Every Christmas (and Easter), I like to get in at least one Bible movie. I have been enthralled by these movies since I was a child and they still hold a powerful message for me. The Nativity Story (2006) is a drama that focuses on the period in Mary and Joseph’s life when they journeyed to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus.
In Nazareth, teenager Mary is betrothed to the local carpenter, Joseph. Mary is visited by an angel and told that she will fulfill a prophecy and as a virgin give birth to God’s son. Mary’s pregnancy brings her the scorn of the community and Joseph struggles to believe her seemingly outlandish story. Meanwhile, a census forces every man and his family to return to his place of birth. Joseph and Mary set out on a long and arduous journey to Bethlehem …. and danger is with them the entire way.
After Roman governor Pontius Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified, the real brutality began.
Roman soldiers — experts at torture and death — stripped Jesus of His clothes and likely chained Him to a stone pillar. They beat Him again and again with a Roman flagrum, a whip that would have had anywhere from three to twelve strands of leather. Metal balls were woven into the leather, and at the end of each strand were pieces of broken pottery, glass, nails, bone, or twisted metal, designed to grab flesh and rip.
Imagine Jesus as He was beaten over and over and over and over again, huge pieces of skin and muscle being ripped and torn away with every blow. By the time the soldiers were done, His back and buttocks and legs would have been bloody, mangled ribbons of flesh and muscle and sinew.
This beating was called “the half death,” because half the men who received it died from it. But not Jesus; He had more to endure.
The soldiers put a purple robe on Him, twisted together a crown of thorns from the famous Jerusalem thorn bush — with thorns that were up to 3 inches long — and beat it into His skull with a rod, which they also used to batter His face. He was beaten so badly He didn’t even look human.
Now Jesus became an object of mockery. The Roman soldiers knelt before Him, laughingly calling out, “Hail, King of the Jews.” They slapped Him and spit on Him. Through it all, He remained silent.
Soon, they marched Him off to Golgotha, the hill of the skull, just outside Jerusalem. Here the Roman soldiers stripped Him of all His clothes, threw Him down on a wooden cross, stretched out His hands, took a spike nail, and hammered it into His right wrist.
Imagine the pain of each blow, as the hammer came down again and again, driving the nail deeper and deeper into His wrist, Why His wrists? Because the weight of His body, once lifted up on the cross, would tear His hands through the nail if it were put through His palm instead of His wrist. Only the spot where the two bones of the wrist come together could support the full weight of a man hung by a spike nail. Next, the soldiers crossed His feet and drove a spike nail through them. The soldiers then lifted the cross up and dropped it into a previously dug hole. It was probably at this point that all of Jesus’ bones came out of joint.
And that’s when the slow suffering began. There He was for all the world to see —naked and bleeding and dying. To add insult to His many injuries, the thieves being crucified next to Him began to mock Him, as did the religious leaders and the crowds who had gathered.
To breathe on the cross is no small thing. Jesus had to push His body up to exhale and come down to inhale, scraping His open, bloody back against the rough-hewn wood of the cross for hours. Jesus did not die from the beating or the bleeding, although they were horrendous; he suffocated. The pain would have been excruciating.
Finally, after six hours of tortured breathing, the end was near. Jesus looked up to Heaven and said, “Eloi! Eloi! Lama sabachthani” which means, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me? In that moment, Jesus was enduring the ultimate agony. Then Jesus yelled out the three words that would change the course of history—“It is finished”—and He bowed His bloodied head and died.
The Elephant's Trunk 