by Simon Caldwell, TCW
TODAY is Good Friday and Christians throughout the world will commemorate the Passion and death of Jesus Christ on the cross, the ne plus ultra of self-giving love in which the Son of God took upon himself the sins of the world and wiped them away.
The crucifixion is recorded by each of the four Evangelists, and St John tells us that he watched it. He records that Jesus died before the two criminals executed on either side of him, whose legs were broken by Roman soldiers to hasten their deaths.
In his own words, this is what happened next: ‘When they came to Jesus, they saw he was already dead, and so instead of breaking his legs one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance; and immediately there came out blood and water. This is the evidence of one who saw it – true evidence, and he knows that what he says is true.’ (John 19: 33-35).
The Fathers of the Church ‘saw an image of the two fundamental sacraments – Eucharist and Baptism – which spring forth from the Lord’s pierced side, from his heart’, according to Pope Benedict XVI.
Undoubtedly, they are symbolic. But St John also insists he was recording a real event.
Now a doctor in London has written a scientific paper explaining why such an effusion may be medically possible, and in Jesus’s case, highly likely.