Ecce Homo

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"Look down upon me, good and gentle Jesus while before Your face I humbly kneel and, with burning soul, pray and beseech You to fix deep in my heart lively sentiments of faith, hope, and charity; true contrition for my sins, and a firm purpose of amendment. While I contemplate, with great love and tender pity, Your five most precious wounds, pondering over them within me and calling to mind the words which David, Your prophet, said to You, my Jesus: 'They have pierced My hands and My feet, they have numbered all My bones.'" --Prayer Before A Crucifix

"By His stripes, we are healed." --Isaiah

Happy Good Friday. I know most people are probably not looking at blog things today, which is as it should be--I won't either. But I thought I'd drop a little (very little) reflection here which perhaps you'll read this evening, or on Holy Saturday, or something.

Anywho.

I've been meditating a lot about the Passion this Lent. 

I always do; it's a Lent thing. The whole point of Lent is to go into the desert with Christ to prepare for His Passion, Death and Resurrection. And the Stations of the Cross is one of my favourite communal prayers of the Church. 

But for whatever reason, the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary have been catching me this time around. 

And one day I was praying through the Scourging at the Pillar (the second Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary) and meditating on that, and a connection popped into my head.

You see, one of my favourite parts of Isaiah is the Suffering Servant passages (Isaiah 52:13-53:12). And one of them scrolled through my head as I was walking and praying. 

"Yet it was our pain that he bore,
our sufferings he endured.
We thought of him as stricken,
struck down by God and afflicted,
But he was pierced for our sins,
crushed for our iniquity.
He bore the punishment that makes us whole,
by his wounds we were healed."

And then my brain (through grace, absolutely) made the connection between "it was our pain that he bore...he was pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquity" with Pilate in John's Passion narrative. John 19:5, specifically. 

"So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple cloak. And he said to them, “Behold, the man!"

In Latin, "Behold, the man!" is rendered "Ecce homo". Or rather, the Latin "Ecce homo" is rendered "Behold, the man". 

But "homo" doesn't mean man as in man man (male human being), exactly. It just means "human". 

And so it's not too much of a stretch (although with apologies to St. Jerome) to render it as "Behold Man."

Behold. 

(This is where the image of Jesus from The Passion of the Christ pops into my head. I'm not going to insert it, because...it's awful. But. That's the visual. And it being awful is the point.)

This is what Mankind should look like.

This is the pitiable state that we have been put in by our sins.

This is what the fruits of sin look like. 

If He "[bears] the punishment that makes us whole"...then this is what the whole human race deserves for our sin...this and more.

This is the woundedness we have in our souls as a result of sin, made visible in Christ Jesus.

Behold, Man. 

Behold, the sorry state of mankind. 

And by His wounds, we are healed. 

So then...what we will see on Sunday is also Man. 

It is Man as He should be, Man fully Himself, Man as we all will be inasmuch as we enter into Him. Man as, God willing, we all will be one day in Heaven.

Because today He shows us what mankind does look like...

On the third day, He can also show us what mankind should look like.

And God willing, will.