Simple Thoughts on the Rosary: Sorrowful Mysteries: The Agony in the Garden
I.—Behold thou hast taught many, and thou hast strengthened the weary hands. ... But now the scourge is come upon thee and thou faintest: it hath touched thee and thou art troubled.—Job. iv.
Then Jesus came with them to a country place, which is called Gethsemane; and He said to His disciples: “Sit you here till I go yonder and pray.” And He taketh Peter and James and John with Him, and He began to fear and to be heavy. And He saith to them: “My Soul is sorrowful even unto death; stay you here and watch with Me.”
And He was withdrawn from them a stone’s cast; and kneeling down He prayed. And He fell upon His face, and He prayed that if it might be, the hour might pass from Him. And He said: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to Thee; remove this chalice from Me; but not what I will, but what Thou wilt.”
And He cometh to His disciples and findeth them asleep. And He said to Peter: “What! couldst thou not watch one hour with Me? Watch ye and pray that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
Again the second time He went and prayed, saying: “My Father, if this chalice may not pass away but I must drink it, Thy will be done.” And He cometh again and findeth them asleep, for their eyes were heavy. And leaving them He went away again, and He prayed the third time, saying the same words.
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.—(Matth. 26, Mark 14, Luke 22.)
A garden on the western slope of Olivet, close to the brook Kedron that flows through the valley of Jehoshaphat. Olive trees all about. The moon at the full, but the darkness beneath the trees impenetrable. To the north of the garden a grotto fourteen yards by eight or nine. Our Lord prostrate there as in an underground torture chamber. Eight of the Apostles near the garden gate. Peter, James, and John a stone’s throw from the scene of the Agony.
According to an ancient tradition, our Lord’s first prayer was made under the trees: He withdrew afterwards into the grotto.
II.—The sorrows of death encompassed Me, and the torrents of iniquity troubled Me.—Ps. xvii.
Ponder the words of the Evangelist describing our Lord’s state of soul in the Garden: “fear,” “heaviness,” “agony,” “sorrow unto death.”
Christ our Lord was not wont to make much of what He did or suffered. He speaks of His Passion as if it were something almost ordinary in the way of pain: “The Son of man shall be delivered to the Gentiles, and shall be mocked and scourged and spit upon and put to death.”—(Luke 18.) Hence we must understand Him literally when He speaks of Himself as “sorrowful even unto death.” He was enduring the pangs which come upon the soul at the last; when it is being torn from its lifelong companion, the body; when the beads of perspiration stand out thick on the brow of the strong man.
This death-sweat is the evidence of interior torture, and in particular of that awful form of torture—fear. We hear of criminals, on the eve of their execution, suffering in this way. But once or twice only has history recorded that the drops on the brow were blood, the body witnessing thus to the terror that filled the mind. What must have been the anguish of our Lord that night, when from every pore there issued drops of blood, a sweat so copious that after soaking His garments it trickled down upon the ground!
He was given up to a horror and dismay which God in His mercy has spared the vilest sinner. If we would realise it in some faint degree, we must consider what it was to which He offered Himself when He undertook to satisfy for our sins. He was “made sin for us,” in the forcible language of the Apostle.—(2 Cor. 5.) The guilt of our sins He could not take, but He took the result of that guilt. He, the All-Holy, drew to Himself all that is loathsome in human sin. He allowed himself to be clad in the foul garment from the contact of which He shrank inexpressibly, and bore the shame of appearing thus before His spotless Court in heaven.
We, on whom sin weighs so lightly, cannot understand what its touch was to Him. But we know that the sensitiveness of the spirit exceeds by far that of the dull flesh. That there is a shrinking from moral defilement, from ingratitude, from shame, more instinctive than any recoil of the senses. But not the most keenly sensitive of us can form any idea of the extent to which pain of body and mind told on the delicate organisation of the Sacred Humanity, framed with a view to its awful office of universal Victim, and supported by Omnipotence to bear the whole weight of the wrath of God, and to satisfy to the full the requirements of His justice.
True, He was offered because it was His own will (Isaias 53). He reminds us again and again that the offering He made in the first moment of His Incarnation was never retracted: “I do not resist: I have not gone back. I have given my body to the strikers, and my cheeks to them that plucked them: I have not turned away my face from them that rebuked me and spat upon me” (Isaias 50). He was so afraid we should see in the petition His anguish wrung from Him a reluctance to suffer for us, that it is almost by stealth we come to know of it. He withdrew even from His three privileged Apostles into the deepest and darkest recesses of the olive grove, into the concealment of the grotto, as if to hide from men the cry of His breaking Heart, which the Father alone would not misconstrue.
Oh yes, He suffered willingly. The very trembling of His spirit and of His flesh bore witness to His devotedness. Only the most intrepid love could have laid itself open to the torture of such fear. Only the absolute determination of His Will could have trusted itself to the violence of such an onslaught.
He suffered willingly. He knelt down to offer Himself for the sins of men, and in an instant the deluge was upon Him. Like a low-lying city whose dykes have given way, His Soul was flooded with the accumulated wickedness of the world. It seemed to identify itself with Him, to be all but His own: “the torrents of iniquity troubled Me” (Ps. 17). Yet there was no vagueness. Each sin stood out clear and distinct, my sin at such an hour, all the sins of my life. And all to be set down to His account, all to be punished in Him as if He were the sinner. O my Lord, what sounding can fathom the depth of Thy humiliation: “Glorious in holiness” (Exod. 15) to be “made sin” for me!
He saw the punishment of the sin He had taken on Himself, and He trembled. He who knows clearly the malice of sin, how should He not tremble at the sight of the expiation due for the sins of the world! The scourge, the nails, the cross, betrayal, mockery, desertion by God and man—all the torture that beginning now was to accumulate and intensify without a moment’s respite for soul or body till the last sob on Calvary, was present before Him, vivid and detailed. Well might His Heart quail. For He was true man as one of us. “I also have a heart as well as you” (Job 12). Helpless and unprotected, He lay upon His face, rehearsing all that was to come upon Him, realising, as His Divinity enabled Him to realise, what it was to have been accepted as the Victim for the world’s sin. God sustains His martyrs under their torments. Long before the moment when these reach the insupportable, His Providence interferes. Death or unconsciousness comes to the rescue of the fainting flesh. As our English martyrs stepped week after week into the torture chamber, and beheld the preparations, rendered more terrible by familiarity, their trust was in the fidelity of God. They knew in whom they had believed, and they were certain that He would keep that which they had committed to Him—the frail, shrinking flesh, the trembling will. And God never failed His servants. Not one was tried beyond his strength. But there was no such mercy for the Son. He must be stricken to extremity, beyond the point where human nature taxed to its utmost can endure. His Divinity will support Him, not for the alleviation, but for the protraction of His pain. Over the agony of death He is to pass—and live on. O sacred suffering Soul, what was my share in Thy intolerable anguish: what has been my return of love to Thee for bearing so much for me!