Harry N. Huxhold
Our age has been called a drug culture. Offhand, it would be impossible to estimate the amount of drug abuse in our society. At times we believe that our intense efforts and huge expenditures to curtail drug abuse are successful only to discover otherwise. However, today we are also engaged in a national debate about the medicinal use of drugs as an important part of the health care delivery system. The drug industry is under scrutiny, because of the high cost of the society's reliance upon their products. The drug companies reply that their part in the national bill for health care is fair enough. Meanwhile, a significant portion of monies paid out for drugs is not curative but for the relief of pain. Daily the populace consumes huge doses of aspirin, barbiturates, ibuprofen, and sedatives in order to get through a normal day. Patients in hospitals are able to administer sedation to themselves intravenously. Those dying in hospices and intensive care wards are sedated sufficiently to make them immune to the pain that signals their imminent death. We applaud these advances in medicine that are capable of relieving the painful distress of patients at any level. Because of our approval of those efforts, we should be all the more sensitive to the manner in which the evangelists relate that attention that was given to sedate our Lord for his crucifixion.
A Routine Courtesy While the evangelists give us some details concerning the passion of our Lord, more than any other portion of his mission and ministry, by today's standards we have sparse information. What we do have, then, is all the more important. The fact that each evangelist mentions something about the sedation of Jesus at the cross is highly significant. To begin with, we note that Mark mentions the attempt of the soldiers to sedate Jesus when they arrived at Golgotha. As was customary, Jesus had been forced to carry the beam of his own cross. Jesus had been exhausted before that grueling march had begun. He had endured a dreadful scourging, the mockery of the soldiers, and night examination by the courts. Under those conditions, it was no surprise that Jesus would stagger under the load of the cross, or that a Roman soldier had only to tap an innocent bystanding citizen with his spear to substitute for Jesus. After all, it was an occupied country. At the cross the soldiers followed the usual routine for crucifixion, which also included offering a drink of drugged wine in order to deaden the pain. A group of wealthy women from Jerusalem apparently made this potion as a project of mercy for citizens who had to suffer this awful fate at the hands of the alien government. Fortunately, the Roman soldiers routinely allowed this act of mercy for the doomed criminals.
Refused By The Suffering Servant We have become accustomed to expecting the worst from people who have the opportunity to do in their enemies. However, it is not uncommon for those who have to carry out the job of being executioners to show some humaneness in their grizzly work. We can give credit to the unnamed Roman soldiers who were willing to offer this mixture of wine and gall as a sedative for Jesus. One can imagine that, as they regularly carried on this business of nailing people to crosses, they needed a sedative themselves. There is some evidence that the Roman soldiers made a drink themselves called posca, which was made of water, sour wine, and eggs. This work of crucifixion was an ugly business, and one can appreciate why the soldiers might be moved to offer a small token of kindness to Jesus. However, that is not the point of the evangelist in mentioning this matter. What the evangelist underscores is that when Jesus tasted it, he would not drink it. Apparently, Jesus was willing to take something for the relief of his understandable thirst, but when he recognized the attempt to dull his senses, he refused. Jesus wanted to take the cup of suffering that the Father had handed to him. He had been prepared and strengthened for this hour in another way. In the Garden of Gethsemane he had already tasted of that cup and had determined that he would take it to its last draft. What was involved was not awful physical pain alone. As ugly and as dastardly as the crucifixion appeared to any who watched, the scene was all the more touching for those who deemed our Lord as innocent. For our Lord himself it was all the more weighty, because Jesus struggled with the full weight of knowing that all such scenes were necessary.
An Inadequate Drug Jesus was more than an innocent victim of injustice. Jesus was contending with the false judgment of the world, its unbelief, and its lack of love. What Jesus had to bear as he suffered at the miserable hands of religious and civil courts would not have to take place for anyone if only humanity had not succumbed to its own self. What Jesus had proved, when he stood trial before the judges of religious and civil communities, was that even they were not capable of recognizing the best of God's revelation of grace and love. As Jesus dealt with the reality of humanity's sin and the judgment of God upon that sin, Jesus was the catalyst for both. At this very moment God was exposing the futility and the inability of humanity to save itself. For that moment Jesus wanted to be fully conscious, fully aware, and fully cognizant that he might save the world from itself. With the full resources of all his senses, Jesus was offering himself to God in faith and to the world in love. The pain that surged through his extended body in throbbing smarts was matched with the pain that throbbed in his mind and tortured his heart. A drug that would have dulled his pain would not have been adequate for all that Jesus felt, but Jesus did not want it to interfere with what he wanted to feel for us.
We Did Our Best Interestingly, the evangelist Mark records the harangue that was carried on by the criminals crucified with Jesus, the passersby, the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes in order to convince themselves that Jesus was not the Son of God or the promised King of Israel. All of these people taunted Jesus with the same temptation to prove himself to be the Son of God by coming down from the cross. On the tree of the cross Jesus was thrown back into Eden where the first temptation to Adam, the son of God, was to prove himself to be like the gods by eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But the greatest temptation came in that moment when the fate of all of humankind hung in the balance as Jesus sensed that moment when he had to enter the final judgment of God, death. It was then, Mark says, after three hours of darkness, that Jesus realized the awful abandonment of God in death. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" By faith, by trust, by surrender to God his Father, he would not be abandoned even in death. God was still his God. By faith he remained the Son of God. By faith he would not let go of God. By faith he would not be separated from God. In that terrible moment as Jesus was suspended upon the cross, heaven and earth were drawn together in this tattered and bruised body and cemented together in that giant heart that pumped innocent blood through the veins of God's obedient Son. Mark notes that when some of the bystanders heard Jesus call out to God in the Hebrew, "Eli, Eli," they thought he was calling for Elijah. No doubt they figured that delirium had set in and the end was near. The Fourth Gospel also mentions that Jesus said, "I thirst." At that, one of the bystanders, according to Mark, not one of the soldiers, "ran and got a sponge, filled it with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink." No doubt, when that person returned to the crowd, he or she said, "I did the best I could for him." We all like to be able to say that when we say our farewells to our friends or dear ones.
It Was Our Best Whoever it was that offered the sour wine to our Lord undoubtedly did it out of sympathy and eagerness to do something for Jesus. Luther did not think much of that. He thought poorly of the idea of someone helping in this manner. For Luther it was an insult that someone would offer the Savior sour wine, or vinegar, in that moment when the Savior was exhausted from his ordeal of battling sin, death, and hell. However, Luther probably gave no thought to the medicinal or sedative effects the sour wine was to offer. To be sure, the total effect had to be minimal in the face of what Jesus had endured. In that regard, it only serves to emphasize that there really is nothing that we can contribute to achieving our own salvation. Jesus had completed and finished what had to be done for the salvation of the world. He had refused sedation before entering that struggle with Satan, death, and hell. Now that it was over, he could be indulged. So the best that the lady or gentleman could offer was a few sips of sour wine.
It Was Accepted Three of the evangelists agree that Jesus took this second attempt at sedation, though Mark indicates that the one who offered it called out that the people should wait to see if Elijah would come to take Jesus down from the cross. No one can tell if that was said in the form of a taunt or as a change of heart in one who had taunted him. What is important for us is to note that Jesus accepts this offer of sedation. As Jesus did, we think back to a parable he told about the rich man and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. In hell and in torment the rich man asked Abraham to send Lazarus with a drop of water to come and cool his tongue. Now as Jesus has completed his suffering of our hell and death upon the cross he permits a sinner to come and to cool his tongue with sour wine. We think also of how our Lord described his coming again to separate the sheep from the goats. When our Lord calls the sheep to inherit the kingdom with him, Jesus said they will be surprised to hear that our Lord took account of their service of love in giving the thirsty something to drink and in visiting those who were in prison. So it was that, wittingly or unwittingly, a bystander served our Lord with a drink of sour wine when he was thirsty and visited him when our Lord was imprisoned by a cross as a criminal and insurrectionist. And our Lord accepted the drink.
Its Finality As our Lord Jesus Christ accepted the gift of sour wine, he also gave indication that the battle was over. The struggle was finished. The work was done. Jesus in complete obedience to the Father had finished the long march from Bethlehem to Golgatha, from the manger to the cross. Passively Jesus had permitted the courts of the religious and civil communities to judge and condemn him. In so doing he had permitted God's judgment to fall hard on him that as one of us he could go to his death as a sinner. Now it was over. A sip of sour wine from a sponge on a stick was a toast to heaven on our behalf. It is this same Christ who suffered, died, and rose again who comes to us as the living Christ under the form of wine in the Holy Eucharist that we might taste of the goodness of God. Probably most pastors sometime in their ministries hear the complaint from parishioners that the wine used in the celebration of Holy Communion was sour. So much the better. Let it be a reminder of how our Lord sipped from sour wine at that moment when he offered up complete and full our salvation to God. To be sure, when we taste of that sour wine, we should be drunk with the joy and gladness of knowing that our salvation is full and free.
Our age has been called a drug culture. Offhand, it would be impossible to estimate the amount of drug abuse in our society. At times we believe that our intense efforts and huge expenditures to curtail drug abuse are successful only to discover otherwise. However, today we are also engaged in a national debate about the medicinal use of drugs as an important part of the health care delivery system. The drug industry is under scrutiny, because of the high cost of the society's reliance upon their products. The drug companies reply that their part in the national bill for health care is fair enough. Meanwhile, a significant portion of monies paid out for drugs is not curative but for the relief of pain. Daily the populace consumes huge doses of aspirin, barbiturates, ibuprofen, and sedatives in order to get through a normal day. Patients in hospitals are able to administer sedation to themselves intravenously. Those dying in hospices and intensive care wards are sedated sufficiently to make them immune to the pain that signals their imminent death. We applaud these advances in medicine that are capable of relieving the painful distress of patients at any level. Because of our approval of those efforts, we should be all the more sensitive to the manner in which the evangelists relate that attention that was given to sedate our Lord for his crucifixion.
A Routine Courtesy While the evangelists give us some details concerning the passion of our Lord, more than any other portion of his mission and ministry, by today's standards we have sparse information. What we do have, then, is all the more important. The fact that each evangelist mentions something about the sedation of Jesus at the cross is highly significant. To begin with, we note that Mark mentions the attempt of the soldiers to sedate Jesus when they arrived at Golgotha. As was customary, Jesus had been forced to carry the beam of his own cross. Jesus had been exhausted before that grueling march had begun. He had endured a dreadful scourging, the mockery of the soldiers, and night examination by the courts. Under those conditions, it was no surprise that Jesus would stagger under the load of the cross, or that a Roman soldier had only to tap an innocent bystanding citizen with his spear to substitute for Jesus. After all, it was an occupied country. At the cross the soldiers followed the usual routine for crucifixion, which also included offering a drink of drugged wine in order to deaden the pain. A group of wealthy women from Jerusalem apparently made this potion as a project of mercy for citizens who had to suffer this awful fate at the hands of the alien government. Fortunately, the Roman soldiers routinely allowed this act of mercy for the doomed criminals.
Refused By The Suffering Servant We have become accustomed to expecting the worst from people who have the opportunity to do in their enemies. However, it is not uncommon for those who have to carry out the job of being executioners to show some humaneness in their grizzly work. We can give credit to the unnamed Roman soldiers who were willing to offer this mixture of wine and gall as a sedative for Jesus. One can imagine that, as they regularly carried on this business of nailing people to crosses, they needed a sedative themselves. There is some evidence that the Roman soldiers made a drink themselves called posca, which was made of water, sour wine, and eggs. This work of crucifixion was an ugly business, and one can appreciate why the soldiers might be moved to offer a small token of kindness to Jesus. However, that is not the point of the evangelist in mentioning this matter. What the evangelist underscores is that when Jesus tasted it, he would not drink it. Apparently, Jesus was willing to take something for the relief of his understandable thirst, but when he recognized the attempt to dull his senses, he refused. Jesus wanted to take the cup of suffering that the Father had handed to him. He had been prepared and strengthened for this hour in another way. In the Garden of Gethsemane he had already tasted of that cup and had determined that he would take it to its last draft. What was involved was not awful physical pain alone. As ugly and as dastardly as the crucifixion appeared to any who watched, the scene was all the more touching for those who deemed our Lord as innocent. For our Lord himself it was all the more weighty, because Jesus struggled with the full weight of knowing that all such scenes were necessary.
An Inadequate Drug Jesus was more than an innocent victim of injustice. Jesus was contending with the false judgment of the world, its unbelief, and its lack of love. What Jesus had to bear as he suffered at the miserable hands of religious and civil courts would not have to take place for anyone if only humanity had not succumbed to its own self. What Jesus had proved, when he stood trial before the judges of religious and civil communities, was that even they were not capable of recognizing the best of God's revelation of grace and love. As Jesus dealt with the reality of humanity's sin and the judgment of God upon that sin, Jesus was the catalyst for both. At this very moment God was exposing the futility and the inability of humanity to save itself. For that moment Jesus wanted to be fully conscious, fully aware, and fully cognizant that he might save the world from itself. With the full resources of all his senses, Jesus was offering himself to God in faith and to the world in love. The pain that surged through his extended body in throbbing smarts was matched with the pain that throbbed in his mind and tortured his heart. A drug that would have dulled his pain would not have been adequate for all that Jesus felt, but Jesus did not want it to interfere with what he wanted to feel for us.
We Did Our Best Interestingly, the evangelist Mark records the harangue that was carried on by the criminals crucified with Jesus, the passersby, the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes in order to convince themselves that Jesus was not the Son of God or the promised King of Israel. All of these people taunted Jesus with the same temptation to prove himself to be the Son of God by coming down from the cross. On the tree of the cross Jesus was thrown back into Eden where the first temptation to Adam, the son of God, was to prove himself to be like the gods by eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But the greatest temptation came in that moment when the fate of all of humankind hung in the balance as Jesus sensed that moment when he had to enter the final judgment of God, death. It was then, Mark says, after three hours of darkness, that Jesus realized the awful abandonment of God in death. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" By faith, by trust, by surrender to God his Father, he would not be abandoned even in death. God was still his God. By faith he remained the Son of God. By faith he would not let go of God. By faith he would not be separated from God. In that terrible moment as Jesus was suspended upon the cross, heaven and earth were drawn together in this tattered and bruised body and cemented together in that giant heart that pumped innocent blood through the veins of God's obedient Son. Mark notes that when some of the bystanders heard Jesus call out to God in the Hebrew, "Eli, Eli," they thought he was calling for Elijah. No doubt they figured that delirium had set in and the end was near. The Fourth Gospel also mentions that Jesus said, "I thirst." At that, one of the bystanders, according to Mark, not one of the soldiers, "ran and got a sponge, filled it with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink." No doubt, when that person returned to the crowd, he or she said, "I did the best I could for him." We all like to be able to say that when we say our farewells to our friends or dear ones.
It Was Our Best Whoever it was that offered the sour wine to our Lord undoubtedly did it out of sympathy and eagerness to do something for Jesus. Luther did not think much of that. He thought poorly of the idea of someone helping in this manner. For Luther it was an insult that someone would offer the Savior sour wine, or vinegar, in that moment when the Savior was exhausted from his ordeal of battling sin, death, and hell. However, Luther probably gave no thought to the medicinal or sedative effects the sour wine was to offer. To be sure, the total effect had to be minimal in the face of what Jesus had endured. In that regard, it only serves to emphasize that there really is nothing that we can contribute to achieving our own salvation. Jesus had completed and finished what had to be done for the salvation of the world. He had refused sedation before entering that struggle with Satan, death, and hell. Now that it was over, he could be indulged. So the best that the lady or gentleman could offer was a few sips of sour wine.
It Was Accepted Three of the evangelists agree that Jesus took this second attempt at sedation, though Mark indicates that the one who offered it called out that the people should wait to see if Elijah would come to take Jesus down from the cross. No one can tell if that was said in the form of a taunt or as a change of heart in one who had taunted him. What is important for us is to note that Jesus accepts this offer of sedation. As Jesus did, we think back to a parable he told about the rich man and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. In hell and in torment the rich man asked Abraham to send Lazarus with a drop of water to come and cool his tongue. Now as Jesus has completed his suffering of our hell and death upon the cross he permits a sinner to come and to cool his tongue with sour wine. We think also of how our Lord described his coming again to separate the sheep from the goats. When our Lord calls the sheep to inherit the kingdom with him, Jesus said they will be surprised to hear that our Lord took account of their service of love in giving the thirsty something to drink and in visiting those who were in prison. So it was that, wittingly or unwittingly, a bystander served our Lord with a drink of sour wine when he was thirsty and visited him when our Lord was imprisoned by a cross as a criminal and insurrectionist. And our Lord accepted the drink.
Its Finality As our Lord Jesus Christ accepted the gift of sour wine, he also gave indication that the battle was over. The struggle was finished. The work was done. Jesus in complete obedience to the Father had finished the long march from Bethlehem to Golgatha, from the manger to the cross. Passively Jesus had permitted the courts of the religious and civil communities to judge and condemn him. In so doing he had permitted God's judgment to fall hard on him that as one of us he could go to his death as a sinner. Now it was over. A sip of sour wine from a sponge on a stick was a toast to heaven on our behalf. It is this same Christ who suffered, died, and rose again who comes to us as the living Christ under the form of wine in the Holy Eucharist that we might taste of the goodness of God. Probably most pastors sometime in their ministries hear the complaint from parishioners that the wine used in the celebration of Holy Communion was sour. So much the better. Let it be a reminder of how our Lord sipped from sour wine at that moment when he offered up complete and full our salvation to God. To be sure, when we taste of that sour wine, we should be drunk with the joy and gladness of knowing that our salvation is full and free.
