231. Christ’s pain
231. CHRIST’S PAIN
One may suffer in as many ways as possible, qualitatively, without suffering as much as possible, quantitatively. How did Christ suffer “to the max”?
There was true and sensible pain in the suffering Christ, which is caused by something hurtful to the body; also, there was internal pain. . . .
The death of the crucified is most bitter, because they are pierced in nervous and highly sensitive parts, to wit the hands and feet; moreover, the weight of the suspended body intensifies the agony; and besides this there is the duration of the suffering because they do not die at once like those slain by the sword.
The cause of the interior pain was, first of all, all the sins of the human race, for which He made satisfaction by suffering. . . .
The magnitude of His suffering may be considered, secondly, from the susceptibility of the sufferer as to both soul and body. For His body was endowed with a most perfect constitution, since it was fashioned miraculously by the operation of the Holy Ghost, just as . . . other things made by miracles are better than others, as Chrysostom says respecting the wine into which Christ changed the water at the wedding-feast. And consequently, Christ’s sense of touch, the sensitiveness of which is the reason for our feeling pain, was most acute. His soul likewise, from its interior powers, apprehended most vehemently all the causes of sadness. . . .
Christ grieved not only over the loss of His own bodily life, but also over the sins of all others. And this grief in Christ surpassed all grief of every contrite heart, both because it flowed from a greater wisdom and charity, by which the pang of contrition is intensified, and because He grieved at the one time for all sins (III,46,6).
This latter pain was probably what caused Him such agony in the Garden of Gethsemane that He sweat blood (Lk 22:44): He saw all the sins of the world, and all the people who would reject Him despite all His sufferings, and their eternal sufferings in Hell. Love suffers far more for the pains of the beloved than for its own pains.
Death by crucifixion is the most painful death mankind could possibly invent (that was its point, its deliberate purpose). St. Thomas gives three very specific reasons for that unique painfulness of crucifixion in his second paragraph. He is not an “absent-minded professor”; he is shockingly concrete.
Christ’s body was also uniquely sensitive to these pains because he was the most perfect, and therefore the most sensitive and vulnerable, man who ever lived, both in body and soul. One proof of this is from Chrysostom: what God does is perfect, and Christ’s body is perfect because it is made by God, by the Virgin Birth; God the Holy Spirit, not Joseph, was the Father of His body as well as His soul. Similarly the tastiest wine ever tasted on earth was no wine ever made by man but the wine Christ made at the wedding feast in Cana. Christ’s body was perfect in all aspects, including His senses, including the sense of touch. Perfection in the sense of touch means sensitivity, and sensitivity means sensitivity to pleasure and pain, and therefore it means sensitivity to pain.
His internal pain was also unparalleled because He felt the weight of all the sins ever committed, as the reason for His pain and the spiritual cause of His pain. The more a parent loves a child, the more pained he or she is by the child’s sins, for sins are always self-harms, little soul-suicides. No love feels no pain, a little love feels a little pain, great love feels great pain, infinite love feels infinite pain.