It started more than 2,000 years ago as a slow march down the Way of Suffering.

Today, in some cases, that march has become a quick trip down Main Street filled with chocolate bunnies and colored eggs.

That’s troublesome to some Christian leaders who say the detour from the events that transpired at Golgotha has turned Easter into an afterthought.

“What worries me most about it is the tendency of Easter to become a mini-Christmas for children,” said the Rev. Matt Henry of First United Methodist Church in Pendleton. “We’re celebrating chocolate and candy and a pair of animals, the rabbit and the baby chick.

“We’re de-ritualizing the mystery of God. Every symbolic spiritual aspect of who we are as a culture is subsequently being replaced by what we’ve come to worship, which is the American lifestyle. That’s a growing tendency as we grow further and further away from connecting with any spiritual side of who we are,” Henry added.

Baby chicks may create a prettier picture than that of a dying man, but to overlook the actual death of Jesus and his resurrection, trivializes what transpired during the final hours of Christ’s life, Henry said.

Prelude to pain

It’s at the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus began to show signs of stress over what was to take place. Jesus, sometimes called the great comforter, needed comfort himself, which came in form of an angel.

It’s while in prayer that gospel writer Luke mentions “(Jesus’) sweat was if it were great drops of blood falling to the ground,” a medical condition called hemohidrosis, which although rare, has been documented in cases of severe distress. The loss of blood would have made the skin even more tender leading up the beatings Jesus was about to receive.

“The way he was so physically abused prior to being hung on the cross is brutal beyond imagination,” said Dr. Jon Hitzman of Pendleton Family Medicine. “It was bad enough he was hung on the cross, but how he was treated prior to being hung on the cross is inhumane.”

The beatings

The severity of the beatings isn’t mentioned in the gospels, although in Isaiah 52:14 says he would be so disfigured one would scarcely know he was a human.

It’s believed that Pontius Pilate may have had Jesus scourged after his return from Herod in an effort to avoid the execution, which proved to be to no avail.

The instrument used by the Romans, a flagrum, was made of metal and small pieces of bone that are attached to leather strands. Jewish law limited the number of blows that could be delivered with the deadly weapon to 39, but the Romans were not accountable to the law.

In “An Examination of the Medical Evidence for the Physical Death of Christ,” Brad Harrub and Bert Thompson said, “During scourging, the victim would experience an oozing of blood from cutaneous capillaries and veins until the wounds went deep enough to cause arterial blood to spurt out rhythmically with each successive heartbeat.”

Crown of thorns

There is no apparent reason for the crown of thorns to be placed upon Christ’s head except for sheer sadistic purposes.

Most likely the thorns came from the lote tree, which had thorns that averaged one inch in length. The gospels say that Christ continued to receive blows to the head, which would have driven the thorns well into the forehead and scalp region, causing massive bleeding.

But the worst was still yet to come.

“Christ was basically beaten,” Hitzman said. “He was whipped and had the crown of thorns, which is not a very comfortable hat to wear. He then had to carry his own cross out of the center of Jerusalem up to Mount Calvary, which is no short distance and this is a pretty heavy wooden cross.”

The nails

Battered and beaten, Jesus was forced to walk a path now known as the “Way of Suffering” to Golgotha, a distance estimated at one-third of a mile. The journey was made even more unbearable considering the crossbar weighed between 80 and 110 pounds.

So horrible was the sight of Jesus trying to carry the cross that Simon of Cyrene felt compelled to assist him on his final path.

“He was basically malnourished, dehydrated, bruised and beaten so he was probably already half dead before they even nailed him to the cross,” Hitzman said. “Upon nailing him to the cross you have the pain of what was probably a fairly large and crude nail, probably half the size of a railroad spike.”

It is widely thought that the nails were driven through the wrists with the points being pounded in the median nerve, causing shocks of pain to travel up the arm, through the spinal cord and to the brain.

The crossbar was next raised and Jesus’ feet were nailed to the base of the cross as his final minutes began to dwindle down.

“You probably couldn’t experience a more physically brutal death,” Hitzman said. “There’s no question that even the advocates of capital punishment today would not condone this type of death.”

Crucifixion

Even though blood poured from his open wounds and from the area where the nails were driven, it was thought to be suffocation that was the cause of death.

“His weight being suspended from the cross would have put an excessive amount of stress on his rib cage and he probably wouldn’t have been able to breathe very well,” Hitzman said. “He probably would have actually succumbed to a combination of dehydration and suffocation.”

With his internal organs failing from lack of oxygen, Jesus breathed his last breath.

“It’s fascinating from the standpoint of anybody who is a Christian and has even an inkling of what transpired,” Hitzman said. “When you think about the actual brutality and the gore that this man endured it’s just heart wrenching.”

Even more remarkable is that everything Jesus went through was by choice, something difficult to fanthom considering what he went through, but it was a choice he would make over and over again.

“As you ponder the cross, he wants you to know he did it for you,” Christian author Max Lucado is fond of saying. “He did it just for you.”