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.