He suffered for Our sake, let us have sorrow
The Mysteries of Sorrow
✝️ The Sorrowful Mysteries
He Suffered for Our Sake — Let Us Have Sorrow
Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered for us, because of us and our sins, but He suffered out of love for us. The Sorrowful Mysteries are the moments of Christ's life right after He was betrayed by His Apostle Judas Iscariot. He willingly went unto His Passion to lay down His life to God the Father as the all-sufficient sacrifice, to redeem man from damnation and to open the gates of heaven once more.
Christ's love is the redemptive love that God has for us. It is the same redemptive love that promised a Messiah to Adam and Eve after their banishment from Eden (Genesis 3:15). It is the same redemptive love that freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. And it is the same love He made clear in the sacrifice of Himself, so that we might come closer to Him, as St. John the Evangelist writes in his first Epistle.
As Christ said, "greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13, RSV-2CE). But in the fullness of His teaching He laid down His life not only for His friends but for His enemies too, because He loved all of them and desired the ultimate good for all of them: that they come to know and love God above all else. This is the charity of Jesus Christ, not charity in the common sense of giving to a food bank, but the highest of the theological virtues, from the Greek Ἀγáπη and the Latin caritas, the highest form of love.
Here the Sorrowful Mysteries answer the deepest ache of the modern heart. Our age can only read pain as pointless, a thing to numb, avoid, or eliminate, and it supposes a good God would simply spare us all of it. The Passion says something harder and better: God did not exempt Himself from suffering, He entered its very bottom, and in doing so He made suffering redemptive. Pain without reason is unbearable; the pain Christ bore had a divine purpose, and He has joined our pain to His.
This is why St. Paul could write of his own afflictions that in them he was completing "what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church." Our sufferings, united to His, are not wasted. The Cross does not explain away pain; it fills pain with meaning, and turns even our sorrow into a share in His redeeming love.
Colossians 1:24 (RSV-2CE)So while Christ did all of this out of love for us, we should feel compunction for the state of our lives, since we are not worthy of such love. He showed this love to save us from ourselves, and in return we thank Him for His sacrifice. But to avoid the empty repentance described on the Proclamation of the Kingdom page, we change ourselves and better ourselves, so that we grow closer to Christ in all things.
Each mystery is described briefly below. Tap any to enter its full meditation and scriptural rosary.
Christ prays in the Garden, knowing fully what is to come, and asks the Father that, if it be His will, this cup might pass, yet He stays true to the Father's will unto death on the Cross. His agony was not only the dread of the tortures ahead but the weight of His whole mission to redeem us all. So great was it that He sweat drops of blood, a condition now called hematohidrosis, brought on by extreme stress.
After Christ was arrested in the Garden and brought before a night court, He was passed between Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate to decide who would condemn Him. The decision fell to Pilate, the provincial governor. Having offered the crowd a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, an insurrectionist and murderer, and seeing them choose Barabbas, Pilate had Jesus scourged at the pillar to appease them.
Jesus was crowned with a plaited crown of thorns, perhaps woven of jujube, a common local plant, flexible and thorn-covered. It was pressed onto His head and beaten in with a reed. The Romans dressed Him in a scarlet cloak and knelt in mock homage, hailing Him "King of the Jews," the very title over which His crucifixion would be demanded.
Given the sentence of crucifixion, Jesus carried His cross, mocked and blasphemed, falling three times on the way from Pilate's court to Golgotha (Calvary). The devotion of the Stations of the Cross, prayed on the Fridays of Lent, walks these same steps of His Passion from the condemnation to the tomb.
Christ hangs upon the Cross, mocked and taunted to come down if He truly is who He claims. The Sanhedrin had charged Him with blasphemy for calling Himself the Son of God; before Pilate the charge became political, that He claimed to be a king. He does not come down. He is the Messiah, though not the military deliverer the crowds wanted, a point taken up on the appropriate page later.
Comments
Post a Comment