Confessions of a Roman Legionnaire

Sherman Kuek, SFO
Published in Catholic Asian News
(March 2009 Issue)

Good Friday wasn't such a good Friday for me; I was working. I happened to be on duty, and so my colleagues and I were tasked with the arduous job of crucifying three condemned criminals.

Not that it was a big deal for us. Crucifying someone wasn't something novel in our day. Sure, pinning these hopeless delinquents to crosses was a tiring job, but we had done it so much we were extremely skilled in the trade.

After countless exercises, we were able to do it with the least possible sentiment of pity in our hearts for the victims. After all, they were nothing more than the worst scum of the earth; the barbaric act of brutal crucifixion was specially designed for these deserving ones.

But one of the three men we crucified on Good Friday was rather different from the norm, which gave a rather bizarre twist to my day at work.

This Jesus of Nazareth was an interesting guy. He had guts. He was put to stand before our Roman governor, Pilate, and was given a chance to clarify his position about himself.

Yet, when asked if he was king of the Jews, he answered, "You've said it yourself", as if purporting that Pilate had just made a true confession about who he really was. It appeared that he had no idea of the fate that would potentially befall him.

The relationship between this Jesus and his people deeply intrigued me. I never understood why a mob of Jews would turn their own "prophet" to the secular government to be executed in the most gruesome way when just a week before, they were hailing him as the next king.

One moment they were waving palm leaves at him, giving him the royal treatment; but now, hardly a week later, they were shouting "Crucify him!" If they really believed he was their prophet, why did they resort to hating him?

I also found it rather odd that when Pilate asked, "Shall I crucify your king?", the chief priests answered, " We have no king but Caesar". I had thought that all the while, those people had been awaiting a king who would dethrone Caesar and take his place. And yet the chief priests were repelled enough by Jesus of Nazareth to make such a confession. This Jesus must have had some measure of influence that was deemed overly threatening to the chief priests.

They even went to the extent of inciting the crowd to demand that Jesus be crucified. Pilate, who could not find any reason to crucify Jesus, had to yield to their demands. But his conscience did not permit him to bear the guilt of this punishment soon to be inflicted upon Jesus.

This was the irony of the situation: even Pilate had a conscience, which was more than I could have said about the chief priests. With this, he washed his hands before the mob and told them, "I'll not be held responsible for this man's punishment; it's your responsibility". The furious mob replied with such frightful hatred, "Both we and our children will take the responsibility"! It's strange what a little political propaganda can do to an unsuspecting crowd.

So there; they wanted him dead, and Pilate had to oblige for the political wellbeing of the Empire. What followed was a series of excruciating punishments we were ordered to put him through, coupled with some others which my colleagues did out of spite towards the Jews.

We began by whipping him. We whipped his back at least forty times with a whip made up of multiple leather strips. At the end of each strip was a sharp piece of bone or glass attached to it, so that it would sink into the skeletal muscles when the whipping was done. And when the whip was pulled out, these sharp ornaments would yank the flesh out together with them. By the end of the whipping, his spine was virtually visible.

Next, we dragged him to the Praetorium and all my colleagues on duty surrounded him. Since he had claimed himself to be king, they decided to have some fun by painfully humiliating him. They stripped off his clothes and put a purple robe around him to give him a "royal" look. Then, they twisted a crown of thorns and pressed it into his skull. When the sap of those thorns seeped through his skull into his bloodstream, it caused him serious mouth irritation, chronic abdominal pain, and blistering.

They put a staff in his right hand and started paying homage in mockery. How's that for a kingly treatment? Some of my colleagues then kept using that staff to hit him on the head repeatedly.

When they decided that they had had enough fun, we led him to Golgotha, initially with a 50-kilogramme beam resting on his fleshless back. When he could no longer bear the weight of the beam, someone else had to carry it for him.

At Golgotha, we began pinning his hands and feet to the cross using 7-inch nails. When we stood the cross up, he was literally hanging on it with his entire body weight resting on the three nails that had been hammered into his wrists and feet. Imagine what it must have felt like to have the nails tearing through the nerves between the bones of his hands and feet. The relentless throbbing pain must been terribly excruciating; but we were quite used to such a sight.

The crucifixion was really a usual routine for me. But there was something really different about crucifying Jesus of Nazareth: I wasn't as sure as the chief priests that he was guilty of the charge.

All I knew about him was that he was a man who had made a claim about himself which he refused to retract; and I'm not sure such a claim deserved punishment by death. But it was surely foolish of him to have refused to retract it when he was given the chance to do so before Pilate. He must either have been a liar or a lunatic - or could it be that he was, after all, God?

At the crucifixion, I noticed all kinds of people standing around the cross. Some were weeping profusely, their hearts torn at the sight of an innocent man having to suffer such agony. Others were sneering, as if that crucifixion had made their day. These sneering ones obviously felt Jesus deserved the kind of punishment he had received. And yet others were just indifferent, like it was any other day, any other crucifixion. At the foot of that cross, one was able to see humanity in all its diverse dispositions.

One person I noticed in particular was Jesus' mother, Mary. She was a haggard looking woman in her late 40s, who had obviously been through much more in life than the average mother. She was gazing intensely at her son on the cross, weeping softly and gently although there were no more tears left to wet her eyes.

On her face, I saw a look of adoration towards her son, as if she had known this was the fate he had to suffer for the greater good. Her countenance showed no sign of shame that her son had been so condemned by society, no sign of regret that she had been chosen to be his mother. At the cross, she was attending to him. At Golgotha, whilst many others had fled from Jesus, she mothered him.

Even as one who was not a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, I realised that the scandal of his crucifixion obligated people to seriously ponder over their allegiance to him. For those who had followed him for several years prior to this event, his crucifixion must have felt like such a defeat, such an injustice. They would have been haunted by the despairing thought that following Jesus was probably the biggest mistake of their lives.

Is there really much hope in such a gruesome event? I guess that's possible.

You see, some really bizarre things happened just after Jesus released his last breath and died. There was an earthquake. And we were shocked out of our skins when we saw tombs breaking open and saw supposedly dead people walking out of those tombs! Even some colleagues of mine who had mocked Jesus and hit his head with the staff couldn't help but confess, "Surely, he was the Son of God!"

As for Jesus, we couldn't find his body anymore three days later. And his followers all over the towns and the villages claimed that he had risen, and for them, this was the sign of hope. They claimed that his coming back to life was a sign of a hope for every cross they had to bear in their own lives.

I never became a follower of this Jesus. I remained faithful to my duty as a soldier of the Empire and to my god, Caesar. But I must say, the way Good Friday had turned out was absolutely unexpected.

Could this man truly have been the Son of God?