Love, Meekness, and Resentment

The Monday Mystery Part 13: The Crowning With Thorns

“And the soldiers wove a crown out of thorns and placed it on his head, and clothed him in a purple cloak, and they came to him and said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they struck him repeatedly” (John 19:2-3)

Welcome to the thirteenth entry of The Monday Mystery. Each week I will write a reflection on a mystery (i.e. an episode in the life of Jesus or Mary) from the Rosary. My hope for this series is to provide fuel and inspiration for your own meditations. When you finish reading the reflection, I encourage you to do a ‘test run’ of the mystery by praying a decade of the Rosary (i.e. one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory Be) while meditating on the mystery.

In an earlier post I reflected on how we ought to do the right thing even if we thought we could ‘get away’ with doing wrong. Our faith assures us that doing the right thing always really is the best option not merely in the long run, but in the immediate consequences of our actions. Sin always instantly hurts us in ways that make the cost benefit equation laughable - whether we realize it or not. A common saying which summarizes this point nicely goes something like this: a righteous life is Heaven on the way to Heaven, and a sinful life is Hell on the way to Hell.

There’s perhaps no clearer example of Hell on the way to Hell than resentment. Here another common saying fits well: Unforgiveness is like drinking poison hoping it will kill the other person. Resentment poisons our heart by closing it to the person we resent. It poisons us because love is an all or nothing matter. When we close our hearts to someone else, we ultimately close it to God. In his first letter John teaches:

If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother he has seen cannot love the God he has not seen (1 John 4:20).

When we understand resentment in this way, we can understand why the scriptures speak of forgiveness in such absolutist terms. Take Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel of Matthew:

If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you.
But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions (Matt 6:14-15).

Without an understanding of how deadly unforgiveness is, Jesus’ words may come across as lacking in sensitivity. Today people commonly think of forgiveness as something optional. It’s considered a beneficial therapeutic measure, or a courageous gesture of strength and graciousness (e.g. being the better man). But we’ve all but lost the idea of forgiveness as a necessity or an obligation.

Last summer I wrote a blog post about a time I dislocated my shoulder and the lessons my time rehabbing that injury taught me about forgiveness. If you’re in the midst of a painful struggle with resentment, maybe read that article before continuing with this one.

Allowing the doctor to move my shoulder to put it back into place was one of the scariest things I’d ever needed to do. During the previous hours, letting my shoulder shift a few centimeters in the wrong direction could trigger some of the worst stabbing pain I’d ever felt. But just because something is scary or painful, doesn’t mean it’s beyond the call of duty. The doctor was not being insensitive when he told me he needed to move my arm. As painful as that would be, leaving my shoulder out of place would have been a hundred times worse. As painful as forgiveness might be, we have to do it if we want any chance of living a happy life in communion with God and others.

In today’s mystery, Jesus puts on a master class in how to face temptations to resentment. When someone feels resentment, you could say that it’s because they feel they did not get what they deserved, whether it be respect, money, attention, or love. With that in mind, we can see that if anyone ever had a right to feel resentment, it was Jesus. And if anyone ever did not give someone what they deserved - if anyone was ever begging God to pour down fire from heaven to smite them off the face of the Earth - it was the Roman soldiers who put a crown of thorns onto Jesus’ head.

In many ways, what they did was even more outrageous than the crucifixion. As evil as the crucifixion was, it seems to me that it at least involved taking Jesus seriously on some level, even if only as a target for destruction. You could almost say that it involved respecting him. It remained on spectrum of love and hate. But when the soldiers crowned Jesus with thorns, they left that spectrum and ventured into pure, insolent mockery. These men not only failed to give Jesus what he deserved, they gave him the polar opposite: He deserved a crown of gold - they gave him a crown of thorns. He deserved the utmost respect - nothing short of divine worship - they gave him abuse and derision.

There was never in the history of the world a greater imbalance between what someone deserved and what they received than in Jesus’ passion. As we saw in The Agony in the Garden, he wasn’t some warrior monk who could endure anything while remaining unfazed emotionally. Or if he could, he chose not to. The soldier’s abusive treatment no doubt hurt him deeply. It would hurt even the strongest of human beings. But Jesus also had a divine nature. Now one would think that a divine nature would help Jesus take their abuse in stride. But this in fact made his hurt even greater, because he loved them with the love of God the Father. He was the one through whom God knit these soldiers together in their mother’s womb.¹ Isaiah teaches us that even a love of a mother does not match the love that God has for us.

Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you (Isaiah 49:15-16).

God’s love is unimaginable. The best we can do is imagine the greatest examples of love (e.g. the love of a mother for a child) and remind ourselves that somehow his love is even greater. If his love is unimaginable, the pain Jesus must have felt when this love was returned with cruel mockery is also unimaginable. But although his love made their rejection more painful, it also empowered Jesus to bear it.

Jesus did not love these soldiers on his own, but with the Father’s love. He knew the Father’s love for them because he knew the Father’s love for him. He was able to bear his pain because he was fully confident in his identity as the Fathers beloved son. He felt pain, but that pain did not fester into resentment because he never felt he needed to justify himself. He he was so certain of his dignity that nothing anyone could do could make him doubt it. Insecurity is resentment’s oxygen. Jesus underwent his passion to show us that nothing can make following the Father’s will ‘not worth it,’ and that his love makes us capable of enduring every slight with meekness, and all sorrow with patient trust.

Before you do your test run today, think of a time you felt resentment. Then picture yourself at the scene as Jesus is crowned with thorns. Watch him, and allow his example to teach you how to view your past injustice. How might the situation have played out differently if you felt totally secure in the Father’s love? May God bless you as you pray.

1. “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” (Psalm 139:13-16)

and

“…all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” (John 1:3)