Wojtyla - The Prayer in Gethsemane (from Sign of Contradiction)

The prayer in Gethsemane

1. Sharing the prayer of Jesus

In this meditation we are going to return to a subject already

spoken of: prayer. But this time, rather than talking about

prayer, I would like us - as far as is humanly possible, and

with the aid of grace - to share in the prayer of Christ

himself.

We know how often he used to pray completely alone,

withdrawing from the company of his disciples and keeping

himself totally free to converse with the Father. More often

than not he did this while the others were resting: “And he

spent the whole night in prayer” — “pernoctans in oratione

Dei” (Lk 6,12), as we read in the Gospel. On one occasion

only did Jesus specifically ask the Apostles to share his

prayer with him, and that was in Gethsemane where the

Master had gone, together with them, on Holy Thursday

night. All that Jesus had said and done in the course of the

last supper was still fresh in their minds and hearts. And

then, leaving most of them behind on entering Gethsemane,

he took just three of them with him: Peter, James and John,

the ones he had taken to Mount Tabor, and said to them:

“Stay here and keep vigil with me”. And then, moving a

short distance away from them, he prostrated himself and

prayed (cf Mt 26,38-39). It was all a clear appeal to them to

share his prayer.

Why at that specific moment? Why on that occasion

only? Perhaps because he had already made them sharers in

his mystery in one way: he had given them bread to eat

saying: “This is my body offered in sacrifice for you”

(Lk 22,19), and wine to drink saying: “This cup is the new

covenant in my blood shed for you’, charging them to “Do

this in remembrance of me” (Lk 22,19-20). In so doing he

had made them sharers in his mystery at its most profound

level.

2. Great understanding of mankind

Jesus begins to pray. Moving a short distance away from the

three, he begins to converse with the Father — as on so many

other occasions. This time, however, his prayer is decisive: it

originates in the depths of his soul and discloses the whole

truth of his human nature, not only showing his acute

anxiety at this particular moment in his life as Son of man

but also bringing together, so to speak, all the anxieties felt

by the one who said of himself: “I am the good shepherd.

The good shepherd gives his own life for his sheep”

(Jn 10,11). Jesus embarks on this prayer with an immeasur-

able universal concern for each and every one: “I know my

sheep and my sheep know me” (Jn 10,14). This prayer

reflects Jesus’s great knowledge and understanding of man

and the whole of human nature, sunk in the abyss after the

first sin and subsequently straying further and further from

the will of the Father, with consequences more frightening

than those of the original disobedience.

This prayer is the prayer of great understanding of

mankind, for it was uttered by the one of whom scripture

says: “He had no need of any man’s testimony concerning

another, for he knew very well himself what was in each one”

(Jn 2,25).

3. “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass me by”

What are the words he uses in this prayer? We know them

very well: they are few but unforgettable, simple but highly

charged with the emotion of the hour — the hour in which the

servant of Yahweh must fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah by saying

his ‘Yes’. “Jesus Christ was not ‘Yes’ and ‘No’: in him

there was only *Yes’” (2 Cor 1,19).

Christ’s words in Gethsemane are very simple, wholly

appropriate for expressing the most profound of truths and

the most important of choices. Jesus says: “Father, if it be

possible, let this cup pass me by; nevertheless, not my will

but yours be done” (Mt 26,39). We may remark that by this

time it was no longer possible for the cup to pass him by,

because it had already been passed on by him to the Church

and had become “the cup of the new and everlasting

covenant”, the cup of the blood “which will be shed”

(Mk 14,24). And yet, in spite of all that, Jesus says: “If it be

possible, let it pass me by ...”’.

What is the meaning of: “If it be possible”? Is this not the

prayer of the Son of God who, in all the truth of his human

nature, “sees into all things, even the depths of God”

(1 Cor 2,10) in the Holy Spirit? Since he shares to the full

the mystery of God’s freedom, he knows that events do not

necessarily have to take this course; but at the same time he

shares God’s love, and so he knows that there is no other

way. He had in fact come to Gethsemane in order to receive

the death sentence that had long ago been pronounced, in

eternity no doubt (Col 2,14). So, having come, he fell on his

knees and prayed — as if that death sentence, already

pronounced in eternity, had to be pronounced there, at that

very hour. “If it be possible, may this cup pass me by ...”.

Prayer is always a wonderful reduction of eternity to the

dimension of a moment in time, a reduction of the eternal

wisdom to the dimension of human knowledge, feeling and

understanding, a reduction of the eternal Love to the

dimension of the human heart, which at times is incapable of

absorbing its riches and seems to break.

The sweat which appeared like drops of blood on the face

of Jesus as he prayed in Gethsemane is a sign of the acute

torment he suffered in his human heart. “And Christ, in the

days of his flesh, offered prayers and supplications to him

who could save him from death ...” (Heb 5,7).

4. A meeting between the human will and the will of God

This prayer is in fact a meeting between the human will of

Jesus Christ and the eternal will of God, which at this

moment can be seen as the will of the Father concerning his

Son. The Son had become man in order that this meeting

might express all the truth of the human will and the human

heart, anxious to escape the evil and the suffering, the

condemnation and the scourging, the crown of thorns, the

cross and death. He had become man in order that this truth

might then serve to reveal all the grandeur of the love that

expresses itself in a “gift of oneself’, in sacrifice: “God loved

the world so much that he sacrificed his only-begotten Son”

(Jn 3,16). In this hour that “eternal Love” has to give proof

of itself by the sacrifice of a human heart. And it does indeed

give proof of itself! The Son does not shrink from giving his

own heart, for it to become an altar, a place of complete

self-abnegation even before the cross was to serve that

purpose.

The human will, the will of the man, meets the will of

God. The human will speaks by means of the heart and

expresses the human truth: “If it be possible, may this cup

pass me by”. But at the same time the human will surrenders

itself to the will of God, as if passing beyond the human

truth, beyond the cry of the heart: it is as if it were taking

unto itself not only the eternal judgment of the Father and

the Son in the Holy Spirit, but also the power that flows

from God, from the will of God, from the God who is Love

(1 Jn 4,8).

All prayer is a meeting between the human will and the

will of God; for this we are indebted to the Son’s obedience

to the Father: “Your will be done”. And obedience does not

mean only renunciation of one’s own will; it means opening

one’s spiritual eyes and ears to the Love which is God

himself, God who loved the world so much that for its sake

he sacrificed his only-begotten Son. ‘Here is the man”. After

his prayer in Gethsemane Jesus Christ, Son of God, rises to

his feet fortified: fortified by the obedience which has

enabled him once again to attain to Love, as gift from the

Father for the world and for all mankind. He rises to his feet

and goes back to his disciples saying: “‘Look, my betrayer is

close at hand” (Mk 14,42).

5. The mystery of Redemption

This is the third time he has broken off from prayer and

gone back to them. And, just as before, he finds them asleep.

He had reproached them already: “Could you not keep vigil

with me for one hour? Stay awake and pray so as not to give

way to temptation: the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”

(Mt 26,40-41). But even that warning had not kept them

awake. Peter, James and John did not know how to respond

to his call to prayer addressed to them as they entered

Gethsemane. The words Jesus now speaks for the second and

third time become a reproach, a reproach of concern to every

disciple of Christ. In one way the Church still hears those

same words: the reproach addressed to the three Apostles is

accepted by the Church as if it were addressed to herself,

and she tries to fill the gap left by that lost hour when Jesus

remained completely alone in Gethsemane. The Apostles did

not know how to respond to the appeal to share the prayer of

the Redeemer, and they left him completely alone. This

showed that the mystery of redemption required the Son to

remain alone in intimate converse with the Father. This total

solitude creates a dimension fully appropriate to the divine

mystery, which at the same time is a human activity on the

part of the Son of man.

And now the Church still seeks to recover that hour in

Gethsemane—the hour lost by Peter, James and John—so

as to compensate for the Master’s lack of companionship

which increased his soul’s suffering. It is impossible to

reconstruct that hour in all its historical veracity: it belongs

in the past and remains for ever in the eternity of God

himself. Yet the desire to recover it has become a real need

for many hearts, especially for those who live as fully as they

can the mystery of the divine heart. The Lord Jesus allows us

to meet him in that hour - which on the human plane is long

since past beyond recall - and, just as he did then, invites us

to share the prayer of his heart: “Cogitationes cordis eius in

generationem et generationem, ut eruat a morte animas

eorum et alat eos in fame” (Entrance antiphon, Mass of the

Sacred Heart of Jesus). And when “from generation to

generation” we enter into the designs of his heart, from that

sharing there flows the mystical unity of the Body of Christ.

How rich in meaning that “Stay awake!” now becomes:

“Stay awake, so as not to give way to temptation!” Christ

hands over to us that hour of great trial, which always has

been an hour of trial for his disciples and his Church.

“I am the vine ...” says the Lord, and these words are

most appropriate to the situation in Gethsemane. “I am the

vine and you are the branches ... As the branch cannot of

itself bear fruit unless it remains joined to the vine, so also

not one of you, unless you remain in me...” (Jn 15,5). “lam

the true vine, and my Father is the vine-dresser. Every

branch in me that bears no fruit he cuts right out: and those

which do bear fruit he prunes, so that they may bear more

fruit still” (Jn 15,1-2).

The prayer of Gethsemane goes on to this day. Faced with

all the trials that man and the Church have to undergo, there

is a constant need to return to Gethsemane and undertake

that sharing in the prayer of Christ our Lord. That prayer—

according to the standards of human reckoning—remains

unanswered. But at the same time, in virtue of the principle:

“My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not

your ways” (Is 55,8), it marks the beginning of the great

victory, the beginning of the redemptive work on which man

and the world still draw and always will draw, because the

Redemption makes manifest the nature and extent of God’s

love for mankind and for the world (cf Jn 3,16).

And so the prayer of Gethsemane is not left unanswered.

Karol Wojtyla, Sign of Contradiction (1977) p. 147-153 

Guardini - Gethsemane (from The Lord)

GETHSEMANE

“After saying these things, Jesus went forth with his disciples beyond the torrent of Cedron, where there was a garden. ..” (Jn 18:1) “according to this custom” adds Luke.

“And they came to a country place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit down here, while I pray.’ And he took with him Peter and James and John, and he began to feel dread and to be exceedingly troubled. And he said to them, “My soul is sad, even unto death. Wait here and watch. And going forward a little, he fell on the ground, and began to pray that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him; and he said, ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee. Remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou willest.’

“Then he came and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, ‘Simon, dost thou sleep? Couldst thou not watch one hour? Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak? And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words over. And he came again and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. And they did not know what answer to make to him” (Mk 14:32-40).

Then he went back again “And there appeared to him an angel from heaven to strengthen him... And his sweat became as drops of blood running down upon the ground” (Lk. 22:43, 44). And he rose and returned a third time to the disciples and said to them: “Sleep on now, and take your rest! It is enough; the hour has come. Behold, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us go. Behold, he who will betray me is at hand” (Mk 14:41, 42).

After Jesus had ended the sacerdotal prayer he and the little group walked down the hill and out of the city. According to tradition, the house in which the Last Supper had been held belonged to the family of the John who later was called Mark, Peter's assistant missionary and author of the Gospel that bears his name. He is believed to be the John who, ‘having a linen cloth wrapped about his naked body” was also there that last night (until he too was put to dramatic flight—Mk 14:51-51). Jesus, then descended to the brook Cedron and crossed it—possibly at the same spot that his ancestor, the ancient King David, had fled from Absalom. Then they walked up the valley until they came to a farm called Gethsemane. Jesus has often sat there with his disciples, teaching (18:2). Now they feel that things are drawing to a close, and are not surprised when he tells them to wait while he prays. They are quite accustomed to his leaving them in order to speak alone and undisturbed with God. Only the three who had recently been with him on the mountain of the Transfiguration, Peter, John and James accompany him.

A terrible sadness overcomes the Lord—sadness “unto death” says Holy Scripture. Then Jesus tells also the three to wait—perhaps they are surprised to hear him say they should watch with him; it is probably the first time he has ever asked them to. Alone he advances a few paces, falls on his face and prays.

This is no place for psychology. When. guided by reverence and warmed by generosity, psychology is an excellent thing, doing much to help one human understand another. Here though it must fail, for it could only say that this was another instance of natural reaction: after the tension of tremendous religious concentration and the climb to dizzying spiritual heights of surrender, love and revelation—the collapsed, depression. We have only to recall the life of the prophets to see what is meant. Psychology would explain Gethsemane similarly: the rejection by both the ruling class and the masses, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem with its tremendous experiences, the entry into the city, the terrible waiting of the preceding days, the treachery and the Last Supper—as a result of the prolonged strain now the breakdown. In the case of any human fighting under duress for a noble cause, the analysis very likely would be correct, also (at least partly) for a prophet. But with Jesus any such explanation is bound to founder. If it is insisted upon, Holy Thursday is robbed of that weight and salutary power which can be sensed only in contrition and adoration. Here we can proceed solely through faith guided by revelation.

And it must be living faith—no mere passive acceptance of facts. We participate in this mystery only when we realise and admit that its content is our sin. Mankind’s sin constantly being relived in our own deeds and omissions today and yesterday and always; in all our daily rebellion and lassitude, interestedness and sharpness; in the indescribable evil deep at the root of our whole attitude towards existence. We understand here as much as we understand that in the agony of Gethsemane the ultimate consequences of our sin had their hour. Not before we have surrendered ourselves to the dreadfulness of that hour will we understand, really, what sin is. In the measure that we comprehend sin, we comprehend Christ; and we comprehend our own sin only in the measure that we experience what he experienced when he sweated blood in the night.

What does faith tell us? Before all else who this man is there on his knees—the Son of God in the simplest sense of the word. For that reason he sees existence in its ultimate reality.

Wherever we encounter Jesus, it is as the Knowing One, as he who knows about man and world, All others are blind; only his eyes are all-seeing, and they see through to the very ground of human depravity. The forlornness Jesus beholds there embraces the whole of human existence. And he does not see it as one who has broken through to spiritual health and clarity with the help of grace. Jesus’ knowledge of sin is not like that of fallen mankind; he knows about it as God knows—hence the awful transparency of that knowledge. Hence his immeasurable loneliness. He is really the Seer among the blind, sole sensitive one among beings who have lost their touch, the only free and self-possessed one in the midst of general confusion.

Jesus’ consciousness of the world’s corruption is not grounded in the world and therefore prisoner of existence. It springs from above, from God, and enfolds the whole globe, seeing as God sees: around existence, through existence, outwards from existence. Moreover, Jesus’ divine consciousness, before which every thing is stripped and lucid, is not extrinsic, but intrinsic, realised in his living self. He knows with his human intellect, feels the world’s forlornness with his human heart. And the sorrow of it, incapable of ripping the eternal God from his bliss, becomes in Christ's human soul unutterable agony. From this knowledge comes a terrible and unrelenting earnestness, knowledge that underlies every word he speaks and everything he does. It pulses through his whole being and proclaims itself in the least detail of his fate. Here lies the root of Christ's unapproachable loneliness What human understanding and sympathy could possibly reach into this realm in which the Saviour shoulders alone the yoke of the world? From this point of view Jesus was always a sufferer. and would have been one even if men had accepted his message in faith and love; even if salvation had been accomplished and the kingdom established alone by proclamation and acceptance sparing him the bitter way of the cross. Even then, his whole life would have been inconceivably painful, for he would have been constantly aware of the world sin in the sight of a God he knew to be all holy and all love; and he would have borne this terrible and inaccessible knowledge alone. In the hour of Gethsemane its ever-present pain swells to a paroxysm.

The life of God is timeless and changeless; it is fixed in a present that is simple and illimitable. The life of men rises and falls like the tides. In the Lord there was both: eternal present and temporal fluctuation; thus also that inner pain will have had its ebb and flow, its variations in volume, pressure, and acuity. Now was the hour in which everything was to be “consummated”. 

Who knows how God the Father faced his Son in that hour? He never ceased to be his Father; the band of endless love between them which is the Spirit never broke; and yet—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46). If we do not prefer to pass over this in reverent silence, we must say that God permitted his Son to taste the human agony of rejection and plunge towards the abyss. Christ’s terrible cry from the cross came from the bitter dregs of the consequence of his union with us. But the chalice was given him to taste already in Gethsemane, when, his consciousness of the abysmal forlornness of the world heightened by God’s proximity, his Father began to “withdraw” from him. It was then that Jesus’ knowledge and suffering reached the frightful intensity evinced by his terror, agonised praying, and sweat of blood that streamed to the ground. In much the same way, a whirlpool on the surface of an ocean may be the visible sign of a catastrophe at its depths surpassing imagination.

Gethsemane was the hour in which Jesus’ human heart and mind experienced the ultimate odium of the sin he was to bear as his own before the judging and avenging countenance of God; | hour in which he felt the fury of the Father against sin per se as directed against himself, its porter, and therefore suffered the unspeakable agony of “abandonment” by holy God. We are humanising again. Perhaps it would be better to be silent. But with God’s help, possibly that hour in the garden will not be quite lost on us. There Jesus accepted the Father’s will and surrendered his own. ‘‘His” will was not revolt against God, that would have been sin; it was simply the repulsion of a supremely pure and vital being against the role of scapegoat for the evil of a whole world; revolt against being the one, through no fault of his own) but as the price of self-sacrificing love, on whom all God’s anger must fall. To accept this was the meaning of his words, “...yet not what I will, but what thou willest.”

There the real struggle took place. All that came afterwards was the realisation of that hour, the actual execution of what had already been excruciatingly anticipated by heart and spirit. And in what solitude? So tremendous that we sense the fundamental guiltlessness of the disciples. In the face of such infinite suffering, their little capacity for compassion must have rebounded like the heart of a small child when the grown-ups are engulfed in some shattering experience: it turns aside, begins to play, or simply falls asleep. The fact that there is no alternative shows how hopeless Christ’s isolation is.

No one has ever seen existence as Jesus saw it; neither before nor after. In that hour when his human heart lifted the world from its vapours of deception, he beheld it as otherwise only God beholds it—in all its hideous nakedness. What happened was truth realised in charity. And we are given the standpoint from which we too can see through and reject deception. For that is the meaning of salvation: seeing the world as Christ saw it and experiencing his repulsion of sin.

Roman Guardini, The Lord (1954) p. 368-372

Sheen - The Agony in the Garden (from Life of Christ)

THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN 

There is only one recorded time in the history of Our Blessed Lord when He sang, and that was after the Last Supper when He went out to His death in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

And so they sang a hymn
     And went out to Mount Olivet.
                                  Mark 14:26

The captives in Babylon hung their harps upon the willows, for they could not bring a song from their hearts in a strange land. The gentle lamb opens not its mouth when led to the slaughter, but the true Lamb of God sang with joy at the prospect of the Redemption of the world. Then came the great warning that they would all be shaken in their confidence in Him. “The Hour” was rapidly approaching about which He had often spoken; when it would strike Him, they would be scandalized: if He was God, why should He suffer? 

Tonight you will all lose courage over Me.
                                   Matthew 26:31

He Who would be the cornerstone of their faith in days to come, now warned that He would also be the stone of their stumbling. He had called Himself their “Good Shepherd,” and now it was the hour of laying down His life for His sheep. Reaching back centuries into their prophecies, He now quoted to them what Zacharias had foretold: 

Smite the shepherd, and his flock shall scatter.
                                         Zacharias 13:7 

For Christ to be a Savior, He must be a sacrifice. This is what would scandalize them. Actually, an hour later, the Apostles all forsook Him and fled. But since He never spoke of His Passion without foretelling His Resurrection, He immediately added words which they did not understand: 

But I will go before you into Galilee,
     When I have risen from the dead.
                                      Matthew 26:32 

Such a promise was never made before; that a dead man would keep an appointment with His friends after three days in a tomb. Though the sheep would forsake the Shepherd, the Shepherd would find His sheep. As Adam lost the heritage of union with God in a garden, so now Our Blessed Lord ushered in its restoration in a garden. Eden and Gethsemane were the two gardens around which revolved the fate of humanity. In Eden, Adam sinned; in Gethsemane, Christ took humanity’s sin upon Himself. In Eden, Adam hid himself from God; in Gethsemane, Christ interceded with His Father; in Eden, God sought out Adam in his sin of rebellion; in Gethsemane, the New Adam sought out the Father and His submission and resignation. In Eden, a sword was drawn to prevent entrance into the garden and thus immortalizing of evil; in Gethsemane, the sword would be sheathed.

The garden was called Gethsemane because of the presence of a press which crushed olives. It was not the first time Our Lord had been in that garden.

Jesus and His disciples had often gathered in it.
                                                          John 18:2 

Furthermore, He had often spent the night there: 

Each day He went on teaching in the temple;
     And at night He lodged on the mountain
Which is called Olivet.
                                Luke 21:37 

Judas had already gone forth on his dirty business of betrayal. Eight of the Apostles were left near the entrance to Gethsemane; the other three, Peter, James, and John, who had been His companions when He raised the daughter of Jairus, and when His face shone as the sun on the Mount of Transfiguration, He took with Him into the garden. It is as if, in that last contest in the valley of the shadow, His human soul craved for the presence of those who loved Him best. For their part, they were strengthened for the scandal of His death, since they had seen the prefigurement of His glory in the Transfiguration. On entering the garden He said to them: 

Sit down here, while I go in there and pray.
                                      Matthew 26:36 

Beginning to grow “dismayed and distressed,” He said to the three Apostles: 

My soul is ready to die with sorrow;
     Do you abide here and watch with Me.
                                   Matthew 26:38 

Isaias had foretold that there would be laid upon Him the iniquity of us all. In fulfillment of that prophecy. He tasted death for every man, bearing guilt as if it were His own. Two elements were inseparably bound together—sin-bearing, and sinless obedience. Falling on His face, He now prayed to His Heavenly Father:

My Father, if it is possible,
     Let this chalice pass Me by;
Only as Thy Will is, not as Mine is.
                             Matthew 26:39 

His two natures, the Divine and the human, were both involved in this prayer. He and the Father were One; it was not “Our Father,” but “My Father.” Unbroken was the consciousness of His Father’s love. But on the other hand, His human nature recoiled from death as a penalty for sin. The natural shrinking of the human soul from the punishment which sin deserves was overborne by Divine submission to the Father’s will. The “No” to the cup of the Passion was human; the “Yes” to the Divine will was the overcoming of human reluctance to suffering for the sake of Redemption. To take the bitter cup of human suffering which atones for sin and to sweeten it with little drops of “God wills it” is the sign of One Who suffered in man’s name, and yet One Whose suffering had infinite value because He was God as well as Man.

This scene is shrouded with the halo of a mystery which no human mind can adequately penetrate. One can dimly guess the psychological horror of the progressive stages of fear, anxiety, and sorrow which prostrated Him before even a single blow had been struck. It has been said that soldiers fear death much more before the zero hour of attack than in the heat of battle. The active struggle takes away the fear of death which is present when one contemplates it without action. But there was something else besides the quiet anticipation of the coming struggle which added to the mental sufferings of Our Blessed Lord. It is very likely that the Agony in the Garden cost Him far more suffering than even the physical pain of Crucifixion, and perhaps brought His soul into greater regions of darkness than any other moment of the Passion, with the possible exception of the one on the Cross when He cried: 

My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me?
                                                Matthew 27:46 

His mental sufferings were quite different from the sufferings of a mere man, because in addition to having human intelligence, He also had a Divine intelligence. Furthermore, He had a physical organism which was as perfect as any human organism could be; therefore it was much more sensitive to pain than our human nature, which has been calloused by crude emotions and evil experiences.

This agony can be faintly portrayed by realizing that there are different degrees of pain felt at the various levels of creations. Humans very often exaggerate the pain of animals, thinking that they suffer as do humans. The reason that they do not suffer as keenly as man is because they do not have an intellect. Each pulsation of animal pain is separate and distinct, and unrelated to every other pulsation. But when a man suffers pain, he can go back into the past with his intellectual memory, add up all his previous aches, and pull them down on himself, saying: “This is the third week of this agony” or “This is the seventh year that I have suffered.” By summarizing all the previous blows of the hammer of pain, he makes the one-hundredth stroke almost combine within itself the multiplied intensity of the previous ninety-nine. This an animal cannot do. Hence a man suffers more than a beast.

In addition to that, the human mind not only can bring the past to bear upon the present, it can even look forward and bring the future to bear upon the present. Not only can a man say: “I have suffered this agony for seven years,” but also “The prospects are that I will suffer with it for seven more years.” The human mind reaches out to the indefinite future, and pulls back upon itself all of this imagined agony that yet lies in store for it, and heaps it upon the present moment of pain. Because of this ability of the mind, not only to throw itself under the heap of the continued sufferings from the past but also under the pile of the imagined tortures of the future, man can suffer far more than any animal. Man loads himself with what has happened and what will happen. That is why, when we bring relief to the sick, we generally try to distract them; by interrupting the continuity of their pain and by relaxing their mind, they are less likely to add up their agony.

But with Our Blessed Lord, two differences from ourselves may be mentioned. First, what was predominant in His mind was not physical pain, but moral evil or sin. There was indeed that natural fear of death which He would have had because of His human nature; but it was no such vulgar fear which dominated His agony. It was something far more deadly than death. It was the burden of the mystery of the world’s sin which lay on His heart. Second, in addition to His human intellect, which had grown by experience, He had the infinite intellect of God which knows all things and sees the past and the future as present.

Poor humans become so used to sin that they do not realize its horror. The innocent understand the horror of sin much better than the sinful. The one thing from which man never learns anything by experience is sinning. A sinner becomes infected with sin. It becomes so much a part of him, that he may even think himself virtuous, as the feverish think themselves well. It is only the virtuous, who stand outside the current of sin, who can look upon evil as a doctor looks upon disease, who understand the full horror of evil.

What Our Blessed Lord contemplated in this agony was not just the buffeting of soldiers, and the pinioning of His hands and feet to a bar of contradiction, but rather the awful burden of the world’s sin, and the fact that the world was about to spurn His Father by rejecting Him, His Divine Son. What is evil but the exaltation of self-will against the loving will of God, the desire to be a god unto oneself, to accuse His wisdom as foolishness and His love as want of tenderness? He shrank not from the hard bed of the Cross, but from the world’s share in making it. He wanted the world to be saved from committing the blackest deed of sin ever perpetrated by the sons of men—the killing of Supreme Goodness, Truth, and Love.

Great characters and great souls are like mountains—they attract the storms. Upon their heads break the thunders; around their bare tops flash the lightnings and the seeming wrath of God. Here for the moment was the loneliest, saddest soul the world has ever had living in it, the Lord Himself. Higher than all men, around His head seemed to beat the very storms of iniquity. Here was the whole history of the world summed up in one cameo, the conflict of God’s will and man’s will.

It is beyond human power to realize how God felt the opposition of human wills. Perhaps the closest that one can ever come to it is when a parent feels the strangeness of the power of the obstinate will of his children to resist and spurn persuasion, love, hope, or fear of punishment. A power so strong resides in a body so slight and a mind so childish; yet it is the faint picture of men when they have sinned willfully. What is sin for the soul but a separate principle of wisdom and source of happiness working out its own ends, as if there were no God? Anti-Christ is nothing else but the full unhindered growth of self-will.

This was the moment when Our Blessed Lord, in obedience to His Father’s will, took upon Himself the iniquities of all the world and became the sin-bearer. He felt all the agony and torture of those who deny guilt, or sin with impunity and do no penance. It was the prelude of the dreadful desertion which He had to endure and would pay to His Father’s justice, the debt which was due from us: to be treated as a sinner. He was smitten as a sinner while there was no sin in Him—it was this which caused the agony, the greatest the world has ever known.

As sufferers look to the past and to the future, so the Redeemer looked to the past and to all the sins that had ever been committed; He looked also to the future, to every sin that would be committed until the crack of doom. It was not the past beatings of pain that He drew up to the present, but rather every open act of evil and every hidden thought of shame. The sin of Adam was there, when as the head of humanity he lost for all men the heritage of God’s grace; Cain was there, purple in the sheet of his brother’s blood; the abominations of Sodom and Gomorrah were there; the forgetfulness of His own people who fell down before false gods was there; the coarseness of the pagans who had rebelled even against the natural law was there; all sins were there: sins committed in the country that made all nature blush; sins committed in the city, in the city’s fetid atmosphere of sin; sins of the young for whom the tender heart of Christ was pierced; sins of the old who should have passed the age of sinning; sins committed in the darkness, where it was thought the eyes of God could not pierce; sins committed in the light that made even the wicked shudder; sins too awful to be mentioned, sins too terrible to name: Sin! Sin! Sin!

Once this pure, sinless mind of Our Savior had brought all of this iniquity of the past upon His soul as if it were His own, He now reached into the future. He saw that His coming into the world with the intent to save men would intensify the hatred of some against God; He saw the betrayals of future Judases, the sins of heresy that would rend Christ’s Mystical Body; the sins of the Communists who could not drive God from the heavens but would drive His ambassadors from the earth; He saw the broken marriage vows, lies, slanders, adulteries, murders, apostasies—all these crimes were thrust into His own hands, as if He had committed them. Evil desires lay upon His heart, as if He Himself had given them birth. Lies and schisms rested on His mind, as if He Himself had conceived them. Blasphemies seemed to be on His lips, as if He had spoken them. From the North, South, East, and West, the foul miasma of the world’s sins rushed upon Him like a flood; Samson-like, He reached up and pulled the whole guilt of the world upon Himself as if He were guilty, paying for the debt in our name, so that we might once more have access to the Father. He was, so to speak, mentally preparing Himself for the great sacrifice, laying upon His sinless soul the sins of a guilty world. To most men, the burden of sin is as natural as the clothes they wear, but to Him the touch of that which men take so easily was the veriest agony.

In between the sins of the past which He pulled upon His soul as if they were His own, and the sins of the future which made Him wonder about the usefulness of His death—Quae utilitas in sanguine meo—was the horror of the present.

He found the Apostles asleep three times. Men who were worried about the struggle against the powers of darkness could not sleep—but these men slept. No wonder, then, with the accumulated guilt of all the ages clinging to Him as a pestilence, His bodily nature gave way. As a father in agony will pay the debt of a wayward son, He now sensed guilt to such an extent that it forced Blood from His Body, Blood which fell like crimson beads upon the olive roots of Gethsemane, making the first Rosary of Redemption. It was not bodily pain that was causing a soul’s agony; but full sorrow for rebellion against God that was creating bodily pain. It has been observed of old that the gum which exudes from the tree without cutting is always the best. Here the best spices flowed when there was no whip, no nail, and no wound. Without a lance, but through the sheer voluntariness of Christ’s suffering, the Blood flowed freely.

Sin is in the blood. Every doctor knows this; even passers-by can see it. Drunkenness is in the eyes, the bloated cheek. Avarice is written in the hands and on the mouth. Lust is written in the eyes. There is not a libertine, a criminal, a bigot, a pervert who does not have his hate or his envy written in every inch of his body, every hidden gateway and alley of his blood, and every cell of his brain.

Since sin is in the blood, it must be poured out. As Our Lord willed that the shedding of the blood of goats and animals should prefigure His own atonement, so He willed further that sinful men should never again shed any blood in war or hate, but would invoke only His Precious Blood now poured out in Redemption. Since all sin needs expiation, modern man, instead of calling on the Blood of Christ in pardon, sheds his own brother’s blood in the dirty business of war. All this crimsoning of the earth will not be stopped until man in the full consciousness of sin begins to invoke upon himself in peace and pardon the Redemptive Blood of Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Every soul can at least dimly understand the nature of the struggle that took place on the moonlit night in the Garden of Gethsemane. Every heart knows something about it. No one has ever come to the twenties—let alone to the forties, or the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies of life—without reflecting with some degree of seriousness on himself and the world round about him, and without knowing the terrible tension that has been caused in his soul by sin. Faults and follies do not efface themselves from the record of memory; sleeping tablets do not silence them; psychoanalysts cannot explain them away. The brightness of youth may make them fade into some dim outline, but there are times of silence—on a sick bed, sleepless nights, the open seas, a moment of quiet, the innocence in the face of a child—when these sins, like spectres or phantoms, blaze their unrelenting characters of fire upon our consciences. Their force might not have been realized in a moment of passion, but conscience is biding its time and will bear its stern uncompromising witness sometime, somewhere, and force a dread upon the soul that ought to make it cast itself back again to God. Terrible though the agonies and tortures of a single soul be, they were only a drop in the ocean of humanity’s guilt which the Savior felt as His own in the Garden.

Finding the Apostles asleep the third time, the Savior did not ask again if they could watch one hour with Him; more awful than any reprimand was the significant permission to sleep: 

Sleep and take your rest hereafter;
     As I speak, the time draws near
When the Son of Man is to be betrayed into the hands of sinners.
                                               Matthew 26:45 

The fatigued followers were allowed to sleep on until the last moment. Their sympathy was needed no longer; while His friends slept, His enemies plotted. It is conceivable that there may have been an interval of time between His finding them asleep and the approach of Judas and the soldiers. That time they could continue to pass in sleep. The Hour which He had ardently yearned for was now at hand. In the distance was the regular tramp of Roman soldiers, the uneven and hurried treading of the mob and the temple authorities with a traitor in the front. 

Rise up, let us go on our way;
      Already, he that is to betray me is close at hand.
                                 Matthew 26:46

Bl. Fulton J. Sheen, Chapter 41 from Life of Christ (1958)

Benedict XVI - The Good Shepherd accompanies us in death

[T]hrough the figure of the shepherd the early Church could identify with existing models of Roman art. There the shepherd was generally an expression of the dream of a tranquil and simple life, for which the people, amid the confusion of the big cities, felt a certain longing. Now the image was read as part of a new scenario which gave it a deeper content: “The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want ... Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, because you are with me ...” (Ps 23 [22]:1, 4). The true shepherd is one who knows even the path that passes through the valley of death; one who walks with me even on the path of final solitude, where no one can accompany me, guiding me through: he himself has walked this path, he has descended into the kingdom of death, he has conquered death, and he has returned to accompany us now and to give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through. The realization that there is One who even in death accompanies me, and with his “rod and his staff comforts me”, so that “I fear no evil” (cf. Ps 23 [22]:4)—this was the new “hope” that arose over the life of believers.

Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (2007), 45-46

Benedict XVI - Most likely to go to Purgatory

There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are. 

Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re­emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge? Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease to matter? What else might occur? Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea of the differing impact of God's judgement according to each person's particular circumstances. He does this using images which in some way try to express the invisible, without it being possible for us to conceptualize these images—simply because we can neither see into the world beyond death nor do we have any experience of it. Paul begins by saying that Christian life is built upon a common foundation: Jesus Christ. This foundation endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us even in death. Then Paul continues: “Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Cor 3:12­15). In this text, it is in any case evident that our salvation can take different forms, that some of what is built may be burned down, that in order to be saved we personally have to pass through “fire” so as to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at the table of the eternal marriage ­feast.

Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (2007), 45-46

Lewis - Death is Unnatural; We fight it in this world although we know it's defeated in eternity

[W]e follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus—not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in His eyes than in ours. The nature which He had created as God, the nature which He had assumed as Man, lay there before Him in its ignominy; a foul smell, food for worms. Though He was to revive it a moment later, He wept at the shame; if I may here quote a writer of my own communion, ‘I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed of it.’ And that brings us again to the paradox. Of all men, we hope most of death; yet nothing will reconcile us to—well, its unnaturalness. We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder; and we know Who has defeated it. Because Our Lord is risen we know that on one level it is an enemy already disarmed; but because we know that the natural level also is God’s creation we cannot cease to fight against the death which mars it, as against all those other blemishes upon it, against pain and poverty, barbarism and ignorance. Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other.

From "Some Thoughts" in God in the Dock (1970)

 

Merton - Epiphany in Louisville on March 18, 1958

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.

Certainly these traditional values are very real, but their reality is not of an order outside everyday existence in a contingent world, nor does it entitle one to despise the secular: though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous.

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race!  To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstakes.

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers!

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.