Torture Porn

Lenten Vespers, Week Two

The Scourging at the Pillar

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

When Jesus is condemned to death on a Cross, He is first tied to a pillar and horribly scourged—tortured in such a way as would probably have proven fatal on its own.

The Roman Legionnaires carrying out this gristly sentence used a sort of cat-o’-nine-tails with bits of bone or metal, nails or hooks, tied into the whips. This was sometimes called the scorpion, and was designed to flay flesh straight off the bone. It’s indescribably gristly, and I have no desire to linger upon the gruesome details. Anyone who wants a fuller picture can go rent Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. Suffice to say that Jesus was most likely mortally wounded long before He reached the crucifixion sight atop the rock of Calvary.

There was a reason for this, of course. Romans were cruel but never senseless. They wanted to make sure that Jesus, and the other convicts to be crucified, expired quickly before sundown. Nightfall marked the beginning of the Sabbath day, and Jerusalem might well riot if there were Israelites on crosses during the Sabbath. The scourging at the pillar helped to speed along the entire execution process.

The whole litany of sufferings endured by Jesus in His final week leading up to the Cross is called the Passion of the Christ because “passion” means something done to you, something you must endure. Passion is, quite literally, to suffer. But why do Christians focus so intently upon it? Why do we fix our gaze upon what our Lord underwent, at our hands and for our sake, when any good and compassionate person might rather look away? Why is the Cross our symbol rather than our shame?

It is precisely because Jesus suffers all this for us. The Passion of the Christ atones for our sins, and atonement means, in fact, at-one-ment. Atonement makes us one with God, with Creation, and with our fellow Man. The original relationship, the original blessed state lost to sin, is restored in Jesus Christ, in what He suffers and undergoes along these Sorrowful Mysteries.

Why does Jesus’ pain and suffering save us? What good does it do us that the Messiah is tortured? It’s disgusting, isn’t it?

It has long been a great mystery of the faith as to how such a horrible event can lead to eternal joy and salvation, and Christians have attempted to explain this in many ways. Some of these, however, I wish to dispel. Great men of the Church have spoken of Christ’s atoning Passion as paying our debt, substituting Himself for the tortures that we deserve at the hands of Satan. We owe the devil, we belong to the devil, and Jesus ransoms His life for ours. Or, another version of this explanation, is that we owe nothing to the devil but rather to God the Father! Our sin besmirches both the Father’s justice and the proper honor due to our Creator, and so a debt must be paid. Heads will roll! Someone must suffer! And Jesus steps in to take the bullet meant for us.

But here’s the thing. The men who tried to explain Jesus’ suffering in this way, they were speaking poetically, metaphorically. This cannot be taken literally. Otherwise God is like some bloodthirsty savage demanding human sacrifice, and Jesus is the fair virgin whom we toss into the volcano lest it erupt and burn us all. Is that the God of the Bible—a God demanding human sacrifice to assuage His affronted honor? By heavens, no! That’s exactly the opposite of the God of the Bible. To preach such a God in a literal, one-for-one manner—“I was scheduled to have my heart cut out atop an Aztec pyramid but Jesus took my place”—is blasphemy.

Let me be perfectly clear on this. God came to earth as Jesus Christ, as one of us. God came down to us when we would not and could not climb up to Him. And what did Jesus do? He taught everyone, healed the sick, called the lost, and forgave sins. Do you understand? Jesus was already restoring the lost relationship. He didn’t have to die on a Cross to forgive us our sins; He was already doing that. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why religious folks got so angry with Him. Jesus was forgiving sins when in fact only God had the right to do that—yes?

Did Jesus have to die on the Cross? Yes. But not because God wanted it that way, not because God demanded human sacrifice. Jesus had to die on the Cross because we demanded it; we demanded not that Man die for God but that God die for Man!

God doesn’t want blood and death and ridiculously awful torture porn. We do. And when we see that God openly takes everything we dish out—the rod, the lash, the thorns, the Cross, the spear, the grave—when we see that He pours out everything that He has, everything that He is, just to show the very people who are murdering Him how much He loves us—only then does Jesus Christ make sense. Only then do we realize that He knew we were going to do this to Him, and He came anyway. He knew that we would respond to His love with our ancient hatred, and He came anyway. He knew that we would dole out death, and He came to bring us life. In Jesus, God did not torture Man. In Jesus, Man tortured God. And against every expectation of our broken, twisted, wretched race—God forgives us.

That’s why Jesus’ suffering is so astonishing. That’s why we cannot look away from His blood, His pain, His Passion. Because we did that to Him, and instead of burning us all, instead of calling the planet Mars to knock the earth out from under Him, He simply rose up from the dead, having harrowed the heart of Hell, and said, “I forgive you. I love you. Come to Me and live forever.” That’s how far God is willing to go to win your love: all the way to Hell and back.

So now, brothers and sisters, when we suffer, let us lift that up to Christ. Let us offer to Him all the pains we cannot bear alone. He will take them upon Himself and transform them into something amazing, something life-giving, something redeeming. That’s what He does. That’s who He is. Lash Him, cut Him, stab Him, kill Him; stick Him up on a Cross for all the world to see. He will suffer it all for you, and love you all the more. And that, more than any power, more than any honor or right, is why we fall down and worship this Man as our God.

Thanks be to Christ, who suffered the lash and the wrath of Man. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.