Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of John 19:28

After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.

28 30. The two words from the Cross, ‘I Thirst,’ ‘It is Finished’

28. After this ] See on Joh 19:38.

knowing ] Comp. Joh 13:1.

were now accomplished ] Rather, are already finished. The very same word is used here as in Joh 19:30, and this identity must be preserved in translation.

that the scripture, &c.] Many critics make this depend on ‘are already finished,’ in order to avoid the apparent contradiction between all things being already finished and something still remaining to be accomplished. But this construction is somewhat awkward. It is better to connect ‘that fulfilled’ with ‘saith,’ especially when Psa 69:21 speaks so plainly of the thirst. The apparent contradiction almost disappears when we remember that the thirst had been felt sometime before it was expressed. All things were finished, including the thirst; but Christ alone knew this. In order that the prophecy might be accomplished, it was necessary that He should make known His thirst. ‘Brought to its due end’ or ‘made perfect’ is the natural meaning of the very unusual expression translated ‘fulfilled.’

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

See the notes at Mat 27:46-50.

That the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst – See Psa 69:21. Thirst was one of the most distressing circumstances attending the crucifixion. The wounds were highly inflamed, and a raging fever was caused, usually, by the sufferings on the cross, and this was accompanied by insupportable thirst. See the notes at Mat 27:35. A Mameluke, or Turkish officer, was crucified, it is said in an Arabic manuscript recently translated, on the banks of the Barada River, under the castle of Damascus. He was nailed to the cross on Friday, and remained until Sunday noon, when he died. After giving an account of the crucifixion, the narrator proceeds: I have heard this from one who witnessed it; and he thus remained until he died, patient and silent, without wailing, but looking around him to the right and the left, upon the people. But he begged for water, and none was given him; and the hearts of the people were melted with compassion for him, and with pity on one of Gods creatures, who, yet a boy, was suffering under so grievous a trial. In the meantime the water was flowing around him, and he gazed upon it, and longed for one drop of it; and he complained of thirst all the first day, after which he was silent, for God gave him strength – Wisemans Lectures, pp. 164, 165, ed.

Joh 19:30

It is finished – The sufferings and agonies in redeeming man are over. The work long contemplated, long promised, long expected by prophets and saints, is done. The toils in the ministry, the persecutions and mockeries, and the pangs of the garden and the cross, are ended, and man is redeemed. What a wonderful declaration was this! How full of consolation to man! And how should this dying declaration of the Saviour reach every heart and affect every soul!

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

Joh 19:28-29

After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished that the Scriptures might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst

A word from the cross

1. Our Lords seven words from the cross, have in all ages been very dear to the Church. There is nothing strange in this. Had it been but some earthly monarch, great, wise and good, would not his latest words, or words uttered at some notable crisis, be accounted a precious legacy? But what king, what moment like this?

2. That the words should be thus exactly seven, the sacred and mystical number is not without its significance. No evangelist records them all; every evangelist some. St. John alone records the briefest of them all; only one word in the original. It is the only utterance which contains any allusion to Christs bodily anguish. He has from His cross a word of intercession on behalf of His enemies; a word of grace for an enemy turned into a friend; a word of tender and thoughtful love for His mother; a word of triumph as He contemplates the near consummation of His work; a word of affiance on His Father and God; yes, too, and His souls agony has claimed one mysterious utterance for itself.

3. And even this word was not wrung out from Him by any overpowering necessity. He would not have spoken it, if He had not known that this was one of the things which were foretold concerning Him. The Scriptures referred to are no doubt Psa 22:1-31. and Psa 69:4. Physicians assure us that all the worst which we could imagine would be but a feeble and remote approach to His sufferings from thirst. Consider all which during the last few hours He had gone through. There is no suffering comparable to that of an unassuaged thirst, such as everything here was caculated to arouse. Those who have wandered over a fresh battlefield inform us that the one cry of the sufferers there is for water; all other agony being forgotten in this. The cry for water swallows up every other cry.

I. WHAT A LESSON OF COMFORT DOES THIS UTTERANCE CONTAIN! We want a Saviour, at least in our times of trial and suffering, not Himself untouched with the same, who can have a fellow-feeling with those who suffer, in that Ha Himself has suffered first. And such a Saviour we are assured that we have. He was God; yet He did not take refuge in His divinity when the stress of the trial grew sharp and strong. There was no make believe in the matter. As He had known slighter accesses of this human infirmity, when, for instance, at Jacobs well, so now He endured the fiercest access of it. He who avoided not this, we may be sure, avoided none of the weaknesses and woes of our fallen humanity.

II. WHAT A CONSTANTLY RECURRING TEMPTATION BESETS EVERY ONE OF US IN THE NECESSARY REFRESHMENT AND REPARATION OF THE DAILY WASTE OF THE BODY. How easily we come to attach too much importance to what we shall eat and what we shall drink; and, though guilty, it may be, of no excess in the eyes of others, yet to burden and clog the spirit through over-much allowing and indulging the flesh! How easily in this way our table may become a snare to us. It is not for nothing that our warning examples of those who sinned, seduced by temptations of appetite, are scattered through all the Scripture. The first sin of all was a sin of this character. It is for a mess of pottage that Esau sells his birthright. No sins of the children of Israel in the wilderness are so frequent as these. Surely, if we would overcome these, the power to do this must be found, where all other power is to be found, in the Cross of Christ. And we need this help. The whole mechanism of social life is at this day, for the higher classes of society, so finished and elaborate, that they are very little trained or disciplined to meet small annoyances, disappointments, and defeats of appetite. Great danger, therefore, there is that those, who would perhaps have borne some great trial bravely, should be immoderately disturbed by these small ones. But how will the Cross of Christ put to silence these petty discontents.

III. CONSIDER WHO IT WAS WHO SPAKE THOSE WORDS. We have seen in them the evidence that He was Man, but He was also God. Surely when we would stir up these cold hearts of ours to love Him better and to serve Him more, it is well that we should bring this before our mind, that He had been in the form of God from eternity, who had now made Himself so poor for us that He was content to ask and to receive a boon from one of the unworthiest of His creatures. He who exclaimed now, I thirst, was the same who had made the sea and the dry land, who held the ocean in the hollow of His hand. All streams and fountains, all wells and waterbrooks, and the rivers that run among the hills, were His, who now thirsted as probably no other child of man ever had.

IV. AND WHEREFORE DOES HE THIRST? That our portion may not be with Him who, tormented in that flame, craved in vain a drop of water for His burning tongue; that we may receive of Him that gift of the water of life which shall cause us never to thirst any more; that He may lead us at last to that pure river of the water of life, etc.; that He might see us thirsting after God. When He sees this in us, then He beholds the fruit of the travail of His soul, and is satisfied. (Abp. Trench.)

The shortest of the seven cries

We shall look upon these words as

I. THE ENSIGN OF CHRISTS TRUE HUMANITY. Angels cannot thirst. A phantom, as some have called him, could not suffer in this fashion. Thirst is a common-place misery, such as may happen to peasants or beggars; it is no royal grief; Jesus is brother to the poorest. Our Lord, however, endured thirst to an extreme degree, for it was the thirst of death, and more the thirst of one whose death was for every man. Believing this

1. Let us tenderly feel how very near akin to us our Lord has become. You have been parched with fever as He was, and gasped out, I thirst. Your path runs hard by that of your Master. Next time your fevered lips thus murmur, you may say, Those are sacred words, for my Lord spake in that fashion. While we admire His condescension let our thoughts turn with delight to His sure sympathy.

2. Let us cultivate the spirit of resignation, for we may well rejoice to carry a cross which His shoulders have borne before us. If our Master said, I thirst, do we expect every day to drink of streams from Lebanon? Shall the servant be above his Master? &c.

3. Let us resolve to shun no denials, but rather court them that we may be conformed to His image. May we not be half ashamed of our pleasures when He says, I thirst?

II. THE TOKEN OF HIS SUFFERING SUBSTITUTION.

1. My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? points to the anguish of His soul; I thirst expresses the torture of His body; and they were both needful. The pangs that are due to law are of both kinds, touching both heart and flesh.

2. The present effect of sin is thirst, dissatisfaction. Now Christ standing in the stead of the ungodly suffers thirst as a type of His enduring the result of sin. More solemn still is the reflection that thirst will also be the eternal result of sin. Father Abraham, send Lazarus, &c.

3. He had no sooner said I thirst, and sipped the vinegar, than He shouted, It is finished; and all was over; and our great Deliverers thirst was the sign of His having smitten the last foe.

III. A TYPE OF MANS TREATMENT OF HIS LORD.

1. It was a confirmation of the Scripture testimony with regard to mans natural enmity to God. According to modern thought man is a very fine and noble creature, struggling to become better. But such is not the Scripture estimate. At the first there was no room for Him at the inn, and at the last there was no water for Him to drink; but when He thirsted they gave Him vinegar. Manhood, left to itself, rejects, crucifies, and mocks the Christ of God.

2. Have we not often given Him vinegar to drink? Did we not do so years ago before we knew Him? We gave Him our tears and then grieved Him with our sins. Nor does the grief end here, for our best works, feelings, prayers, have been tart and sour with sin.

IV. THE MYSTICAL EXPRESSION OF THE DESIRE OF HIS HEART.

1. His heart was thirsting to save men. This thirst had been on Him early. Wist ye not that I must be about My Fathers business? I have a baptism to be baptized with, &c., and when on the cross the work was almost done His thirst could not be assuaged till He could say, It is finished.

2. He thirsts after the love of His people. Call to mind His complaint in Isa 5:1-30, It brought forth wild grapes–vinegar. According to the sacred canticle of love (Solomons Son 5:1-16.), we learn that when He drank in those olden times it was in the garden of His Church that He was refreshed.

3. He thirsts for communion with His people, not because you can do Him good, but because He can do you good. He thirsts to bless you and to receive your grateful love in return.

V. THE PATTERN OF OUR DEATH WITH HIM. Know ye not that ye are crucified together with Christ? Well, then, what means this cry, I thirst, but this, that we should thirst too

1. After Christ. Certain philosophers have said that they love the pursuit of truth even better than the knowledge of truth. I differ from them, but, next to the actual enjoyment of my Lords presence, I love to hunger and to thirst after Him.

2. For the souls of our fellow-men. Thirst to have your children, your workpeople, your class, saved.

3. As for yourselves, thirst after perfection. Hunger and thirst after righteousness, for you shall be filled. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The fifth word from the cross

Wrung from Christ by the most agonizing of pains. Teaches us that Christ was no stoic. Psa 22:15, fulfilled. Not bodily thirst only. The soul sympathized with the body, and through it betrayed its deepest wants. These words

I. Betray AN IRREPRESSIBLE LONGING FOR HUMAN SYMPATHY. Learn this Psa 69:20. The sympathy of Peter rejected because mistimed; that of the daughters of Jerusalem because misdirected. Here, and in Gethsemane, Christ, as a true Man, felt the want of it.

II. Reveal THE DEPTH OF THAT HUMILIATION TO WHICH CHRIST DESCENDED IN ACCOMPLISHING HUMAN REDEMPTION. All the resources of the universe were at His disposal. Had He not miraculously fed the multitude, &c., and proclaimed, If any man thirst, &c. That the Son of the Highest should stoop to ask aid from His executioners proves the voluntariness and greatness of His humiliation.

III. Form THE CLIMAX TO THE PRECEDING CRY OF DISTRESS. My God, My God, &c. Not the Fathers approval, but the consciousness of it, obscured for a moment. Christ longed to hear the familiar words of approval, This is My beloved Son. Two dense clouds intervened.

1. Combined hosts of darkness.

2. Accumulated load of human guilt (Psa 69:1-3).

IV. Express THE SAVIOURS YEARNING FOR HUMAN PENITENCE AND LOVE. He looked upon the multitude, but found no sign of relenting. When He sat on the well He said, Give Me to drink, and meant, Give Me thy heart–so here. (W. Forsyth, M. A.)

The thirst of Christ

Considered in its

I. PHYSICAL ASPECT.

1. Its producing cause–bodily pain and exhaustion.

2. Its significance–that Christ was very Man.

II. SPIRITUAL ASPECT.

1. Its objects. Christ thirsted for

(1) The love of men.

(2) The salvation of men.

(3) Reunion with His Father.

III. PROPHETIC ASPECT.

1. Its expression and import–that the Scripture might be fulfilled.

2. Its significance–that Christ was very God.

IV. PRACTICAL ASPECT. It teaches us

1. To bear suffering with patience and submission.

2. That patience in suffering is quite distinct from stoical endurance.

3. To abstain from fleshly lusts.

4. The blackness of human ingratitude.

5. The unselfishness of Divine love.

6. For what man should thirst.

(1) For reconciliation to God through Christ, by quenching the thirst of His dear Son in accepting His offered salvation, and turning to Him with love, sorrow, and repentance.

(2) For the communion of Christs body and blood in the perpetual memorial of His precious death. (Thirty Thousand Thoughts.)

Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar.–This vessel of the ordinary sour wine drunk by the Roman soldiers was placed near in order to be given to those who were crucified. Thirst was always an accompaniment of death by crucifixion, and that the vessel of wine was prepared for this purpose is probable by the mention of the sponge and the hyssop. This latter detail is peculiar to John. Bochart thinks that the hyssop was marjoram, or some plant like it, and he is borne out by ancient tradition. The stalks from a foot to a foot and a half high would be sufficient to reach to the cross (Archdeacon Watkins.)

Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell

Verse 28. I thirst.] The scripture that referred to his drinking the vinegar is Ps 69:21. The fatigue which he had undergone, the grief he had felt, the heat of the day, and the loss of blood, were the natural causes of this thirst. This he would have borne without complaint; but he wished to give them the fullest proof of his being the Messiah, by distinctly marking how every thing relative to the Messiah, which had been written in the prophets, had its complete fulfilment in him.

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

David said, Psa 69:21, to signify his enemies multiplying afflictions upon him, They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink; which he spake metaphorically. Part of these words were without a figure literally fulfilled in Christ, who was the Son of David; for he crying out upon the cross that he thirsted, there being no other liquor at hand, or this being set on purpose for this end, they dip a spunge in it, and give it to him to drink; whether to stupify his sense, or to prolong his life in those torments, or barely to quench his thirst, is hard to determine. It is probable that it was such a kind of refreshment as they allowed to ordinary malefactors in his circumstances, the particulars of which usage we are not able to determine.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

28-30. After this, Jesus knowingthat all things were now accomplishedthat is, the moment forthe fulfilment of the last of them; for there was one other smallparticular, and the time was come for that too, in consequence of theburning thirst which the fevered state of His frame occasioned (Ps22:15).

that the scripture (Ps69:21).

might be fulfilled saith, Ithirst. Now there was set a vessel full of vinegaron the offerof the soldiers’ vinegar, see on Joh19:24.

and they“one ofthem,” (Mt 27:48).

Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

After this,…. After he had committed his mother to the care of John, which was about the sixth hour, before the darkness came over the land: and three hours after this was the following circumstance, which was not without the previous knowledge of Christ:

Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished; or just upon being accomplished, were as good as finished; and as they were to be, would be in a very short time; even all things relating to his sufferings, and the circumstances of them, which were afore appointed by God, and foretold in prophecy, and of which he had perfect knowledge:

that the Scripture might be fulfilled: might appear to have its accomplishment, which predicted the great drought and thirst that should be on him, Ps 22:15 and that his enemies at such a time would give him vinegar to drink, Ps 69:21

saith, I thirst; which was literally true of him, and may be also understood spiritually of his great thirst and eager desire after the salvation of his people.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

Are now finished ( ). Perfect passive indicative of . See same form in verse 30. As in 13:1, where Jesus is fully conscious (knowing, ) of the meaning of his atoning death.

Might be accomplished (). First aorist passive subjunctive of rather than the usual (verse 24) with . John sees the thirst of Jesus in Ps 69:21f. Jesus, of course, did not make the outcry in any mechanical way. Thirst is one of the severest agonies of crucifixion. For the “perfecting” of the Messiah by physical suffering see Heb 2:10; Heb 5:7.

Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament

Were accomplished [] . Rev., with stricter rendering of the perfect tense, are finished. Finished corresponds better with it is finished, ver. 30. This sentence may be taken with the preceding one, or with that which follows.

Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament

1) “After this, Jesus knowing,” (meta touto eidos ho lesous) “After this, Jesus perceiving,” or knowing, because He knows or comprehends all things, is cognizant of all things and what is in man, Joh 21:17; Joh 2:23-24.

2) “That all things were now accomplished,” (hoti ede panta tetelestai) “That at this time, moment, or point, all things had been and were now fulfilled,” Joh 17:4; Joh 19:30.

3) “That the scripture might be fulfilled,” (hina teteiothe he graphe) “in order that the scripture (particular scripture) might be fulfilled,” Psa 69:21; Joh 19:24; Joh 19:36-37, for they are “true from the beginning,” and “can not be broken,” Joh 10:35; They shall all be fulfilled, Mat 5:17-19; Act 13:29.

4) “Saith, I thirst.” (legei dipso) “Says (or said) I thirst,” after which they gave Him vinegar to drink, Mat 27:48; Mar 15:36.

Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary

28. Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished. John purposely passes by many things which are related by the other three Evangelists. He now describes the last act, which was an event of the greatest importance.When John says that a vessel was placed there, he speaks of it as a thing that was customary. There has been much controversy on this subject; but I agree with those who think (and, indeed, the custom is proved by histories) that it was a kind of beverage usually administered for the purpose of accelerating the death of wretched malefactors, when they had undergone sufficient torture (176) Now, it ought to be remarked, that Christ does not ask any thing to drink till all things have been accomplished; and thus he testified his infinite love towards us, and the inconceivable earnestness of his desire to promote our salvation. No words can fully express the bitterness of the sorrows which he endured; and yet he does not desire to be freed from them, till the justice of God has been satisfied, and till he has made a perfect atonement. (177)

But how does he say, that all things were accomplished, while the most important part still remained to be performed, that is, his death? Besides, does not his resurrection contribute to the accomplishment of our salvation? I answer, John includes those things which were immediately to follow. Christ had not yet died: and had not yet risen again; but he saw that nothing now remained to hinder him from going forward to death and resurrection. In this manner he instructs us, by his own example, to render perfect obedience, that we may not think it hard to live according to his good pleasure, even though we must languish in the midst of the most excruciating pains.

That the Scripture might be fulfilled. From what is stated by the other Evangelists, (Mat 27:48; Mar 15:23; Luk 23:36,) it may readily be concluded that the passage referred to is Psa 69:21,

They gave me gall for my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.

It is, undoubtedly, a metaphorical expression, and David means by it, not only that they refused to him the assistance which he needed, but that they cruelly aggravated his distresses. But there is no inconsistency in saying that what had been dimly shadowed out in David was more clearly exhibited in Christ: for thus we are enabled more fully to perceive the difference between truth and figures, when those things which David suffered, only in a figurative manner, are distinctly and perfectly manifested in Christ. To show that he was the person whom David represented, Christ chose to drink vinegar; and he did so for the purpose of strengthening our faith.

I thirst. Those who contrive a metaphorical meaning for the word thirst, as if he meant that, instead of a pleasant and agreeable beverage, they gave him bitterness, as if they intended to flay his throat, (178) are more desirous to be thought ingenious than to promote true edification; and, indeed, they are expressly refuted by the Evangelist, who says that Christ asked for vinegar when he was near death; from which it is evident that he did not desire any luxuries. (179)

(176) “ On dispute diversement de ceci; mais je m’accorde a l’opinion de ceux qui disent (comme aussi I’llsage enest approuvee par les histoires) que e’estoit une sorte de bruvage, duquel coustumierement on usoit pour avaneer la mort des poures malfaiteurs, apres qu’ils avoyent este assez tormentez.”

(177) The French copy gives an additional clause to this sentence: — “ Comme s’il s’estoit oublid jusqu’k ce qu’ayant satisfait au payement de nos offenses, il declare qu’il n’est pas insensible, mais que l’amour qu’il nous portoit a surmontd toutes les angoisses;” — “As if he had forgotten his own concerns till he had given full satisfaction for our sins, he declares that he is not incapable of feeling, but that the love which he bore to us rose superior to all the pains which he endured.”

(178) “ Comme s’il vouloit dire qu’au lieu de bruvage doux et aimable, on luy a donna de l’amertume, cornroe pour lug escorcher le gosicr.”

(179) “ En quoy fi’ appert qu’il n’estoit question de nulles, delices.”

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

IT IS FINISHED

Text: Joh. 19:28-37

28

After this Jesus, knowing that all things are now finished, that the scripture might be accomplished, saith, I thirst.

29

There was set there a vessel full of vinegar: so they put a sponge full of the vinegar upon hyssop, and brought it to his mouth.

30

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit.

31

The Jews therefore, because it was the Preparation, that the bodies should not remain on the cross upon the sabbath (for the day of that sabbath was a high day), asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away.

32

The soldiers therefore came, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other that was crucified with him:

33

but when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs:

34

howbeit one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and straightway there came out blood and water.

35

And he that hath seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye also may believe.

36

For these things came to pass, that the scripture might be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken

37

And again another scripture saith, They shall look on him whom they pierced.

Queries

a.

What did Jesus mean, It is finished?

b.

Why ask that His legs be broken?

c.

What is the significance of the blood and water?

Paraphrase (Harmony)

And it was now about the sixth hour, and a darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, the suns light failing: And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? And some of them that stood by, when they heard it said, Behold, he calleth Elijah; After this Jesus, knowing that all things are now finished, that the scriptures might be accomplished, saith, I thirst. There was set there a vessel full of vinegar; so straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, upon hyssop, and brought it to his mouth, and gave him to drink. And the rest said, Let be; let us see whether Elijah cometh to save him. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he cried with a loud voice, It is finished: and he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said this, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
And behold the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake; and the rocks were rent; and the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised; and coming forth out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered into the holy city and appeared unto many.
Now the centurion, who stood by over against him, and they that were with him watching Jesus, that he gave up the ghost; when they saw the earthquake, and the things that were done, feared exceedingly, and glorified God, saying, Certainly this was a righteous man. Truly this was the Son of God.
And all the multitudes that came together to this sight when they beheld the things that were done, returned smiting their breasts. And all his acquaintance, and many women were there beholding from afar: among whom were both Mary Magdalene, and Mary the Mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome; the mother of the sons of Zebedee, who when he was in Galilee, followed him, and ministered unto him; and many other women that came up with him unto Jerusalem.
The Jews therefore, because it was the Preparation, that the bodies should not remain on the cross upon the sabbath (for the day of that sabbath was a high day), asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away. The soldiers therefore came, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other that was crucified with him: but when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs: howbeit one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and straightway there came out blood and water. And he that hath seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye also may believe. For these things came to pass, that the scripture might be fulfilled, a bone of him shall not be broken. And again another scripture saith, They shall look upon him whom they pierced.

Summary

The awful chasm of sin separating God and man now bridged by His perfect sacrifice, Jesus gives up His spirit as the body is put to death. The soldiers pierce His side so there can be no question about His death. All this fulfills what was prophecied concerning the Messiah by the prophets.

Comment

The Synoptics include many incidental words and scenes of the crucifixion which John has seen fit to omit. John omits the following:

a.

Jesus cry My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? and the reaction of the bystanders (cf. Mat. 27:46-47; Mar. 15:34-35)

b.

The words of Jesus, Into thy hands I commit my spirit. (cf. Luk. 23:46)

c.

The rending of the veil of the Temple and the resurrected dead walking in Jerusalem. (cf. Mat. 27:51-53; Mar. 14:38)

d.

The words of the Roman centurion. (cf. Mat. 27:54; Mar. 14:39; Luk. 23:47)

e.

The multitudes returning to Jerusalem smiting their breasts. (cf. Luk. 23:48)

John, however, is the only gospel writer who includes the account of the breaking of the legs of the two thieves and the soldier piercing the side of the dead body of Jesus. There is a disputed variation which would cause Mat. 27:49 to read, And another took a spear and pierced his side, and there came out water and blood. But the manuscript evidence is so scant and insignificant that the translators of the K.J.V. and the A.S.V. and the R.S.V. have all omitted the reading from the text.

In Joh. 19:28 we are informed that even on the cross and at the very apex of His suffering that which was uppermost in His mind was the fulfillment of all that the scriptures had prophesied concerning Him! When Jesus knew, that all things are now finished, He looked forward, in omniscience, to the complete work of redemption which would include even the burial and resurrection and ascension, (cf. Joh. 1:42; Joh. 1:47-48; Joh. 2:24-25; Joh. 5:6; Joh. 6:64; Joh. 16:30; Joh. 21:17).

The entire ministry of Jesus and the work of redemption from His incarnation to the sufferings, death, burial, resurrection and establishment of the church and preaching the gospel to the Gentiles is all prophecied in the Old Testament (cf. Luk. 24:43-49 and Act. 13:29). For any reader who desires more information on the prophecies fulfilled in the ministry of Jesus we recommend The Bible Handbook, by Halley, published by Zondervan.

When Jesus said, I thirst, Joh. 19:28 seems to imply that in the very speaking of the words the scriptures which prophesied His redemptive work were being fulfilled. This being true it would seem that there was a deeper significance to His words than merely desiring to slake a physical thirst. Jesus suffered physically upon the cross and there is no denying that! But His real agony was the agony of the second death! Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in him (2Co. 5:21). The second death (eternal death) in Hell is eternal separation from God the FatherJesus suffered and experienced that on the cross and cried out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? The second death includes torment and thirst (cf. Luk. 16:23-24)Jesus suffered the torments of evil men and thirst upon the cross. The second death includes darkness (the outer darkness) and there was darkness over the whole land when Jesus was crucified.

When Jesus died upon the cross the penalty and sentence of the Law was paid and thus the Law was nailed to the cross (cf. Eph. 2:11-22; Col. 2:8-15). When Jesus died upon the cross and came forth from the tomb and sent forth the Spirit to proclaim the way of salvation all the promises of the covenant made to the patriarchs and reiterated in the Law and the prophets reached their climax (cf. Gal. 3:15-29; Act. 3:11-26) thus the Old Testament (covenant) has been fulfilled, abrogated (in its entirety 2Co. 3:1-18) and superseded. This is why Jesus said, It is finished!

The vessel full of vinegar was probably a sour wine which the soldiers were in the habit of drinking. The soldiers had offered Him a mixture (probably as an anesthetic) of wine and myrrh just before they nailed Him to His cross (Mat. 27:34). This vinegar was touched to His lips and then He bowed His head and gave up His spirit, crying, It is finished! and, Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit! Note the emphasis on His death as a voluntary act. He gave up His spirit!

The Jews were meticulously careful that the Law should not be broken by allowing a body to hang upon a tree overnight (cf. Deu. 21:23). And it would be even worse for such a violation to occur on the Sabbath (the day of Preparation being Friday). This was Friday evening and the sun was about to setwhen the sun went down it would be the Sabbath. It would also be a very special sabbath since it occurred within the Passover week. They were extremely scrupulous about this detail while they blatantly violated the weightier matters of the law such as justice, mercy and faith (cf. Mat. 23:23). There was not one ounce of justice or mercy or faith in them when they criminally attacked Jesus and tried Him illegally and sentenced Him on the basis of bribed witnesses.

The Romans employed a very grim method to put to death those who lingered too long after having been crucifiedthey smashed their limbs (legs) with an iron mallet until they died. One contemporary doctor has said, The shock attending such cruel injury to bones can be the coup de grace causing death. This was applied to the two malefactors crucified with Jesus but the soldiers, seeing that Jesus was already dead, did not break His legs. This also fulfilled a prophecy made in Num. 9:12 and Exo. 12:46.

The emphasis John wishes to make when he records his eyewitness account that the legs of Jesus were not broken and the piercing of His side and the blood and water flowing is the actual death of Jesus. Jesus did not swoonHe died a physical death. What caused His death is not of primary importance to John. He is not interested in the medical diagnosis or autopsy. Of primary importance is the eyewitnessed, historically verified fact that He did die.

There is one theory as to the medical cause of His deaththis is the theory of death due to a broken or ruptured heart. This theory is discussed in the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia article entitled Blood and Water, in Hendriksens commentary on Johns gospel, in an article by R. C. Foster in the Christian Standard, April 10, 1965. This is the theory that Jesus died from a ruptured heart in consequence of great mental agony and sorrow. Hendriksen says, Such a death would be almost instantaneous, and the blood flowing into the pericardium (the sac or membrane surrounding the heart) would coagulate into the red clot (blood) and the limpid serum (water). This blood and water would then be released by the spear-thrust. But to quote R. C. Foster, We should rejoice that the physical cause of Jesus death is not a matter of faith. At the center of the gospel is the historic fact, Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures (1Co. 15:3).

There are some commentators who believe that the blood and water which flowed from His side are to be connected symbolically to the three witnesses of 1Jn. 5:6-8. We believe, however that the three witnesses of Johns first epistle concern baptism (Jesus was baptized and gave baptism as a command to be obeyed by all who desire salvation), the Lords Supper (which is a remembrance of the blood of Christ shed for our sins) and the Word of God (which is the Word of the Spirit bearing witness here on earth). The testimony of John in Joh. 19:35 is simply a re-emphasis that he, John, was an eyewitness to the actuality of the death of Jesus, The significance of the blood and water is to show that there was no possibility of any life remaining in the One who had been pierced.

In a tract entitled, A Study in Prophecy, published by Hermon House, 56 Second Ave., New York 3, N. Y., there are listed all the prophecies fulfilled in the ministry of Christ. We list here only those prophecies which were fulfilled specifically at the crucifixion:

a.

Nailed to the cross (Psa. 22:16; Joh. 19:18; Joh. 20:25).

b.

Forsaken by God (Psa. 22:1; Mat. 27:46)

c.

Mocked (Psa. 22:7-8; Mat. 27:39-44)

d.

Gall and Vinegar given Him to drink (Psa. 69:21; Mat. 27:34)

e.

Garments parted and lots cast (Psa. 22:18; Mat. 27:35)

f.

Numbered with transgressors (Isa. 53:12; Mar. 15:27-28)

g.

Intercession for His murderers (Isa. 53:12; Luk. 23:34)

h.

His expiration (Isa. 53:12; Mat. 27:50)

i.

Not a bone of Him Broken (Exo. 12:46; Psa. 34:20; Joh. 19:33-36)

j.

Pierced (Zec. 12:10; Joh. 19:34-37)

k.

Buried with the rich (Isa. 53:9; Mat. 27:57-60).

The two points of emphasis made in this section (Joh. 19:28-37) are: (a) the physical death of Jesus was actual and complete; (b) His death was voluntary and according to foreknowledge and plan of God and fulfilled a number of prophecies made hundreds of years before.

Quiz

1.

Name some of the words and scenes of the crucifixion omitted by John.

2.

What did Jesus mean when He said, I thirst? Was it physical altogether?

3.

Did Jesus suffer anything beyond the physical pain upon the cross? Explain.

4.

What did He mean when He said, It is finished?

5.

Why were the Jews so concerned about Jesus hanging on the cross overnight?

6.

Is it possible that Jesus died of a broken heart? explain!

7.

What are the two major points of emphasis in this section?

Fuente: College Press Bible Study Textbook Series

(28) Comp. accounts of the darkness and death in Mat. 27:45-50; Mar. 15:33-39; Luk. 23:44-46.

Knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled.It is difficult to give the exact meaning of the words in English. In the original the words for accomplished and fulfilled are derived from the same root, and the latter word is not the ordinary formula of quotation which we have had, e.g., in Joh. 13:18 (see Note there). The Vulgate has Postea sciens Jesus quia omnia consummata sunt ut consummaretur Scriptural Perhaps the nearest English rendering is that all things were now completed that the Scripture might be accomplished. But then there arises the difficult question, Is this connected with the words which follow, or not? The margin assumes that it is, and refers to Psa. 69:21. On the other hand (1) St. Johns custom is to quote the fulfilment of Scripture as seen in the event after its occurrence; (2) he does not here use the ordinary words which accompany such a reference; (3) the actual meaning of knowing that all things were now accomplished seems to exclude the idea of a further accomplishment, and to refer to the whole life which was an accomplishment of Scripture; (4) the context of words as they occur in the Psalm (Joh. 19:22 et seq.) cannot be understood of our Lord. There seems to be good reason, therefore, for understanding the words that the Scripture might be completed, of the events of the whole life, and not of the words which immediately follow.

I thirst.He had refused the usual stupefying drink at the moment of crucifixion (comp. Notes on Mat. 27:34; Mat. 27:48), but now all has been accomplished, the moment of His departure is at hand, and He seeks relief from the physical agony of the thirst caused by His wounds.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

The thirst and death of Jesus, Joh 19:28-30.

28. After this That is, subsequent not merely to the event last narrated, but to all the events narrated. The last preceding event was the cry of Jesus, “Eloi, Eloi;” and the present furnishing of drink is parallel with Mat 27:48.

All things accomplished All his sufferings up to the now closing point.

Scripture fulfilled Some commentators refer this clause to what precedes; and the sense would then be that all things were accomplished in order to the fulfilment of Scripture. Stier more properly refers it to what follows; and the sense would then be that Jesus, in order to the fulfilment of Scripture, said, “I thirst.” We would, however, so extend as to include 29, 30. In order to the fulfilment of Scripture, Jesus, after the satisfaction of his predicted thirst, uttered the final “It is finished,” and expired.

I thirst The briefest but not least significant of the Lord’s utterances upon the cross. The reference may be to Psa 22:15, or rather to Psa 69:21: “They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” It must not be conceived that our Lord, in a servile way, directed his mind to the interpretation of Scripture in these agonizing moments; yet, in a full, calm, glorious consciousness, he trod the path foreknown of God. He acts in the full spirit of Psa 40:7: “Then said I, Lo, I come; in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God.” Hitherto in the great agonies of his soul there had been little thought for the pains of the body. His utterance, as Lange well says, “is like the words of a hero, to whose consciousness it now first occurs that his wounds are bleeding, and that he needs some invigoration after the heat of the conflict has been sustained.” And thirst is a deeper suffering than hunger. After the bloody sweat of Gethsemane, the sleepless night of his trial, the scourgings, the loss of blood, and the unknown mental agonies, the fluids of his system became exhausted, and the glorious sufferer has not, perhaps, strength to utter his cry of final triumph. Meekly, like a lamb bleating to its slaughterers, he utters the feeble expression of his need. He consents to receive the aid of his murderers. Invigorated in body by the natural supply, he hastens in spirit, with brief, rapid utterances, to the consummation.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

‘After this Jesus, knowing that all things are now finished that the Scripture might be accomplished, says “I thirst”.’

‘All things are now finished that the Scripture might be accomplished’ (compare Mat 26:56). We cannot even begin to comprehend the fullness of these words, nor the depth of the things that had to be accomplished. He had bruised the Serpent’s head (Gen 3:15), He had made Himself an offering for sin (Isa 53:10), He had been wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, He had borne in Himself the iniquity of us all (Isa 53:5-6), He had brought healing in His wings (Mal 4:2). He had made Himself the all-sufficient Redeemer of mankind (Isa 59:20; Jer 50:34). He had perfected for ever those who are being sanctified (Heb 10:14). To comment properly on this verse we would need to go through the Bible verse by verse and chapter by chapter to reveal all the ways in which He fulfilled them. But what mattered most was that all that had to be done had been done. Thus the specific Scripture in mind may have been Psa 22:31, suggested by the later cry ‘it is finished’.

Now He was free to think of His own needs. “I am thirsty”. Was this a plea for something to assuage His bodily need, or was it a cry to the Father in His longing for His Father’s presence (Psa 42:1), a longing that could only be satisfied when He was fully restored to His Father? He had experienced the sufferings and desolation of the world, and now He knew its thirst (see Psa 42:2, ‘My soul thirsts for God, for the living God’).

Many link ‘that the Scripture might be fulfilled’ with ‘I thirst’, but in our view it fits far better with the previous phrase (compare Mat 26:56). There is no example in John or anywhere in the New Testament where ‘that the Scripture might be fulfilled’ is followed by, ‘he says’. Always it is followed immediately by the direct quote or by ‘which says’.

For the context reference should be made to Psa 69:21 where the Psalmist says, ‘in my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink’, compare Joh 2:17 where the same Psalm is in mind.

The Psalmist in Psa 22:15 also knew this thirst. There is no question but that that Psalm figured heavily in thoughts about the crucifixion and that Jesus saw Himself as going through a similar experience to that of the Psalmist. He quoted the first verse, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mar 15:34; Mat 27:46), He quoted the last verse “It is finished” (‘he has done it’) – (Psa 22:30). He was scorned by the crowds (Psa 22:7), He was poured out like water and all His bones were out of joint (Psa 22:14), He declared His great thirst (Psa 22:15) and His clothes were divided up (Psa 22:18). But in neither case does the Psalmist specifically say, ‘I thirst’.

Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett

The death of Jesus:

v. 28. After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.

v. 29. Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar; and they filled a sponge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it to His mouth.

v. 30. When Jesus, therefore, had received the vinegar, He said, It is finished; and He bowed His head, and gave up the ghost.

Again and again the evangelists bring out this fact that the suffering and death of Jesus took place in accordance with the will and counsel of God and with the sayings of the prophets, through whom the Messiah spoke. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon when the most acute and piercing suffering of Jesus, when, during the darkness that covered the land, He had drunk the cup of the wrath of God over the sins of the world to the very dregs, was over. He had remained victor in the terrible battle; He had conquered all the enemies of mankind; He had accomplished all things, brought them to a successful close; He had gained the salvation of mankind. Here is a word of wonderful comfort for all believers, especially in the hours when the attacks of doubt are directed against the assurance of salvation. The redemption of mankind is complete; nothing remains to be done but to accept this fact and to place unwavering trust in the Savior. But there was still a word of Old Testament prophecy which had not yet found its fulfillment, and therefore Jesus, whose thirst had been intensified by the agony of soul which He had just endured, cried out: I thirst. See Psa 69:21. And just as He had foretold through the mouth of His Old Testament servant, it happened. There was a vessel there containing vinegar, of which they had offered Him a sip when they crucified Him, but in a form intended to act as a mild anesthetic. One of the soldiers now took a sponge, dipped it into the vinegar, attached it to a reed of hyssop, and held it up to the mouth of the Savior, thus relieving, at least in a small measure, the burning thirst attending the crucifixion, although it was in itself a bit of cruelty to offer Him this drink. But the Holy One of God patiently endured all the indignities, all the cruelties that were heaped upon Him. And now, the great work having been accomplished and even the last passage of Old Testament Scripture having been fulfilled, Jesus Himself made the announcement of the redemption’s completion by calling out: It is finished. All that the Messiah was to endure and suffer, everything that belongs to the work of salvation, was finished. Yea, the death of Christ itself was included in this statement, for He was now about to lay down His life in death, in His own power, of His own free will. He now bowed His head and gave up the spirit, delivered His soul into the hands of His heavenly Father. All this He did in His own power; for He did not die of exhaustion, as all the external circumstances of the story also indicate. Jesus died because He wanted to die. In the case of the ordinary human being, death is an unpleasant, disagreeable, terrible experience, from which man shrinks and flees. But Jesus wanted to die, He wanted to fulfill the word which He Himself had spoken, chap. 10:16, 17. The factor of willingness in the death of Jesus gives to it its value, makes it a sacrifice well pleasing to God. Mark also: The Man that died on the cross is not a mere man, but the Son of God, God Himself. Jesus, disposing of His own life as He willed it, Himself is God: This fact erases the guilt of the world; the great worth of the life which was given on Calvary makes it more than equivalent in value and ransom to all the sin and guilt of all men since the beginning of time and till the everlasting day begins.

Fuente: The Popular Commentary on the Bible by Kretzmann

Joh 19:28 . ] Not indefinitely later , but after this scene with Mary and John.

, . . .] as He was aware (Joh 13:1 ) that His death was already at hand, that consequently all was already accomplished, in order to bring the Scripture to fulfilment , in respect of the accomplishment of its predictions concerning His earthly work, He now still desires, at this goal of accomplishment, a refreshment, and says: I thirst . Accordingly, . is to be referred to ., as Cyril (?), Bengel, Michaelis, Semler, Thalem., van Hengel ( Annot . p. 62 ff.), Paulus, Tholuck, Hofmann, [248] Luthardt, Lange, Baeumlein, Scholten, Steinmeyer, have connected it, This is the correct construction, because . leaves us no room to think of a fulfilment of Scripture still remaining behind , and consequently excludes the connection of . . with ; because, further, is selected simply for the sake of its reference to . (it is the of Scripture, to which now nothing more is wanting ), and because John never makes the statement of purpose, “that the Scripture might be fulfilled,” precede the moment of fulfilment, and even where a single definite fact is the fulfilling element, always actually adduces the passage of Scripture in question (Joh 17:12 is a retrospective indication of a passage already before adduced ). Hence the ordinary interpretation must be given up (Chrysostom, Theophylact, Euth. Zigabenus, Ruperti, and many others, including Lcke, De Wette, Brckner, Strauss, B. Crusius, Baur, Ewald, Hengstenberg, Godet), that ., . . . refers to , so that it contains the scriptural ground of the thirst , to which Jesus gave expression, and of the drinking of the vinegar which was given to Him, and Psa 69:22 is the passage intended; where, however, the drinking of vinegar is the work of scorn and of malice, which would not be at all appropriate here , since it is simply the quenching of thirst immediately before death that is in question, without other and further background.

.] , Chrysostom; ( already ) points to the very early occurrence of His death (Nonnus: ).

[248] Weissag. u. Erf. II. p. 146. On the other hand, Hofmann, in the Schriftbew . II. 1, p. 314, has altered his views, and connects . . with .

Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary

DISCOURSE: 1725
OUR SAVIOURS DEATH

Joh 19:28-30. After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar: and they filled a spunge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it to his mouth. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.

NOTHING but Divine grace can change the hearts of men. Signs and wonders may alarm and terrify, and may produce a momentary conviction on the mind; but unless the Spirit of God work in and by them, they will leave the soul unhumbled and unrenewed. It is probable that the darkness which prevailed during the three last hours of our Saviours life, produced an awe upon the minds of all; but yet it wrought no permanent change on any: for, when our blessed Lord poured out his complaint respecting the dereliction of his soul, his enemies mocked and insulted him, pretending to understand him as calling Elijah to his aid, when they could not but know that he was crying to his God. We might as easily mistake the sense of the words, My God, My God, as they could mistake the import of Eli, Eli: the resemblance of the sounds was merely a pretext for venting the malice that reigned in their hearts. One more opportunity only remained for them to shew the enmity that was in their minds against him; and they gladly embraced it: but in that very conduct they added another testimony to the truth of his Messiahship. Their conduct towards him in this particular had been the subject of prophecy; and, when that prophecy was fulfilled, there remained no further occasion for his continuance in the world: he therefore left the world, and went immediately to the bosom of his Father.

Two things are here presented for our consideration;

I.

The completion of prophecy

There remained now but one prophecy to be accomplished
[Every thing relating to the incarnation, life, and death, of the Lord Jesus Christ had been foretold in the minutest manner; and every thing, except that which is spoken in our text, had been fulfilled. The drought occasioned by his long and excruciating agonies both of body and mind, and the method used by his enemies to allay his thirst, had been particularly foretold by the Psalmist [Note: Psa 22:14-15; Psa 69:21.]. To look for the accomplishment of these things in David is in vain. They never were fulfilled in David, or in any other person whatsoever, except the Lord Jesus Christ.]

That prophecy now received its accomplishment in Christ
[The thirst predicted, came upon him: he complained of it: and the people filled a spunge with vinegar, and put it on a stalk of hyssop to his mouth. The vinegar was there at hand; it being, when mixed with water, the common drink of the Roman soldiers. Before his crucifixion, his friends had offered him a drink of wine mixed with myrrh, as a cordial to support him under his sufferings; or rather as a stupifying potion, to allay his pain. But of that he would not drink; because he would endure all that was necessary to make satisfaction to Divine justice for the sins of men [Note: Compare Mar 15:23. with 36]. The vinegar was presented to him by his enemies, who had no desire to sooth his anguish, but only to protract the period of his sufferings, and increase their weight. In this, however, they unconsciously fulfilled the prophecy concerning it, and thereby enabled our Lord to say, It is finished. All was now finished; all that was necessary to be done or suffered for the sins of men and nothing remained, but to surrender up that life, which had answered all the ends for which it had been given.]

Immediately upon this followed,

II.

The dissolution of our Lord

Two things are here particularly to be noticed;

1.

The voluntariness of his death

[He had before expressly declared, that no man could take away his life, but that he should lay it down of himself [Note: Joh 10:17-18.]. And here the correspondence between the prediction and the event is clearly marked. Had the separation of his soul and body been occasioned altogether by his sufferings in a natural way, his strength would have gradually decayed, till he had sunk under them: but behold, immediately before his departure he cried out repeatedly with a loud voice; shewing thereby, that his nature was not exhausted, but that he resigned his soul voluntarily into his Fathers hands [Note: Mat 27:50.]. The Centurion, who superintended his execution, was particularly struck with this, and was convinced by it that Jesus was indeed the Son of God, the Saviour of the world [Note: Mar 15:37; Mar 15:39.]. The very terms used by St. Matthew to express his death confirm this idea. What we translate, He yielded up the ghost, is literally, He dismissed his spirit [Note: .]: so clearly did he manifest, even in death itself, that he was truly the Lord and Prince of life [Note: Act 3:15.].]

2.

His confidence and composure

[Though he had just complained of the hidings of his Fathers face, yet he did not lose the consciousness that God was his Father: on the contrary, with dignified composure he committed his soul into his Fathers hands [Note: Luk 23:46.]. Often had he spoken of going to his Father, just as a man would have spoken of going to a distant land [Note: Joh 16:16; Joh 16:28; Joh 17:11; Joh 17:13.]: and now that his time was come, he meekly bowed his head, and surrendered up his soul, having discharged his appointed office, and filled up his destined measure, both of active and passive obedience. How beautiful does death appear, when thus disarmed of its sting? O that we may be enabled thus to meet this king of terrors, and to welcome his arrival as the best of friends!]

Let this affecting subject be improved by us,

1.

For the confirmation of our faith

[The wonderful minuteness of prophecy, surveyed as it must be in the accomplishment of the predictions, affords the strongest ground for our faith and hope. St. Peter laid great stress upon it in his addresses to the Jewish people, and urged the consideration of it as an encouragement to them to expect from Christ all the blessings of grace and glory [Note: Act 3:18-19.]. To you then would we make our appeal: in whom were these things ever verified, if not in Christ? or what room is there for doubt respecting his Messiahship, when he has fulfilled every thing which the Messiah was either to do or suffer? I may add too, what doubt can exist respecting the accomplishment of all the promises to those who truly believe in him? Let us view him thus as the Foundation which God has laid in Zion; and let us expect from him whatever his grace has promised, and our necessities require.]

2.

For the regulation of our conduct

[We have seen the Saviours example both in life and death: and in conformity to that we should desire both to live and die. Let us not be anxious to depart from life, till we have completed the work which God has given us to do On the other hand, let us not be afraid of death, but regard it as a departure to our Fathers house. The words of David seem to have been referred to by our Lord on this occasion, and they are admirably suited to the case of a dying believer [Note: Psa 31:5.]: and to one who can use them in faith, death is nothing more than falling asleep in the bosom of our Lord [Note: Act 7:59-60.] ]

Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)

XXIX

THE THREE HOURS OF DARKNESS AND FOUR MORE SAYINGS

Harmony, pages 212-214 and Mat 27:45-56 ; Mar 15:33-41 ; Luk 23:44-49 ; Joh 19:28-30 .

The last chapter closed as we were discussing Christ’s third voice from the cross, saying to the penitential thief, “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” And the discussion closed with this question: Where is Paradise? Upon this subject two views prevail: One is that between death and the final resurrection the souls of disembodied saints go to an intermediate place; the other view is that there is no intermediate place. And it is the second view that the author firmly holds. In Dr. J. R. Graves’ book The Middle Life he takes the position that Paradise is a half-way station; that Hades is divided into two compartments, one called Paradise, in which the saints lodge, and the other called Tartarus, in which the souls of the wicked lodge. That neither the wicked nor the righteous immediately upon death go to their heaven or hell, is the “intermediate place” theory. It is also connected with an additional theory that when Christ died his soul went to that intermediate place, and while there preached to the spirits that were imprisoned there. The author does not subscribe to that at all.

In determining where Paradise is, we consult, not the Greek classics (as Dr. Graves does), but the New Testament usage. This usage makes Paradise the antitype of the earthly garden of Eden, which has its tree of life. The antitype of that is the true Paradise. We have these instances of the use of the word in the New Testament: In Luk 18 the first use of it. It is not mentioned again in the Gospels, but we come to it in 2Co 12 . There Paul tells us how he knew such an one about fourteen years ago, whether in the body or out of the body, he could not tell, but he knew such an one caught up to the third heaven and into the Paradise of God. There is nothing in that passage to make Paradise an intermediate place. Both the other two instances are in Revelation. In the letter to the churches Jesus says to one of them, “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.” Then by turning to the last chapter of Revelation you find where that tree of life is: it is in the midst of the Paradise of God. But where is that? The chapter commences: “I saw a pure river of water of life, coming out from the throne of (Sod and of the Lamb, and on either side of it was the tree of life.” Then in the same last chapter, it says, “Blessed are they that wash their robes . . . that they may have the right to the tree of life,” or, as it is expressed in an earlier passage in Revelation, “These are they who have washed their robes and made them white . . . that they may have a right to the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.”

These are the instances of the usage of the word in the New Testament, abundantly settling where Paradise is. There are other passages you may use in making it certain. For instance, in the letter to the Hebrews, Paul tells us where are the spirits of the Just made perfect. He says, “You are come unto Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of Just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better than that of Abel.” So that wherever God is, and the heavenly Jerusalem, and the true Mount Zion is, and where the angels are, there are the disembodied spirits of the saints and this is no half-way house.

Look at it by this kind of proof: Who will deny that after the resurrection of Christ he ascended into the highest heavens? That is abundantly taught. Stephen, when he was dying, saw him there. And Paul says, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” Where the Lord is, there Paul’s soul would go, as soon as he died. He says in 2Co 5:1 , “We know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” So, I do not believe that there is any stopping place for any saint or sinner immediately upon the death of the body, but his soul goes to its final place. We can get at it in this way: when Lazarus died the poor man was carried by angels to Abraham’s bosom. Where is Abraham? Jesus says, “Many shall come from the east and from the west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.” This is no half-way place. So Paradise is a place. Jesus also said, “I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go to prepare a place for you I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. . . . In my Father’s house are many mansions, etc.”

We are now on page 212 of the Harmony. It is the sixth hour, which is twelve o’clock. There was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. That darkness lasted three hours. And the word “land” means the whole of this earth. It does not mean a little section of it, either. Every one of the three Gospel writers uses a particular word which means the whole of the earth. It could not be over all the earth and be an eclipse; for an eclipse is not seen at the same time from all points of the compass. Then, again, no total eclipse ever lasted three hours. I witnessed a total eclipse once, and there were a few minutes when the shadow of the moon covered the sun completely, but in a very few minutes a little rim of light was shown, and it kept slightly passing. More and more of the sun appeared until directly all the darkness was gone. I have a full discussion of these three hours of darkness in my sermon on “The Three Hours of Darkness.”

For three hours that darkness lasted; and there was death silence. About the ninth hour, which would be three o’clock, the silence was broken, and we have the fourth voice of Jesus: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body, and spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God. So just before that darkness passed away, closing the ninth hour, Christ died the spiritual death. Right on the very verge of that deeper darkness came another voice. His words were, “I thirst.” This shows that his soul was undergoing the pangs of hell, Just as the rich man lifted up his eyes in hell, being in torment, and said, “I pray thee, Father Abraham, send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” This anguish was not from loss of blood, as in the case of a bleeding soldier. Any old soldier and I am one can testify that the fiercest pang which comes to the wounded is thirst. The flow of the blood from the open wound causes extreme anguish of thirst in a most harrowing sense. On battlefields, where the wounded fall in the range fire of both armies, a wounded man cannot get away, and nobody can go to him, and all through the night the wounded cry out, “Water, water, water!” After I myself was shot down on the battlefield it was two miles to where any water could be obtained, I had to be carried that distance, and the thirst was unspeakable. How much more the anguish of Christ enduring the torment of hell for a lost world!

The next voice is inarticulate, and that means that he had no joined words. We say a woman shrieks: that is inarticulate; but if she clothes her feelings in words, that is articulate. The record says, “And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, It is finished.” So there is a cry from Jesus which had no words. “It is finished,” that is, the work of expiation of sin, toward God; and the work of deliverance from the power of Satan is accomplished. All of the animals that were slaughtered upon the Jewish altars as types are found there in the Antitype, “It is finished.” The Old Testament is finished ; the old ceremonial, sacrificial law is nailed to the cross of Christ. Paul says, “Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances against us, he nailed them to his cross.” On the cross he triumphed over Satan. “It is finished.” Because it is finished, Paul also says, “Let no man judge if you should eat anything that would be unclean according to the Mosaic law; that is nailed to the cross.” The Mosaic law forbade the eating of swine. But now you can eat swine if you want to. [It is far better, however, to eat fruits and vegetables than flesh foods of any kind. Editor.] “Let no man judge you in meat or drink.” And then he mentions the weekly sabbath, Saturday, and the lunar sabbath. The whole sabbatic cycle is nailed to the cross of Christ. If the Jew, then, after the death of Christ comes and says you must be circumcised according to the ordinances of Moses, you tell him that the handwriting of the ordinances of the Mosaic law were blotted out and nailed to the cross of Jesus Christ. You do not have to be circumcised in order to become a Christian. If he tells you that you should offer up sacrifices of lambs, or goats, or bullocks, you tell him, “No, that is nailed to the cross of Christ.” “Sacrifice and offerings thou wouldst not, but a body thou hast prepared for me”; and “through the eternal Spirit he made one offering once for all.”

“It is finished.” Whenever you preach on that and tell exactly what was finished, you have finished a great sermon. Expiation for sin was made; the penal demands of the law were satisfied; the vicarious Substitute for sinners died in their behalf; and the claims of the law on the sinner that believes in Jesus Christ were fully met. Therefore, no man can “lay any charge to God’s elect.” The debt, all of it, has been Paid.

His last voice on the cross was, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” that is, as soon as he died, his spirit went immediately to the Father, and not to that half-way place you have heard about. There can be no more important thing than this: Where was Christ’s soul between the death of his body and the resurrection of it, and why did he go to that place? Christ’s soul was-with the Father immediately upon his death. As quick as lightning his soul was with God. Now, why did he go there? The answer to this question will come in after the completion of our study on the resurrection. Remember we want to know why Christ’s soul, just as soon as he died, went to heaven.

He went to heaven as High Priest to offer on the mercy seat, in the holy of holies, his blood which was shed upon the earth on the altar on earth in order that on the basis of that blood he might make atonement for his people.

That is one reason. In Lev 16 we have the whole thing presented to us in type. The goat that was offered was slain, and just as soon as it was slain the high priest caught the blood in the basin he had, just as it flowed from the riven heart of the sacrifice. He then hastened with it, without delay, behind the veil into the holy of holies, and sprinkled it upon the mercy seat to make atonement, based upon the sacrifice made upon the altar. There was no moment of delay.

Now, when the true Lamb of God came and was slain, he being both High Priest and Sacrifice, he must immediately go into the presence of God in the true holy of holies, and sprinkle that blood upon the mercy seat. Therefore, Paul says, “When you come to the heavenly Jerusalem, Mount Zion, to God, and to angels, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, you also come to the blood of sprinkling,” there in the holy of holies, where Christ sprinkled that blood.

How long did Christ’s spirit stay up there? Three days the interval between his death and his resurrection. Why did he come back? He came back first to assume his resurrection body. He came back after his body. Second, in that risen body he received the homage of all the angels: “And when God bringeth again into the world his only begotten Son, he said, Let all the angels of God worship him.” He is the Son of God by the resurrection, as Psa 2 declares: “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.” Paul quotes that to show that it is applied to the resurrection body of Jesus Christ. The angels worshiped Jesus in his eternal divinity, and they recognized him in his humanity. But there was a special reason why every angel of God should be called upon to worship the glorified Jesus Jesus in his risen and glorified body. So that is certainly one reason why he returned.

Another reason was to further instruct his people to clarify and confirm their faith, which he did. And the fourth reason was that he might, with all authority in heaven and on earth, commission them to do their work. I will show in subsequent discussions that he did that when he came back. If you do not know why Jesus came to the earth; if you do not know why he died; if you do not know where his spirit was between his death and resurrection, and why that spirit went to that place; if you do not know when he returned, why he returned, and how long he stayed after he returned; when he ascended into heaven; what he is doing in heaven in his risen body, and how long he will stay up there in his risen body, then you have not yet got at the gospel, and you do not know how to preach.

Still another reason why Jesus came back was to breathe on his apostles, that is, to inspire them, which means “to breathe,” to give inspiration to them, and to commission them. How long did he stay? Forty days. In that forty days he finished his instruction upon every point. Then when he went back he did not go as a disembodied soul. He went reunited, soul and body. And why? To be made King of kings and Lord of lords.

Another reason: As the High Priest of his people to ever live and make intercession for them in heaven; to receive from the Father the Holy Spirit, that he might send him down upon the earth to baptize his church. In other words, the old Temple was ended, its veil was rent in twain from top to bottom, and the new Temple, his church, set up, and as the old Temple had been anointed, the new Temple was to be anointed. All of which I discuss particularly in Acts of this INTERPRETATION.

How long will he stay up there? He will stay as long as his vicar, the Holy Spirit, works on earth; until all of his enemies have been put under his feet; until the times of the restitution of all things; until after the millennium, when Satan is loosed, and the man of sin is revealed, who is to be destroyed by the breath of the Lord when he comes. He will stay up there until he comes; until the salvation of the last of his people, and no more people are to be saved. As we learn from 2 Peter, he will stay up there until he comes to raise the dead, be married to his people, to raise the wicked dead, to judge the world in righteousness, and then to turn the kingdom over to the Father. You must know that Christ died with a view of taking the place of the sinner, in his stead, the iniquities of the sinner being put on him. He who knew no sin is made sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. By his death he comes in the sinner’s place to satisfy the penal claims of the law, and to propitiate God. That is the Godward side of his death. What is the devilward side of his death? The devilward side is fully presented in the sermon on “The Three Hours of Darkness.” He died that by his death he might destroy the devil that he might overcome him.

So we have gotten to the last voice, and Jesus is dead. The very moment that he died the whole earth shook; it quaked; there was an earthquake; the rocks were rent, the graves were opened, and the veil of the Temple was rent in twain from top to bottom. We are told by some writers that this veil of the Temple was seventy feet long, thirty feet wide, and four inches thick, closely woven, hard woven. Two yoke of oxen could not tear it, and yet the very minute that Christ died, commencing at the top, it split wide open, clear to the bottom, thus signifying that the way into the most holy is open for everybody.

So you see that is the one reason why he went to heaven between his death and his resurrection to open up a new and living way for his saints to follow him where he has forerun has already passed.

The rending of the veil of the Temple signifies that the old Temple is now empty. They can go on if they want to, but they do not offer sacrifices any longer, and if they did God would not recognize them; and in future years it will be destroyed utterly. In A.D. 70 it was destroyed, and there has been none since, and no Jew today ever offers a lamb or a sheep upon any altar. There is an abrogation utterly of the Old Testament economy, i.e., all of the ceremonial part of it.

Among the things that Jesus came back to earth for was to provide a new sabbath for his people. The Mosaic sabbath commemorated the creation the Christian sabbath commemorates redemption, and as God on the seventh day rested from his work of creation, Christ on the first day of the week rested from the work of redemption. His body came out of the grave, and from that time on it was the day upon which his people met to celebrate his resurrection the first day of the week. He himself met them several times upon the first day of the week, during those forty days. On the first day of the week he poured out the Holy Spirit. He ordered that collections be taken that money be laid aside for collection on the first day of the week. We learn that the Lord’s Supper was observed at Troas on the first day of the week; that John was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, which is the first day of the week. So he comes to provide a new sabbath for his people. But we will discuss all this later.

While the graves were opened in that earthquake, the bodies lay exposed. Many of the saints whose bodies were lying there came to life, that is, after the resurrection. They lay there exposed three days, but after his resurrection, after he became “the first fruits of them that slept,” these bodies came to life and went into the city and were recognized. Then Jerusalem waked up and looked right into the face of their dead that had been buried but a short time before. Here is what the record says: “And the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised; and coming forth out of the tombs after his resurrection, they entered into the holy city and appeared unto many.”

These voices, that darkness) that earthquake, that veilrending, that grave-opening, made a profound impression upon those who were there. The centurion, the captain of the hundred, who was conducting a section of the army the officer in charge) whose business it was to see that he was crucified said) “Truly this was the Son of God.” That is the impression it made upon his mind. No such things happened on the death of any other human being; therefore, one of the great French infidels said that Socrates died like a philosopher, but Jesus Christ died like a god. The effect upon the women is thus described and here are the very women who organized that first Ladies’ Aid Society: “And there were also women beholding from afar, among them were both Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome: who, when he was in Galilee, followed him, and ministered unto him: and many other women which came up with him unto Jerusalem.” How were the people affected? “And all the multitudes that came together to this sight, when they beheld the things that were done, returned smiting their breasts.”

Now he is dead, and the next event to notice is, Why he did not hang on the cross longer? This is the explanation, Harmony page 215: “The Jews, therefore, because it was the preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath (for the day of that sabbath was a high day) asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away.” A sabbath did not necessarily mean the seventh day. Any high day could be a sabbath, and the Jews wanted those who were crucified to die soon. A crucified man might linger several days. So Pilate, out of deference to the Jewish law, commanded their legs to be broken, so as to bring about an earlier death. Now, when they came to break the legs of Jesus, to their surprise, he was already dead. There was nothing in the mere physical anguish in the crucifixion to bring about the death of Jesus Christ. He died under the hand of God. He died by the stroke of the sword of the law: “Awake, O sword, against the Shepherd: let him be smitten and let the flock be scattered.” He died of a broken heart, evidenced by the fact that when the soldiers, to make sure that he was dead, ran a spear in his side, behold, water gushed out, an indication, physicians say, of death from heartbreaking. N ow, while he is hanging there, Joseph of Arimathaea, a member of the Sanhedrin, and Nicodemus, another member of the Sanhedrin, who came to Christ by night, obtained permission to take his body down and bury it. They had become disciples. It is a very precious thought to me that that same Nicodemus who came to Jesus by night, and was so puzzled about regeneration, has at last been born again, and become a disciple of Jesus Christ. They had not consented to what the others did in condemning Jesus, so they take him down and wrap his body with spices in a fine linen shroud and put him in a new tomb, belonging to Joseph of Arimathaea; in which no other one has ever lain, and shut him up in a big stone vault. This stone was hewn out like the vaults you see in New Orleans, and some in Waco. It was not a burial by the piling of dirt on him, but it was the placing of him in a rock vault.

QUESTIONS 1. What was the third voice from the cross?

2. What two views prevail on the location of Paradise and to which one does the author hold?

3. What other theory closely connected with “intermediate place” theory?

4. What are the uses of the word “Paradise” in the New Testament?

5. Where is Paradise and how do you prove it from these scriptures and others cited?

6. How long was the darkness over all the land at the crucifixion, and what is the meaning of the word “land” in this connection?

7. How do you prove that this darkness was not an eclipse of the sun?

8. Has the earth ever known such another period of darkness?

9. When and what was the fourth voice from the cross and what was its meaning?

10. What is meant by death, both physical and spiritual?

11. What was the fifth voice and its meaning? Illustrate.

12. What was the sixth voice and what its significance?

13. What was the seventh voice and what its meaning and broad application?

14. What was the last voice from the cross and what was its significance?

15. Briefly, why did Christ’s spirit go immediately to heaven when he died and of what was this act of Christ the antitype?

16. What does Paul say about this?

17. How long was Jesus up there and why did he return?

18. How long did he stay here after his return, and what was he doing while here?

19. Why then did he go back to the right hand of the Father?

20. How long will he stay there and for what will he come back?

21. What great supernatural events attended the death of Christ?

22. Describe the veil of the Temple which was rent in twain at his death and what is the special significance of this great event?

23. Explain the opening of the graves and the coming forth of the saints.

24. Who were present at the crucifixion and what was the effect on each class?

25. Why did not Christ hang on the cross longer, what caused his early death and what the proof?

26. Who took Jesus down from the cross, where did they bury him and what the manner of his burial?

Fuente: B.H. Carroll’s An Interpretation of the English Bible

28 After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.

Ver. 28. That the Scripture might be fulfilled ] It is a high point of heavenly wisdom to do our ordinary business in obedience to God’s command, and with an aim at his glory; to go about our earthly affairs with heavenly minds, and in serving men to serve God; to taste God in the creature, and whether we eat or drink, or whatever else we do, to set up God, 1Co 10:31 . Every action is a step either to heaven or hell. The poor servant in being faithful to his master, “serves the Lord Christ,” Col 3:24 , who was more careful here of fulfilling the Scripture and working out our salvation, than of satisfying his own most vehement thirst.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

28. ] is generally, but not necessarily, immediate. Here we must suppose the to have been said meantime, and the three hours’ darkness to have taken place. Perhaps during some of this time John was absent: see above. . . ] Various needless objections have been raised to the application of these words to the saying of the Lord which follows, and attempts have been made (by Luthardt and Meyer among others: see on the other hand Ewald) to connect them with ( , ). That St. John does use as applying to what follows , ch. Joh 14:31 shews. And so here, ‘that the Scripture might be accomplished ’ (not ), having it in view to leave no pre-appointed particular of the circumstances of his suffering unfulfilled, Jesus, speaking doubtless also in intense present agony of thirst, but only speaking because He so willed it, and because it was an ordained part of the course which He had taken upon Him, said this word. “Nec hoc levamentum petiisset, nisi scivisset id quoque ad Messi secundum Prophetas spectare. Unde hc altera motiva additur: ut consummaretur Scriptura .” Lampe in loc.

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament

Joh 19:28 . . “After this, Jesus knowing that all things are now finished, that the scripture might be completely fulfilled, saith, I thirst.” Jesus did not feel thirsty and proclaim it with the intention of fulfilling scripture which would be a spurious fulfilment but in His complaint and the response to it, John sees a fulfilment of Psa 69:22 , . Only when all else had been attended to ( . . .) was He free to attend to His own physical sensations.

Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson

NASB (UPDATED) TEXT: Joh 19:28-30

28 After this, Jesus, knowing that all things had already been accomplished, to fulfill the Scripture, said, “I am thirsty.” 29A jar full of sour wine was standing there; so they put a sponge full of the sour wine upon a branch of hyssop and brought it up to His mouth. 30Therefore when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished!” And He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.

Joh 19:28 “Jesus knowing that all things had already been accomplished, to fulfill the Scripture, said, ‘I am thirsty'” It is syntactically ambiguous whether the Scripture mentioned refers to the phrase “I am thirsty” or “all things had already been accomplished.” If it is taken in the traditional way, then “I am thirsty” is a reference to Psa 69:21.

Joh 19:29 “A jar full of sour wine was standing there” This was a cheap wine, a sour wine. It would have been both for the soldiers and for the crucified. They were given small amounts of liquids in order to make the crucifixion last longer.

“sour wine” This is literally “vinegar.” This was the drink of the poor people. Notice that Jesus did not take the drugged wine that the women of Jerusalem offered Him (cf. Mar 15:23; Mat 27:34). Possibly the reason He accepted this drink was to fulfill Psa 22:15. He was too parched to speak and He had one more thing to say.

“upon a branch of hyssop” Some see this as a symbolic use of the special plant that was used in the Passover service (cf. Exo 12:22). Others believe that there has been an ancient scribal corruption of the term and that originally it meant “spear,” “javelin,” or “stick” (cf. NEB but REB reverts to hyssop). Mat 27:48 and Mar 15:36 have “reed.”

The reason many see a scribal change here is because the hyssop plant did not have a very long stem (only 2 to 4 feet), but it must be remembered that the crosses were not raised that high above the ground. Our traditional pictures of a high cross may be our misunderstanding of Joh 3:14. Jesus’ feet may have been within a foot or two of the ground.

Joh 19:30 “It is finished!” This is a perfect passive indicative. From the Synoptic Gospels we learned that He shouted this with a loud cry (cf. Mar 15:37; Luk 23:46; Mat 27:50). This refers to the finished work of redemption. This form of the term (telos) in the Egyptian papyri (Moulton and Milligan) was a commercial idiom for “paid in full.”

“He bowed His head and gave up His spirit” The phrase “bowed His head” was idiomatic of “going to sleep.” Jesus’ death was a calm moment for Him. The inference is that in death the spiritual aspect of a person is separated from the physical. This seems to demand a disembodied state for believers between death and resurrection day (cf. 2 Corinthians 5; 1Th 4:13-18, see William Hendriksen, The Bible On the Life Hereafter).

The Gospel parallels in Mar 15:37 and Luk 23:46 have “He breathed His last.” The Hebrew word for “spirit” and “breathe” are the same. His last breath was viewed as His spirit leaving the body (cf. Gen 2:7).

Fuente: You Can Understand the Bible: Study Guide Commentary Series by Bob Utley

After. Greek. meta. App-104.

were now accomplished = have been already finished. Greek. teleo Not the same word as “fulfilled”, which is teleioo = consummated. There is a deep sig nificance here. He saw the casting of the lots, and knew that all that the Scripture had foretold of others was finished. There yet remained a prediction for Him to realize, that of Psa 69:21. See note on Psa 69:1.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

28.] is generally, but not necessarily, immediate. Here we must suppose the to have been said meantime, and the three hours darkness to have taken place. Perhaps during some of this time John was absent: see above. . .] Various needless objections have been raised to the application of these words to the saying of the Lord which follows, and attempts have been made (by Luthardt and Meyer among others: see on the other hand Ewald) to connect them with (, ). That St. John does use as applying to what follows, ch. Joh 14:31 shews. And so here,-that the Scripture might be accomplished (not ),-having it in view to leave no pre-appointed particular of the circumstances of his suffering unfulfilled, Jesus, speaking doubtless also in intense present agony of thirst, but only speaking because He so willed it, and because it was an ordained part of the course which He had taken upon Him, said this word. Nec hoc levamentum petiisset, nisi scivisset id quoque ad Messi secundum Prophetas spectare. Unde hc altera motiva additur: ut consummaretur Scriptura. Lampe in loc.

Fuente: The Greek Testament

Joh 19:28. , after this) after this one event which immediately preceded. [After the parting of the garments, whereby the Scripture which was immediately before quoted by John obtained its fulfilment.-V. g.] [The conjecture is somewhat different, which is exhibited almost in these words in the Harm., p. 569: The phrase seems rather to refer to the whole act of the crucifixion, than the address to His mother and the disciple mentioned in Joh 19:26-27, as immediately preceding. For John, having brought Mary to his dwelling, returned to the cross, Joh 19:35; from which we may gather the inference, that not only was she brought into the house out of the open air before the darkness, but even that immediately after the first word spoken by Jesus on the cross, which was directed to the Father, the second word had regard to His mother, whom He observed beneath His cross. Let the impartial Reader weigh well in what way best the statements which the Gnomon has, as to the order of these events, can be made to harmonise with those which we have now brought forward, as well from the Harm. Ev. as also from the Germ Vers.-E. B.] differs from , ch. Joh 11:11. The former is never taken adverbially.-, knowing) Believers also, in the agony of the last conflict, may perceive that the issue (end) is near.-, all things) for instance, those things which are recorded in Joh 19:24, even concerning minor matters.-, ) The verb applies to events; , to Holy Scripture. The verb , I thirst, and the verb , it is finished (consummated), are closely connected. The thirst had been, in the case of the body of Jesus, what the dereliction by the Father had been in His soul. In His journey on foot He had felt weariness (ch. Joh 4:6); in His voyage, He had been overpowered by sleep (Mar 4:38); in the desert previously, He had felt hunger (Mat 4:2); and now, in fine, on the cross, the most extreme and burning thirst, after His sweat, His goings back and forward [between Caiaphas, Herod, Pilate, and the people], His speaking, His scourging, and the nails. Amidst all these He had not said, He is in pain; for the fact spoke for itself as to His pains, which were foretold in Scripture; but He does speak of His thirst, in which all the rest have their confluence and termination, and thereby He asks for a drink. For the Scripture had foretold both the thirst and the drink. Thirst is wont both to be felt most, and to be quenched, only then when ones toil has been completely ended: , that, may be joined with , He saith.

Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament

Joh 19:28

Joh 19:28

After this Jesus, knowing that all things are now finished, that the scripture might be accomplished,-[All things preceding his death which were necessary to complete his work and to the fulfillment of prophecy were finished. He now realizes his intense physical suffering, which had been forgotten in the more awful mental anguish of abandonment by his Father as he bore the burden of the worlds sin.]

saith, I thirst.-Jesus had completed his work and the end was near. The suffering and bleeding he had undergone produced thirst. [The increasing inflammation of the wounds, the unnatural position, the forced immobility and the rigidity of the limbs which resulted from it, the local congestions, especially in the head, the inexpressible anguish resulting from the disturbance of the circulation, a burning fever and thirst tortured the condemned without killing him.]

Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary

Jesus: Joh 19:30, Joh 13:1, Joh 18:4, Luk 9:31, Luk 12:50, Luk 18:31, Luk 22:37, Act 13:29

that the: Psa 22:15, Psa 69:21

Reciprocal: Jdg 15:18 – he was sore 1Ki 2:27 – that he 1Ki 12:15 – that he might Psa 69:3 – my throat Ecc 3:14 – nothing Dan 9:24 – seal up Mat 2:15 – that Mat 4:14 – it Mat 12:17 – it Mat 26:24 – Son of man goeth Mat 27:34 – gave Mat 27:46 – Jesus Mar 11:12 – he was Mar 14:21 – goeth Mar 15:23 – they Mar 15:36 – General Luk 23:36 – General Joh 4:7 – Give Joh 10:35 – the scripture Joh 19:24 – that Act 1:16 – this Act 13:25 – fulfilled Act 13:27 – they have Eph 4:10 – fill Rev 17:17 – until

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

THE THIRST OF CHRIST

I thirst.

Joh 19:28

There breaks from the Cross one short, swift word, the only cry through the days long hours, which speaks of His own physical agony. Yet we cannot read these words as merely being signs of bodily suffering; there is a deeper spiritual meaning in the words as we read them now.

I. He thirsted for men.How He thirsted for men! Was that thirst satisfied? Did it have no result? Was He disappointed at all? Nay, one of the soldiers, we read, dipped a sponge in vinegar and held it to our Lord. Do you not think that must have been something to the Master, hanging upon the Cross, that one of the very men who had crucified Him, and scoffed at Him, and scourged Him should have handed something to satisfy His thirst? Yes, that must have been worth something to our Lord. How would it be with us? From the Cross He still appeals to us. None of us can surely ever resist such an appeal. It touches our pity. He says I thirst to-day, and if I can read your thoughts aright by your presence here, I know that you will satisfy that appeal. I know that there will be a response.

II. The thirst satisfied.Here we are amongst friends, those who sympathise with us in our aims, and in our objects, and in our best endeavours; but next week, how will it be then when we are amongst the enemies of Christ, when we are amongst those who are scoffing at Him and scorning Him; who are setting Him at naught? Shall we be as that soldier? Shall we be able to brave the derision and the scoffing of our companions, and to satisfy our Lords appeal, or shall we be as one of those, His enemies, who will do nothing? I have not exaggerated the temptations that will come to you. They come to us clergy just as they come to you. It must have been very easy for the disciples to follow Him in the days of His popularity; and the demand upon our lives at this moment that we should live for Christ is not a great one. But believe me, a time is coming when your religion, if it is anything at all, will make a demand upon you, when somehow in your daily life, in your home life, or in your business life, there will be conflicting interests at work, and it will be a question whether you will satisfy the Redeemer and His love for men, or the world which merely stands by and sneers. What is going to quench that thirst? we ask. Nothing but thisgiving our lives for His service.

III. What it costs.Perhaps you are wondering what men and women are doing for Christ to-day, what it costs to be a Christian. Many men and women, girls and young men, whom the world thinks very little about, are serving Christ, and their love for Christ costs them much in homes where they never know anything but taunts and sneers, where all that they hold most dear is sneered at, and blasphemed, and put to open ridicule! And yet they remain true; they are truly doing their best. You have a best to give; you can give your life to the Redeemer now that He asks for it. Let us not give Him that which costs us nothing, a mere modicum of our service, the least we can do, just the one hour in the week in which we go to His house. Let us give Him the full life-service for which He asks.

Rev. T. J. Longley.

Illustration

A German student who had served in the Franco-Prussian War was wounded in an engagement near Paris, and lay on the field unable to stir. He did not know exactly what was the nature of his wound, and he thought that he might be dying. The pain was intense; the wounded and dying were groaning round about him; the battle was still raging; the shots were falling and tearing up the ground in all directions. But after a time one agony, he afterwards told a friend, began to swallow up all the rest and soon made him forget his wound, his danger, and his neighbours. It was the agony of thirst. He would have given the world for a draught of water. This was the supreme distress of crucifixion. The agonies of the horrible punishment were of the most excruciating and complicated order; but, after a time, they all gathered into one central current, in which they were lost and swallowed upthat of devouring thirst; and it was this that drew from our Lord the fifth word.

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE WORD OF SIMPLE HUMAN NATURE

This I should emphasise as the word of simple human nature. It was perfectly natural that He should feel thirsty. Remember the awful scourging, and the blood that was shed, and the fever from the open wounds: these would naturally make thirst.

I. There was nothing stoical about the Crucifixion.He did not wish to hide any pain: He did not bite His lips and shut His teeth, but said quite calmly, I thirst, implying that He would like a sponge or something put to His lips. He did not receive it at first when they offered it to lull the pain. But now He thirsts, and they fill a sponge with sour wine and put it to His lips, and He drinks.

II. It shows that in the dear Masters heart there was not a spark of resentment.He asks for and receives a kindness from one of the executioners, from one of the men who had been dicing over His clothes, from His enemies, from those who are putting Him to death. That was the most beautiful thing that man ever did in his lifea thing that one who loved the Saviour would long to do. The only thing we can offer Him is a broken heart, and we say, Because, dear Master, we cannot offer Thee the sponge and vinegar, we offer Thee contrition for our sins. And I want you to remember that your heavenly Father will not forgive you unless you from your hearts forgive every one his brother their trespasses. You say, Yes, I will forgive, but I never want to have anything more to do with that man. Or else, Oh, I quite forgive, but I would never accept a thing from his handsI will never accept a favour from that man. I do not think that you can call that forgiveness from your heart.

III. When you are suffering ask the Lord to give you the Living Water that springeth up into Everlasting Life, which if a man drink of, he shall never thirst. May God refresh us with His grace!

Rev. A. H. Stanton.

Illustration

It would seem that there are two extremes about representing and dwelling upon the bodily suffering of our Lord. First, of course, there are such scenic representations as those which we sometimes read of in foreign countries. This sensationalism is like every other form of sensationalism, and carries with it the same dangers. This materialism is sometimes in danger of obscuring the very sacrifice which no doubt it is honestly meant to make personal and dramatic. But it cannot be denied, I think, that much of the thought and feeling around us in this country at the present time sets in the opposite direction. All who have looked at the criticism of the New Testament will remember how much is said of the Docet, that is, those ancient heretics who looked upon matter as in itself evil, and therefore could not believe that the Lord of glory had a true body. They looked upon Him as being a spiritual Being entirely, or rather a shadow playing an apparent part in an unreal world. And is there not something of Docetism at the root of some criticism upon sacred art which has become very fashionable and influential amongst ourselves?

(THIRD OUTLINE)

THE CRISIS REACHED

I. It shows the reality of the bodily pain of our Blessed Lord.Modern religious feeling appears rather to delight in going counter to ancient religious feeling. Ancient religious feeling appears to have held almost universally, that as no sorrow was ever like that sorrow, so no suffering was ever like that suffering. Modern religious spirituality seems to wish to minimise the physical suffering of the Lord on the Cross. It would seem to find a charm in proving that the thieves between whom the Lord was crucified suffered more than He did. But the lower mental and moral organisation would appear to suffer less than the higher and therefore more sensitive. Those who have witnessed it would tell how the Chinese dying of slow starvation with occasional torture superadded, has been known to laugh and jeer through the bars of his iron cage at the multitude who surround him. Our Blessed Lord was made subject to suffering. The word which St. Paul uses in Act 26:23 means physical suffering. They of old believed that the body which was prepared for it had an exquisitely sensitive organism. Yes, after the agony in Gethsemane; after being dragged about from tribunal to tribunal, from Annas to Caiaphas, from Caiaphas to Pilate, from Pilate to Herod, from Herod back again to Pilate; after the crown of thornsthe terrible acanthus thornafter that fearful Roman scourging, after the trance which necessarily accompanied the torture, after the exhaustion of those big drops falling down as they did slow and heavily upon the dust of Calvary, after the parting of human love, the dying Lord does not dwell upon His sufferings at length. Just that one word drops from those white lips of HisI thirst.

II. It indicates to us that a crisis has been reached in the history of our Lords passion.In Joh 19:28 the brightness of the victory begins. After this Jesus, knowing that all things were accomplishedthe word should rather be translated finished, for it is precisely the same word rendered It is finished in Joh 19:30. In the It is finished of Joh 19:30, we have the consummation of that which was in the heart of the Lord in Joh 19:28. There is a perfect unity of character in the representations of our Blessed Lord given to us in the four evangelists. Think of the temptationHe fasted forty days and forty nights, and was afterwards a hungred. First came the spiritual struggle, then the compliance with the lowly needs of the body.

III. A revelation of His character.How truly and how beautifully human He is! He complies with the claims of the body, with the duty of seeking refreshment. The Stoic might have smiled cynically; the Indian brave, girt round with a circle of fire, his eyes starting from his head in the agony of the heat, and his black lips baked, has been known to spurn so much as a single word of compassion; the Buddhist under the burning sun has hung without one exclamation, without one appeal for help from his dreadful suffering; between him and the Lamb of God there is all the difference between free self-sacrifice and crazy suicide.

Archbishop Alexander.

Illustration

A great German Protestant writer, in speaking of this fifth word of our Lord, has likened Him to some hero who feels no exhaustion during the excitement of the battle, until the smoke begins to drift away from the lines, and the roll of cannon-shot is exchanged for a straggling firethen, and not till then, he thinks of his bodily needs, he goes into his tent and calls for drink.

(FOURTH OUTLINE)

THE APPEAL FROM THE CROSS

I. There are many roads to Christ on His Cross, and some of us will come by one road, and some by another.

(a) Somemany nowadays, perhaps mostare repelled by the mystery of that dark wrath, by the tremendous issues which weave themselves round and about the Sacrifice. They recoil from the theology which strains to unravel something of the secret. They fear to ask what is there, what is this hidden struggle. Why evil? why hell? Why did not God sweep it away with one stroke of His hand? So it staggers and bewilders, and to many that road is shut off.

(b) Will they come near by the other road? Will they come near to Christ through the strange sympathetic thrill of human brotherhood? In tender confidential trust, through the pathos of the weakness, and the trouble, and the painwill that draw them? will that help them to come closer? Jesus says to them still, I thirst. I am human, I am your brother, I am as you are; I feel, I suffer, I am very weary and heavy laden, and I cannot hide it. I open my heart to you, and I am wounded by your neglect; I am unhappy, I thirst.

II. Jesus is not ashamed to show Himself on this weak human side.Run up to Him and recognise Him, and clasp Him. Let Him make His entry into your heart. Only remember, though you were sensitive to His humanising touch, yet there are other sides true as this, hidden now to you. This same Jesus, Whom you love for saying so simply I thirst, is He Who speaks also in the high language, when He tells you, I and My Father are one, Father, glorify Thy Son with the glory that I had with Thee before the world was. The two are intertwined. The Gospel of John is the Gospel of the highest, but the Gospel also of the lowest, the Gospel of a high union between the Son and the Father, the Gospel which tells you of the heavenliest, sweetest, gentlest, humblest beauties of the Lords human nature, the Gospel which tells you how He said, I thirst. And do not, therefore, because you can only see one side of the Lord, deny the other, or think you see all because you feel the tender drawing of His word, I thirst.

III. And those who are drawn towards the high theological dogmatic vision of God Incarnate, of the atonement of blood, of Him Who enters in within the holy place carrying that with Himdo not, because of that, be afraid to recognise Him Whom you rightly adore in this poor Sufferer Who so humbly appeals to your help and pity by His plaintive I thirst.

Rev. Canon H. Scott Holland.

Illustration

The expression I thirst was chiefly used in order to afford a public testimony of the reality and intensity of His bodily sufferings, and to prevent any one supposing, because of His marvellous calmness and patience, that He was miraculously free from suffering. On the contrary, He would have all around Him know that He felt what all severely wounded persons, and especially all crucified persons felta burning and consuming thirst. So that when we read that He suffered for sins, we are to understand that He really and truly suffered. Henry observes, The torments of hell are represented by a violent thirst, in the complaint of the rich man who begged for a drop of water to cool his tongue. To that everlasting thirst we had all been condemned, if Christ had not suffered on the Cross, and said, I thirst.

(FIFTH OUTLINE)

THE THIRST FOR FELLOWSHIP

1. Those who have experienced bodily thirst tell us how terrible is the experience.We probably have never really known it; but travellers in the desert, those on battlefields, shipwrecked sailors, and many others have left for us on record their frightful experiences. Nothing, they tell us, can be quite so bad.

II. It was this He chose to suffer for our sakes.

III. The words mean something more.It is the thirst of the spirit which is surely spoken of also. Though betrayed, denied, refused, buffeted, alone, He condescends still to desire the salvation of the poor blind race whom He had come to aid. I thirst. Each time we in our dull apathy or careless wantonness fall into sin, whether of commission or omission, we wound and crucify Him afresh. He has come to light a fire, and our lifeless hearts fail to respond to the glow. I thirst. Yes, He, the Holy One, the Blessed Sufferer, actually stoops to desire our love and loyalty; He thirsts for the fellowship of His own.

Rev. A. Osborne Jay.

Illustration

These wordsI thirstappear immediately to have produced some effect. Johns account would seem to show us that more than one took part in this act of mercy to the Lord. They filled a spunge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it to His mouth. May we not well suppose that these soldiers were the first-fruits of that appeal? Its result was the finer feeling, the readier sympathy, the instinctive tenderness. Some Chinese women said to the wife of a missionary who worked amongst them, and brought them to a knowledge of Christ, We first knew that we were women when we first knew Christ. And so manhood first knew what was best in manhood when it knew Christ. Here was the pledge of the beginningfirst sweet music from the lips of Christ, the first tiny ripple of that great tide of helpfulness, of Christian sympathy, which is now coming in full and big upon the shores of every land in Christendom.

(SIXTH OUTLINE)

DIVINE THIRST

Two wordsI thirstbut how full of meaning! They came from One Who had cried out in the streets of JerusalemIf any man thirst, let him come to Me and drink. It was the same Jesus Who a little time before sat with that woman in Samaria by the well and told her that the water would only quench her natural thirst for a while, but He would give her water which, if she drank, would not only quench for ever that thirst, but would enable her to go out and quench the thirst of others. And yet He said, I thirst.

I. Bodily thirst.After the agonies of the Garden, after the mockery of the Jews and the Roman soldiers, after those three long dark hours, after all that He had endured, He felt a bodily needI thirst. If we could only think of all it means for you and meI thirst. That awful agony was borne for you and for me.

II. Soul thirst.He thirsted, says a modern writer, to be thirsted after. He thirsted long for the souls of men and women. He came down from heaven to draw all the world to Himself. Read once again the story of His Passion, the story of the Cross, the story of His death, and you will understand if you read aright something of the awful soul-thirst through which Christ passed. Christ thirsted for human souls; He thirsted for yours and mine. He thirsts. Is not that pathetic? Still He thirsts, thirsts for the souls of men and women all over the globe. Whenever a man or woman is brought to Him, whenever a man or woman comes to Him, it is as though some one had taken a drop of water and touched the dry lips.

III. Fellowship with His suffering.I thirst. If you and I had been on Calvary we should have loved to do something to minister to the wants of our Saviour. And when little souls cry on beds of sickness, when a man finds the struggle for daily existence more than he can stand, Christ through them is crying I thirst to you and me, and their thirsty souls can be satisfied and Christ will be satisfied through you. Christ believes in man. Christ on the Cross might have been silent, but He chose to speakI thirst, and He showed the world what His sufferings were. He says again, speaking through suffering humanity, I thirst, and He asks you to do something to quench that thirst, because He knows that deep down in the bottom of the heart there is some hope after all for the very worst man. The way of the world is to make the worst of everybody, to paint every one as black as possible. But Christ believed in man. He thought there was some good even in the heart of a Roman soldier, and He was not disappointed. Show your love for Christ by thirsting for souls that He came to save. Any good that we can do, let us do it now. Do not let us neglect it, for we shall never pass through this world again.

Rev. F. W. Metcalfe.

Illustration

The Churchs Master believed in the recovery of man, and therefore He believed in something recoverable in man, when it was influenced by His Spirit. He passed from heaven to earth, He wore the shape of a man, He became like uslike us in form, like us in feature, like us in language, like us in His affections, with their beautiful strength and their still more beautiful weakness, like us in the heart that throbbed, like us in the blood that was shed. He came to make men more human, He came to give them a higher humanity. He seems to say in our text, I cannot use these hands of Mine, they are pierced and fastened to the tree; if you were to offer Me a cup even now I could not lift it to these suffering lips; I know there is humanity among youI thirst.

Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary

8

Not until after all things were accomplished did Jesus give expression to his dying desires. In the throes of his feverish last hours, he complained of being thirsty. That the scripture might be fulfilled denotes that in his thirst and its quenching he would fulfill the scripture.

Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary

This part of John’s narrative of Christ’s passion, contains points of deep interest, which are silently passed over by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The reason of this silence we are not told. Suffice it for us to remember that, both in what they recorded and in what they did not record, all four Evangelists wrote by inspiration of God.

Let us mark, for one thing, in these verses, the frequent fulfillments of prophetic Scripture throughout every part of Christ’s crucifixion. Three several predictions are specially mentioned, in Exodus, Psalms, and Zechariah, which received their accomplishment at the cross. Others, as every well-informed Bible-reader knows, might easily be added. All combine to prove one and the same thing. They prove that the death of our Lord Jesus Christ at Golgotha was a thing foreseen and predetermined by God. Hundreds of years before the crucifixion, every part of the solemn transaction was arranged in the Divine counsels, and the minutest particulars were revealed to the Prophets. From first to last it was a thing foreknown, and every portion of it was in accordance with a settled plan and design. In the highest, fullest sense, when Christ died, He “died according to the Scriptures.” (1Co 15:3.)

We need not hesitate to regard such fulfillments of prophecy as strong evidence of the Divine authority of God’s Word. The Prophets foretell not only Christ’s death, but the particulars of His death. It is impossible to explain so many accomplishments of predicted circumstances upon any other theory. To talk of luck, chance, and accidental coincidence, as sufficient explanation, is preposterous and absurd. The only rational account is the inspiration of God. The Prophets who foretold the particulars of the crucifixion, were inspired by Him who foresees the end from the beginning; and the books they wrote under His inspiration ought not to be read as human compositions, but Divine. Great indeed are the difficulties of all who pretend to deny the inspiration of the Bible. It really requires more unreasoning faith to be an infidel than to be a Christian. The man who regards the repeated fulfillments of minute prophecies about Christ’s death, such as the prophecies about His dress, His thirst, His pierced side, and His bones, as the result of chance, and not of design, must indeed be a credulous man.

We should mark, secondly, in these verses, the peculiarly solemn saying which came from our Lord’s lips just before He died. John relates that “when He had received the vinegar, He said, it is finished; and He bowed His head and gave up the ghost.” It is surely not too much to say, that of all the seven famous sayings of Christ on the cross, none is more remarkable than this, which John alone has recorded.

The precise meaning of this wondrous expression, “It is finished,” is a point which the Holy Ghost has not thought good to reveal to us. There is a depth about it, we must all instinctively feel, which man has probably no line to fathom. Yet there is perhaps no irreverence in conjecturing the thoughts that were in our Lord’s mind, when the word was spoken. The finishing of all the known and unknown sufferings which He came to endure, as our Substitute,-the finishing of the ceremonial law, which He came to wind up and fulfill, as the true Sacrifice for sin,-the finishing of the many prophecies, which He came to accomplish,-the finishing of the great work of man’s redemption, which was now close at hand,-all this, we need not doubt, our Lord had in view when He said, “It is finished.” There may have been more behind [it(?)], for aught we know. But in handling the language of such a Being as our Savior, on such an occasion, and at so mysterious a crisis of His history, it is well to be cautious. “The place whereon we stand is holy ground.”

One comfortable thought, at all events, stands out most clearly on the face of this famous expression. We rest our souls on a “finished work,” if we rest them on the work of Jesus Christ the Lord. We need not fear that either sin, or Satan, or law shall condemn us at the last day. We may lean back on the thought, that we have a Savior who has done all, paid all, accomplished all, performed all that is necessary for our salvation. We may take up the challenge of the Apostle, “Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died: yea, rather that is risen again; who is even at the right hand of God; who also maketh intercession for us.” (Rom 8:34.) When we look at our own works, we may well be ashamed of their imperfections. But when we look at the finished work of Christ, we may feel peace. We “are complete in Him,” if we believe. (Col 2:10.)

We should mark, lastly, in these verses, the reality and truth of Christ’s death. We are told that “one of the soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.” This incident, small as it may seem at first sight, supplies probable proof that the heart of our blessed Lord was pierced, and that life was consequently extinct. He did not merely faint, or swoon away, or become insensible, as some have dared to insinuate. His heart actually ceased to beat, and He actually died. Great, indeed, was the importance of this fact. We must all see, on a moment’s reflection, that without a real death there could be no real sacrifice; that without a real death there could be no real resurrection; and that without a real death and real resurrection, the whole of Christianity is a house built on sand, and has no foundation at all. Little indeed did that reckless Roman soldier dream that he was a mighty helper of our holy religion, when he thrust his spear into our Lord’s side.

That the “blood and water” mentioned in this place had a deep spiritual meaning, we can hardly doubt. John himself seems to refer to them in his first Epistle, as highly significant. “This is He that came by water and blood.” (1Jn 5:6.) The Church in every age has been of one mind in holding that they are emblems of spiritual things. Yet the precise meaning of the blood and water is a subject about which Christians have never agreed, and perhaps will never agree till the Lord returns.

The favorite theory that the blood and water mean the two Sacraments, however plausible and popular, may be reasonably regarded as somewhat destitute of solid foundation. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were ordinances already in existence when our Lord died, and they needed no reappointing. It is surely not necessary to drag in these two blessed Sacraments on every occasion, and to insist on thrusting them forward, as the hidden sense of every disputed text where the number “two” is mentioned. Such pertinacious application of hard places in Scripture to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper does no real good, and brings no real honor to the Sacraments. It is questionable whether it does not tend to vulgarize them, and bring them into contempt.

The true meaning of the blood and water is probably to be sought in the famous prophecy of Zechariah, where he says, “In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and uncleanness.” (Zec 13:1.) When was that fountain so truly and really opened as in the hour when Christ died? What emblem of atonement and purification was so well known to the Jews as blood and water? Why then should we hesitate to believe that the flow of “blood and water” from our Lord’s side was a significant declaration to the Jewish nation, that the true fountain for sin was at length thrown open, and that henceforth sinners might come boldly to Christ for pardon, and wash and be clean? This interpretation, at any rate, deserves serious thought and consideration.

Whatever view we take of the blood and water, let us make sure that we ourselves are “washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb.” (Rev 7:14.) It will matter nothing at the last day, that we held during life the most exalted view of the sacraments, if we never came to Christ by faith, and never had personal dealings with Him. Faith in Christ is the one thing needful. “He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.” (1Jn 5:12.)

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Notes-

v28.-[After this.] When our Lord had commended His mother, Mary, to John, I believe that the miraculous darkness for three hours came on. During those three hours I believe our Lord said nothing, except “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” As the darkness was passing away, He said, “I thirst.” This, and the two last sayings, “It is finished,” and “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” were all that He said during the last three hours. Thus three of His seven sayings on the cross were before the darkness, and four after it, or during it.

The order of the famous seven sayings was as follows:-

1. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

2. “To day shalt thou be with Me in paradise.”

3. “Woman behold thy son. Behold thy mother.”

4. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.”

5. “I thirst.”

6. “It is finished.”

7. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

[Jesus knowing…accomplished, etc.] In order to understand this verse aright, there is one point concerning our Lord’s death which must be carefully remembered. His death was entirely a voluntary act on His part. In this one respect His death was unlike that of a common man; and we need not wonder at it when we consider that He was God and man in one Person. The final separation between body and soul, in His case, could not take place until He willed it; and all the power of Jews and Romans together could not have effected it against His will. We die because we cannot help it: Christ died because He willed to die, and not until the moment arrived when He saw it best. He said Himself, “No man taketh my life from Me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” (Joh 10:18.) As a matter of fact, we know that our Lord was crucified about nine o’clock in the morning, and that He died about three o’clock in the afternoon of the same day. Mere physical suffering would not account for this. A person crucified in full health was known sometimes to linger on alive for three days! It is evident therefore that our Lord willed to give up the ghost in the same day that He was crucified, for some wise reason. This reason, we can easily suppose, was to secure the fullest publicity for His atoning death. He died in broad day-light, in the sight of myriads of spectators; and thus the reality of His death could never be denied. This voluntariness and free choice of His death, and of the hour of His death, in my judgment, lie at the bottom of the verse before us.

Remembering all this, I believe that the sense of the verse before us must be paraphrased in the following way:-“After this, Jesus knowing in His own mind that all things were now practically accomplished, which He came into the world to do, and knowing that it was expedient that His death should be a most public event, in the face of the crowds assembled to view His crucifixion, proceeded to say the last words which He intended to say, before giving up the ghost at three o’clock, and by saying them fulfilled a prophecy of Scripture.”-Nothing in the details of our Lord’s death, we must always remember, was accidental or by chance. Every part of the great sacrifice for sin was foreordained and arranged in the eternal counsels of the Trinity, even to the words which He was to speak on the cross.

The expression “I thirst,” was chiefly used, I believe, in order to afford a public testimony of the reality and intensity of His bodily sufferings, and to prevent any one supposing, because of His marvellous calmness and patience, that He was miraculously free from suffering. On the contrary, He would have all around Him know that He felt what all severely wounded persons, and especially all crucified persons felt,-a burning and consuming thirst. So that when we read that “He suffered for sins,” we are to understand that He really and truly suffered.

Henry observes, “The torments of hell are represented by a violent thirst, in the complaint of the rich man who begged for a drop of water to cool his tongue. To that everlasting thirst we had all been condemned, if Christ had not suffered on the cross, and said, ‘I thirst.'”

Scott observes that Christ suffered thirst, in order that we might drink the water of life for ever, and thirst no more.

Quesnel remarks, “The tongue of Jesus Christ underwent its own particular torment, in order to atone for the ill-use which men make of their tongues by blasphemy, evil-speaking, vanity, lying, gluttony, and drunkenness.”

The theory that Christ only said “I thirst,” in order to fulfil Scripture, is to my mind unsatisfactory and unreasonable. His saying “I thirst,” was a fulfilment of Scripture, but He did not merely say it in order to fulfil Scripture. John, according to his style of writing, only meant that by His saying “I thirst,” and having His thirst relieved by vinegar, the words of Psa 69:21, were fulfilled.

The Greek word which is rendered “accomplished,” is the same that is rendered “finished” in Joh 19:30. This difference, within two verses, in translating the same word, is one of those blemishes in our authorized version which must be regretted.

The connection of the sentence, “that the Scripture might be fulfilled,” is not very clear to my mind. Is it to be taken with the words that follow in the verse, or with those that immediately precede it?-The common view taken, undoubtedly, is to connect the sentence with “I thirst.” The sense will then be, “Jesus saith, I thirst, so that by this the Scripture was fulfilled.” But is it necessary to make this connection? Might not the sentence be connected with the one which precedes? The sense will then be, “Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, so that the Scripture was fulfilled concerning Himself, said, I thirst.” In three other places in John where the sentence occurs, “that the Scripture might be fulfilled,” the connection is with what goes before, and not with what follows. (Joh 17:12; Joh 19:24-36.) Semler and Tholuck incline to take this view. But I admit that the matter is doubtful, and it certainly is not one of vital importance. One thing only we must remember. Our Lord did not say, “I thirst,” for no other purpose than to fulfil the Scriptures. He spoke with far deeper and stronger reasons, and yet by His speaking and afterwards drinking vinegar, a passage in the prophetical Psalms was fulfilled.

v29.-[Now there was set…vessel….vinegar.] This would be more literally rendered “there was lying” a vessel. In all probability this was a vessel full of the sour wine in common use among the Roman soldiers.

[And they filled a sponge, etc.] The persons here spoken of seem to be the Roman soldiers who carried out the details of the crucifixion. The vinegar was theirs, and it is not likely that any one would have dared to interfere with the criminal hanging on the cross, except the soldiers. The act recorded here must be carefully distinguished from that recorded in Mat 27:34, and is the same as that recorded in Mat 27:48. The first drink of vinegar and gall, commonly given to criminals to deaden their pains, our Lord refused. The second, here mentioned, was given, I believe, notwithstanding what some writers say, in kindness and compassion, and our Lord did not refuse to accept it. A sponge filled with vinegar and put on the end of a stick, was far the easiest and most convenient way of giving drink to one whose head was at least seven or eight feet from the ground, and whose hands, being nailed to the cross, were of course unable to take any cup, and put it to his mouth. From a sponge full of liquid, pressed against the lips, a crucified person might suck some moisture, and receive some benefit.

What this “hyssop” here mentioned was, is a point by no means clearly ascertained. Casaubon speaks of the question as a proverbial difficulty. Some think that it was a branch of the plant hyssop fastened to the end of a reed. This seems very improbable, because of the “sponge.” Dr. Forbes Royle maintains that it was the caper plant, which bears a stick about three or four feet long. Hengstenberg gives evidence from Talmudic writers that the hyssop was among the branches used at the feast of tabernacles, and that its stalk was an ell long. Like many other questions of Bible natural history, the point must probably be left obscure. Some see deep meaning in the mention of hyssop, as the plant used in the ceremonial sprinklings of the law of Moses. (See Heb 9:19.) Hyssop, moreover, was used at the passover in sprinkling the door posts with blood. (Exo 12:22.) Yet the allusion, to say the least, seems doubtful, nor is it quite clear how any typical meaning can be got out of the mention of the plant in this place.

It is very noteworthy that even in the roughest, hardest kind of men, like these heathen soldiers, there is sometimes a tender and compassionate spot in the breast. According to Matthew’s account the cry, “I thirst,” must have followed soon after the cry, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me.” This exhibition of great mental and bodily agony combined, in my opinion, touched the feelings of the soldiers, and one of them at least ran to give our Lord vinegar. We should remember this in dealing with men. Even the worst have often a soft place, if we can find it out, in their inward nature.

Cyril maintains strongly, I must admit, that the act of the soldiers in giving our Lord the sponge full of vinegar, was not an act of kindness, but of mockery and insult. I cannot however, agree with him. He does not appear to distinguish between the first drink which our Lord refused at the beginning of His crucifixion, and the last which He accepted; but speaks of them as one and the same. Theophylact agrees with Cyril.

v30.-[When Jesus therefore…finished.] Our Lord having now given plain proof that He had endured intense bodily suffering, and that like any other human sufferer He could appreciate a slight relief of thirst, such as the vinegar afforded, proceeded to utter one of His last and most solemn sayings: “It is finished.”

This remarkable expression, in the Greek, is one single word in a perfect tense, “It has been completed.” It stands here in majestic simplicity, without note or comment from John, and we are left entirely to conjecture what the full meaning of it is. For eighteen hundred years Christians have explained it as they best can, and some portion of its meaning in all likelihood has been discovered. Yet it is far from unlikely that such a word, spoken on such an occasion, by such a person, at such a moment, just before death, contains depths which no one has ever completely fathomed. Some meanings there are, which no one perhaps will dispute, belonging to this grand expression, which I will briefly mention. No one single meaning, we may be sure, exhausts the whole phrase. It is rich, full, and replete with deep truths.

(a) Our Lord meant that His great work of redemption was finished. He had, as Daniel foretold, “finished transgression, made an end of sin, made reconciliation for iniquity, and brought in everlasting righteousness.” (Dan 9:24.) After thirty-three years, since the day when He was born in Bethlehem, He had done all, paid all, performed all, suffered all that was needful to save sinners, and satisfy the justice of God. He had fought the battle and won it, and in two days would give proof of it by rising again.

(b) Our Lord meant that God’s determinate counsel and forewill concerning His death was now accomplished and finished. All that had been appointed from all eternity that He should suffer, He had now suffered.

(c) Our Lord meant that He had finished the work of keeping God’s holy law. He had kept it to the uttermost, as our Head and representative, and Satan had found nothing in Him. He had magnified the law and made it honourable, by doing perfectly all its requirements. “Woe unto us,” says Burkitt, “if Christ had left but one farthing of our debt unpaid. We must have lain in hell insolvent to all eternity.”

(d) Our Lord meant that He had finished the types and figures of the ceremonial law. He had at length offered up the perfect sacrifice, of which every Mosaic sacrifice was a type and symbol, and there remained no more need of offerings for sin. The old covenant was finished.

(e) Our Lord meant that He had finished and fulfilled the prophesies of the Old Testament. At length, as the Seed of the woman, he had bruised the serpent’s head, and accomplished the work which Messiah was engaged by covenant to come and perform.

(f) Finally, our Lord meant that His sufferings were finished. Like His Apostle, He had “finished His course.” His long life of pain and contradiction from sinners, and above all His intense sufferings, as bearer of our sins on Gethsemane and Calvary, were at last at an end. The storm was over, and the worst was passed. The cup of suffering was at last drained to the very dregs.

Thoughts such as these come to my own mind, when I read the solemn phrase, “It is finished.” But I am far from saying that the phrase does not contain a great deal more. In interpreting such a saying, I am deeply conscious that there is an inexhaustible fulness in our Lord’s words. I am sure we are more likely to make too little of them than to make too much.

Luther remarks, “In this word, ‘It is finished,’ will I comfort myself. I am forced to confess that all my finishing of the will of God is imperfect, piecemeal work, while yet the law urges on me that not so much as one tittle of it must remain unaccomplished. Christ is the end of the law. What it requires, Christ has performed.”

To the objection of some persons, that all things were not completely finished and accomplished, until Jesus rose again and ascended into heaven, Calvin replies that Jesus knew that all things were now practically accomplished, and that nothing now remained to hinder His finishing the work He came to do.

[And He bowed His head.] This is the action of one dying. When the will ceases to exercise power over muscles and nerves, at once those parts of the body which are not rigid like the bones, collapse and fall in any direction to which their centre of gravity inclines them. The head of a crucified person would naturally in death droop forward on the breast, the neck being no longer kept stiff by the will. This is what seems to have happened in the case of our Lord.

May we not gather from this expression, that our Lord up to this moment held up His head erect, firm, steady, and unmoved, even under extreme pain?

Alford remarks how this little incident was evidently recorded by an eye-witness. The miraculous darkness must have now passed away, in order to let this movement of the head be seen.

[And gave up the ghost.] These words mean, literally, “delivered up the spirit.” It is an expression never used of any dying person in the Bible except our Lord. It is an expression denoting voluntary action. He delivered up His spirit of His own free will, because the hour was come when He chose to do it. He had just said, after using the phrase “It is finished,”-“Father into Thy hands I commend my spirit,”-and then He proceeded to deliver up His spirit into the hands of God the Father. It is the Father, and none else, to whom the words, “He delivered up,” must apply.

Augustine observes, “Not against His will did the Saviour’s spirit leave His flesh, but because He would, and when He would, and how He would. Who is there that can even go to sleep when he will, as Jesus died when He would? Who thus puts off his clothes when he will, as Jesus unclothed Himself of His flesh when He would? Who goes thus out of his door when he will, as Jesus, when He would, went out of the world?”

In death, as well as in life, our Lord has left us an example. Of course we cannot, like Him, choose the moment of our death, and in this, as in everything else, we must be content to follow Him at an enormous distance. The best of saints is a miserable copy of his Master. Nevertheless, we too, as Cyril observes, must endeavour to put our souls into God’s hands, if God is really our Father, when the last hour of our lives comes; and like Jesus, to place them by faith in our Father’s keeping, and trust our Father to take care of them.

Above all, let us never forget, as we read of Christ’s death, that He died for our sins, as our Substitute. His death is our life. He died that we might live. We who believe on Christ shall live for evermore, sinners as we are, because Christ died for us, the innocent for the guilty. Satan cannot drag us away to everlasting death in hell. The second death cannot harm us. We may safely say,-“Who can condemn me, or slay my soul? I know well that I deserve death, and that I ought to die, because of my sins. But then my blessed Head and Substitute died for me, and when He died, I, His poor weak member, was reckoned to die also. Get thee behind me, Satan, for Christ was crucified and died. My debt is paid, and thou canst not demand it twice over.”-For ever let us bless God that Christ “gave up the ghost,” and really died upon the cross, before myriads of witnesses. That “giving up the ghost” was the hinge on which all our salvation turned. In vain Christ’s life and miracles and preaching, if Christ had not at last died for us! We needed not merely a teacher, but an atonement, and the death of a Substitute. The mightiest transaction that ever took place on earth since the fall of man, was accomplished when Jesus “gave up the ghost.” The careless crowd around the cross saw nothing but the common death of a common criminal. But in the eyes of God the Father the promised payment for a world’s sin was at last effected, and the kingdom of heaven was thrown wide open to all believers. The finest pictures of the crucifixion that artists have ever painted, give a miserably insufficient idea of what took place when Jesus “gave up the ghost.” They can show a suffering man on a cross, but they cannot convey the least notion of what was really going on,-the satisfaction of God’s broken law, the payment of sinners’ debt to God, and the complete atonement for a world’s sin.

The precise physical cause of the death of Christ is a very interesting subject, which must be reverently approached, but deserves attention. Dr. Stroud, in his book on the subject, takes a view which is supported by the opinions of three eminent Edinburgh physicians, the late Sir James Simpson, Dr. Begbie, and Dr. Struthers. This view is that the immediate cause of our Lord’s decease was rupture of the heart. Dr. Simpson argues that all the circumstances of our Lord’s death,-His crying with a loud voice just before death, not like an exhausted person, and His sudden giving up the ghost,-confirm this view very strongly. He also says that “strong mental emotions, produce sometimes laceration or rupture of the walls of the heart;” and he adds, “If ever a human heart was riven and ruptured by the mere amount of mental agony endured, it would surely be that of our Redeemer.” Above all, he argues that the rupture of the heart would go far to account for the flow of blood and water from our Lord’s side, when pierced with a spear. Dr. Simpson’s very interesting letter on the subject, will be found in the appendix to “Hanna’s Last Days of our Lord’s Passion.”

Concerning the deep question as to what became of our Lord’s soul when He gave up the ghost, it must suffice to believe that His soul went to paradise, the place of the departed spirits of believers. He said to the penitent thief, “To-day shalt thou be with Me in paradise.” (Luk 23:43.) This is the true meaning of the article, “descended into hell,” in the Belief. “Hell” in that clause certainly does not mean the place of punishment, but the separate state or place of departed spirits.

Some theologians hold that, between His death and resurrection “He went and preached to the spirits in prison” (1Pe 3:19); and proclaimed the accomplishment of His work of atonement. This, to say the least, is doubtful. But Athanasius, Ambrose, Zwingle, Calvin, Erasmus, Calovius, and Alford hold the view.

Concerning the miraculous signs which accompanied our Lord’s death,-the darkness from twelve o’clock to three, the earthquake, the rending of the temple veil,-John is silent, and doubtless for some wise reason. But we may well believe that they struck myriads with awe and astonishment, and perhaps smoothed the way for our Lord’s burial in Joseph’s tomb, without opposition or objection.

v31.-[The Jews therefore, because it was, etc.] The “Jews” in this verse, as in many other places in John’s Gospel, can only mean the chief priests and leaders of the nation at Jerusalem; the same men who had pressed on Pilate our Lord’s crucifixion,-Annas, Caiaphas, and their companions.

The “preparation” means the day preceding the passover sabbath. That sabbath being pre-eminently a “high day,” or, to render the Greek literally, a “great” day in the year, the Friday, or day preceding it, was devoted to special preparations. Hence the day went by the name of “the preparation of the sabbath.” The expression makes it certain that Jesus was crucified on a Friday. The Jews saw clearly that, unless they took active measures to prevent it, the body of our Lord would remain all night hanging on the tree of the cross, the law would be broken (Deu 21:23), and a dead body would hang throughout the sabbath in full view of the temple, and close by the city walls. Therefore they made haste to have Him taken down from the cross and buried.

The “breaking of the legs” of crucified criminals, in order to despatch them, seems to have been a common accompaniment of this barbarous mode of execution, when it was necessary to make an end of them, and get them out of the way. In asking Pilate to allow this breaking of legs, they did nothing but what was usual. But for anything we can see, the thing would not have been done if the Jews had not asked.-The verse supplies a wonderful example of the way in which God can make the wickedest men unconsciously carry out His purposes, and promote His glory. If the Jews had not interfered this Friday afternoon, for anything we can see, Pilate would have allowed our Lord’s body to hang upon the cross till Sunday or Monday, and perhaps to see corruption. The Jews procured our Lord’s burial the very day that He died, and thus secured the fulfilment of His famous prophecy: “Destroy this temple of my body, and in three days I will raise it up.” (Joh 2:19.) If He had not been buried till Sunday or Monday, He could not have risen again the third day after His death. As it was, the Jews managed things so that our Lord was laid in the grave before the evening of Friday, and was thus enabled to fulfil the famous type of Jonah, and give the sign He had promised to give of His Messiahship, by lying three days in the earth, and then rising again the third day after He died. All this could not have happened if the Jews had not interfered, and got Him taken from the cross and buried on Friday afternoon!-How true it is that the wickedest enemies of God are only axes and saws and hammers in His hands, and are ignorantly His instruments for doing His work in the world. The restless, busy, meddling of Caiaphas and his companions, was actually one of the causes that Christ rose the third day after death, and His Messiahship was proved. Pilate was their tool: but they were God’s tools! The Romans, in all probability, would have left our Lord’s body hanging on the cross till sun and rain had putrefied and consumed it, had such a thing been possible. Bishop Pearson says it was a common rule of Roman law not to permit sepulture to the body of a crucified person. The burial, therefore, was entirely owing to the request of the Jews. The providence of God ordered things so that they who interceded for His crucifixion interceded for His burial. And by so doing they actually paved the way for the crowning miracle of His resurrection!

Let us mark the miserable scrupulosity that is sometimes compatible with the utmost deadness of conscience. Thus we see men making ado about a dead body remaining on the cross on the Sabbath, at the very time when they had just murdered an innocent living person with the most flagrant injustice and monstrous cruelty. It is a specimen of “straining out a gnat, and swallowing a camel.”

v32.-[Then came the soldiers, etc.] Pilate having given his consent to the request of the Jews, the Roman soldiers proceeded to break the legs of the criminals, and began with the two thieves. Why they began with them is by no means clear. If the three crosses were all in a row, it is hard to see why the two outer criminals of the three should have their legs broken first, and the one in the centre be left to the last. We must suppose one of three things in order to explain this.

(a) Possibly two of the soldiers broke the legs of one malefactor, and the other two the legs of the other. Reason and common-sense point out that it does not require four men to do this horrid work on a helpless, unresisting, crucified person. Thus, having finished their work at the two outward crosses, they would come last to the centre one.

(b) Possibly the two outward crosses may have been rather forwarder in position than the central one, so that the sufferers might see each others’ faces. In that case the soldiers would naturally begin with the crosses they came to first. This, perhaps, would account for the penitent thief having read the word “King” over our Lord’s head on the cross.

(c) Possibly the soldiers saw that our Lord was dead, even before they came up to Him. At any rate they probably saw that He was still and motionless, and thus suspecting that He was dead, they did not trouble themselves with His body, but began with the two who evidently were yet alive.

It is noteworthy that the penitent thief, even after his conversion, had more suffering to go through before He entered paradise. The grace of God and the pardon of sin did not deliver him from the agony of having his legs broken. When Christ undertakes to save our souls, He does not undertake to deliver us from bodily pains and a conflict with the last enemy. Penitents, as well as impenitents, must taste death and all its accompaniments. Conversion is not heaven, though it leads to it.

Scott remarks that those who broke the legs of the penitent thief, and hastened his end, were unconscious instruments of fulfilling our Lord’s promise, “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.”

How the legs of crucified criminals were broken we do not know; but it was probably done in the roughest manner. With such tools at hand as the hammers used for driving in the nails, and the mattocks and spades used for putting the cross in the ground, the soldiers could hardly want instruments. It must be remembered that a simple fracture would not cause death. The Greek word which we render “break,” means, literally, “shiver to pieces.” May it not be feared that this is the true meaning here?

v33.-[But when they came to Jesus, etc.] This verse contains the first proof of the mighty fact that our Lord really died. We are told that the soldiers did not break His legs, because they “saw that He was dead already.” Accustomed as Roman soldiers necessarily were to see death in every form, wounds of every kind, and dead bodies of every description, and trained to take away human life by their profession, they were of all men least likely to make a mistake about such a matter. Thus we have it most expressly recorded, that the soldiers “saw that He was dead already,” and therefore did not break His legs. Our salvation hinges so entirely on Jesus Christ’s vicarious death, that a moment’s reflection will show us the divine wisdom of the fact being thoroughly proved. His unbelieving enemies could never say that He did not really die, and that He was only in a swoon, or fainting-fit, or state of insensibility. The Roman soldiers are witnesses that on the centre cross of the three they saw a dead man.

v34.-[But one…spear…pierced His side.] Here we have the second proof that our Lord did really die. One of the soldiers, determined to make sure work and to leave nothing uncertain, thrust his spear into our Lord’s side, in all probability directing his thrust at the heart, as the seat of vitality. That thrust made it certain, if there had been any doubt before, that the body on the central cross was actually dead. They believed it from appearance, and perhaps from touch, when they first came up to the cross. They made it quite certain by the thrust of the spear. The body of a person in a swoon would have given some sign of life, when pierced with a spear.

The gross inaccuracy of those pictures which represent this soldier as a horseman, is worth noticing. Our Lord’s body was easily within reach of the thrust of a spear in the hands of a foot soldier. There is no evidence whatever that any Roman cavalry were near the cross!

The theory of Bishop Pearson, that this soldier pierced our Lord’s side in anger and impatience, as if provoked to find Him dead, does not appear to me well-founded. It is not likely that the soldiers would be angry at finding a state of things which saved them trouble. To me it seems far more likely that the thrust was the hasty, careless act of a rough soldier, accustomed to prove in this way whether a body was alive or dead. I have heard it said by an eye-witness, that some of the Cossacks who followed our retreating cavalry, after the famous Balaclava charge, in the Crimean war, were seen to prick the bodies of fallen soldiers with their spears, in order to see whether they were dead or alive.

Theophylact suggests that this soldier thrust the spear into our Lord’s side in order to gratify the wicked Jews who stood by.

Besser remarks, most sensibly, “Even the soldier’s spear was guided by the Father’s hand.”

[And forthwith…blood and water.] The remarkable fact here recorded has given rise to considerable difference of opinion.

(a) Some, as Grotius, Calvin, Beza, and others, hold that this issue of blood and water was a proof that the heart or pericardium was pierced, and death in consequence quite certain. They say that the same result would follow from a thrust into the side of any person lately dead, and that blood and water, or something closely resembling it, would immediately flow out. They maintain, therefore, that there was nothing supernatural in the circumstance recorded.

(b) Others, as most of the Fathers, Brentius, Musculus, Calovius, Lampe, Lightfoot, Rollock, Jansenius, Bengel, Horsley, and Hengstenberg, hold that this issue of blood and water was supernatural, extraordinary, unusual, and contrary to all experience; and they maintain that it was a special miracle.

The question is one of those which will probably never be settled. We are not in possession of sufficiently precise information to justify a very positive opinion. We do not know for a certainty that the left side of our Lord was pierced and not the right. We do not know exactly how much blood and water flowed out, whether a large quantity or a very little. That a miracle might take place at such a death, on such an occasion, and in the body of such a Person, we have no right to deny. The mere facts that, when our Lord hung on the cross, the sun was darkened, and, when He gave up the ghost, the veil of the temple was rent in twain, and the rocks rent, and the earth quaked, might well prepare our minds to see nothing extraordinary in a miracle taking place, and almost to expect it. Perhaps the safest line to adopt is to combine both views. The thrust of the spear into the side caused blood to flow, and proved that the seat of vitality in the body was pierced. The extraordinary and unusual flow of blood and water was a supernatural event, and meant to teach spiritual lessons.

I may be allowed to say that three eminent medical men in large practice, whom I have ventured to consult on this verse, are all of one mind,-that any large flow of blood and water from a dead body is contrary to all ordinary experience. Each of them, singularly enough, has expressed this opinion independently, and without any communication with the other two.

Concerning the symbolical meaning of this flow of “blood and water” from our Lord’s side much has been written in every age of the Church. That it had a deep spiritual sense appears almost certain from John’s words in his first Epistle. (1Jn 5:6-8.) But what the real symbolical meaning was, is a very disputable question.

(a) The common opinion is, that the blood and water symbolized the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, both given by Christ and emanating from Him, and both symbols of atonement, cleansing, and forgiveness. This is the view of Chrysostom, Augustine, Andrews, and a large body of divines, both ancient and modern. I cannot myself receive this opinion. In matters like this I dare not call any man master, or endorse an interpretation of Scripture, when I do not feel convinced that it is true. I cannot see the necessity of dragging in the sacraments at every point in the exposition of God’s Word, as some do.

(b) My own opinion is most decided, that the flow of blood and water, whether supernatural or not, was meant to be a symbolical fulfilment of the famous prophecy in Zechariah: “In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness.” (Zec 13:1.) It was a practical declaration, by fact and deed, to all Jews, that by Christ’s death that famous prophecy was fulfilled, and that now at last there was a fountain opened for sinners, and a way of atonement and forgiveness made plain by Christ’s death. The moment He was dead this fountain was opened and began to flow. Over the bleeding side of our Lord there might have been written, “Behold the fountain for all sin.” It is no small evidence to my mind, in favour of this view, that this famous prophecy occurs only five verses after the text immediately quoted by John in this very chapter, “they shall look on Him whom they pierced.” (Zec 12:10.)

Augustine sees a type of this wound in our Lord’s side, from which flowed blood and water, in the door in the side of Noah’s ark, by which the living creatures entered in and were preserved from drowning! He also sees another type of the transaction in the first Adam sleeping and Eve being formed out of his side!

The opinion held by some, that this “blood and water” warrant the mixture of water and wine in the Lord’s Supper, seems to me utterly untenable. As Musculus sensibly observes, it was not “wine and water,” but “blood and water” that flowed from our Lord’s side. There is not the slightest evidence that our Lord used water at the institution of the Lord’s Supper.

That “blood” was the symbol of atonement, and “water” of cleansing, every careful reader of the Old Testament must know. The two things are brought together by Paul in Heb 9:19. The smiting of the rock by Moses, and water flowing forth, was also typical of the event before us. Lightfoot mentions a Jewish tradition that blood and water flowed from the rock at first.

Henry says, “The blood and water signified the two great benefits which all believers partake of through Christ,-justification and sanctification. Blood stands for remission, water for regeneration; blood for atonement, water for purification. The two must always go together. Christ hath joined them together, and we must not think to put them asunder. They both flowed from the pierced side of our Redeemer.”

v35.-[And he that saw it bare record, etc.] This singular verse, by common consent, can only refer to John. It is as though he said, “The fact that I now testify to I saw with my own eyes; and my testimony is true, and accurate, and trustworthy, and I know that I say true things in recording the fact, so that you to whom I write need not hesitate to believe me. I stood by. I saw it. I was an eye-witness, and I do not write by hear-say.”

The Greek word rendered “true” in the second place in this verse, means, literally, “true things.”

The question arises naturally, To what does John refer in this peculiar verse? (a) Does he refer only to the issue of blood and water from our Lord’s side, as a singularly miraculous event? (b) Or does he refer to the thrust of the spear into our Lord’s side, as a convincing proof that our Lord really died? (c) Or does he refer to the fact that our Lord’s legs were not broken, and that he thus saw the great type of the passover-lamb fulfilled?

I decidedly lean to the opinion that the verse refers to all the three things I have mentioned together, and not to any one of them only. All three things were so remarkable, and so calculated to strike the mind of a pious and intelligent Jew, and all happened in such close and rapid succession, that John emphatically records that he saw all the three with his own eyes. He seems to say, “I saw myself that not a bone of the Lamb of God was broken, so that He fulfilled the type of the passover. I saw myself a spear thrust into His heart, so that He was a true Sacrifice, and really died. And I saw myself that blood and water came out of His side, and I beheld a fulfilment of the old prophecy of a fountain for sin being opened.” When we consider the immense importance and significance of all these three things, we need not wonder that John should have been inspired to write this verse, in which he emphatically tells his readers that he is writing down nothing but the plain naked truth, and that he actually saw these three things,-the unbroken legs, the pierced side, the flow of blood and water,-with his own eyes.

Pearce and Alford think that the expression “that ye might believe,” signifies that ye might believe that Jesus did really die on the cross. Others decidedly prefer thinking that it means, “that ye may believe that blood and water did really flow from the side of Jesus after His death.” Others take the phrase in a general sense, “that ye may believe more firmly than ever on Christ, as the true sacrifice for sin.”

v36, v37.-[For these things were done, etc.] In these two verses John explains distinctly to his readers why two of the facts he has just mentioned, however trifling they might seem to an ignorant person, were in reality of great importance. By one of these facts,-the not breaking a bone of our Lord’s body,-the text was fulfilled which said that not a bone of the passover-lamb should be broken. (Exo 12:46.) By the other fact,-the piercing of our Lord’s side,-the prophecy of Zechariah was fulfilled, that the inhabitants of Jerusalem “should look on Him whom they pierced.” (Zec 12:10.)

Alford observes that the expression, “they shall look,” does not refer to the Roman soldiers, but to the repentant in the world, who at the time this Gospel was written had began to fulfil this prophecy; and that it also contains a prophetic reference to the future conversion of Israel, who were here the real piercers, though the act was done by the hand of others.”

It is almost needless to say that the passage, like many others, does not mean that these things were done in order that Scripture might be fulfilled, but that by these things being done the Scripture was fulfilled, and God’s perfect foreknowledge about the least details of Christ’s death was proved. Nothing in the great sacrifice happened by chance, luck, or accident. All was arranged as appointed, from first to last, many centuries before, by the determinate counsel of God. Caiaphas, Pilate, the Roman soldiers, were all unconscious instruments in carrying into effect what God had long predicted and foretold to the least jot and tittle.

Let us carefully note here what strong evidence these verses supply in favour of a literal, and not a merely spiritual, fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies.

Rollock observes, “If God have ordained and said anything, it lies not in the hands of any man to disannul it. If God shall say, “There shall not be one bone of my anointed broken,” great Csar and all the kings of the earth, the King of Spain, and the Pope, and all their adherents, shall not be able to do the contrary. So, in the midst of all fear and danger, let us depend on the providence of God.”

Fuente: Ryle’s Expository Thoughts on the Gospels

Joh 19:28. After this. Jesus knowing that all things are now finished, that the scripture might be accomplished, saith, I thirst. It is a question whether the words that the Scripture might be accomplished are to be connected with what precedes or with what follows. In favour of the former connection it may be said(1) It is Johns practice to point out the fulfilment of Scripture after, not before, the event fulfilling it. (2) It is his usual practice to notice the fulfilment of Scripture in what is done to Jesus, rather than in what is done by Him to fulfil it. (3) The use of the word now seems to show that we have already reached a complete accomplishment of Scripture. It would thus appear that it is the intention of the Evangelist to present to us a word spoken by Jesus at a moment when He knew that Scripture had been already fulfilled. He is in the position of One whose work is done, and for whom nothing remains but to depart. The strong counter-argument is that everywhere else in this Gospel (see chap. Joh 2:22) the scripture denotes some special passage. As, however, we cannot doubt that John regarded the utterance here recorded as fulfilling Psa 69:21 (see chap. Joh 2:17), the difference between the two interpretations is less than it at first appears.That thirst was a great part of the agony of the cross we know; nor in all probability should we think of more, were it not the manner of John to relate minor incidents, not for themselves alone, but for the sake of the deeper meaning which he always sees to be involved in them. This manner of the Evangelist, therefore, compels us to ask whether there may not be a deeper meaning in this cry? Let us turn to chap. Joh 4:7. There, immediately after mention of the sixth hour, Jesus says to the woman of Samaria, Give me to drink. Here, in close contiguity with another sixth hour (Joh 19:14), He says, I thirst. But we have already seen in the language of chap. Joh 4:7 the longing of the Redeemer for the fruits of that work which He was then accomplishing in toil and weariness; and we are thus led to think of something of the same kind here. It was not merely to temper suffering that Jesus cried, but it was for refreshment to the body symbolizing a deeper refreshment to the soul.The request thus made was answered.

Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament

Observe here, 1. The affliction or suffering which our Saviour complained of, and that is, thirst; there are two sorts of thirst, the one natural and proper, the other spiritual and figurative; Christ felt both at this time. His body thirsted by reason of those agonies which it laboured under. His soul thirsted in vehement desires, and fervent longings, to accomplish that great and difficult work he was now about.

2. The design and end of our Lord’s complaint; that the scripture might be fulfilled, he said, I thirst. Our Savour finding that all was accomplished, which he was to do before his death, but only the fulfilling of that one scripture, They gave me vinegar to drink; Psa 69:21 he, for the accomplishment thereof, said, I thirst.

Whence note, that such were the agonies and extreme sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross, that they drank up his very spirits, and made him cry, I thirst.

2. That when Christ cried out, I thirst, it was to show, that whatever was foretold by the prophets concerning him, was exactly accomplished, and even to a circumstance fulfilled in him: That the scripture might be fulfilled, Jesus saith, I thirst.

Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament

Joh 19:28-30. After this After what is related above; and after other events recorded by the other evangelists, such as the three hours supernatural darkness, and the doleful exclamation of Jesus, Eloi, Eloi, &c., of which see notes on Mat 27:46-47; Mar 15:34; Jesus, knowing that all things All the grievous and terrible sufferings he had to endure; were now upon the point of being accomplished And being parched with a violent drought: that the scripture might be fulfilled Where the Messiah is described as crying out, My tongue cleaveth to my jaws, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink, (Psa 22:15; Psa 69:21,) to show that he endured all that had been foretold concerning him; saith, I thirst. Now there was set As usual on such occasions; a vessel full of vinegar Near the cross: as vinegar and water was the common drink of the Roman soldiers, perhaps this vinegar was set here for their use. And they filled a sponge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop That is, a stalk of hyssop; and put it to his mouth In a contemptuous manner. See note on Mat 27:48. There must have been some plant in Judea of the lowest class of trees, or shrubs, which was either a species of hyssop, or had a strong resemblance to what the Greeks called ; inasmuch as the Hellenist Jews always distinguished it by that name. It is said of Solomon, (1Ki 4:33,) that he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall. Now they did not reckon among trees any plants but such as had durable and woody stalks, see note on Mat 6:30. That their hyssop was of this kind, is evident also from the uses of sprinkling, to which it is in many cases appointed by the law to be applied. Campbell. When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished The predictions of the prophets that respect my personal ministry are all fulfilled. The important work of mans redemption is accomplished. The demands of the law, and of divine justice, are satisfied, and my sufferings are now at an end. It appears from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that in speaking these words he cried with an exceeding loud voice; probably to show that his strength was not exhausted, but that he was about to give up his life of his own accord. Having thus shouted, he addressed his Father, with a tone of voice proper in prayer; saying, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit, and then bowed his head, and gave up the ghost Leaving us the best pattern of a recommendatory prayer in the article of death. See note on Mat 27:50; Luk 23:46.

Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Vv. 28-30. After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, says, I thirst.29. There was a vessel there full of vinegar; and the soldiers, having filled a sponge with vinegar and having put it on the end of a hyssop stalk, brought it to his mouth. 30. When Jesus therefore had taken the vinegar, he said, It is finished. Then, having bowed his head, he gave up his spirit.

John completes by means of some important details the narrative already known respecting the last moments of Jesus. , after this, must be taken in a broad sense, as throughout our whole Gospel. It is between the preceding incident and this one that the unspeakable anguish of heart is to be placed from the depth of which Jesus cried out: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

The expression: All is finished, refers to His task as Redeemer, so far as He was able to accomplish it during His earthly existence, and, at the same time, to the prophetic picture in which this task had been traced beforehand. There remained, however, a point in the prophecy which was not yet accomplished. Many interpreters (Bengel, Tholuck, Meyer, Luthardt, Baumlein, Keil) make , that, depend on : Knowing that all was accomplished to this end, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. This sense does not seem to me admissible. The fulfilment of the Scriptures cannot be regarded as the end of the accomplishment of the work of Jesus. Moreover, it follows precisely from Joh 19:28-29 that, if the redemptive work was consummated, there was, nevertheless, a point still wanting to the fulfilment of the prophetic representation of the sufferings of the Messiah, and that Jesus does not wish to leave this point unfulfilled. The that depends therefore on the following verb : Jesus says. So Chrysostom, Lucke, de Wette, Weiss, etc.

Only we must not, with Weiss, attribute the purpose to God; it is that of Jesus Himself, as the, knowing that, shows. By saying I thirst, Jesus really meant to occasion the literal fulfilment of this last point of the sufferings of the Messiah: They gave me vinegar to drink (Psa 69:22). Jesus had been for a long time tormented by thirstit was one of the most cruel tortures of this punishment and He could have restrained even to the end, as He had done up to this moment, the expression of this painful sensation. If He did not do it, it was because He knew that this last point must still be fulfilled, and because He desired that it should be fulfilled without delay. John says , and not (which is wrongly substituted by some documents). The question, indeed, is not of the fulfilment of this special prophecy, but of the completing of the fulfilment of the Scripture prophecies in general. Keil thinks that this momentary refreshment was necessary for Him, in order that He might be able Himself to give up His soul to God.

The drink offered to Jesus is not the stupefying potion which He had refused at the moment of the crucifixion, and which was a deadening wine mixed with myrrh (Mark) or wormwood (Matthew). Jesus had refused it, because He wished to preserve the perfect clearness of His mind until the end. The potion which the soldier offers Him now is no longer the soldiers’ wine, as it was ordinarily called; for, in that case, the sponge and the stalk of hyssop would have been to no purpose. It was vinegar prepared for the condemnedthemselves.

In the first two Gospels, the cry of Jesus: Eli, Eli!…My God! my God!… had called forth from a soldier a similar act, but three hours had elapsed since then.

Hyssop is a plant which is only a foot and a half high. Since a stalk of this length was sufficient to reach the lips of the condemned person, it follows from this that the cross was not so high as it is ordinarily represented.

Ostervald and Martin translate altogether wrongly: They put hyssop around [the sponge]; or surrounding it with hyssop. A Dutch critic, de Koe (Conjecturaal Critik en het Evangelie naar Johannes, 1883), has proposed to substitute for , (hyssop) , a lance. The conjecture is ingenious, but not sufficiently well founded. I thirst was the fifth expression of the Saviour, and all is finished the sixth. The first three of His seven expressions on the cross had reference to His personal relations: they were the prayer for His executioners (Luke), the promise made to the thief, His companion in punishment (Luke), the legacy made to His mother and His friend (John). The following three referred to His work of salvation: the cry My God… (Matthew and Mark), to the moral sufferings of the expiatory sacrifice; the groan: I thirst (John), to His physical sufferings; the triumphant expression: It is finished, to the consummation of both. Finally, the seventh and last, which is expressly mentioned only by Luke: Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit, is implied in John in the word , he gave up; it refers to Himself, to the finishing of His earthly existence. This Greek term is not exactly rendered by our phrase to give up the ghost. It expresses a spontaneous act. No one takes my life, Jesus had said; I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again (Joh 10:18); it would be necessary to translate by the word hand over (commit). Such was also the meaning of the loud cry with which, according to Matthew and Mark, Jesus expired.

The word , having bowed His head, indicates that until then He had held His head erect. The breaking of the legs: Joh 19:31-37. Joh 19:31. The Jews therefore, that the bodies might not remain on the cross during the Sabbath, because it was the preparation (for the day of that Sabbath was a high day), asked Pilate that the legs of the crucified might be broken, and that they might be taken away.

John describes here a series of Providential facts, omitted by his predecessors, which occurred in quick succession, and which united in impressing on the person of Jesus, in His condition of deepest humiliation, the Messianic seal. The Romans commonly left the bodies of the condemned on the cross; they became the prey of wild beasts or of dissolution. But the Jewish law required that the bodies of executed criminals should be put out of the way before sunset, that the Holy Land might not, on the following day, be polluted by the curse attached to the lifeless body, a monument of a divine condemnation (Deu 21:23, Jos 8:29; Jos 10:26, Josephus, Bell. Jud. 4.5, 2). Ordinarily, no doubt, the Romans did not trouble themselves about this law. But, in this particular case, the Jews would have been absolutely unable to bear the violation of it, because, as John observes, the following day was neither an ordinary day nor even an ordinary Sabbath; it was a Sabbath of an altogether exceptional solemnity. Those who think that, according to John himself, the Jewish people had already celebrated the Passover on the preceding evening, and that at this time the great Sabbatic day of the 15th Nisan was ending, give to the word , preparation, the technical sense ofFriday, and explain the special solemnity of the Saturday which was to follow by the fact that this Sabbath belonged to the Passover week.

They call to mind also the fact that on the 16th of Nisan the offering of the sacred sheaf was celebrated, a well- known act of worship by which the harvest was annually opened. But neither the one nor the other of these reasons can explain the extraordinary solemnity which John ascribes to the Sabbath of the next day. The 16th of Nisan was in itself so little of a Sabbath that, in order to cut the ears on the evening of the 15-16th, which were intended to form the sacred sheaf, the messengers of the Sanhedrim were obliged to wait until the people cried out to them: The sun is set; then only did the 16th begin, and then only could they take the sickle. Thus in Lev 23:11-14 the 16th is called the day after the Sabbath. How could the weekly Sabbath derive its superior sanctity from its coincidence with this purely working day? As to the technical sense of Friday, given to , it is set aside here by the absence of the article. Finally, the , for, clearly puts the idea of preparation in a logical relation to that of the extraordinary sanctity of the Sabbath which was to begin at six o’clock in the evening, and thus obliges us to keep for this word its natural sense of preparation. Hence it follows that the time of Jesus’ death was the afternoon of the 14th, and not that of the 15th, since the Sabbatic day was on the point of beginning, not of ending. The words: For it was the preparation, signify at once preparation for the Sabbath (as Friday) and preparation for the great Paschal day (as the day before the 15th of Nisan). There was, therefore, on this day a double preparation, because there was an accumulation of Sabbath rest on the following day, which was at once the weekly Sabbath and the great Sabbath, the first day of the feast. By the words: it was the preparation, the evangelist reminds us indirectly that the essential act of the preparation, the slaying of the lamb, took place in the temple at that very moment, and that the Paschal supper was about to follow in a few hours.

This was the reason why it was a matter of absolute necessity, from the Jewish point of view, that the bodies should be put out of the way without delay, before the following day should begin (at six o’clock in the evening).

Pilate, respecting this scruple, consented to the thing which was asked of him. The breaking of the legs did not occasion death immediately, but it was intended to make it certain, and thus to allow of the removal of the bodies. For it rendered any return to life impossible, because mortification necessarily and immediately resulted from it. The existence of this custom (, crurifragium), among the Romans, in certain exceptional cases, is fully established (see the numerous passages cited by Keim). Thus Renan says: The Jewish archaeology and the Roman archaeology of Joh 19:31 are exact. If Keim himself has, notwithstanding this, raised difficulties, asking why the Synoptics do not mention this fact if it is historical, it is easy to answer him: Because Jesus Himself was not affected by it. But His person alone was of importance to them, not those of the two malefactors. Neither would John have mentioned this detail except for its relation to the fulfilment of a prophecy, which had so forcibly struck him.

Is it necessary to understand , might be taken away, simply of removal from the cross. I think not. What concerned the Jews who made the request was not that the bodies should be unfastened, but that they should be put out of sight. The law Deu 21:23, which required of them this request, had no reference to the punishment of the cross, which was unknown to Israel.

Fuente: Godet Commentary (Luke, John, Romans and 1 Corinthians)

CXXXIII.

THE CRUCIFIXION.

Subdivision C.

DARKNESS THREE HOURS. AFTER FOUR MORE SAYINGS,

JESUS EXPIRES. STRANGE EVENTS ATTENDING HIS DEATH.

aMATT. XXVII. 45-56; bMARK XV. 33-41; cLUKE XXIII. 44-49; dJOHN XIX. 28-30.

c44 And it was now about the sixth hour, b33 And a45 Now bwhen the sixth hour was come, there was ca darkness came aover all bthe whole land afrom the sixth hour buntil the ninth hour. c45 the sun’s light failing [The darkness lasted from noon until three o’clock. It could not have been an eclipse, for the moon was always full on the first day of the passover. Whether the darkness was over the whole world, or simply all of Palestine, is uncertain, as, according to the usage of Bible language, the words would be the same]: b34 And at {aabout} the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli {bEloi, Eloi,} lama sabachthani? which is, {athat is,} [729] bbeing interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? [We can imagine what it would mean to a righteous man to feel that he was forsaken of God. But the more we feel and enjoy the love of another, the greater our sense of loss at being deprived of it. Considering, therefore, the near and dear relationship between the Son and Father, it is evident that we can never know or fathom the depth of anguish which this cry expressed. Suffice it to say, that this was without doubt the most excruciating of all Christ’s sufferings, and it, too, was a suffering in our stead. The words of the cry are found at Psa 22:1. Eli is Hebrew, Eloi Aramaic or Syro-Chaldaic for “My God.” The former would be used by Jesus if he quoted the Scripture, the latter if he spoke the language of the people.] 35 And some of them that stood by, {athis man} when they heard it, said, bBehold, he {athis man} calleth Elijah. d28 After this Jesus, knowing that all things are now finished, that the scripture might be accomplished, saith, I thirst. 29 There was set there a vessel full of vinegar: a48 And straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with {band filling a sponge full of} vinegar, aand put it on a reed, and gave him to drink. dso they put a sponge full of the vinegar upon hyssop, and brought it to his mouth. bsaying, {a49 And the rest said,} Let be; let us see whether Elijah cometh bto take him down. ato save him. [Jesus had now been upon the cross for six hours, and fever and loss of blood and the strain upon the muscles of his chest had rendered his articulation difficult and indistinct. For this reason some of those who stood by, though perfectly familiar with the language, misunderstood him and thought that he called upon Elijah. Immediately afterwards Jesus speaks of his thirst, and vinegar is given to him to remove the dryness from his throat. Those who give the vinegar and those who stand by, unite in saying “Let be.” This phrase has no reference to the vinegar; it is a general expression, meaning, “Let us do nothing to prevent him from calling upon Elijah, or to prevent Elijah from [730] coming.”] b37 And d30 When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, aJesus cried again with {buttered} a loud voice, dhe said, It is finished [He had come, had ministered, had suffered, and had conquered. There now remained but the simple act of taking possession of the citadel of the grave, and the overthrowing of death. By his righteousness Jesus had triumphed in man’s behalf and the mighty task was accomplished]: c46 And Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit [ Psa 31:5]: and having said this, dhe bowed his head, and gave up {ayielded up} bthe ghost. ahis spirit. [None of the Evangelists speaks of Jesus as dying; for he yielded up his spirit voluntarily– Joh 10:18.] 51 And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in two cin the midst. bfrom the top to the bottom. [The veil was the heavy curtain which hung between the holy and the most holy places in the sanctuary. By shutting out from the most holy place all persons except the high priest, who alone was permitted to pass through it, and this only once in the year, it signified that the way into the holiest–that is, into heaven–was not yet made manifest while the first tabernacle was standing ( Heb 9:7, Heb 9:8). But the moment that Jesus died, thus making the way manifest, the veil was appropriately rent in twain from top to bottom, disclosing the most holy place to the priests who were at that time offering the evening incense in the holy place.] aand the earth did quake; and the rocks were rent; 52 and the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised; 53 and coming forth out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered into the holy city and appeared unto many. [The earthquake, the rending of the rocks, and the consequent opening of the graves, occurred at the moment Jesus died, while the resurrection and visible appearance in the city of the bodies of the saints occurred “after his resurrection,” for Jesus himself was the “first-born from the dead” ( Col 1:18). Matthew chooses to mention the last event here because of its association with the rending of [731] the rocks, which opened the rock-hewn sepulchres in which the saints had slept. There has been much speculation as to what became of these risen saints. We have no positive information, but the natural presumption is, that they ascended to heaven. These resurrections were symbolic, showing that the resurrection of Christ is the resurrection of the race– 1Co 15:22.] b39 And when the centurion, who stood by awatching Jesus, bover against him, saw that he so gave up the ghost, asaw the earthquake, and the things that were {cwhat was} done, he glorified God, saying, {bhe said,} cCertainly this was a righteous man. a54 Now the centurion, and they that were with him feared exceedingly, saying, Truly this bman was the Son of God. [The conduct of Jesus upon the cross and the disturbances of nature which accompanied his death convinced the centurion that Jesus was a righteous man. But knowing that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, and this claim was the real cause for which the Jews were crucifying him, he concludes, since he concedes that Jesus is righteous, that he is also all that he professed to be–the Son of God. There is no just reason for minimizing his confession, as though he had said, “A son of the gods;” for he said nothing of that kind, and those err as to the use of Scriptural language who think so. Like the centurions of Capernaum ( Mat 8:10) and Csarea ( Act 10:1, Act 10:2), this Roman surpassed in faith those who had better opportunities. But in this faith he was not alone.] c48 And all the multitudes that came together to this sight, when they beheld the things that were done, returned smiting their breasts. [The people who had acted under the influence of the priests now yielded to superior influences and began to experience that change of sentiment which led so many to repent and confess Christ at Pentecost.] 49 And all his acquaintance, a55 And many women balso awere there beholding cthe women that {awho} had followed cwith aJesus from Galilee, ministering unto him: cstood afar off, abeholding from afar, cseeing these things. bamong [732] whom were both Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome; athe mother of the sons of Zebedee. b41 who, when he was in Galilee, followed him, and ministered unto him; and many other women that came up with him unto Jerusalem. [John has already mentioned this group of women (see Act 16:29). The synoptists, who make mention of the women toward the close of the crucifixion, do not mention the mother of Jesus as any longer among them. It is likely that she had withdrawn with John, being unable longer to endure the sight. As to the ministering of these women, see p. 297, 298.]

[FFG 729-733]

Fuente: McGarvey and Pendleton Commentaries (New Testament)

JESUS EXPIRES AMID THE DARKNESS

Luk 23:44-46; Joh 19:28-30; Mar 15:33-37; Mat 27:45-50. And from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. Infidelity has ransacked astronomy to find a total solar eclipse at this time and thus account for the darkness. If you will think of one fact you will see the utter folly of such an effort. You know it was the time of the Jewish Passover, which always took place at the full moon of our April. You know this is a time when a solar eclipse is utterly impossible, as the moon is in the east and the sun is in the west, the eclipse necessarily taking place when they are both on the same side of the earth, as the moon must come between the earth and the sun in order to produce the eclipse. Luk 23:45 : And the sun was darkened. This settles the matter against the hypothesis of an eclipse, as the sun is not darkened in that case, but shining as brightly as if no intervening object casts a dark shadow on the earth. The revelation sustains the conclusion that the sun himself actually refused to shine.

He dies, the Friend of sinners dies! Lo, Salems daughters weep around! A solemn darkness veils the skies, A sudden trembling shakes the ground. Come, saints, and drop a tear or two For Him who groaned beneath your load: He shed a thousand drops for you

A thousand drops of richest blood.

Mat 27:46-49 : About the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a great voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? Thus the darkness, prevailed from twelve to three oclock, when our Lord expired with these words. A momentous crisis right here culminates, leading us down into the profoundest depths of the redemptive scheme.

He made Him sin who knew no sin, in order that we may be the righteousness of God in Him. (2Co 5:21.)

In this wonderfully terse statement of the vicarious atonement, be sure you recognize the fact that sin in both clauses is a noun. If you take it for a verb, you ruin the passage. In the Greek, you see on a glance that it is a noun in both instances; but not so in English, which is a loose, unmechanical language, splendid for universal use, but really unfit for a Divine revelation. Consequently, God in mercy made the intensely mechanical Greek, in order to reveal His wonderful truth to the world in such an explicit presentation that human ingenuity: can never evade its legitimate meaning. While Jesus knew no sin i. e., was always perfectly sinless and holy, God made Him sin as a substitute for a guilty world. E. V. gives it to be sin, as you see, italicizing to be, showing thereby that it is not in the original, which is true. To be is objectionable, too much savoring the idea that Jesus in some way had sin in Him, which is utterly incorrect and unsustained by the Scripture. I trow, this moment, when God turned His face away from Him, was the identical crisis when He laid on Him the sins of the whole world, and the above Scripture was verified.

God can not look upon sin under any circumstances; hence when He laid the sins of the whole world on His Own Son, He turned His face away from Him, when the humanity cried out as above. You see here that sin and righteousness are antithetical and coextensive, all sin being laid on Jesus and all the world receiving the righteousness of God i. e., being justified in Him this taking place in infancy, and explaining the fact of universal infantile salvation. This is also the sinners hope. As Jesus carried all of his sins on the cross, he has nothing to do but forsake all, receive the righteousness of God by faith, and become a disciple of our Lord.

And certain ones of those standing by hearing, said, He is calling for Elijah. As they did not understand the Hebrew word Eli, taking the sound, they mistook it for Elijah. And immediately one of them, running, and taking a sponge, and filling it with vinegar, putting it on a reed, gave Him drink. And the rest said, Let Him alone; let us see if Elijah is coming to save Him. They all knew well that Elijah never died, but was translated to heaven alive. Therefore, looking upon him as still alive, and thinking that Jesus was calling him, they did not know but he would ride down from heaven on his fiery chariot, as he had gone up from the land of Moab many centuries ago.

Luk 23:46. Calling with a great voice, Jesus said, Father, into Thy hands I will commit My spirit. And saying these things, He expired. Matthew and John say, He gave up His spirit; i. e., the human spirit left the body, going into Hades as above described, proclaimed His victory in hell, meeting the thief and all the Old Testament saints in the intermediate paradise, and returned the third morn, when He re-entered His body. As Jesus is both man and God, He has a perfect human soul and body, like Adam before he fell. O what a time the soul-sleeping heresy has with plain and unmistakable Scriptures like these, showing positively that Jesus had a human soul, which He gave up when He died, and it returned to His body in the resurrection, as they are under the necessity either to abandon their false doctrine or prove that Jesus had no soul, which you see flatly contradicts the Word of God, as here given! I hope, reader, if you have a creed of any kind you will throw it away, and take the Bible for your only guide. If your creed is true, you do not need it, as the Bible includes it; if untrue throw it away, lest it lead you to hell.

Fuente: William Godbey’s Commentary on the New Testament

19:28 {9} After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.

(9) Christ when he has taken the vinegar, yields up the Spirit, indeed drinking up in our name that most bitter and severe cup of his Father’s wrath.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

6. The death of Jesus 19:28-30 (cf. Matthew 27:48-50; Mark 15:36-37; Luke 23:46)

John did not mention the darkness that came over the land, as the other evangelists did (cf. Mat 27:45; Mar 15:33; Luk 23:44-45). This is noteworthy in view of John’s interest in the light and darkness motif. Perhaps he did not want to detract attention from the person of Jesus. He also omitted Jesus’ words that indicated that the Father had withdrawn from Him (cf. Mat 27:46-47; Mar 15:34-35). This is understandable since throughout this Gospel John stressed the Son’s essential unity with the Father. The Father’s temporary separation from the Son in judgment did not vitiate their essential unity.

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

All things necessary for the fulfillment of Scripture that predicted the provision of redemption were almost accomplished (Gr. teleiothe). John was speaking proleptically again (cf. Joh 12:23; Joh 17:1; Joh 17:4); He spoke anticipating what would happen. Obviously Jesus still had to die. As the moment of His death drew nearer, Jesus expressed His thirst. This showed His true humanity. A man in Jesus’ physical condition would have also experienced torture by dehydration. It is paradoxical that the Water of Life should confess thirst (cf. Joh 4:4-14; Joh 7:38-39). The solution obviously is that Jesus had referred to Himself as the source of spiritual rather than physical water.

"One may no more assume that John’s emphasis on the cross as the exaltation of Jesus excludes his desolation of spirit than his emphasis on the deity of the Son excludes the Son’s true humanity." [Note: Beasley-Murray, p. 351.]

"By accepting the physical refreshment offered Him, the Lord once more indicated the completion of the work of His Passion. For, as He would not enter on it with His senses and physical consciousness lulled by narcotised [sic] wine, so He would not pass out of it with senses and physical consciousness dulled by the absolute failure of life-power. Hence He took what for the moment restored the physical balance, needful for thought and word. And so He immediately passed on to ’taste death for every man.’" [Note: Edersheim, 2:608-9.]

The Scripture that spoke of Messiah’s thirst may be Psa 22:15 (cf. Joh 19:24) and or Psa 69:21 (cf. Joh 2:17; Joh 15:25). Jesus’ mention of His thirst resulted in the soldier callously giving Him vinegar to drink, which Psa 69:21 mentioned. Thus John stressed that Jesus’ death not only fulfilled God’s will but also prophetic Scripture.

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

XXI. THE CRUCIFIXION.

“The soldiers therefore, when they had crucified Jesus, took His garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also the coat: now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout. They said therefore one to another, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted My garments among them, And upon My vesture did they cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did…. After this Jesus, knowing that all things are now finished, that the scripture might be accomplished, saith, I thirst. There was set there a vessel full of vinegar: so they put a sponge full of the vinegar upon hyssop, and brought it to His mouth. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, He said, It is finished: and He bowed His head, and gave up His spirit. The Jews therefore, because it was the Preparation, that the bodies should not remain on the cross upon the Sabbath (for the day of that Sabbath was a high day), asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away. The soldiers therefore came, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified with Him: but when they came to Jesus, and saw that He was dead already, they brake not His legs: howbeit one of the soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and straightway there came out blood and water. And he that hath seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye also may believe. For these things came to pass, that the scripture might be fulfilled, A bone of Him shall not be broken. And again another scripture saith, They shall look on Him whom they pierced.”– Joh 19:23-24, Joh 19:28-37.

Possibly the account which John gives of the Crucifixion is somewhat spoiled to some readers by his frequent reference to apparently insignificant coincidences with Old Testament prophecy. It is, however, to be remembered that John was himself a Jew, and was writing for a public which laid great stress on such literal fulfillments of prophecy. The wording of the narrative might lead us to suppose that John believed Jesus to be intentionally fulfilling prophecy. Where he says, “After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst,” it might be fancied that John supposed that Jesus said “I thirst” in order that Scripture might be fulfilled. This is, of course, to misconceive the Evangelist’s meaning. Such a fulfilment would have been fictitious, not real. But John believes that in each smallest act and word of our Lord the will of God was finding expression, a will which had long since been uttered in the form of Old Testament prophecy. In these hours of dismay, when Jesus was arrested, tried, and crucified before the eyes of His disciples, they tried to believe that this was God’s will; and long afterwards, when they had found time to think, and when they had to deal with men who felt the difficulty of believing in a crucified Saviour, they pointed to the fact that even in small particulars the sufferings of the Messiah had been anticipated and were to be expected.

The first instance of this which John cites is the manner in which the soldiers dealt with His clothes. After fixing Jesus to the cross and raising it, the four men who were detailed to this service sat down to watch. Such was the custom, lest friends should remove the crucified before death supervened. Having settled themselves for this watch, they proceeded to divide the clothes of Jesus among them. This also was customary among the Romans, as it has been everywhere usual that the executioners should have as their perquisite some of the articles worn by the condemned. The soldiers parted the garments of Jesus among them, each of the four taking what he needed or fancied–turban, shoes, girdle, or under-coat; while for the large seamless plaid that was worn over all they cast lots, being unwilling to tear it. All this fulfilled an old prediction to the letter. The reason why it had been spoken of was that it formed a weighty element in the suffering of the crucified. Few things can make a dying man feel more desolate than to overhear those who sit round his bed already disposing of his effects, counting him a dead man who can no longer use the apparatus of the living, and congratulating themselves on the profit they make by his death. How furious have old men sometimes been made by any betrayal of eagerness on the part of their heirs! Even to calculate on a man’s death and make arrangements for filling his place is justly esteemed indecorous and unfeeling. To ask a sick man for anything he has been accustomed to use, and must use again if he recovers health, is an act which only an indelicate nature could be guilty of. It was a cruel addition, then, to our Lord’s suffering to see these men heartlessly dividing among them all He had to leave. It forced on His mind the consciousness of their utter indifference to His feelings. His clothes were of some little value to them: He Himself of no value. Nothing could have made Him feel more separated from the world of the living–from their hopes, their ways, their life–as if already He were dead and buried.

This distribution of His clothes was also calculated to make Him intensely sensible of the reality and finality of death. Jesus knew He was to rise again; but let us not forget that Jesus was human, liable to the same natural fears, and moved by the same circumstances as ourselves. He knew He was to rise again; but how much easier had it been to believe in that future life had all the world been expecting Him to rise! But here were men showing that they very well knew He would never again need these clothes of His.

A comparison of this narrative with the other Gospels brings out that the words “I thirst” must have been uttered immediately after the fearful cry “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” For when the soldier was mercifully pressing the sponge steeped in vinegar to His parched lips, some of the bystanders called out, “Let be: let us see whether Elias will come to save Him,” referring to the words of Jesus, which they had not rightly understood. And this expression of bodily suffering is proof that the severity of the spiritual struggle was over. So long as that deep darkness covered His spirit He was unconscious of His body; but with the agonised cry to His Father the darkness had passed away; the very uttering of His desolation had disburdened His spirit, and at once the body asserts itself. As in the wilderness at the opening of His career He had been for many days so agitated and absorbed in mind that He did not once think of food, but no sooner was the spiritual strife ended than the keen sensation of hunger was the first thing to demand His attention, so here His sense of thirst is the sign that His spirit was now at rest.

The last act of the Crucifixion, in which John sees the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, is the omission in the case of Jesus of the common mode of terminating the life of the crucified by breaking the legs with an iron bar. Jesus being already dead, this was considered unnecessary; but as possibly He might only have swooned, and as the bodies were immediately taken down, one of the soldiers makes sure of His death by a lance thrust. Medical men and scholars have largely discussed the causes which might produce the outflow of blood and water which John affirms followed this spear thrust, and various causes have been assigned. But it is a point which has apparently only physiological interest. John indeed follows up his statement of what he saw with an unusually strong asseveration that what he says is true. “He that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe.” But this strong asseveration is introduced, not for the sake of persuading us to believe that water as well as blood flowed from the lance wound, but for the sake of certifying the actual death of Jesus. The soldiers who had charge of the execution discharged their duty. They made sure that the Crucified was actually dead. And John’s reason for insisting on this and appending to his statement so unusual a confirmation is sufficiently obvious. He was about to relate the Resurrection, and he knows that a true resurrection must be preceded by a real death. If he has no means of establishing the actual death, he has no means of establishing the Resurrection. And therefore for the first and only time in his narrative he departs from simple narration, and most solemnly asseverates that he is speaking the truth and was an eyewitness of the things he relates.

The emphatic language John uses regarding the certainty of Christ’s death is, then, only an index to the importance he attached to the Resurrection. He was aware that whatever virtue lay in the life and death of Christ, this virtue became available for men through the Resurrection. Had Jesus not risen again all the hopes His friends had cherished regarding Him would have been buried in His tomb. Had He not risen His words would have been falsified and doubt thrown upon all His teaching. Had He not risen His claims would have been unintelligible and His whole appearance and life a mystery, suggesting a greatness not borne out–different from other men, yet subject to the same defeat. Had He not risen the very significance of His life would have been obscured; and if for a time a few friends cherished His memory in private, His name would have fallen back to an obscure, possibly a dishonoured, place.

It is not at once obvious what we are to make of the physical sufferings of Christ. Certainly it is very easy to make too much of them. For, in the first place, they were very brief and confined to one part of His life. He was exempt from the prolonged weakness and misery which many persons endure throughout life. Born, as we may reasonably suppose, with a healthy and vigorous constitution, carefully reared by the best of mothers, finding a livelihood in His native village and in His father’s business, His lot was very different from the frightful doom of thousands who are born with diseased and distorted body, in squalid and wicked surroundings, and who never see through the misery that encompasses them to any happy or hopeful life. And even after He left the shelter and modest comforts of the Nazareth home His life was spent in healthy conditions, and often in scenes of much beauty and interest. Free to move about through the country as He pleased, passing through vineyards and olive-groves and cornfields, talking pleasantly with His little company of attached friends or addressing large audiences, He lived an open-air life of a kind in which of necessity there must have been a great deal of physical pleasure and healthful enjoyment. At times He had not where to lay His head; but this is mentioned rather as a symptom of His want of friends than as implying any serious physical suffering in a climate like that of Palestine. And the suffering at the close of His life, though extreme, was brief, and was not to be compared in its cruelty to what many of His followers have endured for His sake.

Two things, however, the physical sufferings of Christ do secure: they call attention to His devotedness, and they illustrate His willing sacrifice of self. They call attention to His devotedness and provoke a natural sympathy and tenderness of spirit in the beholder, qualities which are much needed in our consideration of Christ. Had He passed through life entirely exempt from suffering, in high position, with every want eagerly ministered to, untouched by any woe, and at last passing away by a painless decease, we should find it much harder to respond to His appeal or even to understand His work. Nothing so quickly rivets our attention and stirs our sympathy as physical pain. We feel disposed to listen to the demands of one who is suffering, and if we have a lurking suspicion that we are somehow responsible for that suffering and are benefited by it, then we are softened by a mingled pity, admiration, and shame, which is one of the fittest attitudes a human spirit can assume.

Besides, it is through the visible suffering we can read the willingness of Christ’s self-surrender. It was always more difficult for Him to suffer than for us. We have no option: He might have rescued Himself at any moment. We, in suffering, have but to subdue our disposition to murmur and our sense of pain: He had to subdue what was much more obstinate–His consciousness that He might if He pleased abjure the life that involved pain. The strain upon His love for us was not once for all over when He became man. He Himself intimates, and His power of working miracles proves, that at each point of His career He might have saved Himself from suffering, but would not.

When we ask ourselves what we are to make of these sufferings of Christ, we naturally seek aid from the Evangelist and ask what he made of them. But on reading his narrative we are surprised to find so little comment or reflection interrupting the simple relation of facts. At first sight the narrative seems to flow uninterruptedly on, and to resemble the story which might be told of the closing scenes of an ordinary life terminating tragically. The references to Old Testament prophecy alone give us the clue to John’s thoughts about the significance of this death. These references show us that he considered that in this public execution, conducted wholly by Roman soldiers, who could not read a word of Hebrew and did not know the name of the God of the Jews, there was being fulfilled the purpose of God towards which all previous history had been tending. That purpose of God in the history of man was accomplished when Jesus breathed His last upon the cross. The cry “It is finished” was not the mere gasp of a worn-out life; it was not the cry of satisfaction with which a career of pain and sorrow is terminated: it was the deliberate utterance of a clear consciousness on the part of God’s appointed Revealer that now all had been done that could be done to make God known to men and to identify Him with men. God’s purpose had ever been one and indivisible. Declared to men in various ways, a hint here, a broad light there, now by a gleam of insight in the mind of a prophet, now by a deed of heroism in king or leader, through rude symbolic contrivances and through the tenderest of human affections and the highest human thoughts God had been making men ever more and more sensible that His one purpose was to come closer and closer into fellowship with them and to draw them into a perfect harmony with Him. Forgiveness and deliverance from sin were provided for them, knowledge of God’s law and will that they might learn to know and to serve Him–all these were secured when Jesus cried, “It is finished.”

Why, then, does John just at this point of the life of Jesus see so many evidences of the fulfilment of all prophecy? Need we ask? Is not suffering that which is the standing problem of life? Is it not grief and trouble and sorrow which press home upon our minds most convincingly the reality of sin? Is it not death which is common to all men of every age, race, station, or experience? And must not One who identifies Himself with men identify Himself in this if in anything? It is the cross of Jesus that stands before the mind of John as the completion of that process of incarnation, of entrance into human experience, which fills his Gospel; it is here he sees the completion and finishing of that identification of God with man he has been exhibiting throughout. The union of God with man is perfected when God submits Himself to the last darkest experience of man. To some it seems impossible such a thing should be; it seems either unreal, unthought-out verbiage, or blasphemy. To John, after he had seen and pondered the words and the life of Jesus, all his ideas of the Father were altered. He learned that God is love, and that to infinite love, while there remains one thing to give, one step of nearness to the loved to be taken, love has not its perfect expression. It came upon him as a revelation that God was really in the world. Are we to refuse to God any true participation in the strife between good and evil? Is God to be kept out of all reality? Is He merely to look on, to see how His creatures will manage, how this and that man will bear himself heroically, but Himself a mere name, a lay figure crowned but otiose, doing nothing to merit His crown, doing nothing to warrant the worship of untold worlds, commanding others to peril themselves and put all to the proof, but Himself well out of range of all risk, of all conflict, of all tragedy? How can we hope to love a God we remove to a throne remote and exalted, from which He looks down on human life, and cannot look on it as we do from the inside! Is God to be only a dramatist, who arranges thrilling situations for others to pass through, and assigns to each the part he is to play, but Himself has no real interests at stake and no actual entrance into the world of feeling, of hope, of trial?

And if a Divine Person were in the course of things to come into this human world, to enter into our actual experiences, and feel and bear the actual strain that we bear, it is obvious He must come incognito–not distinguished by such marks as would bring the world to His feet, and make an ordinary human life and ordinary human trials impossible to Him. When sovereigns wish to ascertain for themselves how their subjects live, they do not proclaim their approach and send in advance an army of protection, provision, and display; they do not demand to be met by the authorities of each town, and to be received by artificial, stereotyped addresses, and to be led from one striking sight to another and from one comfortable palace to another: but they leave their robes of state behind them, they send no messenger in advance, and they mix as one of the crowd with the crowd, exposed to whatever abuse may be going, and living for the time on the same terms as the rank and file. This has been done often in sport, sometimes as matter of policy or of interest, but never as the serious method of understanding and lifting the general habits and life of the people. Christ came among us, not as a kind of Divine adventure to break the tedium of eternal glory, nor merely to make personal observations on His own account, but as the requisite and only means available for bringing the fulness of Divine help into practical contact with mankind. But as all filth and squalor are hidden away in the slums from the senses of the king, so that if he is to penetrate into the burrows of the criminal classes and see the wretchedness of the poor, he must do it incognito, so if Christ sought to bring Divine mercy and might within reach of the vilest, He must visit their haunts and make Himself acquainted with their habits.

It is also obvious that such a Person would concern Himself not with art or literature, not with inventions and discoveries, not even with politics and government and social problems, but with that which underlies all these and for which all these exist–with human character and human conduct, with man’s relation to God. It is with the very root of human life He concerns Himself.

The sufferings of Christ, then, were mainly inward, and were the necessary result of His perfect sympathy with men. That which has made the cross the most significant of earthly symbols, and which has invested it with so wonderful a power to subdue and purify the heart, is not the fact that it involved the keenest physical pain, but that it exhibits Christ’s perfect and complete identification with sinful men. It is this that humbles us and brings us to a right mind towards God and towards sin, that here we see the innocent Son of God involved in suffering and undergoing a shameful death through our sin. It was His sympathy with men which brought Him into this world, and it was the same sympathy which laid Him open to suffering throughout His life. The mother suffers more in the illness of a child than in her own; the shame of wrong-doing is often more keenly felt by a parent or friend than by the perpetrator himself. If Paul’s enthusiasm and devoted life for men made him truly say, “Who is weak, and I am not weak?” who shall measure the burden Christ bore from day to day in the midst of a sinning and suffering world? With a burning zeal for God, He was plunged into an arctic region where thick-ribbed ice of indifference met His warmth; consumed with devotion to God’s purposes, He saw everywhere around Him ignorance, carelessness, self-seeking, total misunderstanding of what the world is for; linked to men with a love which irrepressibly urged Him to seek the highest good for all, He was on all hands thwarted; dying to see men holy and pure and godly, He everywhere found them weak, sinful, gross. It was this which made Him a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief–loving God and man with a love which was the chief element in His being, He could not get man reconciled to God. The mere sorrows of men doubtless affected Him more than they affect the most tender-hearted of men; but these sorrows–poverty, failure, sickness–would pass away and would even work for good, and so might well be borne. But when He saw men disregarding that which would save them from lasting sorrow; when He saw them giving themselves to trivialities with all their might, and doing nothing to recover their right relation to God, the spring of all good; when He saw them day by day defeating the purpose He lived to accomplish, and undoing the one only work He thought worth doing,–who can measure the burden of shame and grief He had to bear?

But it is not the suffering that does us good and brings us to God, but the love which underlies the suffering. The suffering convinces us that it is love which prompts Christ in all His life and death,–a love we may confidently trust to, since it is staggered at no difficulty or sacrifice; a love which aims at lifting and helping us; a love that embraces us, not seeking to accomplish only one thing for us, but necessarily, because it is love for us, seeking our good in all things. The power of earthly love, of the devotedness of mother, wife, or friend, we know;–we know what length such love will go: shall we then deny to God the happiness of sacrifice, the joy of love? Let it not enter our thoughts that He who is more closely related to us than any, and who will far less disclaim this relationship than any, does not love us in practical ways, and cannot fit us by His loving care for all that His holiness requires.

Fuente: Expositors Bible Commentary