And the men that held Him began to spit in His face, and mocked Him, and buffeted Him. And they blindfolded Him and covered His face, and smote Him in the face, and the servants struck Him with the palms of their hands. And they asked Him, saying: Prophesy unto us, O Christ, who is he that struck Thee? And many other things, blaspheming, they said against Him. - Matthew 26:67,68; Mark 14:65; Luke 22:63-65
1. In a sense this scene is the climax of the Passion. To a sensitive man of honour like Our Lord whatever came after could have been as nothing compared with this hour of supreme insult. And our own instinct through the ages has told us that this is of all the scenes in the Passion the most dreadful, since art has attempted to idealize all the others, but not this. The Agony, the Betrayal, the Trial, the Scourging, the Crowning, the Crucifixion, the Funeral all these have been the subjects of great masterpieces; but has any artist made an ideal picture of "the men that held Him began to spit in His face"? Yet so it was; and the great and respectable scribes and Pharisees looked on, and said not a word, perhaps forgot themselves so far as to join in the spitting; for nothing so reduces a man to the level of a savage as hatred. We can only look on dumb founded, repeating: "They spat in His face; they spat in His face."
2. Then follows the series of insults, with an ingenuity of invention which only devilry can display. They spat in His face. They mimicked His every movement. His dignity they mocked as pride; His silence they mocked as if He were dumb; His compassion they mocked as sourness or weakness, making wry faces hanging down their mouths. They cuffed Him; they kicked Him; in their desire to out rival each other, as is the universal custom of a persecuting mob, they invent strange abuses of His body on the spur of the moment. They tied a rag about His eyes. It is something at least to be able to see one's enemy and tormentor; but to be prevented from this, not to know whence the blows are coming, or what will be next the agony of it! They smote Him in the face, an insult which as we have said elsewhere if accepted without remonstrance, in the eyes of the world proves a mean fellow, a coward. And all this He endured without a word.
3. Last of all they insulted His divinity. On other occasions He had shown supernatural knowledge; there were those present who knew it, or they would never have recalled it now; let Him show it again. He had proclaimed Himself before the Anointed, the Messiah; let Him prove it now. "He has saved others, Himself He cannot save." The confession of the truth, of deep-down belief in all the evidence, rings through the whole tale of its defiance, just as the most savage persecution is usually a confession that the persecutors know that they are wrong. They "do protest too much"; they substitute might for right; men do not use such violence to destroy a thing in which they have no faith. The love of Our Lord cannot go lower down than this. He has Himself said that "Greater love no man hath than that he lay down his life for his friend"; but what are we to say of this total surrender of honour?
Summary
1. This scene is the climax of insult.
2. Then follows a series of abuses, such as only a mob can invent.
3. And last they insult His divinity, thus virtually confessing their belief.
- from The Crown of Sorrow, by Archbishop Alban Goodier