The beat goes on in Holy Week as we anticipate a sacred meal before descending into the dark depths of the crucifixion only to arise to new life in Easter glory. The First Testament images we ponder come from Isaiah and a series of songs about the Suffering Servant:
Hear me, O islands,
listen, O distant peoples.
The LORD called me from birth,
from my mother’s womb he gave me my name.
He made of me a sharp-edged sword
and concealed me in the shadow of his arm.
He made me a polished arrow,in his quiver he hid me.
You are my servant, he said to me,
Israel, through whom I show my glory.
Though I thought I had toiled in vain,
and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength,
Yet my reward is with the LORD,
my recompense is with my God.
The Suffering Servant stands in stark contrast to the Jesus presented by John. John, written toward the end of the first century characterizes Jesus and the great I Am who,unlike the Suffering Servant, is above the fray. The church in selecting the readings is challenging us to live with the paradox of the Risen Christ—divine and human.
Until we get through Good Friday, we should focus on Jesus who was crucified as a common criminal. Crucifixion was the form capital punishment took in those days and the Romans had a method beyond their madness in using it frequently. The Romans could have written the manuals for  Abu Ghraib. Water boarding cannot hold a candle to crucifixion.
Check out our crucifixes. We have sanitized the crucifixion as Jesus, properly covered with a loin cloth, “rests” on a tree. Father Ron Rolheiser paints a more graphic picture of the reality of crucifixion; no wonder Jesus cried out to Abba to let this cup pass:
Crucifixion was devised and designed by the Romans with more than one thing in mind.
It was designed as capital punishment, to put a criminal to death, but it aimed to do a couple of other things as well. It was designed to inflict optimal physical pain. Thus the procedure was dragged out over a good number of hours and the amount of pain inflicted at any given moment was carefully calculated so as not to cause unconsciousness and thus ease the pain of the one being crucified. Indeed they sometimes even gave wine mixed with morphine to the person being crucified, not to ease his suffering, but to keep him from passing out from pain so as to have to endure it longer.
But crucifixion was designed with still another even more callous intent. It was designed to humiliate the person. Among other things, the person was stripped naked before being hung on a cross so that his genitals would be publicly exposed. As well, at the moment of death his bowels would loosen. Crucifixion clearly had humiliation in mind.
We have tended to downplay this aspect, both in our preaching and in our art. We have, as Jurgens Moltmann put it, surrounded the cross with roses, with aesthetic and antiseptic wrapping towels. But that was not the case for Jesus. His nakedness was exposed, his body publicly humiliated. That, among other reasons, is why the crucifixion was such a devastating blow to his disciples and why many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn’t connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph. Crucifixion was devised and designed by the Romans with more than one thing in mind.
It was designed as capital punishment, to put a criminal to death, but it aimed to do a couple of other things as well. It was designed to inflict optimal physical pain. Thus the procedure was dragged out over a good number of hours and the amount of pain inflicted at any given moment was carefully calculated so as not to cause unconsciousness and thus ease the pain of the one being crucified. Indeed they sometimes even gave wine mixed with morphine to the person being crucified, not to ease his suffering, but to keep him from passing out from pain so as to have to endure it longer.
But crucifixion was designed with still another even more callous intent. It was designed to humiliate the person. Among other things, the person was stripped naked before being hung on a cross so that his genitals would be publicly exposed. As well, at the moment of death his bowels would loosen. Crucifixion clearly had humiliation in mind.
We have tended to downplay this aspect, both in our preaching and in our art. We have, as Jurgens Moltmann put it, surrounded the cross with roses, with aesthetic and antiseptic wrapping towels. But that was not the case for Jesus. His nakedness was exposed, his body publicly humiliated. That, among other reasons, is why the crucifixion was such a devastating blow to his disciples and why many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn’t connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph. (http://liturgy.slu.edu/PassionB040112/reflections_rolheiser.html)
The physical suffering was excruciating [seems there is a crucis in this word]. Today’s reading from  John reveals Jesus’ great psychological suffering. “Reclining at table with his disciples, Jesus was deeply troubled . . .” No wonder. One of his own was going to betray him for 30 pieces of silver. John goes on to say:
Peter said to him,
“Master, why can I not follow you now?
I will lay down my life for you.”
Jesus answered, “Will you lay down your life for me?
Amen, amen, I say to you, the cock will not crow
before you deny me three times.”
Another betrayal and this one more devastating than the first. Peter the leader of the followers will deny that he knows Jesus in order to save his own hide. The physical torture would be unbearable; the psychological angst of betrayal and abandonment would also deal a crushing blow to the Suffering Servant—Jesus.
Jesus dying suffered irreparable physical and psychological torture. He became a victim of the powers and principalities and the worst evil propensities in the human condition. Jesus did not die for our sins. Jesus died because human kind has not evolved fully into the image and likeness of the Living One. We are good and getting better but we haven’t arrived yet. Jesus was a victim of our inhumanity. Equipped by the Living One for selfless, loving service to others we all to often fall short and crucify those who challenge our self-centered tendencies. We all too often betray and abandon those who call us to become more than we are, especially if becoming more than we are involves pain and suffering. The road to resurrection and new life is through the crucible of suffering.