We are now in Holy Week, and this post is taken from Caryll Houselander's book 'The Stations of the Cross', published in 1955 by Sheed and Ward. The author goes into considerable depth into the circumstances of Christ's Passion, as portrayed in the traditional Catholic liturgical prayers of the fourteen 'Stations of the Cross' represented on the inside walls of most Catholic churches world-wide, by paintings, wall carvings, prints and symbols etc.
Caryll Houselander was an English Roman Catholic writer and artist, very well known in the mid 20th century, as a writer and illustrator of children's books, religious books, and poetry, the latter in an idiosyncratic style which I like very much. Her religious poetry is practical and down to earth, and reflects her strongly held faith and belief that God's presence exists in all men and women, although not necessarily recognised and respected.
This post considers the First Station, Jesus is condemned to death.
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The First
Station: Jesus is Condemned to Death
“Behold the
Man!”
He is a man of sorrows. He is covered in bruises and stripes. He is made
a laughing stock. He is crowned with a crown of thorns. A reed is put into his hands for a sceptre, a
tattered soldier’s cloak is thrown over his naked shoulders. His eyes are
blindfolded. His face covered with
spittings. He is bound like a dangerous criminal. His own people have chosen a
murderer before him. His friends have forsaken him. The kiss of treason burns
on his cheek.
“He has no comeliness
whereby we shall desire him.”
“He is a worm and no man, the reproach of men and the
outcast of the people.”
And he is condemned to death.
“Away with him! --- Away
with him! --- Crucify him!”
“Behold the man!”
Behold the Son of God!
Behold the man abiding in mankind!
He has put on our humanity. He has put you on --- and me.
He has covered himself with our shame, blindfolded his eyes with our blindness,
bound himself with our slavery to self. He is bruised by our falls. He bleeds
from our wounds. He sheds our tears. He has made himself weak with our
weakness. Faint with our faint-heartedness. He is going to die our death.
All men are condemned to die, but he is condemned to die
not only his own death, but yours and mine, and that of every man whom he will
indwell through all the ages to come.
“Behold the Son of God!”
“This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased!”
He alone of all men born need not have died; but because
things are as they are, because we have to pay the price of our sins, and our
life on this earth must inevitably be a journey through suffering to death,
Christ has chosen to give himself to every man who will receive him, so that
each man who wills can tread that road with the feet of Christ, and at the end
of it he can, if he wills, die, not his own death but Christ’s.
That is why death is the choice of Divine Love.
“Dost thou doubt that if I call on my Father, even now,
he will send more than twelve legions of angels to my side? But how, were it
so, should the Scriptures be fulfilled, which have prophesied that all should
be as it is?” (Matt.26 v. 53-4).
His bound hands hold back the legion of angels.
He has chosen our impotence in order to give us the power
of his love, our weakness to give us his strength, our fear to give us his
courage, our ignominy to give us his majesty, our pain to give us his peace,
our wounds to give us his power to heal, our dying to give us his life; our
interdependence that we may give him to one another.
“Behold the man.”
In
him behold mankind!
Already in this mysterious moment of time, at the
beginning of the Via Crucis, Christ has given himself to all those whom he will
indwell through all the centuries to come; already he has taken them to
himself, made them one with himself. All manner of men, and women, and
children, the rich and the poor, the famous and the infamous, saints and sinners,
all who will be redeemed by his Passion are in Christ, and his Heavenly Father
sees them all as Christ, his Son, in whom he is well pleased.
There, in the Prince of Peace, stripped and wearing a
soldier’s coat that has been put on him, are all the conscripts compelled to go
to war. There in the young man in the flower of his manhood, going out
willingly to be sacrificed, are all those young men who go willingly to die in
battle for their fellow men.
“This is the greatest love a man can show, that he should
lay down his life for his friends” (John 15v.13)
There, in the prisoner, bound, publicly shamed, condemned
to the death of criminals, thieves and murderers, are all the criminals who
will repent, and accept death on the scaffold as their due.
There, in “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”, are the
kings of this world.
“Art thou a king then?”
“It is thy own lips that
have called me king.”
“My kingdom is not of this
world.”
There, crowned with thorns, and bearing a reed for a
sceptre, are the kings of our days, whose crowns are thorn indeed and whose
sceptres are reeds shaken by the wind.
There, in the blameless Lord, made subject to men, illimitably
patient, silent when he is mocked, silent before Herod, silent when Peter
denies him, are all those innocent children who are so commonly patient and
inarticulate in suffering, and whose suffering and death baffles and scandalizes
us.
“ --- you will all be scandalized in me!”
There, in him, are the martyrs of all times; those of our
own time with every detail of their martyrdom, including those which their
persecutors try to hide, shown to the whole world.
The trickery---the utter injustice---the faked
evidence---the verdict decided before the trial---and the things that have been
done in secret to prepare the victim, if possible to break him: the mental
torture, a veritable crowning with thorns; the long nights without sleep.
Cruellest of all, the attempt to make him a stumbling block to his own people.
It is significant that everything contributing to that
condemnation is parallel with everything that contributes to the passion of the
martyrs of our own times.
The intrigues and the fears of politicians, the hatred of
fanatics, mass hysteria. The unstable crowd swayed by paid agitators, the
popular craving for sensation--- and those many Pilates of our day, who wash
their hands of the responsibility of knowing “What is truth?”, who shut their
eyes to Christ in man, and try to escape from their own uneasiness by evasions.
“I am innocent of the blood of this just man --- look you
to it!”
“In any case, there is nothing that I could do about it!”
Neither is it by chance that those who will carry out the
sentence will be the young and ignorant soldiers of an army of occupation, lads
brought up like the soldiers of the Red Army, deprived of the knowledge of the
one God, obeying their orders without question, because they are conditioned to
obey orders without questioning or thinking.
“Father, forgive them; they do not know what it is they
are doing.”
“Behold the man!”
Yes, and behold in him yourself. Each one of us can recognise himself, a
sinner, in the disfiguring, the bruising, the ugliness, hiding the beauty of
the fairest of the sons of men. And there can be few who do not recognise
themselves too, in the utter loneliness of this man in the midst of the crowd
that lately spread their garments to be trodden by the little ass he rode on,
and now clamour for his blood.
“Behold we have seen him disfigured and without beauty;
his aspect is gone from him; he has borne our sins and suffers for us; and he
was wounded for our iniquities, and by his stripes we are healed.”
PRAYER
“Lord that I may see!”
Give me light to see you in my even-Christian,
And to see my even-Christian in you.
Give me faith to recognise you
in those under my own roof.
In those who are with me, day after day,
on the way of the Cross.
Let me recognise you
not only in saints and martyrs,
in the innocence of children,
in the patience of old people
waiting quietly for death.
In the splendour of those
who die for their fellow men;
But let me also discern your beauty
through the ugliness of suffering for sin
that you have taken upon yourself.
Let me know you in the outcast,
the humiliated, the ridiculed, the shamed.
In the sinner who weeps for his sins.
Give me even the courage
to look at your Holy Face,
almost obliterated,
bruised and lacerated
by my own guilt,
and to see myself!
Look back at me, Lord,
through your tears,
with my own eyes,
and let me see you,
Jesus, condemned to death,
in myself,
and in all men
who are condemned to die.
Caryll Houselander
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