The Sorrowful Mysteries deal with the Passion of Our Lord: the Agony of our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane, the Scourging of our Lord at the Pillar, the Crowning of our Lord with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross by our Lord and Simon of Cyrene, and finally the Crucifixion of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Traditionally, the Sorrowful Mysteries are prayed on Tuesday and Friday, and either additionally on Sundays during Lent or every day during Lent, depending on personal devotion.
The Agony in the Garden is when Christ, entering into His Passion, prays before God while Judas comes with the Temple Guard to betray Him. The Gospel records the greatness of this psychological stress that our Lord faced, to the point that "his sweat became like great drops of blood" and that an angel came to strengthen Him (Lk. 22:43-44). There is a pious tradition in the Catholic Church that at that very moment, Christ saw all of the sins that He would be dying for in one clear instant, and that the devil came to tempt Him one final time before He entered into His redemptive work. When we pray this decade, we meditate and ask from the fruit of contrition, which is true sorrow for sin. Christ saw our sins and truly regretted them. They caused Him pain not only in His Heart but in His body as well. His Passion begins in the Garden with the shedding of His blood at the very thought of our sins. In this, we must imitate our Lord and beg him to give us a similar hatred of the sins which caused Him to undergo this agony and that caused His flesh to be tortured for us.
The Scourging at the Pillar brings us to the vivid, horrifying torments that our Lord underwent as He entered into His sufferings and offered them to God for the salvation of souls. Christ was scourged at the pillar under the orders of Pilate, who was trying to find a way to appease the Jews calling for Christ's death. This scene is itself a fulfillment of the Messianic prophecy of Isaiah 53: "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief... upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed" (Is. 53:3, 5). With each lash of the centurions' whips, Christ's Flesh is torn from His bones and His holy Blood is shed for us. As St. John tells us, "the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin" (1 Jn. 1:7), and thus the fruit of this mystery is purity. As we meditate on the defilement of Christ's body, His torment because of all of our sins, we are then more apt to beg Him for the grace to be pure and free from sin, because even the smallest of sins we commit led Him to be scourged.
The Crowning with Thorns shows us the humility of Christ. After Christ has had His flesh torn to shreds in His scourging, we see Him humiliated by the Roman guards. They, approaching the King of the Universe, throw a purple garb on Him and beat a make-shift thorny crown into His scalp to scorn His rightful claim to royal authority. An interesting verse describing this is Mark 15:19, "And they were striking his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling down in homage to him." The word translated "kneeling down in homage" is prosekynoun, and it refers to an act of worship. Be mindful, when meditating on this, of how our worship is vain if not united with a contrite and humbled heart. St. Louis de Montfort says that the fruit of this mystery is hatred of the world. Hatred of the world means detachment. It doesn't mean to literally hold the entirety of creation in contempt, because God created the world and saw it was good. Rather, hatred of the world is to submit to Christ and desire Him above all other things; to put aside all earthly desires in order to please and follow Him. Our Lord asks "what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?" (Mt. 16:26). The answer is nothing, and thus we should rid ourselves of earthly desires and cling to our one and only End.
The Carrying of the Cross approaches the culmination of Christ's sufferings and our redemption. Having already been beaten nearly to death and severely humiliated, Christ now takes on the heavy burden of the wooden cross and carries the instrument of His own death to the place where He will redeem mankind. The cross here represents our sins: just as Christ must bear this heavy wooden burden upon His shoulders, so has He willed out of love to bear the burden on our sins in His body and pay for our sins on the Cross. The fruit of this mystery is patience, and we see this fruit in the very actions of our Lord on the cross. Christ first accepts this burden and then bears the entirety of this appointed suffering without any sort of grumbling or complaining. Likewise, we must imitate the Lord and follow His commandment to take up our crosses daily and follow Him (Mt. 16:24). As we meditate on this mystery, we are reminded that we serve a God who knows what it is like to patiently bear all wrongs.
The Crucifixion is the consummation (Jn. 19:30 DRB) of both the Passion of Christ and our redemption. On the Cross the God-Man Himself makes the ultimate Act of Humility, submitting Himself unto death though He knew no sin. Just as Christ participated in our humanity, uniting Himself to human nature, so are we called to participate in His divinity (2 Pt. 1:4) by dying to ourselves and being raised to new life in Him who rose again. Christ's Crucifixion sees our Lord persevere and see the entirety of the work of salvation to its very end, and thus the fruit of this mystery is final perseverance. As Christ persevered in His passion, we are called to persevere in the life of grace, because "the one who endures to the end will be saved" (Mt. 24:13). In reflecting on Christ’s perseverance and coming into His kingdom, we beg God and ask with the Psalmist, “One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” (Ps. 27:4).
In the Joyful Mysteries, we reflected on Christ's birth, the beginning of the Gospel. As we reflect on the Sorrowful Mysteries, we reflect on the climax of the Gospel: Christ, to accomplish God’s plan, gave himself up to death (Eucharistic Prayer IV) so that joining with Him mystically in His death, we might have life anew. In meditating on Christ’s sorrows, we should remember to always flee sin and all temptation, for it is sin that caused Christ’s sufferings. We also are reminded of the depth of the love of Christ, and that, in the words of St. Therese of Lisieux, that God's love is bigger than our sin.
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