This Is My Body Given for You

Gathered around their Master during the Passover, the disciples must have been stunned by what Jesus said. Breaking some unleavened bread, He told them, “This is My body which is given for you” (Luke 22:19).

Jesus uttered these words the night before His death. What did He mean?

Jesus was showing His disciples that the bread He broke symbolized His body and that He would suffer and die the following day.

Beaten, scourged and crucified

In the modern world, many of us have difficulty comprehending the brutality Jesus endured. That suffering began shortly after His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Between His arrest and death, Jesus was beaten by His captors, bruised and beaten during His trial, scourged, mocked and hit by Roman soldiers, and finally crucified (Luke 22:63-65; Matthew 26:67-68; 27:26, 29-30, 35).

Two of these punishments—the Roman scourging and crucifixion—were particularly brutal and cruel. Bible students today may not fully grasp the barbarity of either. We’ll take a brief look at each to gain a greater appreciation for the sacrifice Christ made on our behalf.

What was a scourging?

Roman lictors administered the scourging, which inflicted far more pain and damage to the body than a lashing or whipping. It was designed to inflict massive tissue damage and to rip open the victim’s flesh.

After stripping the condemned individual to expose the flesh of the prisoner’s back, buttocks and legs, Roman lictors began the scourging.

The Romans used a flagellum (also called a flagrum) to scourge prisoners. Attached to the wooden handle were several strips of leather interwoven with pieces of metal and bone.

The metal pummeled the body, inflicting bruising under the skin. The jagged animal bone, on the other hand, shredded the flesh. A medical analysis published in 1965 provides a disturbing picture:

“At first the heavy thongs cut through the skin only. Then, as the blows continue, they are cut deeper into the subcutaneous tissues, producing first an oozing of blood from the capillaries and veins of the skin, and finally spurting arterial bleeding from vessels in the underlying muscles” (C. Truman Davis, M.D., M.S., “The Passion of Christ From a Medical Point of View,” Arizona Medicine).

Death by crucifixion

As savage as the Roman scourging was, the crucifixion was even worse. This punishment was intended to ensure a slow, agonizing death. The English language preserves this concept in the word excruciating, which refers to intense pain. It comes from the Latin prefix ex, meaning “from,” and crux, meaning “cross.”

Crucifixion was designed to leave the victim struggling between two agonizing choices. The position of the body with the arms above the head made it difficult for a victim to exhale, but pushing himself up to breathe involved even more searing pain where the nails pierced through his flesh.

As a result, the individual was continually forced to choose between not being able to breathe and experiencing extreme pain. Depending on how severe the person’s scourging was, death might occur within hours, or it might not occur for days.

A number of factors contributed to death, but “the most important factor was progressive asphyxia caused by impairment of respiratory movement” (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). (For more about this horrific punishment, see our article “The Crucifixion of Jesus.”)

“The Son of Man must suffer”

While teaching on the shores of the Sea of Galilee long before His last Passover, Christ had confided to His disciples that “the Son of Man must suffer many things” (Luke 9:22). He made a similar statement while on His way to Jerusalem (Luke 17:25).

Why did Jesus insist that He must suffer? It is clear throughout the New Testament that Jesus had to die for our sins, but did He really have to suffer so much as well?

In the modern Western world, executions are rare, and they are usually carried out in ways designed to minimize suffering. Executions of even the most violent criminals, for example, might be by lethal injections intended to make death quick and painless.

So why would a merciful and loving God allow His sinless Son to suffer such agonizing abuse?

The horror of sin

The tremendous agony of our Lord and Savior was necessary to demonstrate the consequences of sin. Ultimately, of course, sin leads to death (James 1:15), but sinners and those around them also suffer along the way.

Jesus’ death was terribly severe to demonstrate the absolute dreadfulness of sin.

The world has been full of pain since Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 3:1-6). Their sin brought a curse on the world (verses 16-19).

In his letter to the church at Rome, Paul wrote about this curse and the resulting pain. While discussing “the sufferings of this present time,” he explained that “the creation was subjected to futility” (Romans 8:18, 20).

Alluding to the curse in Genesis 3, Paul personified creation as a woman suffering through childbirth. He wrote that “the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs” (Romans 8:22).

Perfect through sufferings

Humans have endured violence since Cain murdered his brother Abel (Genesis 4:8). That tragedy is recorded just a few verses after the account of God’s judgment on Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit.

Among the myriad atrocities we have inflicted on one another are the Spanish Inquisition (from the late 15th century to the early 19th century), the Holocaust (genocide of European Jews during World War II) and the “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

Anyone who survived horrors such as these had to wrestle with a lifetime of emotional pain as well. Clearly, humanity needs a Savior who understands suffering, not just theoretically, but experientially.

Our Savior does understand because of what He experienced through scourging and crucifixion. God made “the captain of [our] salvation perfect through sufferings” (Hebrews 2:10). Jesus, our High Priest, can sympathize with our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15).

No greater love

There is another reason for the tremendous suffering Christ endured. When we look at what Jesus willingly suffered, we begin to see the tremendous love He has for us, as well as the love of the Father in giving “His only begotten Son” (John 3:16).

It wasn’t easy. Knowing in advance what was in store for Him, Jesus prayed fervently, asking the Father, “If it is possible, let this cup pass from Me” (Matthew 26:39). His prayer was so passionate that “His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44).

Christ did not lay down His life unaware of the pain He would endure. Even so, each time He prayed that the Father might let the cup of suffering pass from Him, He added, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”

Thus He was fully committed to His supreme act of sacrificial love.

Peter wrote about the suffering of Christ, “who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed” (1 Peter 2:24).

As Jesus told His disciples, no love is greater “than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (John 15:13). When we comprehend the horror of the scourging and crucifixion, we come to a greater appreciation of that love.

Breaking bread in remembrance

When Jesus broke bread, telling His disciples that it symbolized His body and coming death, He also told them to do the same “in remembrance of Me” (1 Corinthians 11:24). Christians are to call this tremendous sacrifice to mind when partaking of the bread at the New Testament Passover service. (Study further in our online articles “Passover in the New Testament” and “I Am the Bread of Life.”)

This is a sober reminder of the suffering sin causes, but it is also an encouraging reminder of the immeasurable depth of Christ’s great love for humanity.

Like the apostle Paul, we can be “persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).