The Nails Were Too Short

Yesterday, while doing home repairs, I hurt myself bad.

Again.

Last week I’d pulled a muscle in the right side of my chest, Yesterday I twisted my right knee. All the time the arthritis in my right hip pains me. Before long I’ll be scuttling along sideways like a crab.

The problem was the nails were too short.

We have a boardwalk running along the ground for about 25 feet between the back deck and the pool steps. There are 4X4 inch posts driven in the ground with 2X4 joists nailed between them, and 2X6 inch planks nailed on top.

Over the years the whole structure has sagged and warped and fallen in spots.

As part of my home improvement project (which I’ve been entangled in since January 17^th) I decided to level out this boardwalk. This involved removing boards by crawling around on my hands and knees, prying out old nails, leveling the joists, drilling holes, and re-nailing the planks in securely.

Drilling holes?

Yes. Among the many talents God has given me, the ability to drive a nail straight is not one of them. Christ may have been a carpenter but He didn’t pass that skill on to me. So I have to drill a hole through the board in order to hammer the nail in straight.

As soon as I began tearing the boardwalk apart, the cause of its deterioration became evident. Whoever had built the thing in the first place, had used nails hardly two and a half inches long.

These nails were too short to hold the boards in place.

When I hammered the thing back together, I used 3 ½ inch nails.

Solid workmanship if I do say so myself.

Anyhow, as I crawled around doing all this, I zigged when I should have zagged, caught my foot beneath a joist when I turned to reach for my crowbar, and twisted my knee.

Damn!

The combination of pain and nails reminded me of something:

Between the years of 1932 and 1935, Dr. Pierre Barbet, a surgeon at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Parris, conducted some macabre but interesting experiments with nails and cadavers.

Using square-cut nails to tack an amputated human arm to a board, Dr. Barbet suspended weights from the arm to see how much it would take before the nail ripped out through the fingers.

He and his colleagues performed this experiment dozens of times

Dr. Barbet wrote, “One finds that in the middle of the bones of the wrist there is a free space, bounded by the capitate, the semi-lunar, the triquetral and the hamate bones”.

A nail driven through the hand in that spot, called Destot’s space, would support 288 pounds of weight without ripping out through the fingers.

And no bone would be broken or shattered by the nail.

Dr. Barbet described his work in his book, A Doctor At Calvary, (Image Books, Doubleday, ©1963).

Although he was a surgeon, he was also a scientist who studied the process of crucifixion on the human body. There is a name for experts in this field, crucifixsures or cruciologists or something like that; sorry, I’ve forgotten the exact word.

But anyhow, Dr. Barbet concluded, “Hanging by the hands causes a variety of cramps and contractions in the crucified which are described under numerous general headings, stretching to what we know as ‘tetany’. Eventually these reach the inspiratory muscles and prevent expiration; the condemned men, being unable to empty their lungs, die of asphyxia. They can, however, escape for a few moments from this tetany, and from its consequent asphyxia, by lifting the body upwards with the feet as a support.

“At this moment the knees and the hips are extended, the body is raised, while as a result the angle formed by the forearms with the vertical decreased slightly, in the direction of the original right angle. The body thus alternates, during the agony, between a sagging position and a state of asphyxia and a raised position which brings relief…”

The doctor draws a picture of Christ writhing on the cross, pushing up on the nails through His feet in order to breath — or to speak.

He pushed up on those nails to say, “Father, forgive them…”

In his anatomical experiments Dr. Barbet used short nails, hardly 3 inches long.

I’ve heard of a singing group called Nine-Inch Nails but I’ve never heard them sing and I know nothing about them; I suppose the group name is derived from some idea that it would take nails 9 inches long to hold Jesus to the cross.

I doubt it.

Even those nails would be too short.

Just how long of a nail would it take to pin down God?

Before His crucifixion Jesus said, “I lay down my life for the sheep… I lay down my life that I might take it up again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have the power to lay it down, and I have the power to take it again”.

He said this sort of thing again and again throughout the gospels saying that although He is God come in the flesh, yet He voluntarily went to the cross for our sin.

He suffered agony for us.

No matter their length, nails alone were too short to hold Him to the cross.

It was love alone that held Him there.

Love for us.

----

Last night during our normal prayer time after supper, Ginny and I got to talking about John the Baptist and the virgin Mary. We discussed how the call of God had come to each one of them and to other people mentioned in Scripture.

Ginny observed, “They agreed with God, but they were not sure of just what it was they were agreeing to”.

We decided that’s a good summary of the Christian life.

We don’t agree to something; we agree with Someone.