Tag Archives: Agony in the Garden

The Darkness of Gethsemane

Passion of Christ, Redemption, Suffering, The Life of Jesus, , ,

There is a darkness, both in the literal and in the figurative sense, which hangs over the week preceding Our Lord’s Passion.  The Church tries to make this darkness present to her children throughout the liturgies marking Holy Week.  It moves from the darkness of Judas’ human heart to the darkness of the Agony in the Garden, culminating in the darkness of the crucifixion.  There is perhaps nowhere else that the theme of darkness is made more manifest that at the end of the Holy Thursday liturgy when the faithful silently watch Our Lord’s Eucharistic presence going out into the darkness.  More than just a mere liturgical gesture, it is an invitation for us to accompany Jesus in His forsakenness and to stand by Him.  It is our moment to participate in His Agony in the Garden as He goes to an altar of repose for us to watch and pray with Him.

Darkness had fallen upon Jerusalem by the time Our Lord entered the gates of Gethsemane with His inner circle.  All four of the Evangelists provide us details of His time of anguished prayer and yet, we find that this event, perhaps more so than any other aspect of the Passion, is shrouded deeply in mystery.  It would seem that Our Lord suffered more during these three hours than all the rest of His Passion combined.  How acute must a man’s suffering be in order to sweat blood?  We could overlook His sufferings here or give them a cursory nod of understanding, but this would be like Judas who, fearful of the darkness comes carrying a torch.  Or we could, as the Church is inviting us, enter into this darkness with Our Lord and, so, comfort Him by our presence.  That a mere creature could comfort the God man is in itself a great mystery.  Nevertheless Our Lord was comforted by having his three closest companions near Him and from the presence of an angel just before His arrest.  It seems that He pre-ordained that He would not suffer this alone.  Still, in order to be most fully present to Him we must begin to grasp the source of His suffering.

Our Lord’s Emotional State

There are few places in the gospels where the Evangelists point out Our Lord’s emotional state.  When they do, it can be quite illuminating for us because it gives a glimpse into the mystery of His interior life.  We know much about what He said and did, but we know little about what He truly thought and felt.  Because Jesus had perfect integrity in His soul, what He thought and felt always had a perfect correspondence.  What this means is that His emotions perfectly followed His reason and will.  When He felt an emotion it was only because He willed to feel it.  The Eternal Son of God knew the sufferings He would endure and His hour was always before Him.  Yet it is only when His hour comes that His suffering comes.  In other words, when the Word of God says “I will to suffer,” His suffering starts and not a moment before.  This suffering is expressed through the two emotions Our Lord describes Himself as having—fear and sorrow.

Immediately upon entering the Garden with Peter, James and John we are told that Our Lord “began to feel fear and to be exceedingly troubled” (c.f. Mark 14:33).  Fear as an emotion is always future directed; towards some evil that is difficult to avoid, but in truth is not yet present.  An obvious cause of this fear is awareness of the bodily sufferings and death that He is going to endure.  This is the natural human reaction to pain and suffering and Our Lord in His human will must choose to endure it.  But to stop there is to pluck the fruit before it is ripe.  He is no ordinary man, but the God-Man and thus He is able to foresee not only His own sufferings, but the sufferings of those whom He holds most dear because of His Passion.  He is able to see the effect His Passion will have upon His Mother whom He will crown as the Queen of Sorrows.  He sees the pain endured by the Beloved Disciple, the same man who slumbers beside Peter, the same man who will suffer a martyr’s death because of His Passion.  In fact it is not just Peter but all the martyrs that He sees.  He wills to endure all of their inner turmoil so that they go to the gallows laughing and without any trace of fear.  He will even endure the mental anguish of one particular martyr, St. Thomas More, who will write about Christ’s Agony in the Garden (The Sadness of Christ) as the real source of martyrdom while he joyfully and jokingly awaits his own execution.  Christ foresees the sufferings of the Church, His Mystical Body, and lives them in His physical body.  Although it is necessary that He drinks this cup, He is well aware of all the suffering that it will cause in the future because He drank it to the dregs.

The Sadness of Christ

All of those things are future directed but there is pain in the evil of the moment as well.  We know this because Our Lord also expresses His sadness—“And He said to them “My soul is sad, even unto death” (Mk 14:35).  Sadness as an emotion is always present-directed; towards a present evil that cannot be avoided.  So acute is Christ’s sadness that it threatens to kill Him right on the spot.  What cup is Our Lord already drinking?  It is the cup of our guilt.

Guilt is, or at least should be, a profound sorrow for having done something wrong.  It is a painful way to move us to make amends for what we have done wrong.  When properly experienced the pain bears a certain proportionality to the pleasure we have stolen.  The problem is that we find all kinds of ways to avoid it because it is painful.  Now think of a man who is genuinely trying to be good and he does something gravely wrong.  For him guilt is really painful.  The more sensitive the conscience the more acutely we can feel the pain of guilt.  Now take a man Who has never done anything wrong in His life and introduce an awareness of guilt such that He experiences it as if He has done something wrong.  Because of His innocence, the pain would be quite unimaginable.  Now, take that experience and multiply it by all the sins in the history of the world and only by a miracle of grace does the soul remain in the body of this man (“sorrowful unto death’).  Hard to imagine for sure, but it is enough to bring the God-Man to His knees and cause blood to mingle with His sweat as His body desperately clings to His soul.  One might think it is His soul that is bleeding.

Now He does this for His Father, Who has been offended not just by our sins, but our seeming incapacity for sorrow.  He does it for you and me not only to save us, but to win grace to have true sorrow for sin.  When this grace is accepted and we express sorrow it somehow lightens His load.  The field of His vision spanned across the unrepentant, the lukewarm and the truly repentant.  It was the vision of the latter that brought Him comfort in His afflictions.  And this is ultimately why we must journey with Him into the darkness of Gethsemane and remain there with Him.

 

The Media and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

Bible, Culture, Media, Passion of Christ, Scripture, Sin, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, ,

“If it bleeds, it leads.”  If there is a single maxim that guides the main stream media in their reporting, then it is this.  The principle itself is based on a simple calculation: the more carnage, death and human depravity in a story, the higher it appears in the reporting hierarchy.  We, of course, are all quick to condemn the media for this.  But not so quick that we don’t watch it first.  The main stream media is a business, a big business at that, and guided by the law of supply of demand.  It is all based on ratings and with so many ways to monitor what we are watching, they know exactly how much is consumed.  In other words, they lead with the blood because we watch it.  The more we watch, the more we get.  Inundated by it, we feel powerless to keep from watching.  We watch while covering one eye.  But like all things we feel powerless to avoid, it is illuminating to ask why we do it.

Rather than strictly psychological, the answer is more theological in nature.  Its genesis is found, well, in Genesis.  Returning to “the beginning” of mankind, we find man and woman in Eden made in the image and likeness of God.  In His likeness, Adam and Eve are practically unlimited, able to eat from every tree in the Garden except one.  Unlike God, they have a single limitation; they cannot eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Their test then will be whether they are willing to accept this limitation or not.  The Serpent, the inventor of “if it bleeds, it leads,” leads with “You shall not die” and tells the story of how Adam and Eve can be like God if they will simply take from the tree and eat.

The Knowledge of Good and Evil

Even if the tree itself is symbolic, the limitation itself is real.  In order to understand our bloodlust we must first understand exactly what the tree represents.  Adam and Eve attempted to know evil without experiencing it.  That is, they tried to know it from the outside without participating in it from the inside.  This capacity of knowing evil while not experiencing it is something that only God can do.  Only God is all holy and can be unstained by it.  As Blessed John Henry Newman puts it,

“You see it is said, ‘man is become as one of Us, to know good and evil,’ because God does know evil as well as good. This is His wonderful incommunicable attribute; and man sought to share in what God was, but he could not without ceasing to be what God was also, holy and perfect. It is the incommunicable attribute of God to know evil without experiencing it. But man, when he would be as God, could only attain the shadow of a likeness which as yet he had not, by losing the substance which he had already. He shared in God’s knowledge by losing His image. God knows evil and is pure from it—man plunged into evil and so knew it.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, Ignorance of Evil).

This is also the sin of Lot’s wife when she is turned to a pillar of salt.  Overcome by the curiosity to know the evil of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah without being touched by it, she quickly finds out that to know it, is to share in it.  But Scripture is most clear on this when we examine the accounts of Our Lord’s Agony in the Garden.  It is the God-Man and only He Who can know evil without actually participating in it.  So great is the protest of His human nature that He sweats blood.

One might rightly ask at this point how it is that merely watching “bad news” has anything to do with the knowledge of good and evil.  It is in seeing this particular aspect of it that we can begin to separate ourselves from it.  Why is simply hearing about “bad news” not enough and why do we crave the details?  Why are we unsatisfied with a report such as“13 people were killed in an attack today” but have to know how it happened (video even if it contains the “graphic material” is especially wanted), who the perpetrators were, what their motivations were, etc.?  It is because what we learned theologically is proven empirically (or else it wouldn’t be the main part of the consumer news cycle).  In short, it shows we cannot just know about evil, we want to know it like Adam knows Eve, that is experience it fully.

What the Tree Offers Us

This doesn’t mean we want to pull the trigger but just don’t have the courage.  For most of us its meaning is more subtle than that. It means we want to experience the pleasure attached to the evil even if we do not actually commit the act.  It is what the Church calls the glamor of evil, the primal curiosity that brings pleasure from evil acts.  We can call it virtual reality evil—all of the thrills with none of the bills.  It is what keeps us from looking away at bad car accidents, watching Youtube videos of accidents, going to the movies to see the latest “psychological thriller” and the reason why serial killers gain celebrity.  The Devil really is in the details.

The illicit pleasure is not the only effect or really even the worst.  This habit of dwelling on depravity is soul deadening.  It causes us to view evil through a carnage calculator that relativizes it against the last one or against the greatest acts of reported slaughter.  We slowly become immune to evil and see it solely for its entertainment value.  I once saw a lady drive into a storefront and no one went to help her even though there were 20-30 bystanders each with his phone in hand recording the accident.  Not only does it make us slow to love, but also suspicious and fearful of our neighbor.  When bad news gets significantly more play time than good news, we become masters of suspicion and avoid other people, assuming the worst of them.

Returning to man’s Retake in the Garden of Gethsemane we find the strength to overcome the ubiquity of bad news.  Our Lord was the one who “resisted sin to the point of shedding His blood” (c.f. Hebrews 12:4) not just to show us His divine power put to win for us the grace to remain pure of heart amidst so much evil.  We should become cautious and discerning viewers of the news, even sites and channels we would consider reputable.  Avoid getting drug into the details and focus only on headlines.  All too often there is nothing we can do personally to combat a particular evil and so knowing the details is simply curiosity rearing its ugly head.  Get in the habit of asking yourself why you need to know anything more and you will quickly realize that you don’t.

When St. Paul wrote the Christians in Philippi he knew they too were living in a culture where evil had been glamorized he had what is the most practical of advice, “whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things” (Phil 4:8).  We would do well to focus on these things as well, turning away from the bad news so that we can more fully embrace the Good News.