Nail Stained Hands

4.2.21 Good Friday

Jesus’ Empty Nail-Pierced Hands

Luke 23:32–34 (EHV)

32 Two other men, who were criminals, were led away with Jesus to be executed. 33 When they came to the place called The Skull, they crucified him there with the criminals, one on his right and the other on his left. 34 Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

You can tell alot about someone by looking at their hands. Lloyd Kramer, whom many of you probably knew, was a butcher on the south side here for years and years. His hands were bent and crippled from handling and cutting beef for a living. Joe Rechsteiner was another man who had huge and strong hands as a builder. You didn’t want to be on the end of a handshake with him when you had a broken finger. Trust me, I know. My father in law grew up as a dairy farmer, so naturally he had a very strong grip from milking cows. On the other hand, (pardon the pun), musicians and seamstresses need a completely different type of hand shape to do the work that they do; with thinner and more dexterous fingers.

As we’ve been journeying through Lent we’ve been looking at different people’s hands. Today we get the privilege of looking at Jesus’ hands. There are so many stories where Jesus did beautiful things with His hands. Think of the little dead girl in the upper room. He grabs her by the hand and says, “Talitha koum!” And she rises from the dead. (Mark 5) Think of when Jesus saw a funeral procession in Nain, walked into the middle of the procession, put his hand on the open casket, and raised the young man from the dead. (Luke 24) Think of Peter, sinking in the water, how thankful he was for the strong hand of Jesus to grab him by the hand. One of my favorite stories is how Jesus was approached by a leper, whom everyone had to avoid and distance from for fear of the disease. Jesus didn’t just speak to Him. He TOUCHED him and said, “be clean.” (Mark 1:41) And who can forget the gentle touch of Jesus on Malchus’ ear after Peter had chopped it off? People would bring their babies to Jesus, just to have Him touch them. What beautiful things Jesus did with His hands!

Today, on this darkest of days, we see something ugly being done with Jesus’ beautiful hands. The Romans soldiers are driving nails through them in order to fasten them to the crossbeam of a cross. That is what “crucify” means, to nail someone to a cross.

When you attack someone’s hands, you attack their ability to do almost anything. When I was growing up one of my best friends had a grandpa who had two hooks for hands. His arms had been torn off in an auger. He seemed like an angry man, and I can’t completely blame him. His wife had to feed him and clothe him and do so much for him. Or you might think of science fiction books where they tie up a wizard’s hands in order to keep him from casting spells. But Jesus was no wizard. Think of handcuffs in which they try to keep a criminal from being able to use his hands. You see forms of torture where fingers are broken in order to get people to talk. I would hate to think how painful that would be.

Here at the cross, the primary purpose of putting nails through the hands was to render their arms and hands useless, to keep the criminals hanging there until they died. They ended up asphyxiating to death, but nonetheless their hands must have been in tremendous pain as well. Here is the Messiah who had performed such miracles with His hands, having them nailed to a cross! It’s an awful thing to see such beautiful hands being crucified. But that’s what we do every year. We sit and listen to the story of Christ crucified. We envision it with our minds, the hands of Jesus getting nails put through them with a huge hammer. It’s a sad and bloody scene. In Mel Gibson’s movie of the Passion he centered in on the hammer striking the nail into the flesh of the hand, a very gruesome thing.

It’s striking to think about. I just watched a portion of the Derek Chauvin trial. Did you watch it? After you see George Floyd go limp, you can’t help but say to yourself, “Ok, get up and get off of him!” Then you hear the people in the video saying the same thing, but being quite vulgar about it. They were taunting and calling names, quite vulgar and humiliating names to the police officers. But then you think, “Why didn’t you do something besides just film it? Couldn’t one of you gone to try and pull the officer off of him? Why didn’t you risk arrest if you really felt he was being murdered?” And from what I understand, some of them are in fact very troubled by the fact that they just watched and filmed while doing nothing. It brings me back to my own life growing up where I’ve seen kids getting picked on or even beaten up and I did nothing to step up or step in out of fear of my own safety. I still feel guilty over the times I have passed by those who needed my help.