The Loathly Lady

Baba Yaga, by AndrejZT

Lections: Good Friday, AD 2026 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Romans reserved crucifixion for those whom they deemed humiliores: that is, rebels, traitors, slaves, foreigners and seditionists. People at the bottom of the barrel. It wasn’t just a method of execution but a public demonstration of absolute and ruthless domination; a message to anyone feeling uppity, anyone who might want to challenge the powers that be. “We can do whatever we want to you. We can make you beg for death.”

They would start with the flagrum, or scorpion-whip, a many-thonged scourge equipped with hooks and weights, bits of metal and bone. A scorpion didn’t just lash but tore off hunks of skin and flesh. The shock and bloodloss just from that could sometimes do you in. With Jesus they added a little extra flair, a touch of additional theatricality, jamming a crown of inch-long thorns upon his brow, wrapping his shredded back in a crimson cloak. Thus they hailed Him as “King of the Jews”—while striking Him on the face.

A full-sized Roman cross would’ve weighed some 300 pounds. Likely what Jesus carried was the crossbeam, an impressive hundred or so pounds in and of itself. The Gospels do not record that Jesus fell, though tradition reports that He did. That would make sense of the accounts that we have: He starts off carrying His Cross but collapses, and so the Romans force Simon of Cyrene to pick it up and carry it with Him.

They drove Him out the nearest city gate to a rock-quarry along the road. There an outcropping of stone had been prepared with three post-holes bored into it in order to erect three crosses. Here they could display the execution for everyone to see. Roman nails of the period were generally heavy, square iron spikes, up to nine inches long, and some three-eights of an inch thick. They drove them through the wrists and ankles, both to support the weight of the body—a nail through the palm would tear right out—and because of the nerve clusters located there.

By design, this caused immense pain to the crucified. The agony in one’s ankles would naturally lead to shifting one’s weight to the arms. But then the agony in one’s wrists would shift the load back onto the ankles. And so the victim would do a sort of little dance upon the Cross, a writhing, until at last one’s strength gave out—we all have our limits—and the crucified would slump in such a way that the weight of one’s own body would bring about suffocation.

This could take hours, or in some cases even days. But Jesus dies more quickly than that, and not of asphyxiation. He’s crucified sometime between 9:00am and noon. Darkness falls upon the land. For much of His time on the Cross, He appears to be reciting the Psalms. He can still speak: He entrusts His Mother to the Apostle John, and forgives His murderers whilst in the very act of murdering Him. That alone would make Him divine in my eyes. Then He feels the end coming, commends His spirit to His Father, and dies with a loud cry, which surprises even Pilate, who had expected Him to linger.

As evening draws nigh, in order to prevent further religious unrest amongst the Judeans during the Passover, the soldiers use an iron bar to break the legs of the two criminals crucified on either side of Jesus. This speeds along their suffocation. But Christ they pierce with a spear—up and under His ribcage into His heart—in order to confirm that He is dead. “Blood and water,” we are told, gush from His side.

This has several implications. On an allegorical level, it points to the Sacraments of the Church, Baptism and Holy Communion, flowing from Jesus’ wounded side, the womb from which we are reborn. On an anagogical level, it points to Christ as the new and true Temple, just as Ezekiel prophesied, when he spoke of blood and water flowing from the Temple in his vision.

But on a literal level, it points us to the way in which He died. The pericardium is a two-layered, fluid-filled sac around the heart. Blunt force trauma—such as a car accident, or falling under a great weight—can cause an effusion of fluid, or “water,” that crushes the heart. This sounds like what happened to Jesus. After the scourging, the beating, the Crucifixion, it was likely the blow from bearing and falling beneath the Cross that killed Him.

There’s an old trope in literature known as the Loathly Lady. It goes like this. A knight meets an ugly hag who demands great deeds from him. When he succeeds, she is transformed into a beautiful bride. The medieval Ballad of King Henry tells us one such tale. In it, young King Henry, out hunting, takes shelter in the ruins of an old hall. His hounds growl and his horse grows skittish. From deep in the shadows, he hears an old woman’s voice:

Some meat, some meat, King Henry.

Bring some meat to me.

Go kill your horse King Henry,

And bring him here to me.

Oh, bring me now your berry brown horse.

Oh, bring your trusted steed.

Oh, bring me now your berry brown horse.

His flesh is what I need.

King Henry slays his horse and brings it to the hag, who gobbles the beast down, bones, fur, and all. But still she’s hungry. The loathly lady demands his hounds as well, and then his hunting hawk. Finally, when he’s sacrificed all that he has, she demands a heather bed. He makes the bed and lies down beside her, at which point her curse is broken, and she metamorphoses into a lovely young woman, for to be his bride. Yet even as he holds her, he can feel his horse, his hounds, his hawk still moving beneath her skin.

It’s a cautionary tale, you see; a warning of exactly what kingship must cost. The loathly lady represents the kingdom he would claim. And in order to make it his own, he must sacrifice everything that he has. Jesus was such a King, come to claim His Kingdom, and the Church to be His Bride. But loving us cost Him everything. He suffered abandonment, betrayal, humiliation, agony, and a most awful death. He came to gather us home in Him, and in return we slew Him.

We cast Him down into the deepest pits of Hell—and there He conquered!

I do not recount to you the grisly and gruesome details of Christ’s Crucifixion simply to be lewd, nor to twist the knife of guilt within our guts. Rather I present you with the sublime, unspeakable wonder that no matter what we did to Him, no matter what we threw at Him, none of it could stop Him from loving us, from forgiving us, from saving us. He knew what He would have to suffer, at our hands and for our sake, and never did He waver. Never did He blink. Jesus accepted this Good Friday as the price to pay for love, the ransom of our souls from sin and death and Hell.

The Crucifixion wasn’t God’s idea. It was ours. God didn’t sentence an innocent Man to death. It was God upon that Cross! It was God who died that day. And we were the ones who killed Him. We wove that Crown of Thorns. We drove those nails home. And no matter how hard we hit Him, He kept on saying, “I forgive you. I love you. And I will bring you home.” What can we do against a love like that, a love beyond all violence? What can we do against a God like Him? Not a damned thing.

We murdered Jesus Christ in the worst way we knew how, and it barely slowed Him down. Behold the glory of the Cross. Behold the love of Him who died. Behold your salvation, and the price in blood He paid. We are the loathly lady, who consumed Him flesh and bone. And He has come to claim us for His own. This night is the victory of love defeating death. And now the King shall break the spine of Hell.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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