What The Crucifixion Can Teach Us About Freedom
Or the Martyr's Paradox
Lonely are our martyrs: Socrates murdered with poison hemlock; Jesus with a wooden cross.
Good Friday is a holy day to reflect on the death of one of these martyrs, Jesus of Nazareth.
What, then, is the significance of Good Friday in the year 2025 AD? Is it still relevant? If so, what can we learn from it? My hunch is a great deal of irony is waiting to be unearthed.
Compared to liberal societies, traditional societies gave clear rules on how to live and often came with a cost—oppression. A traditional society was as likely to give us gold, frankincense, and myrrh, as it was to give us a nail of iron, a crown of thorns, and a cross of wood. The crucial point is that it did not tolerate dissent and Jesus was a dissenter. He flipped tables and cursed hypocrites. He said No.
For this dissent, he was crucified, a form of torture and execution meant for “slaves, foreigners, revolutionaries, and the vilest of criminals.”1 It is considered one of the most painful deaths ever invented, and the symbol of this mode of execution was the cross.
Death-by-cross, then, is our clue to the value of Good Friday. Let us walk along the Via Dolorosa of Jerusalem—the Sorrowful Way—to place this mode of death in the mind’s eye.
These examples, while brutal, will help us make sense of our quest.
Scourge: Jesus was stripped naked and his hands were tied to a post. A whip of leather strips with iron balls and sharpened bits of sheep bone on the ends was repeatedly raised and cracked down on his shoulders, back, and upper legs by two Legionnaires. The bone and metal bits ripped through skin, then muscle, until the crowd could see white bone. Streams of blood radiated outwards from his mangled body. His blood pressure dropped and may have put him in a state of circulatory shock.
Crown and Robe: The crown of thorns, probably taken from the Ziziphus spina-christi tree, would have carved into the nerves of his face. The robe clotted the slash wounds across his back; when torn off, the wounds reopened and blood flowed once again.
Cross: The vertical piece of the cross called a stipes was probably a permanent feature on the hill of Golgotha overlooking Jerusalem. The horizontal piece, called the patibulum, weighed roughly one-hundred pounds and had to be carried to the top. He lost so much blood during his unusually harsh scourging that he needed help.
Nails: At the top of the hill, our Nazorean lied down on the patibulum. Tapered iron nails roughly seven inches long were driven through his wrists into the wood. This severed the median nerves that ran to his hands and would have sent “excruciating bolts of fiery pain in both arms.” The patibulum was then lifted and placed on the stipes, dislocating his shoulders and elbows and stretching his arms to at least six inches longer than their original length. A nail was then driven through his feet and into the vertical portion of the cross, severing his dorsal pedal arteries.
Death: The diaphragm is the muscle that separates the chest cavity from the abdominal cavity. To inhale, we lower the diaphragm. To exhale, we must lift it. Because the weight of his body dragged him down, the only way he could exhale fully was by pushing down on the nail through his feet and pulling down on the nails through his wrists. Carbon dioxide built in his blood stream and further increased his need to exhale. Eventually, emptied of blood and water, his lungs collapsed, he suffocated, and his heart stopped.
What then?
It is significant his execution could have been painless. It could have taken place in a quiet valley of lilies. It could have been in private without a crowd. Instead, his crucifixion was designed for maximum pain and public exposure. The cross was not only designed to break him, but to warn everyone else. But the cross did not break him—he broke the cross. It is a welcome twist of fate that the cross built to terrorize men, women, and children into submission is now a symbol of freedom.
He hung before a crowd who watched him suffocate for their amusement and in front of those who betrayed him. What is an iron nail to a man like this? A thorn, a whip, or a sword? What is choking, pain, or death? He did not care for bones whitened in the rays of the sun or sandaled feet speckled red with blood. He did not care for heart, lungs, or muscle. A few more years, months, or breaths—none of it mattered. His physical self was nothing; his autonomous self was everything.
To the mass, it made sense to sacrifice oppression, tyranny, and terror for a regulated life—rule by others. To our carpenter, it made sense to endure whip, thorn, and cross for freedom—rule of self. The mass trades freedom for life; the martyr trades life for freedom.
That is, until the masses are inspired.
And so we have what I think of as the Martyr’s Paradox. The martyr dies for freedom and the masses make freedom their cause. But when freedom is won, they find the weight of chains has been replaced by a far greater weights—the weight of existence and of owning one’s self.
What then? What does this have to do with the modern era?
The absence of chains means all perspective on brutal suffering can be lost. Suffering becomes a mere abstraction. Words. Death-by-cross is no more than a vague image floating about in a skull or on a television screen. And so it is amusing to witness a minor nuisance blossom into a crucifixion: a news cycle is “traumatic,” a micro aggression is “violence,” a digital mob is “excruciating,” an election is “unbearable.”
The weight of existence, however, is a deeper matter. In freedom, “the individual is entirely responsible for—that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choice, and actions.”2 This world is heavy indeed. Life becomes a cross to be born. Why not, then, share the burden and lighten the load? Why author oneself when one can merge with the mass? A mass movement “appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self.”3 Who, then, will save these poor souls, remove the burden of self-rule, and inflict justice on evil doers, dissenters, truth-speakers, and all those who flourish in freedom? A strong man who will bring back order? Structure? Rule?
Bitter is the irony that will taste of hemlock: wails of lamentation bring back the burden of oppression and the circle completes itself. The unhappy masses may bring back the whips, the patibulum, and the long walk to Golgotha in an attempt to turn their eyes away from the abyss within.
An axiom of oppression is to put the cross on the shoulders of others to flee from freedom; an axiom of liberalism is to bear the cross on our own shoulders to preserve freedom. This is the hard road. This may be what our carpenter meant when he said, “… the gate is wide and the road is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. The gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
How, then, may we view Good Friday?
As a choice: to walk the broad road or the hard one. The road that leads to rule of others or self-rule. The road to oppression or the road of the old philosopher and the young carpenter—the road that leads within.
What then? is a passion project.
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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Edwards, William D., Wesley J. Gabel, and Floyd E. Hosmer. "On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ." JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 255, no. 11, 1986, pp. 1455-1463.
Yalom, Irvin D. Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books, 1980.
Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010.
Sam, you are tough to tackle this. I walked along the Via Dolorosa of Jerusalem in my visits to Israel and the hair on the back of my neck stood!
Powerful meditation Sam. Your intuition is spot on, one of the sayings of Jesus is “Take up your cross and follow me.” You’ve written an excellent reflection for Holy Week.