John 19:32Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

At the same time, an ineffable mystery was accomplished here: “Immediately there came out blood and water” (v. 34).

These fountains did not flow without meaning or by chance, but because the Church is formed from both.

Those initiated into the mysteries know this. By water they are reborn, and by blood and flesh they are nourished.

Thus the mysteries take their beginning from here. Therefore, when you approach the dread cup, approach as though drinking from the very side.

Christ so ordered it that, after the sufferings, one of the soldiers pierced the Lord’s side with a spear, and from it blood and water flowed.

“From His side,” says the Evangelist, “immediately there came out blood and water” (Jn 19:34), confirming the truth of His death and prefiguring the mysteries.

And blood and water came forth, not simply flowing out, but with force, so that it splashed upon the body of the thief.

When water comes out with force, it produces splashes. When it flows slowly, it goes quietly and calmly.

But from the side the blood and water came out with force, so that they splashed upon the thief. By this sprinkling he was baptized.

So also the Apostle says: we have come “to Mount Zion” and “to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better than Abel’s” (Heb 12:22, 24).

Wishing to resolve the matter of the woman and preserve her, who first came forth from the side and brought death, He Himself gave His sacred side to be pierced.

From it flowed sacred blood and water, perfect and holy signs of spiritual, mystical marriage, adoption, and rebirth.

“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Lk 3:16): with water as the Spirit, and with blood as fire.

Not that the legs were to be taken away, but those whose legs were broken, so that they might die. Then they were to be removed from the tree.

This was so that, by continuing to hang on the crosses, they would not darken the great feast with the dreadful sight of prolonged torment.

He did this in order to become the firstborn from the dead and Himself have preeminence in all things (Col 1:18).

The robbers are understood as our nature, divided into righteous and sinners. The breaking of the legs shows that among dying men you will find no one without error and the crushing of sin.

The Lord alone died whole and without any sin.

With respect to each person, the robbers are understood in many ways. They are understood as soul and body, and as fleshly and spiritual mind.

They are also understood as anger and desire, as the sensible world and the intelligible world, and as the written Law and the Law of grace.

Since, when we sin or act righteously, the Logos always descends and is crucified among us, then whenever by evildoing or ignorance we render the Logos inactive and bending downward, the demons immediately rush upon us.

They crush the powers of our soul, which walk and pass through the sensible realm.

See Jn 19:32-33; Mt 27:38; Mk 15:27. A fuller anagogical interpretation of the two robbers is found in Maximus, Ambigua 53, PG 91, 1372C-1376B.

At the same time, the Evangelist indicates that, in Christ's legs not being broken, the Old Testament type was fulfilled. This type was given in the unbroken bones of the paschal lamb.

In the piercing of Christ's rib, the prophetic words of the prophet Zechariah were fulfilled (Zech 12:10).

Concerning the flow of blood and water from Jesus' wound, Bishop Michael says that, according to natural laws, this could not have happened. When a dead body is pierced, blood and water do not flow from it.

Priest Butkevich cites the opinions of Strauss, Weisse, Baur, Schleiermacher, and Wilke. They say that blood cannot flow from a dead, congealed body.

They say that blood remains liquid in a dead body only briefly, no more than an hour. They add that separation of watery fluid from the blood begins only with decomposition.

They also mention certain illnesses preceding death, such as typhoid fever, fever, dropsy, and the like. On these grounds, these deniers assert that blood and water could not have flowed from Jesus' dead body.

In reply, Butkevich says that after abundant loss of blood a feverish condition always follows. From Jesus' hands and feet, nailed to the cross, there necessarily had to be abundant bleeding.

Therefore, in His death-agony Jesus must have suffered fever. For this reason, watery fluid could have separated in His blood.

Moreover, the piercing of the rib followed soon after death had occurred. Therefore there is no ground for saying that Jesus' body had already congealed by that time, or that blood could not have appeared from it.

There is an opinion of Professor A. Shiltov, Doctor of Medicine, that the scourging and tortures of Jesus before the Crucifixion, His total exhaustion and collapse of strength, and then the unbearable torments on the cross, must have caused a most dangerous illness, pulmonary edema.

The proof of this is the flow of blood and water from the pierced side. Consequently, pulmonary edema is the cause of the flow of water, or watery fluid, from the pierced side of the Lord. This is entirely natural.

Jewish law, as we have already seen, treated this differently. Wishing to make a criminal’s execution especially shameful, the Jews sometimes hung the executed corpse on a tree.

Yet they never left it there overnight. According to God’s own word, this would have defiled the land given as an inheritance to the chosen people (Deut 21:22-23).

So it was during the better period of the Jewish people’s life.

Even now, when the right of capital punishment had been taken from them by the Romans, Israel could not completely forget this decree of Jehovah.

Nor could they be indifferent toward those nailed to the wretched tree according to Roman laws, which were often practiced in a foreign land.

At least it would have been a very great offense for them to leave such men in their shameful state at the place of execution overnight before a Sabbath or feast day.

See The Jewish War 4.5.2, and compare Antiquities 4.8.24.

The Sabbath on the eve of which the Lord Jesus Christ was crucified was also a great day (Jn 19:31). It was especially solemn, since it coincided with the feast of Pascha.

After this, the Jews’ request before Pilate for permission to take the crucified down from the crosses is understandable.

But in order to do this, they first had to put them to death. Therefore the Jews proposed that their legs be broken.

The Romans did not know the humane custom of easing the sufferings of the crucified. The unfortunate had to die a slow and agonizing death.

Sometimes, to make this death still more painful, a fire was laid beneath the cross.

Or the body of the crucified man was given to beasts to tear apart, or his limbs were crushed with clubs and hammers.

Yet this last practice was not the breaking only of the legs, which the Jews asked of Pilate.

The Roman crurifragium was not a constant feature of crucifixion. It was a special kind of punishment, practiced chiefly on slaves and enemies, and sometimes on free citizens.

It is unknown why the Jews pointed Pilate specifically to this in the present case.

One thing alone is beyond doubt. Their aim was not to increase the sufferings of the crucified, but to hasten their death.

They wanted to be able to take the bodies down from the crosses before sunset.

Since breaking the legs by itself did not always bring death, Friedlieb supposes that, after receiving Pilate’s order, the soldiers did more than break each robber’s legs.

He thinks they also dealt each one a spear thrust, after which death was certain.

Friedlieb’s supposition is scarcely correct. It is true that there were cases in which men with broken legs still lived for some time.

Yet Friedlieb himself also knows examples in which perfectly healthy men died immediately after this terrible punishment.

Thus, in Armenia, near the city of Sebaste, the legs of forty soldiers who had proved to be Christians were broken.

The sufferers, unable to endure the torment, all died, not excluding even the youngest, Meliton.

If such a fate befell healthy men, what shall we say of those who had already endured the torments of crucifixion for more than five hours?

Before this, they had also been torn by the scourge.

It is hard to suppose that the heavy hammer, after crushing the bones of their legs, left any spark of life in their bodies.

This is all the more so because the soldiers pursued one aim here: to put the crucified men to death.

For us, the Gospel narrative must stand beyond every doubt. In it there is not the slightest hint that the crucified robbers received a spear thrust in addition to the breaking of their legs (Jn 19:32).

Only one soldier, unwilling to leave any doubt, either for himself or for the Sanhedrin, concerning the death of Jesus, struck Jesus with a spear in the side.

Immediately after this, blood and water flowed from the wound.

To explain the cruelty of the blow, there is no need to insist that it was delivered into the left side, that is, into the heart or near the heart.

There is still less need to do so, since according to ancient tradition the blow was delivered into the right side.

The weapon and the force of the blow show by themselves that the blow was mortal.

The depth and breadth of the wound are evident from the words of the Apostle Thomas. Into the wounds of the Savior’s hands and feet he wished to put only his finger.

But into the wound of the side he expected to put his hand (Jn 20:25, 27).

With such a blow and such a wide and deep wound, when no movement was observed in the body, any physician would be convinced that there was no longer life in the body.

The blood and water that flowed from the side of Jesus finally left no doubt, even for a physician, that Jesus had already died.

Blood will not flow from a body long grown cold. The decomposition of blood does not begin at the same time in every dead person.

But in no one does it begin earlier than a quarter of an hour after death.

Therefore the blood and water that flowed from the pierced side of Jesus testified by themselves that Jesus had died at least a quarter of an hour before the blow that drew forth blood and water.

For us this consideration is fully confirmed by the Evangelists’ account of the circumstances of the Savior’s burial.

According to the Law of Moses, a body hanged on a tree could not be buried later than sunset, and therefore not later than six o’clock in the afternoon (Deut 21:23).

Consider also that Joseph, and afterward the centurion, had to spend about two hours traveling back and forth between Pilate’s praetorium and Golgotha.

About an hour also had to be spent on the burial.

Jesus died at the beginning of the ninth Jewish hour, according to our reckoning in the first half of the fourth hour.

It is therefore clear that the soldier’s blow occurred no later than five o’clock in the afternoon.

Consequently, it occurred no later than half an hour after the death of Jesus, when blood and water, the witnesses of death, could flow from His pierced side.

Therefore the Jews could not dispose of His most pure body. This is also clear from the fact that Pilate gives the most pure body to Joseph of Arimathea, without asking the Jews about it at all.

It is very likely that, in ordinary cases, the Roman authority completely ignored the Mosaic Law. Those condemned to the cross remained on the cross for more than a day.

But during the betrayal and sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ, two causes compelled the Jews, that is, the rulers, to ask that those nailed to the cross be killed.

The chief of these causes was malice against the Lord. It gave them no rest until they were certain of His death, of which they may not yet have known.

Most probably, during the darkness from the sixth hour to the ninth, that is, from noon until six in the evening, they had gone home.

Only as sunset approached, when the darkness began to pass away, did they decide to go out. They went straight to Pilate with the request that the crucified be killed.

To convince Pilate that this was necessary, they concealed the true reason for their request. They pointed to another reason, the Mosaic Law, relying also on the fact that "that Sabbath was a great day."

We have seen above, in the introduction to chapter 13, that in that year the ordinary weekly Sabbath coincided with the day of Unleavened Bread, or Passover. On the evening of this Friday the paschal lamb was eaten.

Pilate did not refuse this request, since it was altogether unimportant to him.

We shall note in passing what a dreadful society this was. The life and sufferings of a man were counted as nothing. The duty of an executioner was imposed indiscriminately on any soldier, with complete assurance that he would carry it out quite willingly.

Yet into this society a ray of the light of Christ's teaching broke through. It illumined the darkness of savagery and insensibility, dispelled that darkness, and created the order of Christian life and feeling.

Blind are those who do not see this miracle, the regeneration of the world by Christ crucified.

The life of the crucified that day had to be ended by the crushing of their bones with a hammer. The breaking of bones, crurifragium, was a punishment also used apart from crucifixion.

Compare Suetonius, Augustus 67, Tiberius 44, and Eusebius of Caesarea, Chronological Canons, book 5, chapter 21, on the sentence of Perennis against Apollonius. This punishment, like crucifixion, was abolished by Constantine the Great.

The knees were broken, and death followed from nervous shock. But the most pure body of the Lord, and His bones, were not crushed. Prophecies were fulfilled independently of the will of men.