We wanted to entitle the 2nd Sorrowful Mystery as "The Scourging of the Lord" on purpose. Because, let's not forget, Jesus of Nazareth is "the Lord", since "all things were made by him" (Jn 1,3). The "God away from God" has already been mentioned. Perhaps it is time now to contemplate the "Man away from the man": he does not even look like a man anymore! He has relinquished himself of his divinity and is now on the way to "shed" his humanity (our words fall short to express these mysteries). The Virgin also drank from this same cup ...

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1st) "Then Pilate took Jesus and had him scourged" (Jn 19,1). No more details! It is impossible to relate so much pain in so few words. God is like that! Discretion goes in his DNA! Authentic love seeks to serve without being noticed, acting naturally. St. Matthew tells us that, during the judicial process before the Sanhedrin, "Jesus was silent" (Mt 26,63): love knows how to suffer without causing suffering (read more: Christ the King: the authority to serve; He accepts everything in silence and with meekness).

The birth of Jesus is narrated by Luke in only 2 Bible verses (cf. Lk 2,6-7). God is like that and the Virgin also is! She was the one who told it discreetly in inner circles (with few words and modestly!).

2nd) «He had no majestic bearing (...).He was spurned and avoided by men» (Is 53.2-3). It is impressing how the prophet Isaiah - 7 centuries before - glimpsed the Messiah made a "Suffering Servant". When Jesus he is imprisoned and taken out of Gethsemane he doesn’t seem God anymore. Now, in the scourging pillar, He doesn’t look like a man anymore. The scourging "was an extremely barbarous punishment" (Benedict XVI): all the barbarism, all the savagery that we are capable of when there is no God ... «When man does not know God, then man does not know man» (Saint John Paul II ). This are not theories! Those two men, Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, have experienced it personally ... (read more: Jesus, "God’s Servant").

We should not turn our eyes away: in the Scourged arises the image of man destroyed by sin. «What the man is appears in Jesus. In Him is reflected what we call "sin": that is what man becomes when he turns his back on God» (Benedict XVI). During the Passion God "disappears"; the Man-God also "disappears" and the result of sin appears graphically. He who had not committed sin "became a sin" (2Cor 5:21) by bearing "our pain and sufferings" and being "pierced for our sins" (cf Is 53,4,5). Will we ever learn? (read more: Jesus made himself “a leper” so that we might be cleansed).

3º) "Come, all who pass by the way, pay attention and see: Is there any pain like my pain" (Lam 1,12). Israel used the "Book of Lamentations" to express its sorrow for the destruction of Jerusalem. From the Christian perspective, we apply these same words to the Mother of Jesus expressing her dismay at "seeing" the sufferings of her Son. A pain comparable only to the pain that she herself had already heard and suffered: the savage massacre of the Innocent Children under the "Herod of the moment" (cf Mt 2,16).

In fact, Virgin Mary has not seen Jesus yet. In Gethsemane he didn’t see Him; It must be assumed that during the scourging either, she simply "heard". But what did she hear exactly? Not Christ -always discreet, He "did not open his mouth; Like a lamb led to slaughter" (Is 53.7)-, but the impact of the scourge on his Body (as Blessed Ana Catalina Emmerich sensed).

That piercing sword - announced like 30 years before by old Simeon (cf Lk 2,35) - was already piercing Saint Mary’s soul (read more: A sword will pierce your own soul). She who asked Jesus, the adolescent "why?" (Lk 2,48) about 18 years before in the Temple, now no longer asks ... Her Son has already been taken away from her and she "suffers without making suffering" . She will be our Mother!

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