10 October, Antonio Cardinal Bacci: Meditations For Each Day

The Third Sorrowful Mystery

The Crowning with Thorns

1. Having had Jesus flogged in spite of the fact that he believed in His innocence, Pilate showed Him to the mob in the vain hope that, when they had seen His bleeding body, their hatred would be appeased. It was no use. The enraged crowd kept crying: “Crucify him!” (Luke 23:21) Then Pilate, with a shameful gesture of open injustice, abandoned Jesus to the will of the Jewish executioners. “Jesus he delivered to their will.” (Luke 23:25)

It was probably before Pilate showed Him to the mob for the second time (Cf. John 19:4) that the sad scene of the crowning with thorns took place. “The soldiers led him away into the courtyard of the praetorium, and they called together the whole cohort. And they clothed him in purple, and plaiting a crown of thorns, they put it upon him, and began to greet him, ‘Hail King of the Jews!’ And they kept striking him on the head with a reed, and spitting upon him; and bending their knees, they did homage to him.” (Mark 15:15-19)

This new torture was a diabolical invention decreed by no law or authority. Purely for their own savage entertainment, the soldiers procured a bundle of thorned reeds which they wound into the shape of a crown and pressed into Jesus’ head.

Mary knew what was going on. She was there with the holy women when Pilate brought her bloodstained Son before the people, and their blasphemous yells pierced her tender heart. Her mother’s heart felt the sharp thorns, too, but she accepted this affliction with resignation, silently protesting against the insults of the crowd by acts of adoration and of love. We should behave in this way also. We should participate in the passion of Jesus by offering our own sufferings and we should make acts of love and of self-surrender in reparation for these acts of blasphemy.

2. When we see Jesus scourged and crowned with thorns, how can we complain if our path in life is also strewn with thorns? Jesus was the embodiment of innocence; He was God, yet He willed to suffer in order to expiate our sins and to teach us that the surest road to Heaven is the way of the Cross. It was because the Saints understood this so clearly that they were so eager to participate in the passion of Jesus Christ and to offer Him not only the inevitable sorrows of life, but also voluntary sufferings of their own as a proof of their love.

Anyone who does not desire mortification and suffering does not desire Heaven, because he is not a true follower of Jesus crucified. “They who belong to Christ,” says St. Paul, “have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires.” (Gal. 5:24) Let us meditate carefully on the significance of these stern words, so often forgotten today.

3. By the crowning with thorns Jesus wished to make special reparation for sins of thought, thoughts of impurity and of hatred, thoughts of ambition and of anger, and thoughts of despair. The evil thought is often the beginning of the greatest sins. It is essential to resist immediately and resolutely before the thought takes hold of us and arouses our evil instincts and desires. When we are tormented by bad thoughts let us look at Jesus crowned with thorns and ask Him for the grace to resist generously and successfully.