He is crowned with many thorns.
Third Sorrowful Mystery
The Crowning with Thorns
Mocked as King, and Crowned in Truth
Our Lord was mocked during His Passion. Though He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, He was given a crown of thorns to be mocked and treated with contempt. He was charged with being the King of the Jews, a title the chief priests ultimately did not want left over His head, and one they begged Pontius Pilate to change on the placard at the top of Jesus' cross. They asked him to write instead that Jesus had merely claimed to be King of the Jews, but Pilate answered, "What I have written I have written" (John 19:22), a firm dismissal of their request.
On the plaque at the top of every crucifix you will see four letters: INRI, for Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum, the charge for which He was condemned. In truth it only proclaimed who He is: a King. So in the lead-up to His crucifixion the Romans treated Him as they would anyone accused of claiming a throne against Caesar; they crowned Him and did Him homage, in mockery.
The Romans plaited a crown of thorns, a relic of which has been venerated for centuries as the crown and is kept now at Notre-Dame in Paris, where it was rescued from the 2019 fire. The Church permits its veneration without pronouncing on its authenticity; over the centuries the thorns were said to have been separated and distributed as relics in their own right.
The plant used was a thorned species long naturalized in the region. The exact species is debated, the traditional candidates being the Christ's-thorn jujube (Ziziphus spina-christi) and the thorny burnet. Whatever the plant, the thorns were dense, woody, stiff, and sharp, and the sap of many such plants irritates skin and eyes on contact. As Christ's Most Precious Blood ran down from His head, it would have carried that irritation into His eyes and over His face.
After the scourging had already cost Him great blood, they pressed the crown onto His head and drove it in with a reed, the same reed set in His hand as a mock scepter, a symbol of royalty. They put on Him a robe of purple or scarlet, both royal colors, as St. Augustine explains in St. Thomas Aquinas' Catena Aurea:
Then they knelt before Him and jeered, "Hail, King of the Jews," struck Him, and stripped away the garments and the reed, an act of refuting and usurping a king's authority. The crown of thorns He received is the very image of the crown of martyrdom the martyrs would one day receive, the reward of their courage in standing for Christ before a world that killed them for it.
The deepest irony of this mystery is that every mocking gesture was accidentally true. They meant the crown, the robe, the scepter, and the homage as a joke. Heaven meant them as a coronation.
They knelt and hailed a King they did not believe in, and He is the King. They wrote Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum to name a crime, and it named the truth. Pilate's "what I have written I have written" stands over the whole scene: the world's contempt cannot unwrite what God has declared.
And when the chief priests finally cry "we have no king but Caesar," they say more than they know. To reject this King is always to enthrone another. The crown of thorns asks each of us the same question the Passion asked Jerusalem: who, in truth, is our king?
The fruit of this mystery is moral courage. Christ was berated, mocked, beaten, tortured, and accused of a crime that would cost Him His life, knowing His accusers would not listen. Knowing that He was right, that He truly is the Messiah, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, He neither refuted the charges nor defended Himself.
Like the saints, the apostles, and the martyrs, who upheld the Risen Christ and His divinity before the trials of this world and the death that loomed over them, we meditate on His crowning so that we may grow in moral courage, especially in the midst of suffering, great or small.
Pray each verse, then the Ave Maria. (Scripture here follows the RSV-2CE.)
Comments
Post a Comment