He was crowned with thorns for us. In order to prove to us the greatness of His love and the grievousness of our sins, our Blessed Lord allowed tortures, unthought-of till then, to be invented on His account. Such a torment, contrived with devilish cruelty, was the crowning with thorns, by means of which tortures were inflicted on the noblest part of His Body, His Sacred Head. Being accused of making Himself king, He was thus crowned in mockery and subjected to the malicious homage of His tormentors, who drove the thorns into His Head, striking Him with the reed which fell from His Hands, spitting in His Divine Face, and adding the sting of their scoffing words to this cruel treatment. Truly no son of Adam had ever endured such pain as Christ, the second Adam, endured, when He suffered the sharp cruel thorns to pierce His Sacred Head, in order to save us from the eternal ruin which the pride and disobedience of the first Adam had brought on us. Jesus, the King of everlasting glory, bore this for us, and carried the crown of thorns even unto death, to make satisfaction to the divine justice for our pride and all the sins which spring from it.
The following prophecies were fulfilled by those sufferings of Jesus about which you have just heard: i. David’s prophecy: “I am a worm (i. e. despised and trodden under foot like a worm) and no man: the reproach of men, and the outcast of the people” (Ps. 21, 7). 2. The prophecy of Isaias: “There is no beauty in Him, nor comeliness. Despised, and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows. He was wounded for our iniquities, He was bruised for our sins, the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His bruises we are healed” (Is. 53, 2 & c.). 3. The prophecy of our Lord Himself (Mat. 20, 18): “The Son of Man shall be betrayed to the chief priests and the scribes (as was done by Judas), and they shall condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the Gentiles (Pilate and his soldiers) to be mocked, and scourged and crucified.”
Mortal sin in its true aspect. Nothing is so calculated to show us the fearful evil of mortal sin as that horrible cry of the Jews: “Away with this Man! Give unto us Barabbas!” Any Christian who commits a mortal sin thinks, speaks and acts just as did those blinded Jews. Whenever there is a question between observing or transgressing God’s commandments in any important matter, then, we may say, Almighty God with His promises and Satan with his allurements are placed face to face, and man has to choose between them. The choice is put to you. Will you choose God, the most gracious, the most holy God, the source of true joy and of all noble happiness, His grace, His friendship, and His heaven so full of inconceivable bliss; or will you choose the prince of darkness, the liar and the murderer from the beginning, and the sinful pleasures which are all that he holds out to you? Whenever a man consents to sin, he, as it were, says to God: “I have compared together Thy service and that of the devil, and I find that Satan is a better master than Thou art, and that I can gain more from him than
