The Book of the Holy Rosary: Part II, Chapter IV. Jesus Is Scourged at the Pillar
“And Pilate, calling together the chief priests, and the magistrates, and the people, said to them, ‘You have presented unto me this Man, as one that perverteth the people; and behold, I having examined Him before you, find no cause in this man, in those things wherein you accuse Him: no, nor Herod neither. For I sent you to him, and behold, nothing worthy of death is done to Him. I will chastise Him, therefore, and release Him.’ Now, of necessity, he was to release unto them one upon the feast-day. But the whole multitude together cried out, saying, ‘Away with this Man, and release unto us Barabbas;’ who, for a certain sedition made in the city, and for murder, was cast into prison. And Pilate again spoke to them, desiring to release Jesus. But they cried again, saying, ‘Crucify Him, crucify Him.’ And he said to them the third time, ‘Why, what evil hath this Man done? I find no cause of death in Him. I will chastise Him, therefore, and let Him go’” (St Luke xxiii.)
The better to contemplate, in the Second Sorrowful Mystery, our Divine Redeemer submitting Himself to bear for our sakes the “multa flagella peccatoris” (Ps. xxxi. 10)—“the many stripes of the sinner,”—piety seems to require that we should attempt to follow Him briefly through the chief intervening circumstances of His Passion, in the well-founded hope also of deriving thereby an additional insight into the reasons which He had for undergoing in our behalf this particular humiliation and suffering of a public scourging, which forms the subject of the “Second Sorrowful Mystery.”
After the angel who was sent to strengthen Him had departed, and after He had risen the third time from His prayer, the traitor Apostle Judas comes into the garden, with a band of soldiers and servants of the high priest, and straightway going up to Him, says, “Hail, Rabbi,” and kisses Him. Jesus answers, “Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?” His disciples, seeing their Master overpowered by numbers, profit by His words to the multitude, “If therefore you seek Me, let these go their way,” and all forsake Him, and seek for their own safety in flight.
Jesus is hereupon bound by the servants of the high priest; and, if we may accept a venerated tradition, He was taken down the valley of the Brook Cedron, and brought by a circuitous route through the Dung Gate to the house of Annas, the father-in-law of Caiphas, the high priest of that year, situated on the Mount Sion, there to be in safe keeping till the Sanhedrim or high court of the Jews could assemble for judgment on the morrow.
In the house of Annas He passes the night, exposed to indescribable insults and buffeting from the various servants of the high priest, all of which are to be repeated on the next day by the Roman soldiery and the mixed multitude; and it is during the course of these indignities that He is three times denied by His chosen disciple Peter.
At the early dawn of the morning, like the lamb that has been chosen for the morning sacrifice, Jesus is hurried off from the house of Annas to that of Caiphas, where the Sanhedrim assembles to sit in judgment upon Him. Various witnesses are brought forward, and the result is that He is judged by them to be worthy of death; upon which they adjourn, to have their Prisoner brought before the court of Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor, as the sovereign jurisdiction over life and death has been taken away from them by the Romans, and reserved to the Roman court.
In the meantime, Judas appears before the Sanhedrim, filled with remorse on hearing of His Master having been condemned to death; and casting down the thirty pieces of silver in their presence, saying, “I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood,” he goes and hangs himself in fruitless despair, a terrible warning to all future traitors.
Jesus is now brought before Pilate by the judges of the Sanhedrim, who at first merely inform Pilate that they have judged His case, and have passed sentence of death upon Him. But when Pilate answers by telling them to proceed in their own manner, they reply that they have no longer the power by law of putting any one to death; therein bearing witness out of their own mouths that the term fixed in Jacob’s prophecy, “The sceptre shall not depart from Juda, nor a lawgiver from his thigh, until He that is to be sent shall come” (Gen. xlix. 10), was past and gone. The sceptre had now departed from Juda; and Jesus, after having been condemned as having forfeited His life under the law of Moses, must now be accused as one who has also forfeited it to the laws of the Roman empire. They consequently now proceed to lay to His charge state crimes against the Roman power, in order to force Pilate to give them a hearing, and to extort the Roman sentence of death from him. Their charges are three in number—
1. Of perverting their nation, and making them disaffected to the Roman power.
2. Of forbidding to give tribute to Caesar.
3. Of making Himself a king, saying He is Christ the King.
Pilate, quite aware that their motive is nothing else than envy, is still unable to appear to make light of such charges as these, and therefore returns to his court to examine his prisoner; the doctors of the Sanhedrim refusing to enter with him on account of its being the eve of the great day of the Pasch. In due time Pilate returns to them, saying, “I find no cause of death in Him;” upon which the doctors insist, saying, “He disturbeth the people, teaching throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee.”
Pilate hearing Galilee named, forthwith seizes on it as a pretext for saying that the cause must in this case belong to Herod’s jurisdiction, to whom, as Herod happened to be in Jerusalem, he sends Him and His accusers with Him. Herod, however, only mocks Him, and sends Him back.
Pilate finding His prisoner returned to his hands, and perceiving that it looks likely to end by his being forced to give some kind of satisfaction to the malice and hatred with which the principal men of the city are so deeply animated, thinks it will be best for all parties to propose a compromise; as if he had said, “I find no cause in Him, but to satisfy you I will scourge Him, and then set Him at liberty.” This proposal does not appear to find acceptance, and Pilate tries one more way of escape for himself. The populace have the privilege at this season of the year of asking for the release of some one public prisoner, and he gives them the choice between Jesus and Barabbas: Barabbas being a well-known robber and murderer. To Pilate’s great surprise and embarrassment, the populace cry out, “Not this Man, but Barabbas.”
“What shall I do then,” asks Pilate, “with Jesus who is called Christ?” They all answer, “Let Him be crucified! let Him be crucified!”
Pilate is now in this difficulty: the populace have manifestly taken sides with the principal men of the city in clamouring for His crucifixion. It appears much too unsafe to an unscrupulous man of the world to go against an entire city; and yet, with his ideas of Roman dignity proper to a Roman official of high rank, Pilate is not prepared all at once to degrade a Roman tribunal in his person into a mere instrument of gratifying the malice of Jews; but still something must be done. There has, it is true, been no notification of any assent on the part of the Jews to the proposed compromise, but Pilate thinks that the “scourging” may very possibly satisfy them; at least he will risk the experiment on his own responsibility, in hope of being able to set Him at liberty after He has been scourged. And, accordingly, in the plan of Divine providence, it is to Pilate’s act that we owe the accomplishment of the‸
Nothing whatever has been brought to pass by the will of the Eternal Father, in the work of our redemption, for which there do not exist wise reasons known to God; and as nothing can be more certain than that it could have been for no mere superfluity of humiliation that the Manhood of the Eternal Word was subjected to the open indignity of a public scourging before the eyes of men, we therefore reverently ask and seek to know the reason why a public scourging, brought about by such a remarkable chain of providential circumstances, is chosen as so conspicuous a stage in the progress of our Lord’s Passion, as to have its knowledge specially promulgated, and its memory perpetuated, among the whole multitude of the faithful as a Mystery of the Holy Rosary? Public scourging, by the Roman law, was the punishment restricted exclusively to the slave, who had no citizen rights, or was inflicted on the criminal under sentence of death, who had forfeited his rights as citizen by his crime. The world, for the redemption of which the Eternal Word became man, was precisely in the predicament of the latter. It had forfeited its right of citizenship in the eternal city, in the person of Adam, who in his transgression had become the bondservant of the devil, and had ever since been lying under sentence of death as a condemned criminal, waiting for the hour of his execution to come. In the Divine Passion, therefore, through which the bondsmen of the devil, under sentence of death, were to recover their forfeited rights as free citizens in the eternal city, it became the Man of Sorrows, who was sent to redeem them, that one of the solemn stages of His Passion should be His suffering publicly in the eyes of men the very penalty of a public scourging, which human law was wont to inflict in the case of the slave who was condemned to death, as the conjoint just due of his condition of bondage, coupled with the fact of his crime. The Restorer, therefore, of the liberty of the sons of God, fitly suffers the public scourging, the penalty reserved for the crime of a bondsman, that we may all learn to see reflected in this stage of His Passion our own lost state of bondage and condemnation to death, from which He is become our one sole merciful Deliverer; “there being,” as the apostle says, “none other Name given under heaven whereby we may be saved, except His Name” (Acts iv. 12).
Moreover, there is a special healing power that flows from the wounds of Jesus. Isaias says, “Cujus livore sanati sumus,”—“by whose livid sores we are healed” (Isa. liii. 5). “We thought Him,” continues Isaias, “to be as one smitten with leprosy, stricken of God, and humbled.” “See,” says St Chrysostom, “the Lord is made ready for the scourge. See it now descends upon Him. That sacred skin is torn by the fury of the rods; the cruel might of repeated blows lacerates His shoulders. Ah, me! God is stretched before man; and He in whom not one trace of sin can be discerned, suffers punishment as an evil-doer.”
“The Lord Himself so willed it,” writes Ludolph of Saxony, “that He should suffer a scourging, in order that, as it is written, ‘Many are the scourges of the sinner,’ we might be spared, and that He might deliver us from an everlasting scourging by His own suffering; as a loving mother, who sees the father about to smite his son, will sometimes run with outstretched arms, and screen her child by exposing herself in his place to the blows. Man had offended God, and had, therefore, deserved to suffer. Christ, therefore, willed to submit Himself to the scourgers, in order to appease the anger of God, and hence it is written, ‘The discipline of our peace fell upon Him.’ (Isa. liii. 5). And if He who was innocent was thus grievously scourged for the sins of others, with what scourges do you not think those who are guilty will be scourged for their own crimes, except they correct themselves” (Life of Christ, part ii. ch. lxii.)
“And that godless man, Pilate,” writes St Anselm, “was far from not knowing that all things were done against Thee through envy, and yet he did not keep his rash hands from Thee, but filled Thy soul with bitterness without a cause. He sent Thee to Herod to be mocked; he received Thee back again from the hands of Herod after Thou hadst been mocked; He commanded Thee to stand naked in the midst of Thy scorners, and spared not to tear Thy virgin flesh with scourges, inflicting blows upon blows, and wounds upon wounds. O Elect Child of my Lord! what hadst Thou done that deserved such bitterness and such shame? Alas, nothing! I, lost man that I am, was the cause of all this suffering and all this shame. It was I, Lord, ‘that had eaten the sour grapes, and Thy teeth were set on edge;’ and ‘for that which Thou didst not seize Thou didst pay the forfeit.’ Thy love and our injustice hath made Thee thus infirm. Cursed be the injustice that hath caused Thee thus to suffer! And yet, by all this, the impiety of the faithless Jews remained unsatisfied” (St Anselm, Meditation ix.)
“From this flagellation of Christ,” writes Ludolph of Saxony, “we learn two things—First, That we ought at all times willingly to submit ourselves to the scourges of God, that each one of us may say with the Psalmist, ‘For I am prepared for being scourged’ (Ps. xxxvii. 18). And with the best of reasons; for if the only Son of God was ready to submit Himself to the scourges which are our portion, out of obedience to the Father, why should not we, who are sons by adoption, submit ourselves to the scourging which the same Father deigns to inflict upon us, either directly or by His ministers, as so many instruments intended in mercy for our correction; for according to both the wise man and the apostle, ‘Whom God loveth He reproveth, and He chastiseth the son whom He receives’ (Prov. iii. 11; Heb. xii. 6). The second is that we should diligently beware how we renew the scourging of Christ, which we do whenever we fall into grievous sin. For as Christ was stricken with scourges on account of our sins, whenever we sin, as far as in us lies we inflict by each sin a blow of the scourge upon Him; as the apostle says of some, ‘Crucifying the Son of God afresh in themselves, and making Him a mockery’ (Heb. vi. 6).” (Life of Christ, part ii. ch. lxii.)