Torture
The torture of Jesus
The Gospels do not go into details of the brutality with which Jesus was treated.
Many of the details in accounts of the Passion derive from other texts, such as the 14th century German text Christi Leiden in Einer Vision Geschaut which covers the event in horrific detail. Such treatments of the Passion were common in mediaeval texts.
Those who wrote texts like this didn't want to sensationalise the story but to emphasise that Jesus Christ was as fully human as he was divine by showing that the Son of God had suffered the most extreme torture that could be inflicted on a human being.
The Passion in stained glass ©
The texts also provided vivid word pictures that would help those so inclined to meditate on the suffering of Christ and, in mind and spirit, to enter into the experience to the extent of imagining themselves actually there.
Bernard of Clairvaux (died 1153) taught that meditation on the Passion was the way to achieve spiritual perfection.
St Anselm mourned the fact that he had not been present at the Crucifixion...
Why, O my soul, were you not there to be pierced by a sword of bitter sorrow when you could not bear the piercing of the side of your Saviour with a lance? Why could you not bear to see the nails violate the hands and feet of your creator?Saint Anselm
And Anselm went further, and wished that he had been a participant in those events...
Would that I with happy Joseph might have taken down my Lord from the cross, wrapped him in spiced grave-clothes, and laid him in the tomb.Saint Anselm, quoted in Ewert Cousins, The Humanity and the Passion of Christ, in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, by Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff, Jill Raitt, 1988
St Francis of Assisi was another who longed to experience Christ's suffering:
My Lord Jesus Christ, I pray you to grant me two graces before I die: the first is that during my life I may feel in my soul and in my body, as much as possible, the pain which you, dear Jesus, sustained in the hour of your most bitter passion.
The second is that I may feel in my heart, as much as possible, that excessive love with which you, O Son of God, were inflamed in willingly enduring such suffering for us sinners.
Saint Francis of Assisi
An alternative view of suffering
Professor Terry Eagleton, cultural theorist, literary critic and Catholic, talks about suffering in the light of the Passion story. He argues that an emphasis on self-denial misses the point of Christianity.
