John 19:37

37. Whom they pierced The quotation is from Zechariah 12:10, with which compare Psalms 22:16: They pierced my hands and my feet. According to the prophet, God should pour upon the house of David (who in the Psalm quoted personates the pierced Messiah) the spirit of penitence, by which they should look with weeping upon the pierced One, and mourn as for an only Son, by them slaughtered. In this bodily piercing John sees a physical fulfilment of the prophetic physical image. It impressed his senses as he gazed. It was by inspired after-thought that he fully realized the Scripture verification. The visible image here too embodies its world of import. John saw the soldier look upon him whom his spear had pierced.

So every penitent Jew of John’s time looked upon the pierced and crucified Messiah and repented. In the fulness of time all Israel shall look upon him whom they have pierced, and repent; and all men whose sins have been the spear that pierced his side, have just reason to look upon him and repentantly mourn, as over a son their sins have murdered.

This leaving his bones unbroken, yet piercing his side, exhibited to John both the divine preservation and the sacrificial execution of the Lamb of God. Had Jesus been executed by Hebrew law his body must have been mutilated and crushed by stoning; so that, strange to say, the old Hebrew prophecy had to wait for the Roman to come, and in a mode his laws had prescribed, to sacrifice the Son of David according to the Scriptures. No wonder that John asseverates so solemnly that he saw it with his own marvelling bodily eyes.