10th Station

THE TENTH STATION : JESUS IS STRIPPED OF HIS GARMENTS

“St. Augustine assures us that there is no spiritual exercise more fruitful or more useful than the frequent reflection on the sufferings of Our Lord. St. Albert the Great, who had St. Thomas Aquinas as his student, learned in a revelation that by simply thinking of or meditating on the Passion of Jesus Christ, a Christian gains more merit than if he had fasted on bread and water every Friday for a year, or had beaten himself with the discipline once a week till blood flowed, or had recited the whole Book of Psalms every day” (The Secret of the Rosary, St. Louis Marie de Montfort, “Twenty-Eighth Rose”).

The following passage is taken from The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ by Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich

The preparations for the crucifixion being finished, four archers went to the cave where they had confined Our Lord and dragged Him out with their usual brutality, while the mob looked on and made use of insulting language, and the Roman soldiers regarded all with indifference, and thought of nothing but maintaining order. When Jesus was again brought forth, the holy women gave a man some money, and begged him to pay the archers anything they might demand if they would allow Jesus to drink the wine which Veronica had prepared; but the cruel executioners, instead of giving it to Jesus, drank it themselves. They had brought two vases with them, one of which contained vinegar and gall, and the other a mixture which looked like wine mixed with myrrh and absinthe; they offered a glass of the latter to Our Lord, which He tasted, but would not drink.

The executioners soon pulled off Our Lord’s cloak, the belt to which the ropes were fastened, and His own belt, when they found it was impossible to drag the woolen garment, which His Mother had woven for Him, over His head, on account of the crown of thorns; so they tore off this most painful crown, thus reopening every wound, and seizing the garment, tore it mercilessly over His bleeding and wounded head.

Our dear Lord and Savior then stood before His cruel enemies, stripped of all, except the short scapular which was on His shoulders, and the linen which girded His loins. His scapular was of wool; the wool had stuck to the wounds, and indescribable was the agony of pain He suffered when they pulled it roughly off. He shook like the aspen as he stood before them, for He was so weakened, from suffering and loss of blood, that He could not support Himself for more than a few moments; He was covered with open wounds, and His shoulders and back were torn to the bone by the dreadful scourging He had endured.

He was about to fall when the executioners, fearing that He might die, and thus deprive them of the barbarous pleasure of crucifying Him, led Him to a large stone and placed Him roughly down upon it, but no sooner was He seated than they aggravated His sufferings by putting the crown of thorns again upon His head.

MEDITATION

Let God strip away all your undue attachments
There is one detachment that we bring about, and there is another that God brings about for us. The Christian who is trying to follow Christ on the way to Calvary does not confine his detachment to what he gives up; he thinks of detachment more from the point of view of what God takes. A religious man can become so deeply interested in the process of detaching himself from this and that—in drawing up his list of things to be shed — that he forgets what detachment is primarily for.

So long as I say, “Lord, look with favor upon these renunciations I am making for You,” I have one eye on the generosity of my sacrifice. When I say, “Lord, I tend to cling so tenaciously to the things I like that the best plan would be for You to detach me in Your own way by taking whatever You want,” I have my eyes on God.

It is a fairly general rule that wherever there is less glamour, there is more room for grace, and there is far less glamour in allowing God to take than in making self-chosen sacrifices. But it is a doctrine that has to be properly understood. A man has no right to conclude that because he has nominally given God a free hand, he can dispense himself from ever making a sacrifice. Far from providing a good excuse for indulgence, the principle of letting God take supposes an overall declaration against indulgence. On the assumption that a measure of renunciation is recognized by the soul as absolutely necessary, it is suggested here that the grace of detachment comes more readily when the emphasis is on God’s action rather than on our own.

Detachment is a grace, but not necessarily a miracle. There has to be the will to detachment, and even the actual striving after detachment, before God grants the supernatural habit of detachment. We are inclined to make the mistake, when thinking about the relation between the gift and the use of the gift, of imagining that the reward comes first and that the virtue comes after — as one who would say, “I can wait for the grace of continence before I need to try to be continent.” While we have every reason to trust in grace rather than in any strength of our own, we have no reason to trust in grace as though it were magic.

Leaving aside the man whose laziness is supported by superstition, who persuades himself that one day there will be a click in his mind and he will thenceforth be able to float his way to God, unencumbered by creatures, we can consider the alternative methods employed by two men who are seriously bent upon perfection. Both men hear Christ’s summons to launch out into the deep (Luke 5:4). Both survey their respective crafts, and to each it must appear that his boat is overloaded for the task.

One man says, “If I am heading for deep waters, I must take no risks. I shall have to throw overboard my cigarettes, my sherry, my spare clothes, my books, my pictures, my camera, and my television set. It is the price I have to pay, and, after all, I am doing it for God.”

The other man says: “I hate getting rid of anything. When it comes to choosing, I do not know what I am meant to keep and what I am meant to throw away. If I am heading for deep waters, I must take no risks. I dare not throw away something that may be necessary to me when the voyage gets under way. I dare not risk having to come back to pick up what I had stupidly judged to be ballast. I must put my confidence in God, and let Him arrange the journey for me. It is He who has called me to do this thing, so I can believe that He will either wash overboard what is excessive weight or else give me the judgment to make these practical decisions as I go along.”

Whereas the first man is liable to alternate moods of dismay and vainglory, the second is made constantly aware of God’s Providence and of his own insufficiency. Whereas the first, devising an approach that may or may not be in the plan of God, limits the idea of renunciation to a particular area, the second gives unconditional scope to the divine action. The one looks at his boat more than at God; the other looks at God more than at his boat.

It was Christ’s will that all His life He would do without luxury and even comfort. Unlike the foxes with their lairs and the birds with their nests, the Son of Man had nowhere to rest His head (Luke 9:58). He who owned all ― to whom every inch owed rent — willed to have no place of His own. Detaching Himself from what belonged to Him, he lived for the love of the Father as a poor man.

Not only did He choose to be without this and that, but He chose to let others take from Him what they wanted. He submitted to being stripped of even those things which were for His necessary use. The Tenth Station shows us the extreme to which Christ’s love of detachment took Him. While many of those who aspire to the Christ-life will be deprived of their comforts, few will so nearly resemble Christ as to be deprived of their covering.

But in spite of the gulf that exists between Christ’s example in this matter of detachment and our own practice, there is occasion here for self-examination. Am I detached enough about dress, or do I set too much store by being comfortably or fashionably or expensively or strikingly clothed? Am I resentful when people take away my things and wear them? I must remember that while the lilies of the field are better dressed than Solomon (Matthew 6:28-29), Christ had not the comfort of being as properly clothed as the plants He had created.

If we are to be detached from soft living and all that pleases the senses, we are to be detached all the more from pleasures and possessions that touch us more closely. The pleasures of friendship, for example, are to be held in a loose grasp. A good friend is as legitimate a possession as a good suit, but the follower of Christ should be as ready to be stripped of the one as of the other.

The man whose affections cause him to snatch at the response that he looks for in others, that cause him to cling to the time or the confidence or the exclusive love of another, has not understood the meaning of detachment. The more subtle the pleasure, the greater is the need for detachment. At the moment when Our Lord was allowing His clothes to be taken from Him, He was allowing His Apostles to leave Him. It is harder to he detached from our followers than from almost anything else.

Detachment, if it is to be complete with the completeness of Christ’s, must extend to our good name. A man’s reputation is as legitimate a good as can be had, but even here there can be occasions when the possessor must stand back and show a supernatural indifference toward it. In the approach to Calvary, no prelude to the Crucifixion can be more apt than loss of standing. When the world turns against a man whom it once approved of, when the cry goes up that the hero had clay feet after all, the consummation cannot be far off. But a man has to be far advanced in detachment if he is to bear this trial with equanimity. If without dramatizing it in any way or indulging in the least self-pity, a man can watch the process of his own decline in public favor, and unite the experience to Christ’s at the hands of the Jews, he is blessed indeed. Not many can bear the reversal of a confidence that has been placed in them.

Finally, there is the detachment from ourselves. A man may have renounced physical indulgence, may have risen above the intellectual delights of reading and the arts, may have surrendered his following of disciples, and may have sacrificed his reputation for the love of God, but if he is to enjoy the grace of transforming union, he has still to be stripped of his self-esteem. Layer after layer of self has to come off until he knows by the most intimate of all experiences — the experi-
ence of truth burning its way into the soul ― that he is nothing and that God is all. He has to stand there and look on while the light of grace exposes one by one his evasions, part-playings, secret refuges, compensations, and self-deceptions.

Since there is room for self even in the disgust and humiliation that follow such a revelation — “He who despises himself,” says Nietzsche, “nevertheless esteems himself as a despiser” ― there must be a detachment once again. When full confidence in God has replaced the bitterness of self-knowledge, then can the soul be made ready for the final union.

Not without reason do the earliest presentations of this station include in its title the mention of gall. That Christ at His stripping was handed the sourest of all drinks is a detail that implies much (Matthew 27:34). The cup has always been the symbol of suffering, even when we think of it as the chalice of salvation, so we should not be surprised at finding in it vinegar as well as wine.

CONCLUDING PRAYER

V. We adore Thee, O Christ, and we praise Thee,
R.. Because by Thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the world.

O Jesus, strip me of my old sinful self and renew me and rebuild me according to Thy will and desire. I will not spare myself, however painful this should be for me: stripped of all temporal and material things, stripped of my attachments to the persons, places and things of this world; stripped of my own will and preferences; I wish to die to all these, in order to live for Thee forever.

PRAYER
O Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! Offer me Thy helping hand, and aid me, that I may not fall again into my former sins. From this very moment, I will earnestly strive to reform: nevermore will I sin! Thou, O sole support of the weak, by Thy grace, without which I can do nothing, strengthen me to carry out faithfully this my resolution.

Our Father Hail Mary. Glory Be.
V. Lord Jesus, crucified,
R. Have mercy on us!