The Book of the Holy Rosary: Part II, Chapter II. The Agony and Prayer of Jesus in the Garden
The Holy Scripture Narrative
“And going out, He went, according to His custom, to the Mount of Olives. And His disciples also followed Him. And when He was come to the place, He said to them: Pray, lest ye enter into temptation. And He was withdrawn away from them a stone’s cast; and kneeling down, He prayed, saying: Father, if Thou wilt, remove this chalice from me: but yet not My will, but Thine be done. And there appeared to Him an angel from heaven, strengthening Him. And being in an agony, He prayed the longer. And His sweat became as drops of blood, trickling down upon the ground. And when He arose up from prayer, and was come to His disciples, He found them sleeping for sorrow. And He said to them: Why sleep you? arise, pray, lest you enter into temptation. As He was yet speaking, behold a multitude; and he that was called Judas, one of the twelve, went before them, and drew near to Jesus, for to kiss Him. And Jesus said to him, Judas, dost thou betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” (St Luke xxii.)
We have seen in the preceding introduction how our Divine Saviour Jesus Christ, in undertaking to rebuild the city of God in our fallen world, had taken upon Himself a work of suffering which must terminate in death. We now prepare to follow Him through the five stages of His suffering which form the Five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Holy Rosary.
Jesus, then, we must call to mind, lest we should be tempted with the temptation to suffer a feeling of shame for what we are about to see Him suffer, is, as St Proclus writes, “In His Divine nature impassible,—that is, incapable of suffering; and it was only in obedience to the Eternal Father, and moved by mercy for us, that He took to Himself our nature, in which He has made Himself liable to sufferings. Christ did not advance in perfection till at length He became God. God forbid! But being God, as the faith teaches, moved by mercy He became man. We do not preach a man who was raised to be God, but we confess God who has taken our flesh.” “He took not on Him the nature of angels,” writes St Paul, “but of the seed of Abraham, that He might be made in all things like unto His brethren, to become a merciful and faithful High Priest before God, and a propitiation for the sins of the people” (Heb. ii. 16).
Jesus, therefore, in all the humiliations and indignities through which we are now about to follow Him, stands before us as a voluntary sufferer. “He was offered,” says Isaias, “because He willed it.” He came to suffer, not because fallen men had a claim to His coming, for they had no claim, but because He loved them, though they were lost, and desired to redeem them, and make them members of His eternal kingdom. “In this He commendeth His love,” writes St Paul, “because when as yet we were sinners, according to the time, Christ died for us” (Rom. v. 8). Who could have brought Him down from heaven into the hands of those from whom He suffered insults and death, except, out of love to us, He had been pleased to place Himself in their power, and to subject Himself to their will? In return, then, for this so great love, “Let us,” says St Paul, “go forth to Him without the camp bearing His reproach” (Heb. xiii. 13). Let us do this in faith, and we shall find for our reward that these Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary are full, as the Patriarch of Nicomedia writes, of a dread and a most august majesty: “To us they are titles of nobility; to the Jews who perpetrated them, they are horrible and terrific;—to them, they are despair; to us, they are radiant with hope;—to them, they are the punishment of their Deicide; to us, they are the gift of the knowledge of God;—to them, they are mourning; to us, joy and gladness. Theirs is the act of butchery; ours is the benefit. Far other is our part in them than theirs. They have rejected Him, we have received Him. They have cast the Heir out of the vineyard; we, by receiving Him, have been restored to life. They have the cross, we the salvation gained by the cross; they have the spear and the nails, we the immortality that has flowed forth from them” (Sermon on the words “Stabant juxta Crucem”).
In the outset of these Mysteries which record the humiliations and death of our Captain and Deliverer, we thus do well to fortify ourselves against any inroad of the temptation to a feeling of shame for the spectacle of apparent powerlessness and inability to help Himself which Jesus is about to exhibit. This is the mystery of the cross, as St Paul says, “to the Jews a scandal, to the Greeks foolishness, but to him that believeth the power of God.” We would not that our Divine Saviour should say to us, as He said to the disciples going to Emmaus, “O fools and slow of heart to believe all that is written in the prophets! Ought not Christ to suffer these things?” Therefore we will study to have the spirit of the Holy Apostle, who says, “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. vi. 14).
The drama, so to speak, using the word in a pious and religious sense, of the sufferings and humiliations which Jesus voluntarily undertook for our salvation, as set forth in the Mysteries of the Rosary, opens and exhibits our Divine Saviour falling to the ground in the garden of Gethsemane in a mental agony. His three chosen disciples, whom He had taken with Him that they might be witnesses of His humiliation, as they had been witnesses a few months before of His being transfigured in glory, are fallen fast asleep.
Jesus had withdrawn Himself from them about a stone’s-throw to pray; and in the midst of His prayer He falls into an agony of mind, and His agony of mind becomes so terrible that His sweat falls from Him in large drops of blood rolling to the ground. Wherefore this prayer? and wherefore this terrible agony? St Paul, writing to the Hebrews, after applying to Jesus the verse of the 109th Psalm, “Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec,” says, “Who in the days of His flesh, with strong cries and tears, offering up prayers and supplications to Him that was able to save Him from death, was heard for His reverence” (Heb. v. 7).
“Jesus,” writes St Anselm, commenting on the preceding words of St Paul, “as a true High Priest, offered up prayers. For we often read in the Gospels, particularly in St Luke, who describes Him in His character of Priest, that He went to pray. Now all that He did in the days of His flesh, all His prayers and supplications, were for men. All His life long He prayed His Father to grant Him the resurrection of His flesh, and our salvation; and at the approach of His Passion, He offered supplications—that is, the most humble and urgent entreaties—with the utmost devotion and affection of heart; when, falling into an agony, He prayed the longer, and His sweat became great drops of blood trickling down to the ground. And these prayers and supplications He offered, or rather He laid them before His Father, who came out as it were to meet Him and to hear Him. He offered them to Him who was able to save Him from death—that is, to raise Him from the dead,—to Him whom He knew to have power to save Him—that is, to make Him immortal and impassible, by delivering Him from death, so that neither His soul should remain in hell nor His flesh see corruption in the tomb. And these prayers He offered with strong cries and supplications—that is, with the most vehement and efficacious intention of a pious devotion; so that when He prayed more intently, shedding tears—for He is to be believed to have shed tears during that most earnest prayer when His sweat fell from Him as great drops of blood—then He was heard; for that which He asked He obtained in His resurrection. He was heard above all others who have prayed, since after the warfare of His Passion was finished, He was raised by the Father above every creature” (St Anselm, Commentary on Epistle to the Hebrews).
Jesus having terminated His personal ministry of going about from city to city and from village to village preaching the kingdom of God, by the act of instituting the adorable sacrifice of the New Law, and the perpetual priesthood of the Church, into whose hands He committed it, now enters upon the work of His Passion and death. And how does Jesus commence this great work of His Passion, which He undertakes of His own will for our sakes? As an example to thee, O Christian! which Thou shouldst be careful to follow in every work which Thou undertakest, Jesus begins the work of His Passion by prayer, “Sit down here,” He says, “while I go and pray yonder.” Canst thou then hope, O Christian! to spend any day to the honour and glory of God, in which thou hast not followed this example, by first praying for the blessing of God on all the works thou purposest to do. See here is Jesus, moved solely by love, about to undertake sufferings for thy sake, which are to end in His ignominious death! Is it not enough for Him that He is about to suffer, the Just One for the unjust? Consider well! No; it is not enough! He will first throw Himself before His Eternal Father. He will first assure Himself through prayer that He is about to suffer by the will of His Heavenly Father, and after this He will pray that His work may be blessed and prospered, to thy salvation. In this, O Christian! behold thy pattern, and never put thy hand to any work respecting which thou hast not first consulted God in prayer, and never proceed in any work except thou knowest that in proceeding with it thou art doing not thine own will but the will of God. Neither canst thou stop here; if thou followest the pattern of Jesus, thou must also earnestly pray that thy work may be blessed in the event. All these things Jesus did at the beginning of His most blessed Passion. Blessed is he that followeth in all his own works this most holy example!
Wherefore, then, this prayer of Jesus? For an example for all faithful people, and especially for thee, O Christian reader! saying to thee, “Watch and pray lest ye enter into temptation.”
But wherefore this great and terrible agony of Jesus? To prove to thee, O Christian! that Jesus had a true human soul, and was like unto thee in all things, sin only except. Jesus knows that His Gospel will cause thee to suffer in this present life, “for all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Tim. iii. 12), says the apostle of Christ; and, therefore, He is mercifully pleased to show Himself unto thee in His agony, that thou mayest see thy Master and Teacher under the influence of all the terror and affliction that the soul of man can suffer. He even bears to be blasphemed, as showing faintness where other martyrs have shown unquailing courage, that He might give thee this proof of His having compassion for all thy infirmities.
Jesus has come into a garden of olives, the symbol of peace and joy, to commence in it His expiation of the sin which Adam perpetrated in the garden of Eden. It is in a garden that Adam eats of the forbidden fruit with a perverse delight, and it is also in a garden that Jesus in agony and sore affliction receives the chalice of His Passion.
Jesus is very and true man; and while many martyrs by supernatural grace have been delivered from the fear of death, and have been able to mock and deride their tormentors in the midst of their sufferings, Jesus refuses to be delivered from any suffering to which human nature is subject, and therefore submits Himself to become subject to the fear of death, despising the shame. His soul foresees all and each of the torments,—the scourging, the buffetings, the insults, the mockeries, the blasphemies, and the death of the Cross, which He is about to suffer; and the fear and agony of death falls upon him. “Coepit pavere,” says St Mark,—“He began to be afraid.”
Jesus foresees the cowardice of His chosen Disciples, how on the first sight of danger they would all forsake Him and flee. He sees the obstinate and impenetrable malice of the Jews; the cowardly and miserable friendship of Pilate, that, after exposing Him to needless suffering and insult, will sacrifice Him in the end; the fickle ingratitude of the multitude, who, notwithstanding that they were so lately all on His side with their loud Hosannas to the Son of David, will soon cry with one voice, “Crucify Him!” and He is overwhelmed with weariness and disgust. “Coepit taedere,” says St Mark,—“He began to be weary.”
Jesus sees all the countless sins of the children of Adam, their sacrileges, murders, adulteries, calumnies, blasphemies, and all the horrible crimes that have been perpetrated, and will continue to be perpetrated in spite of His sufferings; and He elicits acts of contrition for them.
Jesus foresees all the countless torments of the martyrs and of the prelates and pastors of His Church, and all the sufferings that the rage of the devil and of impious men will soon inflict upon His faithful people; and His compassionate soul is overcome with grief. “Coepit moestus esse,” says St Matthew,—“He began to be sorrowful.”
Jesus foresees the obduracy and ingratitude of so many of His own people, to whom His bitter Passion and death will not bring salvation by reason of their own impenitence, and upon whom He will hereafter have to pass the sentence, “Go ye into the eternal fires prepared for the devil and his angels;” and His infinite love grieves over their impenitence. “My soul is sorrowful even unto death,” says the merciful Jesus. So the zealous Apostle, who thought he had the mind of Christ, cries out “that he would fain be anathema for his brethren.”
Wherefore, then, did Jesus submit Himself to this mortal agony? That He might give thee an example, O Christian! by which thou mightest learn not to be terrified through the weakness of the flesh from encountering the trials which God may be pleased to send to thee, but rather be emboldened to follow the example of thy Lord, who, notwithstanding the terrible agony to which He submitted for thy sake, still endured the Cross, despising the shame; and now, as the Apostle says, “sitteth at the right hand of God.”