The lashes of the whip were scintillating. They cracked the air like lightning, tearing his back open with fire. To those watching, it was brutality; to him, it was transfiguration. The most excruciatingly beautiful thing he had ever felt.
Each stroke was more than pain. He transcended them by forgiving the men who raised their arms against him, soldiers bound by duty, blind to the mystery they enacted. Forgiveness lifted the agony into clarity, and every whiplash drew him closer to God.
The welts they carved into his flesh were not random. They were counted, measured, exact. Each one marked the accumulating progress of a finite burden, the suffering written into his story — no more, no less. He bore them as steps on a staircase ascending to eternity. With each lash, eternity entered his body.
Although he was blinded by the pain, he knew exactly what was happening: prophecy was being fulfilled. By his stripes we are healed. It was not a metaphor. It was the living truth. The whip cracked, and in the burning welt left behind, another measure of eternal life was inscribed. A wound became a doorway. A scar became a seal. Every stripe was a badge of honor, a sign that heaven itself had passed through his flesh.
The crowd saw blood. He saw light. The lashes were terrible, yet every whip was a blessing. They were not accidents of cruelty; they were sacraments. Instruments of pain, but also of infusion. With every scourge, the Father was writing immortality into his mortal frame.
He screamed with each lash, but not in agony alone. The sound broke through as something higher — ecstasy mixed with anguish, a cry of triumph as much as torment. Eternal life was being whipped into him, seared into his skin, struck into his soul.
Above, heaven bent low. Angels trembled. Creation shuddered. Each lash struck not just his body; it struck the veil between time and eternity, thinning it, breaking it, until light seeped through.
And when the lashes finally ended, and his body was broken and bloodied, in the hidden registers of heaven, he was writ whole. Every wound gleamed like gold. Every scar was a crown. What looked like defeat was the beginning of forever.
By the scourging of his flesh, eternity had entered the world.
