Good Friday
Johanan
3 April – 33 AD
Johanan ben Timaeus owned the largest and by far the most prosperous carpentry shop in Jerusalem. The former shepherd had his start learning his trade by helping the local carpenter near their farm build toys for himself and his brothers as a young lad. At the first opportunity to break away from sheep herding after his father’s untimely death, and not being the eldest son to inherit the family’s minor estate, Johanan wisely chose his enthusiasm for woodworking as a permanent occupation. He was so passionate, gifted, and innately honest that he was immediately a successful entrepreneur and businessman.
At this moment, the streets of Jerusalem were overrun with the annual Passover week crowds. Johanan’s business, as well as every other, was slammed with last-minute work, including emergency repairs as families and pilgrims arrived from all over Israel and jammed into inns and residences.
Yet with the many people came increased demands loaded atop his routine responsibilities. Johanan had a contract with the Jerusalem authorities to build bare coffins for nameless or destitute travelers and strangers who unfortunately occasionally met their ends in Jerusalem during crowded holidays.
But it was the occupying Romans who truly were an aggressive, hostile scourge to Johanan and his business. The unwanted army had no contract with him or any other legitimate business in Jerusalem at all, yet when they wanted something, they demanded it immediately – and typically did not pay anything for the work. The unpredictable tasks were tedious enough, but especially onerous were the demands for the many wooden crosses they required from him on which they nailed anyone who resisted the frequently deadly Roman path to world domination in any fashion they did not approve.
These instruments of Roman execution were certainly not elaborate – merely rough crossed beams notched and pinned with metal spikes at their intersection. The ugly devices of torture stood nine feet tall and seven feet horizontally. But each took a toll on Johanan as he constructed it.
Just before closing his business the day before, Johanan had turned over six newly constructed crosses to the Optio-Centurian, who always ordered them on the morning of the day they were required. On this rare occasion, the Centurian’s deputy actually paid him a denarius. As he was shorthanded that day, Johanan had constructed the six crosses himself. So, being quite pleased with the rare payment on the previous afternoon, he slipped the coin in his pocket.
Inside his office, Johanan was looking over a raft of orders for the week after Passover when his closest friend, Aran ben Asher, burst through his door and announced breathlessly in his typically excitable fashion, “Johanan, you must come with me immediately! They are crucifying the Rabbi, Jesus!”
Johanan looked up from his work with surprise. “What are you saying, Aran? Just four days ago He was paraded through the city like He was to be the next King David! How can this be?” he exclaimed with utter astonishment.
Of course, he remembered his encounter with Jesus the babe as a young shepherd on that starlit night 33 years ago. He knew that Child was the same person but had always doubted that such a poor, powerless Rabbi could possibly attain to the title of Savior of Israel and the long-awaited Messiah, the Christ. The only sure mystery in his mind was how the mighty angel messenger could have been so wrong…
“We must depart immediately, Johanan!”
Johanan cocked his head sideways at his volatile friend as if to beg off without a struggle, but Aran would have none of it. He reached over and grasped Johanan by the sleeve and pulled him toward the door. “You cannot miss this!” he begged.
Johanan sighed, exited his office, closed its door, and half walked, half ran as Aran led the way through the crowded streets of Jerusalem during Passover week. They turned down one street and then another until they met a wall of people standing at the intersection between the Cardo Maximus and the street leading to the Gennath Gate.
Effortlessly, Aran pushed their way through several rows of onlookers, clutching Johanan’s hand until they stood at the very edge of the street itself. What Johanan saw would forever haunt his dreams.
There, just 12 paces from them, the battered form of Jesus lay on the blood-splattered coarse street unmoving, pinned to the rough cobblestone way by the weight of His execution cross.
The noisy, hostile crowd echoed between the walls on either side of the street with a cacophonous racket, punctuated by the roughened voices of the Roman Legionnaires. “Get up! Get up!” they callously commanded relentlessly, using their whips on his tattered flesh to make their point as they laughed and mocked his suffering.
Johanan hardly recognized the barely clothed Jesus as a man. He was beaten and whipped to within a single inch of His life, His face swollen and disfigured. His flesh was ripped and lay hanging from his bloody frame like ribbons of fabric, in places exposing white ribs beneath the tattered skin. A hastily fashioned crown of treacherous thorns was driven deeply into his scalp, trails of blood streaking from each puncture site. Were it not for His heaving chest and trembling extremities, Johanan would have believed Jesus to be dead beneath the rough wooden cross.
In less than a minute, it occurred to Johanan that Jesus lay beneath one of the very crosses that just yesterday he had crafted with his own hands and delivered to the Romans for money. Overcome with the realization, Johanan winched his hand free of Aran’s clutching fingers and ran out on the street toward the prostrate Jesus.
In seconds, he landed on his knees just beside the cross he had built and began to try to lift it off the abused body. Instantly, the business end of a bloody whip connected with his shoulder, tearing through both fabric and skin and causing him to reflexively recoil.
“Get back on the sidewalk!” a Legionnaire commanded, raising his arm for yet another strike.
But Johanan just lowered his face to Jesus, weeping as he whispered, “What have I done?! I’m so sorry, Jesus. I did not know this cross was for You!” As he spoke, another pop of the whip lashed down his back, followed by a fire-like pain running its length. Another soldier approached, grabbed a handful of his hair, and brutally yanked, Johanan’s hands instantly flying to his injured scalp and seizing the offending fingers to help lessen the awful agony.
Just as Johanan was lifted upright, Jesus’ eyes met his. Despite His swollen and bloodied eyelids, His gaze was not filled with condemnation or anger or hatred but with forgiveness and unimaginable love.
Johanan was overcome by immeasurable sorrow – more than he ever imagined could exist. He knew that he was partly responsible for this horror and epic injustice to a humble, simple rabbi. His breaths came in ragged gasps as he began to comprehend the enormity of his complicity in this hideous crime.
The soldier began to tug at his hair again when another Roman officer approached, pushing forward a man outfitted in a cloth turban with skin as dark as a starless night. He shoved the newcomer toward the fallen Jesus as the man kept glancing over his shoulder at his two children, who obediently followed their father along the edge of the crowd. When he reached the exhausted form, the officer ordered him to lift the cross and carry it, but its awkward angle left it unbalanced and near impossible to lift alone.
The soldier released his hold on Johanan’s hair, shoved him roughly toward the struggling man, and screamed, “Don’t just stand there gawking; help him!”
Johanan and the man who introduced himself as Simon of Cyrene lifted the cross off Jesus’ body. The roughened wood was coated with blood, so much so that it was slick and difficult to get a steady grip. But with the two men working together, in a few moments, Johanan helped settle the cross on Simon’s shoulders and back and he began to take the first steps toward Golgotha under the encouragement of the whip.
Johanan returned to Jesus to help Him to His feet and was completely stunned at the sight. He had never seen a man beaten so severely or anyone who had lost so much blood and yet still lived. It mattered little how carefully Johanan placed his hands and fingers to assist Him; Jesus responded in pain, for much of His body had been beaten and His flesh ripped.
Just as he raised Jesus upright and supported Him until He could stand, Johanan received another biting wound from the same strap that had been used to beat Jesus. He flashed into uncontrollable anger at the incalculable injustice of it all and was about to reach for the strap and return the beating to the soldier when Jesus gripped his arm.
Johanan turned and looked into the face mere inches from his own.
He was suddenly filled with an unexplainable peace that passed all understanding, enfolding him completely… just as another flash of the whip slashed across his face and left eye, blinding pain searing his consciousness before he staggered with its effects. Then he stared in abject horror at his left eye lying at his feet in the gruesome street, staring back up at him.
In the single moment of horrified awareness of the extent of his injury, Johanan staggered away from Jesus, his hands coated with both their blood, his fingers touching his torn skin and empty eye socket. His knees began to buckle, and he knew he was about to drop in shock and horror.
With his hands cradling his brutalized face, he blinked repeatedly and uncontrollably… then he opened his left eye and realized that he could see. The blood of Jesus had miraculously healed his eye, even though he could see his previous eye lying on the street below.
Suddenly, the guard gripped his hair once more, pulling Johanan viciously back to the sidewalk and slamming his body into the adjacent wall.
“Go ahead and step into this street one more time, Jew boy,” the Legionnaire sneered, “and you’ll hang on the cross next to this one!”
Trembling with shock, fear, and guilt, Johanan collapsed to the ground and faced away from the guard, his hands covering his wounded face as the scoffing soldier departed. Aran fell to his knees beside Johanan, grabbing his injured friend by the shoulders.
“Are you totally insane?!” he asked with open-mouthed fear. Then he demanded, “Look at me, Johanan! Look at me!”
Johanan compiled.
“You have two eyes! You have two eyes!” Aran declared breathlessly. “I knew… I thought… no, I saw, I watched the whip remove your eye… and there it is lying over there in the street! I saw it happen!”
“You did,” Johanan responded. “It was… is still… over there,” he pointed to the now flattened organ lying trampled on the filthy cobblestones by the crowd that followed the suffering Jesus.
“But… how??” Aran stammered, looking closely at Johanan’s face, the skin sliced and still bleeding directly above and below his perfectly functioning and uninjured new eye.
“Jesus,” Johanan responded calmly, slowly standing while watching Jesus following His cross, clinging to it for balance as Simon trudged it down the street.
“Jesus what?” Aran asked.
“Jesus,” Johanan repeated simply. “Jesus. Do you know Who He is, Aran? I have known since I was a young man. Only, now, today, I finally understand. This Jesus is the Savior, Who is Christ the Lord. Now, right now, Aran, He is my Savior and yours.
“It’s just that…” Johanan continued, with his guilt surging back again, “I don’t understand how this is ending, Aran. It’s nothing like the angel said…”
“What angel?” Aran asked urgently, for Johanan had never shared his shepherd story with anyone since his father’s death.
Johanan began to weep openly and fully. He slid down the wall and onto the sidewalk, burying his bloody face in his hands, once again mingling Jesus’ blood with his own. His body was filled with the pain of just a few slashes of the whip. He could not even begin to imagine the agony that innocent Jesus was bearing right now… and he knew that he had a great part in it.
He wept for His Savior, for his personal guilt, and for his wretchedness. He wept in contrition and repentance, begging God to forgive his sins and grant him the faith to believe.
Johanan did not realize, but as he wept, Aran marveled to see the cuts and slashes from the Roman whip miraculously slowly disappearing from his body. No scars would ever remain… except a smooth white line above his restored left eye to remind him of this day and what his Savior did for him.
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