St. Alphonsus Liguori tells of this legend: “St. Thomas Aquinas was one day paying a visit to St. Bonaventure, and asked him from what book he had drawn all the beautiful lessons he had written. St. Bonaventure showed him the image of the Crucified, which was completely blackened by all the kisses that he had given it, and said, ‘This is my book whence I receive everything that I write; and it has taught me whatever little I know.’” Yet, as is the case with Scripture, Christ himself is a book which must be read in the spirit and mind of the Church, in continuity with the tradition that has been and is being painstakingly traced out through the ages. Apart from this formation, ongoing so long as we have life and breath, we risk novel interpretations, strange notions which come of thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.
Too great an emphasis, for example, on the physical sufferings of the Passion can lead us astray. Victimization by torture and brutality is not unique to our Lord (although even his bodily nature was supremely sensitive). It is Christ’s interior disposition, and with it, his totally personal spiritual agony, which we must set before us. Fr. Rainero Cantalamessa, now Cardinal, preacher to the papal household under three popes, names this “the death of the heart, which precedes and gives meaning to the death of the body. It has its culminating moment in Jesus’s agony in Gethsemane.”
“Meditating on this,” Cantalamessa tells us, “we lose that slightly materialistic feeling about the Lord’s passion being an ensemble of horrifying torments, or a script written and learned in advance from the Scriptures, which Jesus performs virtually unperturbed. When we approach this mystery we must indeed remove the sandals from our feet, for it is holy; we must be of humble and contrite heart.” Indeed, Pope Francis – to whom Cardinal Cantalamessa preaches! – says, “We dread in some sense to approach what Jesus went through at that hour; we tread softly as we enter that inner space where the destiny of the world was decided.”
Then, after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. We can suppose that what Jesus and his disciples sang were the Hallel Psalms (113-18 and 136), used to conclude the Passover meal. These texts of praise and victory speak of Israel’s history of deliverance, of exodus and liberation… and of how the stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. As an aside, there is even historical evidence to conjecture at certain of the musical tones which would have been known to Christ – a truly awesome thought, the beauty alone of which could reduce one to ashes: the Word singing, in a unique human voice, most sublime among the entire cosmos.
For St. Peter Julian Eymard, it was completely natural that they would be singing; the Eucharist had just been confected. Jesus had come “from Bethany to the Cenacle; he was full of joy; he quickened his step; he could not get there soon enough” – as one of the Hallel Psalms sings, The mountains leapt like rams, and the hills, like yearling sheep. For this entire undertaking, “he appointed the time: the last hour[s] of his life he could freely dispose of.” And so Jesus goes out into the night, a night darker than that of Israel’s release from Egypt, when there was such darkness that one can feel it, and this hero among martyrs is still singing. St. Peter Julian tells us: “Love welcomes sacrifice.”
Jesus prays, and sings, the Psalms – the new David, the David for all peoples, destined to be king, not of the nation, but of the universe. Benedict writes: “When he prays, he is completely in union with Israel, and yet he is Israel in a new way: the old Passover now appears as a great foreshadowing. The new Passover, though, is Jesus himself, and the true ‘liberation’ is taking place now, through his love that embraces all mankind.” And thus does this liberation come; from another of the Hallel Psalms: I was caught by the cords of death; the snares of Sheol had seized me; I felt agony and dread.
We have already noted that Jesus came to the Cenacle, the upper room which housed the Last Supper, from Bethany, where he had been staying. As an observant Jew, he is obliged to keep this, the Passover night – the night of his Passover – within Jerusalem; the boundaries of the city were customarily extended for the holiday, to accommodate the throng of pilgrims. The garden on the Mount of Olives to which the Lord goes forth is outside the city, but is reckoned as Jerusalem for the purposes of the sacrifice. Christ the Eternal High Priest, whose body is the new Temple – Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up – chose to carry out the whole of His sacrifice in Jerusalem.
Then they came to a place named Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” The disciples of Gethsemane are the selfsame disciples of Tabor: Peter, James and John; Gethsemane and Tabor mutually shed light on the single reality by which suffering and glory are trans-suffused, just as the Passion itself is inseparable from its animating love. “This is so true,” Cantamessa tells us, “that John, in formulating the paschal mystery, rather than say Jesus ‘died for our sins,’ says he died ‘for love’: Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end (Jn. 13:1), and again, No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s own life for one’s friends (Jn. 15:13).”
And yet Jesus, who spent a Lenten journey in the wilderness, who retired from the disciples to pray in strict solitude, here asks them to remain – and in this we gain a presentiment of Christ’s impending doom. Each of us, no doubt, finding ourselves utterly powerless against loss or grief or pain or sickness, has known the deep, deep desire – the need – for accompaniment. “The events… in Gethsemane,” Pope St. John Paul Il writes, “introduce a fundamental change into the whole course of the revelation of love and mercy in the messianic mission of Christ. The one who went about doing good and healing and curing every sickness and disease now himself seems to merit the greatest mercy and to appeal for mercy, when he is arrested, abused, condemned, scourged, crowned with thorns, when He is nailed to the cross and dies amidst agonizing torments. It is then that he particularly deserves mercy from the people to whom he has done good, and he does not receive it.” The sainted pontiff then astounds us: “God also reveals His mercy when He invites man to have ‘mercy’ on His only Son, the crucified one.”
And they could not stay awake; they could not even keep their eyes open. The flesh is weak. That part of us which is tapped into the here and now only, which resists transcendence, is numbed and dazed in the presence of this suffering; to its narrowly circumscribed bios, agony is irrelevant; it tunes out and shuts down. This is the bowl of staggering, to be drunk to the depths.
Jesus went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to where there was a garden, into which he and his disciples entered. In his Gospel account, St. John is very intentional in his use of the imagery of a garden. At a later point the evangelist conveys: Now in the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had yet been buried. This is a hearkening back to Eden. The narrative of the Creation and, alas, the Fall, is being presented as recapitulated in Christ. In much earlier eras of Christianity, what was called the Antiochene school made a focus of just this interpretation, exalting in Christ the New Adam. Yet how unlike to Paradise is this Garden of Olives: the literally “winter-flowing” Kidron is fed only by the cold rains of the season, just as the Hebrew Qidron derives from a word indicating darkness.
I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be dispersed. Jesus invokes the dark prophecy of Zechariah; here is the time and place of betrayal, denial and shaken faith. He immediately follows with a prophecy of hope: But after I have been raised up, I shall go before you to Galilee. As a post-exilic prophet, Zechariah’s concern was precisely the repatriation of a scattered people and the rebuilding of the Temple in its midst. At the conclusion of the book of Zechariah we find this: On that day God’s feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which is opposite Jerusalem to the east. The Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west by a very deep valley, and half of the mountain will move to the north and half of it to the south. Our Lord at this moment portrays himself as shepherd; indeed, the phrase “going before” evokes the task of the shepherd. There would seem to be a relation between this image and the valley of the shadow of death.
This is the first of a set of three meditations on the Agony in the Garden; I will be continuing to post these through the upcoming Lenten Fridays.
Image: Andrea Mantegna, Agony in the Garden, 1458/60 (detail), National Gallery, London
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
Popular Posts