STRIPPED

 

“Before He is nailed to the cross, Jesus gives us yet another overwhelming showing of His love, yet another proof of His identification with men in their bitterest humiliation: Jesus is stripped of His garments.

It is hard to bring oneself to reflect on this, yet it is necessary because of what every detail of this dreadful incident can mean to men today.  With all the wounds on His body, the wounds of the scourging, of the falls on the way to Calvary, of the heaviness and the roughness of the cross on His shoulder, Christ’s garments must have been stiff with blood and adhering to His body.  The soldiers would not have treated Him tenderly, although there is no reason to suppose they were fundamentally cruel.  They would undoubtedly have torn His clothes from Him as quickly as they could and as roughly as they must.  It would have been almost as if His skin was being torn off Him.

There, exposed in His nakedness, He stood in front of the whole mob – and, which must have been far harder to bear, in front of those whom He loved, His mother; John, His chosen friend; Mary Magdalen, who washed His feet with her tears.  He stood naked.

He was stripped there on the summit of Calvary not to reveal His sacred body in its perfection.  He was the fairest of the sons of men; no other men had ever had, or ever would have, a body approaching His in perfection; but it was exposed to the world only when it was disfigured by wounds and bruises, only when it was exhausted and almost falling to the ground with weariness.

Again Christ identified Himself with those whom He would indwell through all time.

He stood there naked in front of the world and in front of His Heavenly Father, identified with all those sinners who are found out, whose shame is made public, or, perhaps more terrible for them, shown to those whom they love and from whom, above all others, they would wish to keep it secret...

He stood there identified with everyone who loves, because everyone who loves must be known sooner or later as he is, without pretense, his soul stripped bare.  

Art: Glass, Albert Chavaz (d. 1990), Parish Church, Vercorin, Swiss Alps