Self-Flagellation Is Worse Than Useless
When Pontius Pilate ordered Jesus to be scourged and beaten to a bloody pulp, he did so in part with the idea of showing Him to the angry mob in the hopes that he could move them enough to compassion to get them to change their mind and give up on their desire to see Jesus crucified. This did not work because an angry mob does not feel and it does not think. There is no compassion or mercy or rationality in the swirl of angry voices. In the end, Pilate scourging Jesus was worse than useless and only added to his pain and misery without helping Him to avoid execution in the least. Sometimes we have an angry mob inside our head screaming for the punishment of our sins. We sometimes believe that if we beat ourselves bloody with shame and self-loathing, we can move the cruel voices of guilt and shame to have compassion on us and leave us be. But our attempts at self-flagellation are as useless as the scourging given by Pilate to Jesus. The enemy of our souls wants only to see us as miserable as possible and is not moved at all by compassion or pity or reason. We do nothing at all by deepening and prolonging our misery other than making our Savior sadder and the devil gladder. Pilate had noble intentions in whipping Jesus because he hoped that it could avoid His death. We may have noble intentions on punishing ourselves in hoping that it will somehow avoid or cancel out some future reckoning, but Christ has already paid for all of our sins and more suffering on our part in procrastinating our repentance does not relieve our Savior of any burden but rather adds to it, since He also felt the additional misery we feel as we continue to avoid repentance. If we have the noble goal of helping our Savior to suffer less, then we need to repent as soon as possible so that we can end our suffering through the power of the Atonement. The enemy has no compassion for our suffering but our Savior has infinite compassion and He wants to take the pain from us as soon as we are willing to give it up, if not much, much sooner.
