Page 7 - callingpassion

– Your transfer to the adulterous puppet ruler who had beheaded your

cousin, John the Baptist.

– Your refusal to speak to the decadent Herod who calls for your thrashing.

– Your vicious punishment at the hands of Herod’s guards.

– Your staggering and humiliating return to Pilate clothed in mockery.

– Your subjection by Pilate to the fearful Roman scourging to win sympathy.

– Your murderous scourging, reducing you to a bleeding mess not human.

–Your blood, that saves us, wasted on the ground and walked in.

–Your total self-giving that the depth of wickedness should receive the

depth of all agony.

–Your embracing of suffering matched only by a profundity of deepest love.

–Your deliberately staying alive and conscious in order to touch everyone
ever.

–Your spirit still active in a body torn apart and yet with hours of dying and

reparations to go.

–Your falling again into the hands of men keen to make sport of your Divine
claims and you already nearly dead.

– Your hair and beard torn out, your face soaked in spittle; you are non-

resistant to their pleasure in cruelty.

– Your head struck and beaten to force in a crown of vicious thorns but You
are covering with them the deliberate sins of the mind.

– Your Precious Blood, the Blood of the very God- man offered in Love to

buy back the lost.

–Your face so shockingly torn and swollen, fixing kindly eyes on your
enemies.

–Your loving gaze, too much for those evil men. They had to blindfold you.

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