I was pondering the Sorrowful Mysteries today, and had some reflections I thought were worth sharing.

Ever since Nicaea, the Church has held that Christ has two natures: He is fully human, and fully divine, at one and the same time. His two natures cannot be separated, but are nevertheless distinct. This is a difficult thing to keep in mind (he said with dry understatement). While knowing and believing that Jesus is God-Incarnate, Man Divine, I tend not to think about Jesus’ human side. But Jesus was a man like us in all things but sin. And that means He had a choice.

Jesus didn’t have to do it. The essence of His sacrifice—the thing that makes it a sacrifice—is that He had a choice. At any time during His passion, with but a word, or perhaps even a thought, He could have summoned the hosts of Heaven. He could not be forced to submit to the lash, the thorns, the mockery, the spitting, the slapping, the road to Calvary, the Cross, the nails, the spear; He chose to submit to these things. All the while He was suffering and bearing the pain and humiliation, He in his humanness must needs also force Himself to continue to do so. With every lash He must, of His own free will, choose to bear the next one. It was His choice.

We know that it wasn’t easy for Him. He spent the night in Gethsemane agonizing over the choice, and asking His Father that this cup might pass from His lips.

One of the early heresies held that Jesus had no Human nature, but was only Divine; the Passion was therefore easy for Him. The Church rejected this. Indeed, it seems to me (I hope I do not fall into heresy with this) that during His Passion, Jesus needed to be most fully Human, that his Divine self could give little or no aid. We know that on the Cross there came a moment when He felt utterly abandoned, and He cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

What enabled Him to bear so much suffering, and to choose to let it continue for so many hours? If it wasn’t His Divinity, what could it be? So I asked myself. And the answer, of course, was Love. Jesus allowed the suffering to continue out of Love. Love for you and I; but also Love for the very men who were tormenting Him. He was God; He could easily have destroyed them with a word. But He loved them, and forgave them even as they killed Him.

And so, I thought…maybe in His Human suffering He had one Divine aid: He was able to Love us with the Father’s Love.

And then I thought…maybe not. Maybe Jesus had to do it all in His own strength, as you and I cannot do. Maybe for His sacrifice to have meaning, His Humaness was on its own. The words from the Cross seem to indicate this.

In that case, we were saved, in that time of suffering, by Jesus’ purely Human love, by His strength of will in the greatest of the virtues, Charity.

Jesus, being free from concupiscence, that tendency to sin from which all the rest of us suffer, was not thereby free from temptation, this we know. As He was free from sin, we can assume He had no vices. But it does not follow that in human terms his virtues were innate. Perhaps he had to cultivate them as the rest of us do…through constant practice.

Thirty-three years of practice.

Perhaps that’s the reason for the Lost Years, from His visit to the Temple when He was twelve until the beginning of His public ministry eighteen years later. Perhaps that’s how long it took, leading a perfect and holy life, to develop that charity, that heroic virtue, that would enable Him to bear the torments and humiliations of His Passion with patience, forbearance, and love.

Update: I’ve just read that St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, teaches that Jesus had all of the virtues in heroic measure from the instant of his conception. Me, I’m not going to argue with St. Thomas. Oh, well.