Thus
the Lord stood uncovered in the presence of a great multitude and the six
torturers bound Him brutally to one of the columns in order to chastise Him so
much the more at their ease. Then, two and two at a time, they began to scourge
Him with such inhuman cruelty, as was possible only in men possessed by Lucifer,
as were these executioners.
About to be scouged
The first two scourged the innocent Saviour with
hard and thick cords, full of rough knots, and in their sacrilegious fury
strained all the powers of their body to inflict the blows. This first
scourging raised in the deified body of the Lord great welts and livid tumours,
so that the sacred blood gathered beneath the skin and disfigured his entire
body. Already it began to ooze through the wounds. The first two having at
length desisted, the second pair continued the scourging in still greater
emulation; with hardened leather thongs they levelled their strokes upon the
places already sore and caused the discoloured tumours to break open and shed
forth the sacred blood until it bespattered and drenched the garments of the
sacrilegious torturers, running down also in streams to the pavement. Those two
gave way to the third pair of scourges, who commenced to beat the Lord with
extremely tough rawhides, dried hard like osier twigs. They scourged Him still
more cruelly, because they were wounding, not so much his virginal body, as
cutting into the wounds already produced by the previous scourging. Besides
they had been secretly incited to greater fury by the demons, who were filled
with new rage at the patience of Christ.
The scourging of Christ
As
the veins of the sacred body had now been opened and his whole Person seemed
but one continued wound, the third pair found no more room for new wounds.
Their ceaseless blows inhumanly tore the immaculate and virginal flesh of
Christ our Redeemer and scattered many pieces of it about the pavement; so much
so that a large portion of the shoulder bones were exposed and showed red
through the flowing blood; in other places also the bones were laid bare larger
than the palm of the hand. In order to wipe out entirely that beauty, which
exceeded that of all other men (Ps, 44, 3), they beat Him in the face and in
the feet and hands, thus leaving unwounded not a single spot in which they
could exert their fury and wrath against the most innocent Lamb.
During the scourging
The divine
blood flowed to the ground, gathering here and there in great abundance. The
scourging in the face, and in the hands and feet, was unspeakably painful,
because these parts are so full of sensitive and delicate nerves. His venerable
countenance became so swollen and wounded that the blood and the swellings
blinded Him. In addition to their blows the executioners spirited upon his
Person their disgusting spittle and loaded Him with insulting epithets (Thren.
3, 30). The exact number of blows dealt
out to the Saviour from head to foot was 5,115. The great Lord and Author
of all creation who, by his divine nature was incapable of suffering, was, in
his human flesh and for our sake, reduced to a man of sorrows as prophesied,
and was made to experience our infirmities, becoming the last of men (Is. 53,
3), a man of sorrows and the outcast of the people.
Jesus' appearance after the scourging
Amid
all this confusion the Virgin Mother endured unheard of insults, and She was
deeply afflicted by the injuries and blasphemies heaped upon her divine Son by
the Jews and gentiles. I have already mentioned in other places of this
history, and especially in that of the Passion, that the blessed Mother felt in
her own body all the torments of her Son. This was true also of the scourging,
which She felt in all the parts of her virginal body, in the same intensity as
they were felt by Christ in his body. Although She shed no blood except what
flowed from her eyes with her tears, nor was lacerated in her flesh; yet the
bodily pains so changed and disfigured Her, that saint John and the holy women
failed to find in Her any resemblance of Herself. Besides the tortures of the
body She suffered ineffable sorrows of the soul; there sorrow was augmented in
proportion to the immensity of her insight (Eccles. 1, 18). For her sorrows
flowed not only from the natural love of a mother and a supreme love of Christ
as her God, but it was proportioned to her power of judging more accurately than
all creatures of the innocence of Christ, the dignity of his divine Person, the
atrocity of the insults coming from the perfidious Jews and the children of
Adam, whom He was freeing from eternal death.
