poor, despised; He gave Him into the hands of slaves to be treated as a miscreant, and even to be put to death, covered with shame, on an infamous gibbet. O grace! O force of the love of a God! exclaims St. Bernard: "O grace! O the strength of love!" O God, who would not be touched to hear of such an instance, that a monarch, to release his slave, was compelled to put his only son to death,---that son who was all the love of his father, and was beloved by him as his very self? Had not God done this, says St. John Chrysostom, who could ever have imagined it or hoped for it? "What things the human mind could never have conceived, could never have hoped for, these things He has bestowed on us."
But, O Lord, it seems like an injustice to sentence an innocent Son to die for the purpose of saving a slave who has offended Thee. "According to all human reasoning," says Salvian, "one would certainly accuse that man of outrageous injustice who should kill an innocent son in order to free his servants from the death which they had deserved." Yet no, with God this has not passed for injustice, because the Son made the spontaneous offering of Himself to the Father to satisfy for men: He was offered, because it was His Own will. [Isaiah 53:7] Behold, then, how Jesus voluntarily sacrifices Himself as a victim of love for us; behold Him, how as a mute lamb he puts Himself into the hands of the shearer, and although innocent, He comes to suffer from men the greatest ignominies and torments, without even opening His mouth: He shall be dumb as a lamb before His shearer, and He shall not open His
