Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives, a place he has hallowed by many nights spent in prayer to his Father. Taking aside Peter, James, and John, he reveals to them his anguish, and seeks solace in their company: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here and watch with me” (Mt 26:38). Yet he bids them watch from afar, as he goes to face what must be faced alone.
Jesus’ hour
Our Lord, even in his human knowledge, had long known the end he was to meet. He had revealed this to his disciples on three separate occasions in the Passion predictions of the Synoptic Gospels (Mt 16:21; Mk 8:31; Lk 9:22). The divine plan for our salvation requires the suffering and death of the God-man. Looking toward this end just days earlier, the Lord had confidently rejected any proposal of clemency: “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ No, for this purpose I have come to this hour” (Jn 12:27). But now that his end has come, Jesus appears to resist his Father’s plan: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” (Mt 26:39) Why then does Jesus now make this prayer?
Though a divine person, Jesus, as man, shrinks from death in the natural instinct for self-preservation. Agony is not only the intense suffering which precedes death; it refers first to the struggle with the evil of one’s own death—human mortality—with which every dying mortal contends. Suffering and death are the consequences of sin, and since Jesus was entirely free from the very possibility of sin, these would have been all the more repellant to his sensitive soul.
God’s will and our redemption
In the Garden, the Lord experienced the emotions of sadness, grief, weariness, and fear surging up like waves to envelop him. Not only the reality of physical pain and death loomed large: in the Garden Jesus tasted the far more bitter cup of moral suffering. Rejected by his people, abandoned by his apostles, betrayed by his friends, he bore already the burden of the world’s sins to be crucified in his flesh. Not once, but three times, did the horror of his impending Passion impel Jesus to pray that this cup might pass.
Yet each time he asked this of his Father, he put his request humbly in his Father’s hands: “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Mt 26:39). Jesus prays as he taught us to pray: Thy will be done. Though his soul felt acutely the rising emotions as he approached the consummation of all human suffering, he faced death with supreme courage, freely accepting this suffering in conformity with the Father’s will. Moreover, the eternal plan for our redemption was not his Father’s alone; it was equally the will of God the Son. But this makes no less heroic Christ’s embracing of the cross. His divine will does not overwhelm his human will; rather, the one Lord saves us as God and as man, through his two wills, divine and human, acting in harmony: “Christ’s human will ‘does not resist or oppose but rather submits to his divine and almighty will’” (CCC 475, cf. 612). It was not the Father’s plan that Jesus resisted, but rather death; even this he overcame by his matchless act of love for his Father and for us.
The divinized will
By his initial resistance of the cup, the Lord teaches us an important truth about his humanity: he possessed it entirely, including weakness, vulnerability, and fear; he was like us in all things save sin (Heb 4:15). The wonder of this truth is that he was thus able to take up and sanctify all of human nature, from our physical passions to our mind and will, overcoming weakness by humbly choosing obedient love. “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (Heb 5:8-9).
Like the human will of Jesus, our wills, too, can be “divinized” by grace: perfectly human and perfectly free. When we embrace God’s will, especially in temptation and suffering, we are conformed to the obedient Christ, our Savior and exemplar, who draws us into his own excellence. Pope St. John Paul II put it thus: “The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom: he lives it fully in the total gift of himself, and calls his disciples to share in his freedom” (Veritatis splendor, 85).
©Magnificat Holy Week 2000
