to take It down from the Cross and cast It into the pit with the bodies of the two thieves, when Joseph of Arimathea came up, and showed to her Pilate’s order that the Sacred Body should be given to him. And when he had taken down the beloved Body from the Cross, he gave It to the holy Mother, and laid It in her arms where It had so often rested in childhood. The faithful friends helped her with loving hands to wash the Body of the Most Holy, so disfigured, torn, and blood-stained; and now for the first time the sorrowful Mother was able to examine the number of His wounds and bruises, and to picture to herself the extent of the horrible torments which Jesus had endured. His wounds bled afresh in her own heart, and her grief was deep as the sea. But while we contemplate this sorrowful picture, let us not forget that sin alone is responsible for the torments of Jesus, and the sorrow of His Mother. Let us awaken within us a deep sense of contrition, and a heartfelt horror of our own sins; and let us make a firm resolution never again to commit a wilful sin!

The courage of Joseph of Arimathea is expressly mentioned in Scripture. “He went in boldly to Pilate and begged the Body of Jesus” (Mark 15, 43). He feared neither the hatred of the Scribes and Pharisees, nor the scorn and ridicule which, as a member of the Sanhedrin, he would draw on himself by taking down One Crucified from the Cross with his own hands, and by laying Him in his own sepulchre. Moreover he shewed Pilate, by his very petition, that he considered Jesus to have been unjustly put to death; and he openly confessed himself to be an adherent and disciple of the Crucified One.

The generosity of Nicodemus also deserves praise. He brought with him a hundred pounds’ weight of very precious spices, to lay on the Body of our Lord. He considered nothing too precious for Jesus. Love made him generous.

The sins of our Lord's enemies. The chief priests and Pharisees sinned by falsely suspecting the disciples of intending to steal the Body of their Master. They also committed the sii* of calumny by imparting their unfounded suspicions to Pilate, representing to him the disciples of Jesus as deceivers and thieves. They also sinned by blasphemy, in calling our Lord a seducer.

The devices to which the enemies of Jesus resorted to keep His Body in the grave, and to destroy all belief in Him, tended against their will to His glory, and manifested to the whole world that it was by His own power alone that Jesus came forth from the sealed and guarded grave. Thus, by God’s wisdom, good can be made to come out of evil.

The poverty of Jesus was extreme. Neither in life nor in death had Jesus a place where to lay His Head; and after He died, His Body did not belong to those who loved Him, but to His executioners and tormentors; and was given away by them to the first asker as a thing of no value. Jesus renounced everything in the world, even His Body,

1. The sixth hour. i. e. from noon.
2. Darkness. This was not a natural eclipse of the sun, for the Jewish Pasch was kept at the time of full moon, when a natural eclipse is an impossibility. This wonderful darkening of the sun lasted three hours. It began soon after our Lord was crucified, and only ended when He died. Darkness in the middle of the day is a very terrible thing. Men feel very uneasy, and even the wild beasts creep into their dens.
   
   The darkness was observed beyond the confines of Palestine. The pagan Phlegon mentions in his Annals that the greatest eclipse of the sun ever known occurred in the year of our Lord’s Death; and that at the sixth hour of the day it became so dark that the stars could be seen in the heavens. The Christian writer, Tertullian, who lived in the second century of our era, referred the pagans to the archives of the Roman State, wherein this extraordinary darkness was described as an “event which had astonished the whole world”. [Schuster- Holzamnur, Handbuch xur Bibl. Gesch.7 II 549.)
3. The ninth hour. Till three o’clock in the afternoon.
4. Eli, Eli. Jesus had borne all His torments and insults without uttering a word. The impression might have been thereby given that though, as was the case with so many of the holy martyrs, He was outwardly tormented, He was inwardly full of joy and consolation. This opinion would be quite wrong. The terrible darkness that covered the whole earth was but a weak picture of the more terrible darkness and absence of all comfort which reigned in the Heart of Jesus. As His bodily sufferings increased, so did His Soul become more and more oppressed by the burden of sin which He had taken on Himself, and by the ingratitude of His people. His divine nature left it to His human nature to endure all this pain of soul and body, until, deprived of all help and consolation, His Soul sank into the feeling of being abandoned by God — the greatest of all sufferings for any soul which loves God. In order to make known this full measure of His interior and invisible pain, and with it the greatness of His love for us, He cried aloud to His heavenly Father: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me!”
5. I thirst. The loss of Blood suffered by Jesus, first on the Mount of Olives, then when He was scourged, and finally on the Cross, must have produced the most violent thirst. The first cry of a soldier lying wounded on the battle-field is, not to have his wounds dressed, but for some cooling drink. Moreover, the wounds of Jesus, being exposed to the open air, were- inflamed, and caused a burning pain. He cried aloud: “I thirst”, to show us that He was not spared even this suffering. Even as the sense of abandonment by God was the greatest pain to His Soul, so was this raging internal fire the climax of His corporal sufferings.
6. His lips. That He might at least moisten His parched lips.
7. Consummated, i. e. the work of Redemption.
8. A loud voice. This loud cry was miraculous, as was everything which surrounded and accompanied the death of Jesus. We who are of the earth die speechless; but He who came to this earth from heaven died, crying with a loud voice, to show that He had triumphed over death. In a general way men lose their strength before they die, and the tongue usually refuses its service, for those who are dying can either not speak at all, or else very feebly. But Jesus cried out His last words with a loud, far-sounding voice. It was as if death did not dare to lay hold of the Author of life, until He Himself bade it come. This loud cry was something so surprising that the bystanders, and especially the centurion, were deeply struck by it. In fact, He who had the strength to cry out so loudly, had the strength to go on living, and when He died, it was only because He willed to die.
9. Bowing down. When the soul leaves the body, the head sinks down on the breast, because the muscles have no more power to hold it up; but Jesus, before He died, voluntarily bowed His Head in token of obedience and resignation to His Father’s will.
10. Behold. This word implies that the following wonders occurred at the very moment when Jesus died.
11. The veil. Which separated the Sanctuary from the Holy of Holies. The hand of God tore the veil in two, and the Holy of Holies, into which even the High Priest was only allowed to enter once a year, was exposed to the gaze of everyone.
12. The rocks. Especially on Mount Calvary.
    There exists to this day on Mount Calvary a deep cleft twenty feet broad, about which a Protestant explorer, after having examined, it writes thus: “I am convinced that this cleft was the result of no ordinary or natural earthquake, the shock of which might have rent the strata on which the mass of rock rests. Such a fissure would have shown the line of stratum, the rent would have occurred at the weakest part; but here, on the contrary, the rock is rent obliquely, and the fissure crosses the line of stratum in a wonderful and unnatural manner. It is evident that the rent is the effect of a miracle, such as neither nature nor art could produce. I thank God, therefore, who brought me here to behold this witness to His miraculous power, which so clearly reveals the Divinity of Jesus Christ.” [Schuster- Helza miner, Handbuch rur Bibl. Gesch.7 II 552).
13. The graves. Which were hewn in the rocks.
14. The Saints. The souls of the departed just rose and appeared to many at the time of the Resurrection of Christ.
15. Afraid. All the marvels that accompanied our Lord’s Death, and especially His loud cry as He gave up the ghost, made a deep impression on the Roman centurion and soldiers, who were keeping watch over Him. The soldiers had seen many people die, but never had they witnessed such a Death as this. They confessed that Jesus was “a just man” (and therefore innocent) and “the Son of God”, and they were “seized with fear”, because they knew they had crucified an innocent Man, and hence they dreaded the punishment of God.
16. Sight. The people who had flocked to see the Crucifixion of Jesus, and who had scoffed at Him.
17. Striking their breasts. As a sign of compunction for having crucified and insulted Jesus.
18. The Sabbath. This Sabbath was doubly holy, being a “great Sabbath-Day”, as it came in the paschal week.
19. Broke. If one who had been crucified had to be taken down from the cross before he was dead, his arms and legs were broken with a club, and then, out of so-called mercy, he was pierced through the heart with a lance.
20. Pierced His side. The opening made by the lance was so wide and deep that Thomas was able to put his hand in it (see chapter LXXXI). The spear reached the Sacred Heart of Jesus and pierced it through, for the intention was to inflict an absolutely mortal wound, supposing that Jesus had been still alive. But there was no life left in our Crucified Lord, as was proved to the soldiers by the outpouring of blood and water, which was a clear sign of death. To the four sacred wounds which Jesus bore in His Hands and Feet, there was now added a fifth, in His Side. This was about four o’clock in the afternoon. The bodies of the two thieves were thrown into an empty pit near at hand, and the Sacred Body of our Lord would have been thrown in there likewise had not His disciples, in union with His holy Mother, provided another and more honourable burial for it.
21. Blood and water. The water and the blood that flowed from the Side of Jesus are figures of two great Sacraments; the blood referring to the Holy Eucharist, and the water to Holy Baptism.
22. Arimathea. A town to the north-west of Jerusalem (see Map).
23. The council. Or the Sanhedrin. Scripture says that "he had not consented to their counsel and doings” against Jesus, "because he was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly, for fear of the Jews”. Now, however, he came forward openly as a disciple of the Crucified One, and besought Pilate that he might take away the Body of Jesus.
24. Nicodemus. "Who at the first came to Jesus by night” (see chapter XV). Nicodemus helped Joseph both to take down our Lord’s Body from the Cross, and to bury it. It stands to reason that our Lord’s holy Mother, as also St. John and Mary Magdalen were there.
25. Took down. And laid Him in the arms and on the knee of His Mother. His Head rested on her breast as it used to do in the days of His infancy, no longer, however, in sleep, but in death. Mary contemplated the countless wounds of her beloved Son with unspeakable and silent grief. Magdalen fell on her knees, and for the second time (see chapter XXV) clung to, kissed, and wept over the Feet of her Lord. Then Joseph and Nicodemus took the Body from the Mother’s arms, wrapped it in a new clean linen cloth, inside which they laid about a hundred pounds’ weight of sweet smelling spices, myrrh and aloes. They postponed the real embalming of the Body to another day, for time failed them now, as the Sabbath began with the setting of the sun.
26. The sepulchre, or cave in the rock, was about fifty paces from the spot of the Crucifixion. It was hewn out of the solid rock, and consisted of an outer cave,
27. The chief priests. When they learnt how honourably Jesus had been buried, their suspicions were aroused. They did not believe that Jesus could really rise from the dead, but the badness of their own hearts made them suspect that the disciples would steal His Body.
28. Guards. Of Roman soldiers. A guard usually consisted of sixteen men, divided into watches of four, each watch having to keep guard for three hours.
29. Sealed. Our Lord’s enemies could not content themselves with an ordinary guard. They could not trust the soldiers implicitly, and feared that they might be suborned by the disciples of Jesus, and allow’ these latter to steal the Body. To guard against this they sealed the stone which closed the entrance to the sepulchre, by stretching a cord across it, the two ends of which were secured by seals.