Pondering through the Scriptures this morning, I was much struck by the passages in all four canonical Gospels concerning Judas Iscariot, the one who ultimately betrayed Jesus. The grand sweep of the greatest story ever told contains many rich details, and it is sometimes easy to skip over them as you read through the glorious epic of Our Lord’s victory over sin and death.

One of those details, has got to be the pain Our Lord felt when He was betrayed by those closest to Him.

Christian doctrine holds that Jesus on Earth was both fully Man and fully God – two natures in one body. As God, in the person of the Son, albeit in a limited and humbled form, Jesus assuredly knew what was coming – He said so Himself, throughout the lead-up to the Last Supper. But, as a mere man, I suspect Jesus was horrified by what His friends did – especially Judas.

I had an opportunity to think about this when I attended the Stations of the Cross service at midday – in a Catholic church, admittedly. (I have strong differences of opinion with the rosary-rattlers over a number of key points of doctrine, not least with their obsession over ceremony and works over faith and true repentance, and I reckon most Catholics have never actually read the frellin’ manual, but I will readily admit, they know how to put on a show.)

I once walked the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, so the ceremony holds more than a little resonance. In between the repeated mumbled prayers of the same three prayers, and all the kneeling and bowing and so on, there is space to think and contemplate what Jesus endured on His way to Calvary.

It does not make for a pleasant or pretty set of thoughts.

Consider what Jesus had gone through over just twenty-four hours. His disciples, who had stood with Him through every trial for the past three years, fled and abandoned Him at precisely the moment when He, as a man, needed them the most. One of them had sold Him out to the Pharisees for thirty pieces of silver. The Pharisees and their guards had manhandled and brutally beaten Him for the “sin” of answering their insistent line of questioning – “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God” – by replying:

You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of Heaven.

Matthew 20:64, English Standard Version

(Interestingly, the Synoptic Gospels all have slightly different takes on this passage. Matthew’s version states that Jesus never directly claimed to to be the Son of God. Mark’s version has Jesus responding, “I am” – which is the most direct claim to Jesus’s Godhood outside of the Gospel of John. Luke has Jesus simply saying, “You say that I am”. This seems to be an outright contradiction. In fact, it is not, and all you have to do is to realise that these are descriptions of the exact same event from at least two different points of view, to understand why.)

From a modern perspective, this seems to be a rather weird answer. It does not make a whole lot of sense. But, from the perspective of a First Century Jew of the Second Temple era, it smacks of blasphemy of the worst kind – of the sort that would cause a Jewish rabbi to tear his robes in horror at the claim that a mere man could possibly be the Son of God, the Messiah, the King of Israel prophesied for nearly a thousand years, and described in great detail by prophets like Isaiah, Daniel, and Jeremiah.

After that, and at least one further beating, the Pharisees handed Him over Rome’s representative in Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate. Jesus refused to say anything before Pilate, standing silently after being accused of the worst of crimes. Pilate attempted repeatedly to dismiss the case against Jesus and free Him, because he could see no crime or guilt in Jesus. But, because of the politics of the region and the intense pressure brought upon Pilate by the crowd of angry fundamentalist Jews gathering outside, he had Jesus scourged.

Anyone who knows what a Roman scourging involves, would be physically sick at the brutality and horror visited upon the victim. Mere words are not enough to describe it.

The Roman conception of scourging involved a whip with multiple cords, each one ending in a small metal ball or piece, or a hook of wood or bone. The purpose of the metal pieces was to cause vasodilation – the expansion of the blood vessels at the impact site – which would increase blood flow to that region, thereby amplifying the tremendous pain involved with each strike. The purpose of the hooks was to latch into the victim’s flesh, and then tear it away.

A single strike from such an instrument of torture would have been unimaginably painful. Imagine what Our Lord endured, taking up to FORTY such strikes.

Roman history documents men having DIED from the sheer pain and brutality of the floggings, alone. There are Roman records of men seeing their own guts spilling out, because their abdominal and back muscles become so weakened from the trauma, that the back and sides tear open and the intestines distend through the gaps.

Our Lord did not endure a mere whipping or flogging. He endured a flaying alive, a flensing of the skin from His very bones.

And that was merely the torture of His body. Try to imagine the torture of His soul that had already taken place – the betrayal by His disciples, who ran away from Him.

Those disciples had been with Him throughout the past three years. They had seen Him quite literally perform miracles. They saw Him turn water into wine; walk on water; literally raise people, plural, from the dead; heal the sick, the lame, the blind; give speeches that made the hearts of men soar; and cast out daemons, who ran shrieking from His very presence. They had actually witnessed, with their very own eyes, those daemons call Him the Son of God. His spiritual enemies KNEW perfectly well exactly who He was, and they were terrified of Him.

And for all of that, they still ran, because they feared mortal enemies more than they loved Him.

It is not for mere men to try to comprehend the mind of God. But one is tempted to ask whether Jesus, in His human form, felt grief and pain at the betrayal of His friends.

One also has to wonder whether knowing all these things lay ahead, made the pain any less. Personally, if I KNEW a beloved friend or family member would betray me, I do not believe I would have the equanimity and presence of mind to let him go through with it. I would surely attempt to stop my friend, or change the course of events.

But then, I am not God. I am not even worthy to speak or write His name – a wretched and sinful creature like myself, should not, by rights, even exist within the creation of a perfect and almighty God.

The very fact that we exist is itself a miracle. The fact that God does not blot humanity out from existence, for what we have done – for what we did to Him – is a measure of the truly infinite depths of God’s compassion and mercy.

And so, betrayed, bleeding, broken, nearly blind from the crown of thorns jammed down upon His head, Jesus walked – staggered, really – with what must have been a couple of hundred pounds of wood on his shoulder and back, to the place where the most painful part of the entire horrific journey awaited.

He carried the instrument of His own death, to the place where He knew He would die.

What man among us would have the courage to do that? Especially after knowing that those who once loved us, fled like cowards? That NOT ONE OF THEM spoke up in our defence, at the time we needed them the most?

At Golgotha, the Roman soldiers drove long iron spikes into the hands (or possibly the wrists – no one is entirely sure about this) and feet of Jesus. The public depictions we have of this event, are highly sanitised. No one shows what truly happened to Jesus, because we always show Him as clothed with a loincloth about His waist on the Cross.

In reality, He was not clothed. He was naked. The point was to increase His humiliation still further – for Roman crucifixion was a punishment reserved only for the most wretched of criminals. Only traitors, murderers, rebels, and thieves suffered such punishment. The Romans viewed crucifixion with such horror that, under Roman law, NO Roman citizen could ever be crucified.

He suffered in absolute agony upon the Cross for more than three hours – bleeding, thirsting, naked, with the wounds on his back rubbing raw upon the wood as He pulled Himself up every so often to take a laboured breath, the spikes in His hands and feet twisting ever deeper into the pierced long nerves in His limbs every single time.

And He died – broken, beaten, bloodied, and betrayed.

To contemplate this is to weep at the sheer awfulness, the wretchedness, the humiliation of it all.

In two days’ time, we will celebrate the victory of Our Lord over the forces of darkness and evil, over the entirety of the Kingdom of Hell itself. But that victory could never have happened without what seemed, at the time, to be the most terrible and devastating of defeats.

As we celebrate that victory, let us all take a moment to consider what it must have been like, to be betrayed and failed by those whom we love the most. What would that do to you and me, especially if it happened with our full foreknowledge?

Would you be able to accept your fate with humility and grace? Would you go to your death willingly for the sake of those who hate and disparage you with every word?

Jesus did. We owe Him nothing less than our full allegiance and deepest gratitude for that act of selfless devotion.

THAT is the true meaning of Christianity – the acceptance that we are, on our own, trash, that deserve to be blotted out of existence with a mere thought on God’s part, and the realisation that, in spite of that fact, God views each and every one of us as infinitely precious and valuable to Himself.

He judges each of us for what we believe and do. But the fact that He gave us grace, through His sacrifice, is surely a source of great comfort in these dark times.