Saint Longinus
The centurion at the crucifixion
Join me today to meet the saint who pierced Jesus’ side with a spear.
Name: Remembered as Longinus
Life: died early 1st century AD
Status: Saint
Feast: October 16
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We meet the centurion on execution detail. On this day, three people were being executed. Two were robbers, perhaps loosely affiliated with the movement of the Zealots who were trying to push the Romans out of what was then the Province of Judea. The last Prisoner was different. His case was certainly also political, but it was more complex. The governor had dithered about what to do, balancing justice against the need to keep order in his province. Finally, Pontius Pilate had made the call: sacrifice the Prisoner for the sake of order.
The governor had washed his hands, symbolically trying to remove his guilt in the matter. Then, still unhappy with the situation, he had made another unusual gesture. A sign would be put up over the third Prisoner, Jesus of Nazareth. The sign would be trilingual, written in Greek, the common language of the East, Hebrew, to ensure that it would irritate the Jewish authorities who had forced Pontius Pilate’s hand, and Latin, the official language of the Roman empire. The sign would read: “This is the King of the Jews”.
Finding a piece of wood for the sign and rounding up some scribes probably fell to the centurion in charge of the whole operation. He may have started to work himself, at least for the Latin inscription - centurions needed to be literate in Latin, since that was the language in which their written orders were likely to arrive.
We don’t know the centurion’s name, although tradition supplies many suggestions: Caius Oppius, Ctesiphon, Abenadar, Legorrius, Ignatius, Primianus. Tradition gives us another bit of knowledge about the centurion instead. He was going blind. When the condition got bad enough, he would no longer be able to work, and he’d be discharged from the legions and have to find his way home, back to Tyana in the Roman Province of Cappadocia, the modern town of Kemerhisar in central Turkey.
Even now, a half blind centurion probably wasn’t well equipped to spot the ambushes set up by the Zealots. Perhaps that was why today the centurion had been put in charge of the unpleasant business of punishing the enemies of Rome.
The Roman method of punishment included flogging prior to crucifixion. By now the third Prisoner, Jesus, had been up all night, having been arrested after marking the Passover with His followers and then interrogated through the early hours of the morning. He was supposed to be a wonderworker, even a king. He didn’t look so special now. And so the Roman soldiers added some humiliation of their own, putting the Prisoner in a mock-kingly robe and making a crown of thorns to press down on His head.
As for the centurion, he might have put his doubts about Jesus’ reputation in more intellectual terms. After all, there were other wonderworkers. One had grown up in the centurion’s own neighbourhood: Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius, who was now about the same age as Jesus, would be remembered as one of the great wonderworkers of the ancient world.
Apollonius wasn’t just a wonderworker, he was also a philosopher. Like most philosophers of his time, Apollonius was what we would call a monotheist: he understood that our world of changes must originate in something permanent, some single Supreme Being. But this knowledge brought no comfort and little guidance. True, philosophers called this Supreme Being ‘Father’, for without this Being we could not exist. But Apollonius taught that the distance between this cosmic Father and us was vast, and it was ludicrous to imagine that this Being cared about us or even thought about us. That would be like supposing that the Roman emperor worried about what was happening inside an anthill.
And that was why, despite acknowledging the existence of a supreme God, even the philosophers still turned to subordinate supernatural beings, the many lowercase ‘g’ gods and goddesses of the East and West. These beings were limited in their power, but at least they were small enough to be interested in human problems.
Maybe such thoughts were on the centurion’s mind, as he stood overseeing, rubbing his eyes in the tricky light of the early morning. If this Prisoner, Jesus, was appealing to the Father, the Supreme Being, He was obviously making a basic philosophical mistake. The Father had no interest in legal matters on the edge of the Roman Empire.
Eventually the daylight came, and the Prisoner was made to carry His own cross up to the place of execution. By then the lack of sleep and the flogging had taken their toll, and the centurion needed to commandeer a man in the crowd to help. There on the hill, Jesus was crucified between the two robbers. For the next few hours, the centurion and his men stood guard, waiting, as the three figures on the crosses suffered. At least one of the robbers, whose name comes down to us as Saint Dismas, spoke to Jesus, and seemed to find a sort of peace.
The suffering of crucifixion went on and on, but Roman executions had a schedule to keep. The Jewish authorities preferred for such things to be wrapped up before Sabbath, which would begin at six o’clock that evening. By three in the afternoon, the centurion wanted to make sure that everything was on track. The robbers were still fighting to live, and so their legs were broken to ensure that they would die more quickly, as crucifixion caused a buildup of fluid around the heart. But Jesus had cried out and now seemed to have died. And so the centurion took a lance, a long stabbing spear rather than the traditional Roman fighting pilum, and stabbed upward under Jesus’ ribcage to His heart. As expected, blood and water poured out.
Only, as the centurion checked for the signs of death, he was finding it even more difficult than usual to see what he was looking for, as though his vision was getting worse moment by moment. But no, that was not quite right. The day was darkening around them, and the earth under their feet began to shake as earthquakes rumbled through the land. In the Jewish Temple, the curtain that protected the hidden, holiest place was torn wide open.
Maybe at this point the centurion was still holding the lance. Or maybe he took it from one of his men to check for the telltale signs of blood and water. And then, after handling it and trying to see it in the bad light, he reflexively rubbed at his eyes.
And he saw.
Tradition teaches that in that moment the centurion’s vision returned, and as he looked around the things that had been just blurry shapes were now crisp and clear. But the miraculous healing went further, deeper.
And the centurion Saw.
Up above him, on the cross, the centurion saw that the Prisoner he had brought to this place was no mere man. The centurion saw the Son of the Father, the Word, the Beginning and the End, arms stretched wide in death. And the centurion reeled back, and said,
“Truly this man was God’s Son!” (Matthew 27:54)
As we read in the Gospels, the centurion and his men felt terror, and for good reason. He and his men had spent the last day torturing and killing the Son of God.
Now, pagan tradition did not give the centurion much guidance for what would happen to a mortal who killed a god. Homer spoke of mighty heroes, half gods themselves, who had fought with gods. But even these heroes had never managed to kill a god. And anyway, what would be the point? The house of death was merely another domain of a god. People in the East knew the story of Osiris, a god who had died and taken over control of the land of the dead.
There was a tradition of foolish mortals daring to lay hands on a god. Once, some pirates had tried to abduct Dionysus, and the god had stood amused in their ship as grape vines, his symbols, snaked out of the water and held the ship in place. The pirates, realizing their mistake, had tried to swim to safety, and the god had transformed them into dolphins with a casual wave of his hand.
The ancient trickster, King Sisyphus, had tried to bind the god of death. It had even worked, for a little while. Now, for his hubris, Sisyphus was in hell, punished with an eternity of meaningless work, trying to roll a stone up a hill forever.
Of course, the crimes of the pirates and the trickster king were mild compared to what the centurion had done, for he had managed to help to kill the Son of the Father, that is, the Supreme Being. The philosophers taught that the Supreme Being would never deign to pay attention to something as insignificant as a man. Well, the centurion was going to get noticed now.
What should the centurion do? Running away was an option. But where would he go so far that he could not be found? Despair would have been an understandable reaction. But a man became a centurion in the Roman legions by learning to meet his fears face to face. And so the centurion remained in his post, doing his job, as he waited for whatever punishment God had in store.
Tradition tells us that the centurion was one of the guards posted at Jesus’ tomb, at the request of the Jewish authorities. And on the third day, as the stone in front of the tomb began to roll away, I imagine the centurion standing up, squaring his shoulders, and waiting for whatever terrible thing was in store for him.
We do not know what the centurion saw.
Afterwards, a rumour would spread that some terrible thing did happen to the centurion, since he did not return to the military encampment. In fact, whatever he saw at the tomb had caused the centurion to completely change his life. He took off his uniform and walked away. Perhaps he found Saint Peter and the others at Pentecost, hearing them speak the language of his home province of Cappadocia. And the centurion came to understand what he was being called to do.
And so it was that a lone figure began the long walk back to Cappadocia, shedding his rank, his career, even his name. We remember him by the object that had changed his life and which, perhaps, he carried with him as a sign: the lance. The Greek word for lance is longche. The former centurion became the lance bearer, Longinus.
When he got back to the province of his birth, the lance bearer began to tell the story of what he had seen and done in the Province of Judea. He brought the good news that the philosophers were quite mistaken when they taught that the Supreme Being was unreachably distant. The Being they called ‘Father’ noticed them, and loved them so much that He had even sent His Son to die for them.
In time, Longinus, the lance bearer, would face his own trial. Tradition has it that he was martyred, receiving his martyrdom with grace and treating his killers with kindness. Perhaps the killing was meant to silence the centurion, for the Church was already growing, and it was inconvenient to have such a public eyewitness. But the Church in Cappadocia had already grown too large to contain. Centuries later, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, himself now bishop of Cappadocia, would remember that the first man to hold his office was the nameless centurion.
And the lance that the centurion bore, the spear of destiny as it came to be called, would be swept away by the river of history, being broken and divided, found and lost and found again, travelling West and then back East, carried into battle where manly Christians and sometimes even manly saints were to be found.
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Beautiful! Brought me to tears!
Beautifully told.