“Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil.” - Luke 4
This is such a grand mystery in Our Lord’s life. On one level, it parallels Israel wandering in the desert for forty years, suggesting to me how Jesus embraced every aspect of suffering which afflicted the Chosen People, indeed, the entire human race. How He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, wandering amidst the evils and temptations humanity is subjected to. Revealing how He who did not know sin, became sin for our sake - to deliver us from sin. I may be mistaken, yet it seems to me it is precisely our sin that so attracts the Lord in His love and mercy.
His sojourn in the desert and His temptation was for us, just as certainly as His sorrowful passion and death.
I believe it is in the Grunewald Crucifixion where Our Lord is shown badly wounded and in agony. If my memory serves me, the triptych had been painted for a hospital that cared for patients suffering from the effects of the plaque, others have noted that the wounds resemble those suffered by patients with advanced cases of syphilis. Contemporary observers have suggested the wounds appear similar to Kaposi sarcoma, a skin cancer people with AIDS suffer from - or once did when the epidemic broke out. (Although, I don’t know if it is still a symptom in AIDS cases.)
Once I mentioned this to a Cancer Home sister, in conjunction with the passage from Corinthians; God allowed Christ, who did not know sin to become sin for us. Sister was somewhat scandalized at my assertion, imagining that I was saying Christ actually sinned - which was so far from my meaning. For some reason, she could not identify His wounds with those people develop as a result of sexual sin.
The words of Isaiah best expresses my understanding however:
“He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity, One of those from whom men hide their faces, spurned, we held him in no esteem. Yet it was our sins that he bore, our sufferings he endured…Upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his wounds we are healed.” - Isaiah 53
So often we think of Jesus in glory, so pure in the Blessed Sacrament, the glorious and terrible Judge who separates the sheep and the goats, or the gentle Lamb welcoming the pure and innocent children, failing to comprehend His abject abasement, His complete understanding of our fallen state. After all, He embraced it, being born in human estate, He took it upon Himself - He owned our misery.
When he revealed Himself to mystics such as Josepha Menendez, He frequently referred to her as a worm, a miserable wretched creature. The Blessed Lord was not at all insulting her dignity, nor abusing her through these references - rather, He was revealing His experience of our humanity - that He knows our fallen nature and propensity to evil - He shared in it. He was revealing His Sacred Heart as the refuge for sinners, the font of mercy - calling souls to come to Him without fear or intimidation because of their sins.
In my life, and I think in the lives of others caught in sin or depression of whatever sort, it is good to take to heart the words Betsy Ten-Boom expressed in the Nazi concentration camp, “There is no pit so deep that His love is not deeper still.” He who suffered for us, suffers with us, even in His mysterious descent into Hell, which demonstrates that no one can take the last place from him, no one can comprehend the sufferings He endured; no one, not one, has ever endured what Our Lord endured.
The only way we can understand suffering and the excruciating effects of sin in the world is to study His Life, to immerse ourselves in the contemplation of His suffering, His sacred passion and death. Then we will know that those wounds are indeed proof that while naked upon the cross, he was actually clothed with our sins, becoming sin for our sake - to reveal the secret of His love and bring us eternal salvation, redeeming us from our sins.
Nevertheless, this is foolishness to the worldly minded.
