Lent day thirty-five: "by His stripes"

For this final week of Lent, let us prepare for the two most momentous Church events of the Catholc year: Good Friday, and the Saturday Night Easter Vigil.

Thankfully, both the Good Friday service and at the Saturday Night Easter liturgy have an ample amount of Scripture readings, so we will not be short on material.

The first reading on Good Friday is arguably one of the most beautiful an powerful passages of the Old Testament: the Suffering Servant. It is one of those passages, like Psalm 22, that clearly describes Jesus of Nazareth as He lays down his life for us.

Isaiah Chapter 52, verse 13, and Chapter 53 verses 1 through 12. It begins:

See, my servant shall prosper,
he shall be raised high and greatly exalted.
Even as many were amazed at him,
so marred was his look beyond human semblance
and his appearance beyond that of the sons of man,
so shall he startle many nations,
because of him kings shall stand speechless;
for those who have not been told shall see,
those who have not heard shall ponder it.

Jesus bore the sins of a fallen humanity. And remember that Jesus defines what God created man to be.

Man's fallen state consists in taking what is beautiful, and making it ugly. What Jesus endures is what a fallen humanity had for thousands of years before Him done and has continued to do for 2,000 years since. In other words, the manner in which He suffers is a perfect example of the sins He is taking onto Himself. Fallen men have marred the look of their fellows beyond human appearance. Through lustful exploitation, through unjust war, through violence against the most defenseless.

But Jesus also was the Son of God, the Word of God. He had no obligation to lie in the bed made by fallen humanity. Yet He endured it. He allowed Himself to suffer the greatest outrage in human, and divine, history.

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured, while we thought of him as stricken, as one smitten by God and afflicted. But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed. We had all gone astray like sheep, each following his own way; but the LORD laid upon him the guilt of us all.

This is the doctrine of the atonement. Christ took onto Himself the weight of our sins, and paid the price for them. One might object that the doctrine is unreasonable, because the human who least deserved punishment was precisely the one who received it, which was itself a grievous injustice, and yet as a result, the sins of humanity's injustices were expiated.

It does not make sense unless one recognizes that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, by becoming man, made Himself a member of the human family. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says He "established himself in solidarity" with us.

Also, the consequences of sin are in another sense still being paid, by everyone. It's called suffering and death. We all will face both these realities, no matter how righteous we are, at some point in our lives. If we are more righteous, we may have more joy, at least interiorly. But suffering and death awaits everyone.

The choice is not whether we as humans will face these prospects. The choice is what we will do with our sufferings, and what will happen after we die. What Christ offers is a choice as to both. Our suffering no longer need be in vain. He offers that we may redeem our sufferings by uniting them to His own. That is why Jesus said in Matthew 16, "whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me."