I don't want to experience what you experienced. But - how can I not? The root system of my heart is inextricably interlocked with your heart's roots, Jesus. If my whole body fell on that large flat rock, I could touch your writhing body, because I AM your body. You told me so; your weeping Body today is your weeping Church. I cannot escape watching with you these hours. Even if I shudder in guilt because sometimes I fall asleep.
I don't want to experience your agony - but haven't I already, just a bit? Don't I even now? How often do I throw myself down, questioning, afraid, begging God so that I won't receive a particular cross that is already weighing on me? Like the day we received the diagnosis that our son had only a year or so to live? You can teach me how to endure suffering, you with your loud cries which my cries echo again and again.
To really know you, Word of God, I have to enter the words that tell your story and be with you. I will walk and pray your story with Mark, Mark, your disciple at whose mother's house you ate your last supper, Mark who was the good friend of Peter. Peter was there at this garden, one of the three you take to be nearest to you. Peter saw and heard it all, and told Mark, not holding back any words. Not holding back any of your pain or the darkness you entered.
I can see you and see your friends praying and singing hymns, walking to this garden; your friends have full stomachs, yet they're anxious because of your mysterious, somber words the last few days, hinting that something bad - death - is coming. No one is surprised that you want to come here to pray. You've always taken time to pray alone, either here, or in the desert, or on lonely mountain sides. When you arrive, you tell most of your friends to sit a distance from you while you pray. Do you know that they aren't ready for the kind of anguished prayer you need to pray? They who have questioned and misunderstood you every step of the way, who wait with full stomachs ready to fall asleep?
But you bring Peter, James, and John to be closer to you, to watch and hear everything that will happen, even to sense this darkness descending on you.
For, you are beginning to be troubled and distressed. You say to them, "My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch."
Do you trust these three to understand you better? To be true friends in solidarity with you in your most extreme anguish? To give you support, which you humanly need so badly right now?
How humble you are, to let them see you like this, almost falling apart in terror and anguish. You don't keep up a "false front" with these friends.
Mark writes in Greek, and couldn't use stronger words than these - "troubled and distressed" - to describe your mental condition the way Peter, James, and John see you. You're in such deep anguish that you're close to a nervous breakdown. You're in shock, overwhelmed by dread, you who have always been in control of situations and of your emotions. You're sorrowful, you say, even to death. You must feel as if this pain is going to kill you, break your heart wide open.
Maybe you'd even rather die than face what you're facing.
You know what's coming, Jesus. Know because no one has ever been better than you at reading the signs of the times. You have spoken out forcefully to the spiritual leaders of your people about their hypocrisy, healed people on the Sabbath, a day on which they have rigidly proscribed that no "work" is to be done (as if healing were work!) You've told the people that God is their Father, whom they can personally approach in prayer. You've hurled over tables in the Temple and thrown out the money-changers, crying out that your Father's house is a house of prayer. You've even said that the Father and you are one. With every word and deed you've been a threat to their power, authority, and legalistic, even cruel, interpretation of your Father's Will for His children.
So you know they loathe you and plot against you with the Roman occupiers. Only your death, your absolute removal from the scene, will satisfy them now.
More than that: you know the reasons for which you've taken on flesh. Not to reconcile your Father - and our Father - to us, for the Father, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, has never turned His face away from us but stays out in the road waiting for us to return. God is Mercy Itself! But you've chosen to reconcile us to God, bring us back to God, because we have traveled so far away from the One Who made us. Now our only way home to our Father's embrace is for you to deliver us by by your self-sacrifice of total, unconditional love. God isn't our enemy! We've made ourselves into enemies of God by our hostile rebellion. Nothing other than the unconditional love-action of God's death for our sakes - for it is God-in-Christ Who dies for us - could ever convince us of how much God loves us, could be the act of atonement - at-one-ment - to unite us with God once more. Our sins have splintered us from Him, from you, Jesus, from the Holy Spirit. Our sins are about to lay you down on the cross for our sake.
Humanly and divinely you know that you'll have to die, and on a cross. Your own leaders are conspiring with Rome, and you've seen the Roman crucifixes lining the roadsides, heard their bloody, tortured occupants' asphyxiated cries. Sin always puts Love to death. You know the words and stories of the prophets who came before you, and the grisly deaths that all of them endured at the hands of their own people. You hear Jeremiah's anguished cry even now - the cry of the man who knew what his fate would be, and feared it, but still had to keep speaking God's truth, in spite of mockery and torture and possible death -
"I will speak in his (God's) name no more -
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary, holding it in,
I cannot endure it...
Yes, I hear the whisperings of many...
All those who were my friends
are on the watch for any misstep of mine....
But the Lord is with me, like a mighty champion..."
Right now, the ones who claim to be your friends are dozing, finding it hard to keep their eyes open, and God the mighty champion seems far away, hidden from you by consuming darkness. You don't pristinely, neatly kneel in this prayer. You separate yourself a little from these three, and fall on the ground, praying that if it were possible the hour of such a terrible death would pass you by. You moan it - "Abba, Father, all things are possible to You. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what You will."
Jesus, you are so close to your Father! Your faith is so strong, even in this darkness! You are telling your Father just how strong your faith is - you KNOW that all things are possible for God, your Beloved Father. This isn't bargaining. It's telling your Father how well you know Him and His mighty works. It's a fact, pure and simple.
You fear drinking the cup of suffering, of wrath. "Wrath" is not the punishment of God, but rather God giving us over, during our lives, to our experience of the intrinsic and fatal consequences of sin. The final, awful consequence of our sins is death. "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 6:23)" You understand, Jesus, that sin is like a crippling, venomous bite from a serpent - and only you, Jesus, the Great Physician,can heal us from sin and its venomous, fatal effects on our lives. But - you fear!
What do you fear the most? I'm sure your body shrinks from the whips, the nails, the thorns, the slow, awful asphyxiation. But your soul fears more. Your soul fears what will happen in the darkness of dying. In the darkness of dying, you will not be able to sense your Father's Presence, even though He is there. You will feel alone, bereft, abandoned by Him even when, like the Sun behind the clouds, He is there. This is what you fear the most - this terrible sense of aloneness and separation from your Father. This will be the greatest pain and horror of your Passion, the greatest sacrifice you make for us.
Yet you will obey your Father always. You cry out "But now what I will but what You will." The Father and you are one! You will always will what the Father wills because you have the same heart, and that heart beats for us, for poor, pitiful, sinful us. It always has. It always will.
Over and over again, in the weakness and paralysis of your fear and grief, you fall on the ground, try to pick yourself up, keep collapsing. Pray this prayer.
Over and over again. Periodically you return to find Peter, James, and John asleep. Perhaps watching your agony, they are exhausted from grief at the sight of your pain. You say to Peter, "Simon, are you sleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."
Poor Peter! Jesus had renamed you "Peter," the "Rock." But now he calls you "Simon," again, as if he's saying "Have you gone back to being 'Simon'? To you old ways?" You haven't kept watch with him.
Jesus, I know how often I have not kept watch with you! Not been "with" you in your Body when you've been sick, suffering, starving, depressed, suicidal, dying; when you've lived in an addict, a prisoner, a gay man, a Muslim, a dying parishioner, a lonely friend - because I've insulated myself, not visited, not spoken out, not called, not shown support, not contributed to your welfare. My spirit is willing My flesh is weak. Perhaps you'd ask me if I deserve that name you've given me - "Christian"!
Finally you return a third time and say to them "Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It is enough. The hour has come. Behold, the Son of Man is to be handed over to sinners. Get up, let us go. See, my betrayer is at hand."
In your words, I see a difference in you. What has happened? This is you, Jesus, the confident one, the one in control of his emotions. Even serene. What has happened to the man collapsing from grief and fear?
The Father has heard you, hasn't He? He has made you ready for what is to come. Strengthened you with His Love. You have shared your human heart with Him and He has heard you because of your reverent faith. He has given you Himself once more. Once more you are living in the Light. You will enter wholly willingly into your Passion - and discover Resurrection - for yourself and for us.
You, God, Father, Son, and Spirit, have done this for me in my praying, over and over. I thank you for all the times I have wept, crushed by fear, grief, and anxiety, steeped in darkness. And slowly, subtly, the darkness has shifted. Finally lifted. Light and serenity have filled me. How great You are, my God. How merciful to me.
How often it is you, Jesus, in me, strengthening my heart to go forward, to say "Yes" to my Father, to shoulder my cross. For you have fallen down, paralyzed by anguish and the fear of what is to come. You have suffered to a depth that is beyond me to understand. But - you understand me. In "One Thousand Gifts," a heartbroken Ann Voskamp, bending over her moaning, wounded son, about to receive surgery on his mutilated hand, muses,
"I can't read the cryptic, indecipherable text of injured farm boys, anemic marriages, terminal mamas...war, famine, disease. What do all the words written in the world really spell out?....To read His message in moments, I'll need to read His passion on the page; wear the lens of the Word to read His writing in the world. Only the Word is the answer to rightly reading the world, because the Word has nail-scarred hands that cup our face close, wipe away the tears running down, has eyes to look deep into our brimming ache, and whisper, 'I know. I know.' The Passion on the page is a Person, and the lens I wear of the Word is not abstract idea but the eyes of the God-Man who came and knows the pain."
As we approach and finally enter Holy Week, friends, enter into Jesus' life. Enter his Passion in the pages of the Gospels, and encounter the life-changing Person he is - for you. For his heart beats for you. It always has, and it always will.