By Pio Pantaleon, 46YP MA Humanities
The College of Arts and Sciences – Office of the College Secretary and Alab, the student interest group under the Chaplaincy, organized a talk on The Holy Shroud of Turin on December 8, 2021. The write-up that follows was first published in Bosun on December 12, 2021.
We often hear about the Passion of Jesus Christ, but do we truly grasp the intensity of the pain He suffered?
Mrs. Luchie Cuerva, a member of the Society of the Holy Mary of Guadalupe, shared during her talk on the Holy Shroud of Turin numerous details about the Passion, which, I believe, will leave you hanging your head and beating your breast.
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The agony in the garden
The stains from the Shroud reveal that Jesus experienced hematidrosis, a rare condition in which a person sweats blood, and is triggered only when the person is in utter anguish. It occurs when “capillaries all over the body burst, and the blood mingles with sweat and comes out of the pores of the body,” Mrs. Cuerva said.
Jesus’ sweating of blood only increased the agony He would experience in the following tortures because the hematidrosis made His body tender and sore, increasing the pain of any infliction dealt Him.
The flagellation at the pillar
The Roman soldiers had what they called a flagrum, a short-handled whip with numerous thongs, at the ends of which there are sometime bones of sheep, or, more frequently, balls of lead shaped like dumbbells. It was “designed to tear the flesh to pieces.”
At the time, they had a law that “no criminal should receive more than 39 strokes” of the flagrum because of the immense pain it inflicted on a person, but scientists discovered from the Shroud that Jesus received more than a hundred of those unbearable lashes. The wounds it caused were so incredibly deep that portions of His skin were detached and hung loose from His body.
The crowning with thorns
The crown that was driven on His head was made of long, flexible branches with long and short thorns protruding from it. These branches were “woven like a basket and pressed on His head like a cap.” The thorns that punctured His head “irritated His fifth cranial nerve, causing trigeminal neuralgia,” which induces a jolt of agonizing pain whenever the areas around the face are stimulated.
Those sudden attacks of pain, combined with persistent buffeting from the soldiers, increased the swelling of Jesus’ body and left Him with a broken septum (the thin bone that separates the two nostrils), all of which later on contributed to traumatic shock.
The carrying of the cross
The way up to Calvary was steep and bumpy. Jesus had about one kilometer to tread to arrive there. Under the scorching heat of the midday sun, He carried the horizontal beam of the cross (called the patibulum) squarely on His shoulders.
It was a hard and rough piece of wood that weighed around 56 kilograms, the average weight of one person. This wooden burden caused, as is evident on the markings of the Shroud, grave abrasions on either shoulder.
The crucifixion and death
The nail on Jesus’ left wrist was about a centimeter thick. As it pierced His skin, it damaged His median nerve, causing the “most unbearable pain any man can experience in his lifetime”—the damaging of His entire nervous system.
When Jesus was drooping from the cross, He could only inhale; His raised arms made it difficult to exhale. He was thus suffocating slowly because of the lack of oxygen in His lungs. To prevent this, He had to push His body up to “relieve the pressure on [His] arms and relax [His] muscles… So for three hours Jesus alternated… between breathing and suffocating.”
But eventually, His body had to give and He gave up His spirit.
According to forensic pathologist Frederick Zugibe, the cause of His death was traumatic and hypovolemic shock. “In other words, there was not enough blood in the body of Jesus to bring oxygen to his vital organs, and, one by one, they stopped functioning,” Mrs. Cuerva explained.
The details presented by Mrs. Cuerva are only those examinable from the Shroud. They do not capture the whole of Jesus’ Passion. As they are only physical descriptions of His sufferings (and not even the whole of it), we can only imagine how infinitely worse the emotional and mental suffering He endured. Nevertheless, the facts derived from the Shroud ought to give us a better understanding of what Jesus went through for us—for me, for you.#
Banner photo by Photo by Alem Sánchez from Pexels.
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