Meditating Upon The Scourging Of Christ Through Scripture And Art
By JAMES MONTI
Everything about Lent directs our thoughts toward the Passion of Christ. For Christ Himself has invited us to the Passion, to be with Him in His suffering, to witness with the eyes of the soul what He suffered, to get so close to Him in His sufferings that we become willing to partake of those sufferings in ourselves, in our own lives. From Gethsemane onward, He beseeches us: “… remain here, and watch with me” (Matt. 26:38). He summons us: “Follow me” (Luke 5:27). He instructs us, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24). He tells us where we need to be: “… where I am, there shall my servant be also …” (John 12:26). Even through His prophets He cries out from the Cross to us: “Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow …” (Lam. 1:12). That it is our privilege in our own small way to partake of His sorrows He reveals at the Last Supper: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). When we are tempted to turn away, to walk away, He gently confronts us, “So, could you not watch with me one hour?” (Matt. 26:40).
In the Eastern liturgies there is frequent reference to the utter astonishment of the angels in beholding the Passion. We too need to feel that astonishment, to open our eyes to the unutterable mystery that our infinitely good and omnipotent Creator has stooped down to take our human nature and suffer the most painful, torturous and degrading death of all in both soul and body.
We need to understand and consider that because Christ possessed both divine and human knowledge, His sufferings were all the more acute, for as God He knew all the evils and horrors of mankind’s countless sins, the malice and cruelty of each and every sin committed from Adam onward. In His divinity He was incapable of suffering, but in His humanity He was most certainly capable of suffering unimaginably from this knowledge given to Him by His divine nature. St. John Henry Newman brilliantly describes how this knowledge must have made the chalice of which Our Lord speaks in His Gethsemane agony overflow with grief at the thought of “all that is hateful and heinous in human crime” as “His very memory is laden with every sin which has been committed since the fall, in all regions of the earth” (“Discourse XVI: Mental Sufferings of our Lord in His Passion,” in Saint John Henry Newman, Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, Dublin, James Duffy, 1862, pp. 392-393).
Medical experts affirm that the bloodiest episode of Our Lord’s Passion would have been the scourging at the pillar. A typical scourging would have meant nearly 40 blows with a two-pointed lash, potentially inflicting nearly 80 lacerations of the flesh. Markings on the Shroud of Turin indicate that those striking Our Lord went much further, with evidence of well over 100 lacerations. Thus, the scourging did more than enough to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy:
“Who is this who comes from Edom, in crimsoned garments from Bozrah …? / … Why is thy apparel red, / and thy garments like his that treads in the winepress? / I have trodden the wine press alone … their lifeblood is sprinkled upon my garments, / and I have stained my raiment” (Isa. 63: 1-3).
From the Gospel accounts one can readily infer that the men scourging Christ were not inclined to show Him any mercy, for, as if not sated to their satisfaction by the carnage of scourging Him, they added afterward a further torture seemingly invented for the occasion — the crown of thorns. The ferocity of the blows inflicted upon Our Lord’s flesh can be seen as prophesied in the Psalms. Psalm 22, the very psalm that Christ applied to Himself while hanging upon the Cross, quoting its first verse in His final death agony, invokes the harrowing imagery of being gored by the horns of bulls and oxen and being torn to shreds by lions:
“Many bulls encompass me, / strong bulls from Bashan surround me; they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion … / Save me from the mouth of the lion, / my afflicted soul from the horns of the wild oxen” (Ps. 22:12-13, 21).
Similar imagery appears elsewhere in the Psalms, with an even more explicit depiction of a band of men rushing at their victim in Psalm 62:
“How long will you set upon a man to shatter him, all of you, / like a leaning wall, a tumbling fence?” (Ps. 62:3).
Our Lord underwent His Passion as the supreme act of obedience to His Heavenly Father, Who “so loved the world that he gave his only son” (John 3:16). In this context of Christ receiving all the pains of His Passion as “the chalice” He accepts from the Father in Gethsemane, we can see these words from Psalm 38 as applicable to His scourging:
“For thy arrows have sunk into me, and thy hand has come down on me. / There is no soundness in my flesh …” (Ps. 38: 2-3).
The Gospels, I believe, were written to be “portable” — I think that the Evangelists were mindful that they needed to write succinctly in order that their Gospels might be “short enough” to be readily transported and copied. With the first three earlier Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), there was an urgency to get the essential facts of Christ’s life recorded and circulated as soon as possible. Even St. John, who, writing somewhat later, could afford to narrate in a more reflective and meditative manner, had to leave much unsaid. Thus, the Gospel accounts of Our Lord being scourged and later crucified supply no details as to the physical scourging itself or the physical details of Christ being nailed to the Cross and hanging from it for three hours. The Old Testament prophecies and foreshadowings of Christ and His Passion provide us with a prime way to “unpack” what the Evangelists tell us more succinctly.
There are artists who have succeeded particularly well in setting before our eyes the raw brutality of the scourging at the pillar, all in an effort to help us to grasp the sheer immensity of Christ’s sacrifice for our sins. For our contemplation of the Passion can be seen as our answer to the same question that Our Lord posed to the apostles after washing their feet at the Last Supper: “Do you know what I have done to you?” (John 13:12).
Among the very many “pasos” (floats bearing religious statues) carried in Seville’s annual Holy Week processions are quite a few that present an entire scene from the events of the Passion, in which an ensemble of several sculpted figures visually conveys to onlookers the intense drama of a key moment from the Sacred Passion. Among the finest and most evocative of these is a paso of the scourging at the pillar carried by the Brotherhood of the Sacred Column and Scourges. Unlike the many pasos that feature statues sculpted in the 1600s and 1700s, this paso is of fairly recent vintage, with the statue of Christ at the Pillar, sculpted by Francisco Buiza, dating from 1974 and with the five other figures, all Roman soldiers, sculpted by José Antonio Navarro Arteaga, dating from between 1996 and 2003. Two of these men are flagellants, one of whom is in the very act of beginning to hurl his scourge down upon the bloodied back of Our Lord; the flagellant’s face is livid with hatred and rage, a torturer without mercy for his victim.
The figure of Christ is bent forward, evincing that He is by now physically near the end of His strength, close to collapsing from the many blows that have already torn His flesh. His face is calm, but His eyes, staring vacantly downward, reveal deep suffering, and the fingers of His hands, bound by the wrists to the flagellation pillar, are convulsively spread open from the repeated shock of sudden spasms of intense pain. In stark contrast is the demeanor of a Roman soldier crouched in a half-kneeling posture directly in front of Our Lord, dipping a sprig of hyssop into a mixture of vinegar, oil and water in a small bucket, intended by its sprinkling to keep the Prisoner from fainting. The soldier has turned his head to look with an air if nonchalant curiosity at the bloody spectacle unfolding behind him. To the right behind Our Lord, the second flagellant has been interrupted in his cruel task by a Roman commander who is emphatically ordering him to end the scourging immediately, seeking to prevent the Prisoner from dying before He is led to His Crucifixion. To the rear of the scene is the fifth of the Roman soldiers, standing at attention with his spear as he gazes down with apprehension at the robe of Christ that he holds in his left hand.
Another Spanish artist, the 17th-century painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, in his work entitled “Christ after the Flagellation” (after 1665), has set on canvas a glimpse of what would have transpired in the aftermath of the scourging at the pillar. Here Our Lord appears as a solitary figure, His torturers having departed after completing their bloody work. He is crawling on His knees away from the pillar of flagellation to retrieve His garments that the torturers had earlier thrown on the floor when they stripped Him. A trail of spattered blood can be see across the ground. It captures not only the sapping of Our Lord’s strength by the ferocity of His persecutors but even more so the sheer depth of the degradation to which Our Lord was subjected in His Passion, epitomized in the prophetic words of the earlier-cited Psalm 22, “But I am a worm and no man; / scorned by men, and despised by the people” (Ps. 22: 6).
On the right side of the picture, standing behind the robe of Our Lord that He is struggling on His knees to retrieve, are two angels. They like us are spectators, stunned, awed and shaken to see God Incarnate suffer like this. One of the angels leans his right hand on the shoulder of the other, as if he were about to faint at the sight. But the divine ordinance from all eternity that “the Christ should suffer” (Luke 24:46) forbids them from intervening.
In His Sacred Passion, Our Lord comes to us as a beggar, as it were, pleading for us to love Him. Let us respond to Him with all our heart.
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