We see the cross or a crucifix with a corpus hanging on it so frequently that we sometimes don’t reflect on how cruel this form of execution was. Although none of the gospel accounts state it, traditional Christian iconography tells us that nails were driven into Jesus’s hands and feet, and he hung from these. Medical opinion claims that the weight of Jesus’s body would have torn the flesh of
his wrists and ankles, so he could not have remained suspended only by nails. Thus, more recent depictions have Jesus tied to the cross and the nails. The weight of his body suspended by the arms caused him and the two criminals at his side to suffer death by slow suffocation.
Let us not imagine him as so divine that his body is somehow irrelevant. His sensitive fingertips and rough feet were no different from ours. Do we fully
believe that Jesus was human in every way that we are and suffered the same pains as we do?
As we meditate on the hands and the feet nailed to the cross, do we stop to consider the hands that learned to use the tools in the carpenter’s shop, that stretched out to touch the leper, that mixed mud from his saliva to put into the blind man’s eyes, that touched the little children whom the disciples were turning away, that shared the bread
and fish when the multitude were being fed, that broke the bread and gave it to the disciples, that took the cup that represented his new covenant? Do we look at those feet, cracked and caked with blood, that walked hundreds of kilometers, sharing good news, occasionally being washed when he was the guest in somebody’s house, the feet that were anointed in Bethany as a harbinger of his death?
Reflections by Peter Knox SJ
