2. Jesus' agony in the garden

     For as long as I can remember, I have been deeply moved by the report that, when Jesus went to the garden, he took Peter, James and John apart with him and asked them to watch and pray.  He obviously wanted understanding friends to be with him as he brought his anguish to God, but they fell asleep. In the meantime, he underwent an agony so violent that blood burst through his veins.  In that agony, he asked that "this chalice might pass from him,” but echoed the words of his Mother in the story of the Annunciation:  "Not my will, but thine be done." Then, when he returned to his sleeping friends, he asked, plaintively, "Could you not watch an hour with me?"

     In my youth and in my early years as a priest. I went to Jesus when I was achingly lonely, anguishing over wounds, in need of comforting, pleading for help in remaining involved with individuals I would gladly exclude from my life, and hoping to yield to God’s will as he did.  Recalling his agony in the garden, I knew that he would understand.

     As I probed the implications of an incarnational theology, I began to see the events remembered on Holy Thursday and Good Friday as a single process. Thus, Jesus’ command to reenact the Last Supper instituted a ritual designed to assure us of his continuing presence with us, despite the cruel crucifixion.  In each reenactment, he reaffirms the Covenant sealed at his birth, when he became fully human in order to share intimately in the lives of all human beings.

     In the garden, he glimpsed the existential implications of the promise encoded in the Eucharist.  In sum, his promise to entrust himself to anyone who receives Communion committed him to intimate involvement in the pain as well as the joy they experience. And if he loved with an ever faithful love, he would have to be willing to seek even those who inflicted horrendous pain on other individuals.

     When I began to see the Agony as a willingness to empathize with the pain of every human being throughout the ages, I was more awed by the Yes in the Garden than by Jesus’ submission to a cruel scourging, a crown of thorns, and a humiliating and painful death on the cross.  But I also became convinced that regarding the Agony in the Garden and the Crucifixion as discrete events distorted the meaning of both.

     Perhaps the most staggering insight came on the feast of St. Francis. I had long been awed by Francis’ intimate involvement with Jesus, but I had also been uncomfortable with his apparent desire to suffer as Jesus did.  Frankly, I tended to dismiss it as a motivation inspired by an ascetical theory that I could easily reject.  (In that vein, I could never understand how he could treat everything in nature with profound respect except his body.)

     On this feast day, I realized that, in his intimate involvement with Jesus, Francis longed to comfort Jesus in his Agony.  As a child of his age, he lived out that involvement in part by inflicting pain on himself through fasting.

     The point of this reflection:  I had often imagined Jesus undergoing the agony in the garden to aid me in bringing my anguished struggles to him, the wounded Healer.  Until that day, I had never recreated the scene in my imagination with the intent of watching with him, as one of his disciples.  I could tell myself that I went through his agony with him when I did so with wounded individuals who came to me.  After all, he assures me that whatever do to them, I do to him.  Now, though, I want to converse directly with him, as I would with them, to hear his cry for human companionship in the agony he continues to experience because of his intimate involvement with all who suffer.

     (Addendum:  The pain Jesus experienced was the price of being human and loving with an ever faithful love, not a price paid to divine justice in reparation for human sinfulness.)