John 19:36

36. A bone… not be broken John quotes these words with but slight verbal variation from Exodus 12:46, and Numbers 9:12. In those passages it is the Passover lamb to which the words apply. In John’s view, therefore, Christ himself is the paschal victim, so that the words must be true of him. In other words, the Passover lamb is a predictive emblem of the Redeemer. So Paul affirms (1 Corinthians 5:7) Christ, our Passover, (or paschal victim,) is slain for us. That it was a substitutive victim is plain from the facts of the original institution of the Passover. Israel was as true a sinner as Egypt; but for Israel the paschal victim died instead. And as, when the destroying angel saw the paschal blood he passed over unharming, so when divine justice beholds in our behalf the atoning blood, it spares our souls. As the paschal victim by its blood redeemed Israel from Egypt and transmitted them to Canaan, so Christ’s atoning blood delivers us from the bonds of sin and furnishes our passport to the heavenly land. And this paschal lamb was to be without blemish, was to be eaten entire, without the breaking of a single bone. And this is the physical symbol of that perfectness, completeness, and sacredness belonging to the Redeemer’s person. So in our Saxon-English dialect the word holiness is but a different form of the word wholeness. Corporeally, our Saviour’s person was so divinely guarded, that except those scourgings and wounds prefigured by the slaughter of the emblematic victims of sacrifice, no harm could mar him. In his body must therefore be fulfilled the requirement laid upon the paschal lamb; not a bone of him shall be broken.

This bodily inviolable wholeness, belonging both to the emblematic and real victims, must, moreover, be taken with all the momentous import it contains. Christ’s whole nature is perfect before God and man; hence is he acceptable to God completely and perfectly; and hence should he be accepted by man in all the same completeness and perfectness. Thereby we aspire to the same perfection; and thereby, becoming the very body of Christ, we finally attain its own perfectness, and become acceptable once and forever before God the Father Almighty.