The Most Painful Wound Of Jesus

Homily for Monday of Holy Week

What was the greatest suffering of Jesus, as He gave His life to take away our sins and reconcile us to the Father? Doctor Barbet, in that masterwork A Doctor at Calvary, gives us a detailed and sometimes shocking picture of the Crucified Servant of God. When the nails were driven into the Destot’s space just above the wrist, the median nerve is severely injured, and His thumb reflexively jerked inward, so that on the Holy Shroud we see only the four fingers. Severing this nerve is so painful that it usually causes fainting by a vagal response.

The nasty whipping with bone-tipped thongs He endured prior to carrying His cross would have nearly killed Him. The heavy wooden beam itself rubbed his shoulders until they, too, were bleeding.

Indeed, the crucifixion itself was unspeakably painful. Sagging down from the nails in His wrists, He could not take a breath. He had to push Himself up onto the nails in His feet in order to get oxygen. That pain from one nail through the two intermetatarsal spaces could only be endured for a few seconds, leading us to understand why Jesus said so few things from the cross, those few words that forgave us our sins and gave us a new mother in the order of spirit.

I think it was the wound in the heart that hurt the most. What? You may say. He was already dead when the soldier pierced his side. No, I think the wound that hurt the most is the wound of rejection. For thousands of years He had been pouring His love out on us. And in response we murdered Him. I murdered Him with my sin. For three years he went about doing good, teaching, healing, forgiving. And we murdered Him. What heartache that must have caused.

Yet even this was part of the plan. God knew what we would do to that much goodness. God knew what faithlessness and greed and envy would lead us to do. So God took on Himself our weakened human nature and our sin, and as we killed God’s Son, sin and death also died. So as we through our baptism and confirmation and communion relive that mystery, we are made more and more like Him. We enter into the mystery of His death so that we may share in the glory of His resurrection.

This week, more than any other week, we give to God what He does not need but really wants, a sacrifice of praise. Let’s spend as much time as we can in praising God for His unending love, shown in the pierced heart of the Crucified.