The Message of Gethsemane
by John Lowrey, Parishioner and Nullity Coordinator | 04/03/2016 | Weekly ReflectionA week after Easter, John Lowery reflects on the sacrifice Jesus willingly accepted and what it reveals about who exactly Jesus is.
How many times in our lives do we make the small, simple decision of which way to go, which way to turn our feet? On one night, a man made that same decision, and the fate of all of mankind rested on his choice. The man had lain on the ground and prayed, and now he pressed his fingers into the sandy soil of the garden, and stood up. We can be sure that he could hear the sounds of soldiers coming toward him. He knew what was about to happen to him, to his body: he was going to give himself over to others to do with as they will and there can be almost nothing more abhorrent to a human than that thought; they would put their hands on him to take him and torture him and kill him. Not only did he have that reality to face, but he had the fate and the weight of the entire 4 world on his shoulders. Who was this poor soul?
Fulton Sheen tells us:“Here for the moment was the loneliest, saddest soul the world has ever had living in it, the Lord Himself.” So many times in the gospel accounts do we read that Jesus “slipped through the crowd unseen” or that “he hid himself from the people;” he could have just stepped into the shadows and walked away, but he did not. His hour had come now, and he had fully accepted his Father’s will, so he turned toward the entrance to Gethsemane and met the angry mob calmly, in complete possession of who he was and what he must do.
This most pivotal of movements was preceded by the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane and it is in the description of these moments where we get the most clear understanding of how the two natures, human and divine were joined in the person of Jesus. It is important to see this passage in context.
Mark’s account of Jesus’ agony in the garden is actually two moving scenes in one. In the first (vv. 33-36), Mark’s readers are privileged to witness Jesus’ profound humanity, as he is over- whelmed by fear and sadness at the prospect of his imminent death. They also recognize in his final acceptance of his Father’s will the ultimate act of his loving humanity....The second scene (vv. 37-42) focuses the reader’s attention on the disciples who fall asleep as Jesus struggles in prayer.
This twofold message is important to us, as it was to the early followers of Jesus: “This story was told over and over again in the early Church for its obvious apologetic and edifying value: Jesus’ acknowledgement of his Father’s will contrasted with the slumbering disciples, unaware that ‘the hour had come’” (Brown).
At his most human, Jesus says to the three “My soul is very sorrowful, even unto death....” “Jesus’ distress is so great that he reaches the point of wanting to die; death would have been a welcome relief” (Brown). These words that Jesus speaks to his disciples are not without significance for they come from Psalm 43:5 and begin a pattern of his using the Psalms throughout his Passion. Pope Benedict XVI explains the importance of this:
Jesus uses passages from the Psalms to speak to himself and to address the Father. Yet these quotations have be- come fully personal; they have become the intimate words of Jesus himself in his agony. It is he who truly prays these psalms; he is their real subject. Jesus’ utterly personal prayer and his praying in the words of faithful, suffering Israel are here seamlessly united.
And, while this message has significance in salvation history, it remains one of ultimate personal agony: “One can dimly guess the psychological horror of the progressive stages of fear, anxiety, and sorrow which prostrated Him even before a single blow had been struck” (Sheen). St. Thomas More has given us one of the most poignant, yet clear understand- ings of the meaning of these words:
But when he had gone on a little way he suddenly felt such a sharp and bitter attack of sadness, grief, fear, and weariness that he immediately uttered, even in their presence, those anguished words which gave expression to his over-burdened feelings: ‘My soul is sad unto death.’ For a huge mass of troubles took possession of the tender and gentle body of our most holy Saviour. He knew that his ordeal was now imminent and just about to overtake him: the treacherous betrayer, the bitter enemies, binding ropes, false accusations, slanders, blows, thorns, nails, the cross and horrible tortures stretched out over many hours.
What he dreaded at this moment was human and physical, but it was also much more: “What Our Blessed Lord contemplated in this agony was...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” (Sheen).
Jesus asked “that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.” “The possibility depends on his Father’s will. The hour may reflect the eschatological use of hora... it is the hour of destiny for Jesus in his passage to the Father through death” (Brown). As Mark records it, the prayer of Jesus is personal, plaintive, and completely loyal: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.” The first word in this prayer is significant: “In most Semitic languages, the word Abba means ‘father’ (or more affectionately ‘papa or ‘daddy.’)
According to the Christian Gospels, Jesus used the word ‘Abba’ when praying to God, which reflected a level of intimacy unheard of in the Old Testament era.” “Jesus uses it (the term Abba) to address God the Father and underscore their intimate relationship” (Curtis). The first part of his prayer is a very human one, that he may be spared the terrible physical and mental agony to which he is about to be subjected. The image that he uses in his prayer is that of a cup passing him by, rather than his being forced to drink it, and this choice of images is no accident. The Last Supper was the Passover meal that he had just had with his disciples, and “Jesus had cut the Passover short before it was finished. He still had one cup to drink – the ‘cup of con- summation.’ Now he was praying to his Father to take away this cup” (Hahn)
What is important about the simple prayer of Our Lord? It contains the human entreaty for he desires and also contains the complete surrender to the will of God (his Father). “Thus he expresses the horror that death represented for his human nature” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 159) And yet, “Even in the horror of Gethsemane Jesus knows God as his Father, expresses full confidence in him, and finally his willingness to face his destiny alone, if this be the Father’s will” (Brown) With his usual comprehensiveness, Bishop Sheen summarizes the cohesion of the two opposing forces in the one man and the one moment:
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.
In verse 37, Mark records the first time that Jesus returns to find his three friends sleeping, and when he does, he says to Peter: “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour?"
In verse 38, Jesus gives his sleepy friends a commandment and a warning. The commandment that he gives them is to “watch and pray that you may not enter into the temptation.” “The sense is that of ‘the trial’ facing all men in the struggle between God and Satan, of which the agony and the passion are the climax” (Sheen). The commandment that Jesus gives is directly related to the warning that “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” and we can interpret this as “Jesus here refers to man’s inner struggle where the flesh, wounded by sin, is constantly at war with the spirit” (Curtis). Jesus gives them a warning that he understands more perfectly than any human, for he is the Divine Spirit, incarnate in human flesh. He has seen the weakness of the flesh as a man, and now he has taken it on in all of its foulness as he bears the burden of all sin. “The spirit is drawn to what is good yet found in conflict with the flesh, inclined to sin. Everyone is faced with this struggle, the full force of which Jesus accepted on our be- half...” (Catholic Study Bible). A second time he finds them sleeping, and then a third, “On the great Day of the Lord, the disciples fail” (Dauphinais & Levering). And, finally, he tells them that “the hour has come; the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.”
The exegesis of the text unveils the most basic event that transpired in the Garden of Gethsemane: Jesus accepted the mission of his Father and that is to take on the sin of the world, and to endure suffering and death in order to redeem mankind. “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” (Sheen). Underlying this event is an even more profound movement, a confrontation of wills that enables the ultimate decision. St. Thomas Aquinas begins the explanation of this most significant psychological event:
In saying, “Let this cup pass from me,” He indicated the movement of His lower appetite and natural desire, whereby all naturally shrink form death and desire life. And in saying “Nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt” He gives expression to the movement of His higher reason which looks on all things as comprised under the ordination of divine wisdom.
So, Aquinas seems to be saying that within Jesus there is a movement. “As a result of his godly fear, Jesus was made perfect and became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.”
But what is really happening here? Is Jesus talking to Himself? Is he arguing with Himself? Pope Benedict then continues the explanation:
The two parts of Jesus’ prayer are presented as the confrontation between two wills: there is the ‘natural will’ of the man Jesus, which resists the appalling destructiveness of what is happening and wants to plead that the chalice pass from him; and there is the ‘filial will’ that abandons itself totally to the Father’s will. ...What does this mean? What is ‘my’ will as opposed to ‘your’ will? Who is speaking to whom? Is this the Son addressing the Father? Or the man Jesus addressing the triune God? Nowhere in sacred Scripture do we gain so deep an insight into the inner mystery of Jesus as in the prayer on the Mount of Olives.
There are two wills involved in this movement because there are two natures; Jesus had a human nature that was completely human and a divine nature that is completely divine. So, here in Gethsemane is where the two wills, the two natures come together in perfect unity. So, what is this prayer?
If Christ was God, in what sense was He praying to God? It is idle to try to avoid the difficulty by answering that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity was speaking to the other two Persons. Assuredly He was, but this converse within the divine nature is not the prayer we have in mind here, nor indeed is it a prayer at all. Christ also prayed as we pray, as the creature prays to the Creator. And here precisely is the difficulty. What is done in the nature is done by the Person. To say that Christ prayed as the creature prayed to the Creator is to say that God the Son prayed the prayer of the creature. It is difficult, but it is precise (Sheed).
We can say then that in Gethsemane, when Jesus’ prayer was answered, and he accepted his Father’s will absolutely, his human will and his divine will were united in that mission and in that moment, and so his human nature was perfectly united with his divine nature. “Thus the prayer ‘not my will but yours’ is truly the Son’s 6 prayer to the Father through which the natural human will is completely subsumed into the ‘I’ of the Son. Indeed, the Son’s whole being is expressed in the ‘not I but you’ – in the total abandonment of the ‘I” to the ‘you’ of God the Father” (Ratzinger). The prayer is the completion of Christ’s human development in that through it, his will is perfectly conformed to that of the Father, which is in essence to say that his human nature and will are perfectly con- formed to his divine nature and will. “It is there- fore quite mistaken on the part of some theologians to suggest that the man Jesus was ad- dressing the Trinitarian God in the prayer on the Mount of Olives. No, it is the Son speaking here having subsumed the fullness of man’s will into himself and transformed it into the will of the Son.”
One particular Friday morning, when I was praying the rosary and thinking of the Agony in the Garden, I had a clear understanding of how those minutes were the process of Christ’s divine nature and his human nature becoming perfectly united. When I thought about this later, I was not sure if it was an acceptable idea, but then a few weeks later Pope Benedict’s second volume on Jesus came out and I found validation of my thoughts in his chapter on Gethsemane. Now that I have studied the text thoroughly, I am completely convinced of my original thought. So, what does it mean? To me, it is a beautiful message because Jesus’ human nature became perfectly divine when he conformed his will to the Father; and not only that, but this perfect union occurred when he completely gave himself to save mankind.
This showed me the perfect essence of God, what God is. God of course is eternal, omniscient, omnipresent...He is big! But, in His most perfect essence, He is what Jesus became when he became perfectly united, he is perfectly giving, he is small and gentle. We can almost see this after Jesus has prayed in the garden; not just in the obvious act of giving his body as sacrifice, but in his entire demeanor. He says nothing, but submits quietly. He protects his disciples. He stops violence. He for- gives his torturers from the cross. The first thing he says to the Apostles is Peace. He calls them his children when he has breakfast on the shore. This knowledge gives me a perfect person to emulate.
There is an important message in this passage that needs to be taught, and that is that we can be worse than the sleeping Apostles. Listen to what Pope Benedict XVI says about this message in the passage:
Across the centuries, it is the drowsiness of the disciples that opens up possibilities for the power of the Evil One. Such drowsiness deadens the soul, so that it remains undisturbed by the power of the Evil One at work in the world and by all the injustice and suffering ravaging the earth. In its state of numbness the soul prefers not to see all this; it is easily persuaded that things cannot be so bad, so as to continue in the self-satisfaction of its own comfortable existence. Yet this deadening of souls, this lack of vigilance regarding both God’s closeness and the looming forces of darkness, is what gives the Evil One power in the world.
I hope that we are able to see the profound truth in the Pope’s message and the Message of Gethsemane.
Endnotes
-David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, (Nashville: Anchor Bible, 1992), 932.
-Raymond E Brown., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and Roland E. Murphy, eds. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999), 55.
-Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth.: from the Entrance Into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius Press, 2011), 153.
-New World Encyclopedia, online edition.
-Catholic Study Bible, The., (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1345.
-Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering. Holy People, Holy Land: a Theological Introduction to the Bible. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2005)
-Scott Hahn, Understanding the Scriptures, Semester ed. (Woodridge, Ill.: Midwest Theological Forum, 2010), 229.
-Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering. Holy People, Holy Land: a Theological Introduction to the Bible. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2005), 160.
-St. Thomas Aquinas, Light of Faith: the Compendium of Theology, (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Inst Pr, 1993), 301.
Frank J. Sheed, Theology and Sanity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 248.
-St. Thomas Aquinas, Light of Faith: the Compendium of Theology, (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Inst Pr, 1993