The Book of the Holy Rosary: Part II, Chapter VI. Jesus Is Crowned with Thorns
Ezechiel, in his vision, saw the likeness of a throne, and upon it the appearance of a man, “From his loins upward and from his loins downward,” the prophet says, “I saw as it were the resemblance of fire shining round about, as the appearance of the rainbow when it appears in a cloud on a rainy day” (Ezech. i. 28). In Jesus, in the hands of men, bent down to the pillar and scourged for our sins, from his loins upward and from his loins downward there stream forth the many coloured signs of the everlasting covenant, “as the appearance of the rainbow when it is in a cloud on a rainy day.”
The Holy Scripture Narrative
“Then Pilate, having taken Jesus and scourged Him, the soldiers plaiting a crown of thorns, put it upon His head; and they put on Him a purple garment. And they came to Him and said: Hail, King of the Jews; and they gave Him blows. Pilate therefore went forth again, and said to them: Behold, I bring Him forth unto you, that you may know that I find no cause in Him. Jesus therefore came forth, bearing the crown of thorns and the purple garment.
“And he said to them: Behold the Man.” (St John xix.)
Pilate has now found that his hope of being able to appease the hatred and bloodthirsty animosity of the enemies of Jesus, by the attempt to put them off with the compromise of inflicting a public scourging, in the place of passing the judgment of death for which they were clamouring, has failed. The enemies of Jesus are not satisfied, and not disposed to abate in any degree their clamorous demand for His being put to death. What is Pilate to do? Is he to allow himself to be driven forward against his will to pass the sentence of death, when he has publicly said that, after having scourged his prisoner, he would then let Him go free? This would be a manifest humiliation of Roman power before Israelite clamour, to put the injustice of the judgment out of the question. But, on the other hand, Pilate is a man of the world, and he must, above all things, look to it that he allows no handle to be taken against himself by reason of any love of justice which he may show. The weak point in Pilate’s case, and the one which the adversaries do not fail to press relentlessly, is that his Prisoner is accused of making Himself a King. And if Pilate is as good as his word and lets Him go after the scourging, all the malignant malice of the Jews, enraged at being disappointed of their Victim, will turn its fury upon Pilate, and pursue him to the uttermost, as the betrayer of Caesar’s interests, in letting a man go who had made Himself a King. The dilemma, therefore, is not a small one. He is publicly pledged to let his Prisoner go free, and yet by it he must not turn the whole city against himself. Pilate is a man of expedients, and he has one ready for the emergency, and it is to this expedient of Pilate that we owe the Third Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary—THE CROWNING OF JESUS WITH THORNS.
Pilate, then, up to the present moment, has no intention whatever of surrendering his pledged word to the clamour of the Jews; but he sees quite clearly that, whatever happens, the infuriated rage which the people and their leaders now show against Jesus must not be turned against himself, particularly with such a plausible handle against him as his enemies would be sure to make out of the accusation of his having let a man go that had made Himself a King. He must therefore take the best care to be beforehand with the accusation if it should come to be made, and make sure of having reliable evidence to bring forward to prove that the character of King attributed to his prisoner, was, in a political point of view, nothing but a perfectly harmless hallucination. The reputed King must be exposed to a public mockery and ridicule of His pretensions as King. He must be dressed in a mock purple robe, He must receive mock homage on bended knee, He must have a reed put in His hand for a mock sceptre, and lastly, He must have a crown of thorns put on His head for a mock crown; and after all this has been done, Pilate will come and exhibit Him in this mock guise to the people, saying, “Ecce homo,” “Behold the Man,”—as if adding, behold the man whom you say makes Himself the King, who contests the right to reign against Caesar. Accuse me to Caesar, then, if you can or dare, of being Caesar’s enemy, for letting such a mock King as this Man is go free.
Such, then, was the chain of natural circumstances which were overruled, according to the counsels of God, to bring about this remarkable stage in the Divine Sufferer’s Passion, that constitutes the Third Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary, and in which the Victim for the sins of the world is exhibited to the eyes of men crowned according to the established usage of sacrifices, and wearing for His crown the very thorns which the earth, when laid under a curse for the sin of Adam, was commanded to bear in punishment of the crime that had been committed. As it is written, “cursed is the earth in thy labour, thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” (Gen. iii. 17).
“Behold the Man,” says the Eternal Father, to all generations of the children of Adam in this Mystery of the Rosary. “Behold the Man” whom I have sent to you, to be your ransom from death, and to make you citizens of the celestial city, the Heavenly Jerusalem which is above.
Like the prophet of old in the desert, who saw the fire bursting forth from the bush which was not consumed, and who said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight,” can we resist turning aside to see this fire of Divine love bursting out from the midst of the thorns? and beholding, can we do otherwise than, like Moses, fall down and adore?
This is He of whom St Jerome says, “He has been crowned with thorns that He might earn for us a royal diadem in the kingdom of His Father.” This is He who is given to us for a testimony of the power of God, that we should seek, as Tertullian says, “the crown which afterwards came to Him,” for He ate of the honeycomb after He had tasted of the gall, and He was not saluted King of glory by the hosts of heaven before He had been crowned with thorns King of the Jews, and at their suit condemned to the death of the Cross, being, as St Paul writes, made a little lower than the angels, that He might be crowned with honour and glory (Heb. i.)” (Tertullian, De Corona).
This is He of whom St Augustine says “that He is our King, The King of a kingdom which, though not of this world, nevertheless has overcome this world, not by the fierceness of fighting, but by the humility of suffering, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, not exhibiting the magnificence of power, but overwhelmed with mockery and insult” (Tract. 116 on St John).
This is He who is given to us as an example of patience. “Not one member only of His body,” says St Chrysostom, “but His whole body suffered these atrocious injuries. His head was pierced with thorns, and struck with a reed, His face was besmeared with spittle, and His cheeks were deformed with blows; the rest of His body was tortured with stripes and nakedness, the buffoonery of the purple robe and the simulated homage. His hands were mocked with the reed which they made Him hold in the place of a sceptre; His lips and His tongue were tortured with the vinegar and gall that was given Him to drink” (Chrysostom, Homily lxxxviii. on St Matthew).
“From this crowning of Christ,” writes Ludolph of Saxony, “there are three lessons which we may derive. First, that we should bear our sins in mind, as Christ bore the thorns of our sins on His head; for, according to Bede, His taking our sins upon Himself is shown in the crown of thorns which He wore. For it was said to the first man concerning these thorns, ‘the earth shall bear thorns and thistles to thee,’ for our earthly body brings forth sins which inflict their sharp wounds on our consciences after the manner of thorns. These thorns, then, Christ took to Himself to wear them as a crown of victory; for it is the wont of conquerors to carry the arms of their conquered enemies as a trophy of their victory. The arms of the devil are our sins, with which he is armed against us, and these the Lord has taken away from him through His Passion, for ‘He is the Lamb of God, who hath taken away the sins of the world.’ Therefore, He deigned to wear the crown of thorns on His head as a token of His victory; and it is delightful to every loving soul to see our King in this crown; and consonant with this are the words of the spouse of the Canticles, ‘Come forth, ye daughters of Sion, and behold the King Solomon in the diadem with which His mother (the synagogue) has crowned Him in the day of His espousals’ (Cant. iii. 11). The second, according to Theophilus, recommends us to seek the crown of a disciplined and abstemious life in honour of the crown of thorns. And in the third, we are exhorted to study how to gain a crown by the victory over our temptations; for each temptation is, as it were, a thorn in the mind, which, on the temptation being overcome, is changed into a crown; and in proportion as a man is able to bear up under the thorns of the temptations that come across his path in this life, and to overcome them, he thereby gains so many precious jewels for his crown” (Life of Christ, part ii. ch. lxiii.)