By JOE SIXPACK
In 1852, the people of the Caucasus Mountains in the southern part of the Russian Empire were ruled over by a just sultan named Schlamyl. He wanted to clean out corruption and bribery from among his people, so he made a law that anyone convicted of bribery should be punished with fifty lashes with the whip in front of all the people.
To everyone’s surprise, the first person to be caught in the act of bribery was Schlamyl’s own mother. He was grief stricken that his mother should do this grave act against his law, and for three days he struggled with himself about what he should do. On the fourth day he appeared before all the people, had his mother brought before them, and ordered two men to begin the whipping. As the first blow was about to fall, the sultan suddenly went to his mother’s side and untied her. Then he gave orders to the two men to tie his hands, rip off his shirt, and whip him instead. They did so, but unwillingly.
With a deathly pale face, he bore all fifty blows himself. Blood flowed from his wounds as they were made to gape open further and further from the slicing action of narrow leather against his flesh. Once the beating was finished, he turned to his shocked people and said, “Now you may go to your homes. The law has been satisfied; the blood of your sultan has flowed to make up for this crime.” From that day bribery was never heard of again among Schlamyl’s people, because they never forgot their just ruler and the sacrifice he made in love for his mother . . . and justice.
I think it’s very easy for us to take our redemption for granted. After all, we’ve heard how Jesus was crucified for our sins, and when we look at the crucifix we see a very sterile version of what really took place. The corpus on the crucifix is always clean, with very little evidence of injury beyond a slit in His side and the nails protruding from the hands and feet. His face, if depicted as still living, shows an expression of great anguish, but still sterile. Yes, with a mere abbreviated version of Christ’s Passion and death and sterile pictures and crucifixes, it’s easy to begin to take our redemption for granted.
Strictly speaking, the redemption of mankind might have been accomplished without the pains of Christ’s Passion. It was the will of the Father that the world should be redeemed not only by the Incarnation, but with suffering and pain. So in obedience to His Father, Christ chose to save the human race by enduring poverty, rejection, opposition, and finally the disgrace of crucifixion. That Jesus preferred this method of saving the world shows His wisdom in proving how much He loves us and how much we mean to Him. It also invites us to follow His example and prove our love for Him in return — much as the example of the just sultan, explaining why bribery was never again known among his people.
As stated, our crucifixes are sterile and modest in depicting the suffering of Our Savior. Take time to read the Gospel accounts of Christ’s Passion carefully and meditatively and you’ll see what I mean. In the upper room, Jesus exposes His anxiety when He not only told Judas to go and do what he must do (betray Him to the Pharisees), but to do so quickly. Later, in the garden, Jesus actually began dying there when He began bleeding through the pores of His skin, a medical condition brought on by extreme stress. So bad was His stress and anxiety, the Father sent His Son an angel to minister to Him — the final consolation He would receive until His death was exchanged for our lives.
When Jesus was arrested, He wasn’t given any sort of compassion or “rights” by His persecutors, such as our laws guarantee for felons today. He didn’t even have the benefit of counsel from a lawyer, which is what the scribes were. Indeed, the Sanhedrin convicted Jesus of blasphemy in a short kangaroo trial held in the middle of the night. Then they punched Him with fists repeatedly. They jerked out handfuls of His beard from His face. He was horribly treated by His own people.
Since the Sanhedrin lacked the power under Roman law to execute Jesus, they had to wait until morning to take their case before Pontius Pilate. So where did Jesus spend the remainder of the night? They dropped Him into a hole in the ground that was too deep to climb out of, and so narrow that he couldn’t even sit down to rest.
After meeting with Pilate the next morning, it was agreed that Jesus should stand before the governor in judgment. Pilate, coward that he was, couldn’t find anything Jesus had done worthy of death, so he had Jesus scourged in the hopes that this punishment would satisfy the Jews. We hear about the scourging and “meditate” on it each time we pray the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary, but this brutal event is also sterile in our thinking, due to the sterile and modest pictures depicting it.
Following Roman law, Jesus was beaten by two soldiers with a scourge made of leather strips, like a handful of smaller bull whips. On the end of each of those leather strips were sharp rocks and hook-like pieces of metal. Each time Jesus was struck with a scourge, as it reached around His body and head, the hooks dug into His flesh and ripped out huge hunks. Jesus was beaten almost to death. Adding insult to injury, the soldiers then mocked Him as King of the Jews with a crown of long thorns. It wasn’t merely placed on His head. The soldiers, in their lust for savagery, thrust those long and painful thorns onto His head to make them dig into His skull.
Jesus’ suffering continued for hours. He was forced to listen to the crowd demand His death — the very people He loved and came to save — while finding Himself taking the place of a murderer for execution. He was forced to carry His heavy cross through the streets of Jerusalem, until the consequences of His scourging wouldn’t allow Him to carry it any further. He found Himself face to face with His Mother along the way, knowing how broken her heart was at seeing Him in the shape He was in.
The crucifixion itself was the greatest of His humiliations. Was it painful? Yes, and the pain is more than you and I can possibly understand. I could write an entire article on how Jesus physically suffered from the cross, but the humiliation is just as important and can be covered here. In our crucifixes, we see Jesus hanging there with a loin cloth, but a careful reading of the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion tell us that wasn’t the case at all. Jesus was hanging on the cross before a crowd of people gloating over His demise, and His Mother standing in front of all them before her Son…stark naked. He had nothing on at all, not only exposed to His murderers, but exposed to His loving and faithful Mother.
Jesus’ final emotional agony came when He gave His Mother to St. John. In a homily about the sufferings of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Bernard the Abbot explained it this way:
“Or were the words: Woman, behold your Son, not more than a sword to you, truly piercing your heart, cutting through to the division between soul and spirit? What an exchange! John is given to you in place of Jesus, the servant in place of the Lord, the disciple in place of the master, the son of Zebedee replaces the Son of God, a mere man replaces God Himself.”
It had to be equally as painful for Jesus as it was Mary. Indeed, Bernard’s words show us how Mary had an active participation in our redemption.
Jesus suffered for us more than we like to think. In fact, I don’t believe any of us like to think about how much Jesus suffered for us. No one likes to dwell on such brutal, barbaric events. Still, dwelling on the Passion of Christ is something we must do. If we fail to meditate on His Passion and death, then we take Him and His sacrifice for granted. If we take Jesus and His sacrifice for granted, then we become lukewarm — if feeling anything at all about our redemption.
Then the day will come when Jesus will say to us, “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:15).
If you have a question or comment you can reach out to me through the “Ask Joe” page of JoeSixpackAnswers.com, or you can email me at Joe@CantankerousCatholic.com.
Hey, how would you like to see things like this article every week in your parish bulletin as an insert? You or your pastor can learn more about how to do that by emailing me at Joe@CantankerousCatholic.com.
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