John 19:36-37

John 19:36-37. For these things came to pass, that the scripture might be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not he crushed; and again another scripture saith, They shall look on him whom they pierced. The passages referred to in the first of these quotations seem to be Exodus 12:46 and Numbers 9:12, rather than Psalms 34:20. It is probable, however, that the last of these is founded upon the first two. Great importance was attached by the Jews to the precept that no bone of the Paschal Lamb should be broken. God's counsel, typified in this, is now fulfilled in the true Paschal Lamb (see chap. John 1:29).

In the second passage referred to (Zechariah 12:10), the Evangelist sets aside what is universally allowed to be the false translation of the Septuagint, and translates from the Hebrew. It is not impossible that in this passage also there may be a distant allusion to the rites of the Pass-over; for the bitterness of the ‘mourning' alluded to seems to be founded on the mourning of Egypt for its first-born. But, whether this be so or not, it will not be denied that the allusion in the Prophet to Him who is to come as the manifestation of God to His people is distinct. The true reading of the passage in Zechariah is, ‘They shall look on Me whom they pierced,' where the word ‘Me' is to be explained by the fact that the Sender is identified with the Sent, the Lord with His prophet. It is worthy of notice that the words translated ‘pierced' in John 19:34; John 19:37 are different, from which we may conclude that the Evangelist does not rest in the mere detail of the piercing,.but dwells upon the wider thought, that Israel rejected and crucified its Lord. Such, however, had been God's counsel; and thus spoken, not only by the law but by the Prophets (comp. chap. John 1:45), this counsel is now fulfilled in Jesus.

One remark more may be permitted on the peculiar light in which the whole of this remarkable scene seems to present itself to the eye of the Evangelist. Jesus is obviously here, as indeed He has been throughout the Gospel, the true Paschal Lamb (chaps, John 1:29; John 1:6). Yet He is that Lamb looked at not simply in the moment of dying, but as, in dying (in that dying which has been going on throughout His whole suffering life and only culminates now), the true substance of His people's Paschal feast, their nourishment, their life. The conduct of the Jews to Jesus as He hangs upon the cross thus assumes the form of an inverted, a contorted, Passover. They had that morning lost their legal Passover, had lost even the shadow; because they rejected and despised the substance. ‘Yet,' says the Evangelist, ‘they found a Passover. Let us follow them to the cross. There let us see the righteous dealings, the deserved irony, of the Almighty, as He makes their cruel mockings of the true Paschal Lamb shape themselves into a Passover of judgment, of added sin and deepened shame.' If the passage be looked at in this light the only light, as it seems to us, which at once explains the general structure of the section and the peculiar expressions employed it will be found to be full of the most important consequences alike for the biblical critic and for the dogmatic theologian.