Station VII Jesus Falls the Second Time
By now, further weakened and exhausted, not just by his physical abuse but because in His agony in Gethsemene Jesus had willingly agreed to take upon Himself all our sinfulness, it is logical to assume Jesus must have fallen.
In 2 Corinthians 5:21 Paul says, “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin..” How could Jesus become sin? What did Paul mean?
In his book called The Grace of Ars Father Frederick L. Miller attempts to explain what Paul meant by quoting a sermon by Saint John Henry Newman.
“There, then, in that most awful hour, knelt the Savior of the world, putting off the defenses of His Divinity, dismissing His reluctant Angels, who in myriads were ready at His call, and opening His arms, baring His breast, sinless as He was, to the assault of His foe,-- of a foe whose breath was a pestilence, and whose embrace was an agony. There he knelt, motionless and still, while the vile and horrible fiend clad His spirit in a robe steeped in all that is hateful and heinous in human crime, which clung close around His heart, and filled His conscience, and found its way into every sense and pore of His mind, and spread over Him a moral leprosy... Oh, the horror, when He looked, and did not know Himself, and felt as a foul and loathsome sinner, from His vivid perception of that mass corruption which pored over His head and ran down even to the skirts of His garments! Oh, the distraction, when He found His eyes, and hands and feet, and lips, and heart, as if the members of the Evil One, and not of God! Are these the hands of the immaculate Lamb of God, once innocent, but now red with ten thousand barbarous deeds of blood? Are these His lips, not uttering prayer, and praise, and holy blessings, but as if defiled with oaths, and blasphemies, and doctrines of devils? Or His eyes profaned as they are by all the vile visions and idolatrous fascinations for which men have abandoned the Adorable Creator? And His ears, they ring with sounds of revelry and of strife; and His heart is frozen with avarice, and cruelty, and unbelief; and His very memory is laden with every sin which has been committed since the fall... Oh, who does not know the misery of a haunting thought that comes again and again... Or of some odious and sickening imagination... Or of evil knowledge... which he would give a great price to be rid of once and for ever?... these gather round Thee, Blessed Lord, in millions now... Of the living and of the dead, of the as yet unborn, of the lost and of the saved, of Thy people and of strangers, of sinners and of saints, all sins there...
They are upon Him, they are all but His own; He cries to His Father as if He were the criminal, not the victim... He is doing penance. He is making confession, He is exercising contrition with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all the saints and penitents together; for He is the One Victim for us all, the sole Satisfaction, the real Penitent, all but the real sinner.”
Father Miller also quotes a sermon by Hans Urs von Balthasar: “Jesus, the Crucified, endures our inner darkness and estrangement from God, and he does so in our place... There is nothing familiar about it to him: it is utterly alien and full of horror. Indeed, he suffers more deeply than and ordinary man is capable of suffering, even were he condemned and rejected by God, because only the incarnate Son knows who the Father really is and what it means to be deprived of him and to have lost him... forever.”
Considering all of this, is it any wonder that Jesus fell?
