For Part I, link here.
My soul is sorrowful, even to death. To attribute Christ’s desolation to anticipatory fear before his betrayal, condemnation and crucifixion is profoundly inadequate (although St. John of the Cross teaches that the more spiritual an experience, the more it will vivify past and future into a single lived present). The Mystical Doctor expounds the terrors of the dark night: “David describes the suffering and affliction – although it is truly beyond description – when he says: The sighs of death encircled me, the sorrows of hell surrounded me, in my tribulation I cried out.” Alongside the Synoptic and Johannine accounts, the agony is alluded to in the Letter to the Hebrews: In the days when he was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Benedict reads, precisely in this dolorous cry of Jesus, the supreme exercise of High Priesthood: “It is through his cries, his tears, and his prayers that Jesus does what the high priest is meant to do: he holds up to God the anguish of human existence. He brings man before God.”
He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground. This is mentioned only in Luke, and was not part of the original text. The divine blood of the Lamb was shed first in the Passion not through any exterior causality of violence, but through ardor. We see in this the fully voluntary oblation of the Redeemer: the death of the heart effecting its own interior wound, before the lash, the crown, the nails, the spear.
We might imagine that, Jesus being perfect, his faith and resignation would temper the natural fear of death. This is not so. Fr. Cantalamessa cites Karl Rahner thus: “Since Jesus possesses a human nature and a human will, he also possesses a human subjective center of activity, which is that proper to a creature who freely places himself before the incomprehensible God. This allows Jesus to have the same experiences as we have of God, and in an even more radical, we might almost say, more dreadful way. And this is not in spite of but because of the so-called hypostatic union.”
Pope St. John Paul II offers an idea that likely few of us have ever considered – humankind, though marked by the curse of death, was nonetheless insufficiently able to esteem its gravitas, or the loss it entails. Jesus makes suffering man transparent to himself: “Christ’s agony. First the moral agony at Gethsemane. Then the agony, at once moral and physical, on the cross. No one has expressed so deeply as Christ the human torment of dying… the death of the God-Man was necessary, in order that we, heirs to original sin, might see what the drama in man’s death is.”
Jesus, however, can see with singular clarity the disaster which is sin to its tragic depths. Christ who is life of very life, experienced what in John is indicated by the word tetáraktai, from the verb to disturb, confuse; John uses this word to relate Jesus’s state of being before the tomb of Lazarus, and while foretelling his betrayal by Judas. As Benedict writes, “Jesus’s fear is far more radical than the fear that everyone experiences in the face of death: it is the collision of light and darkness, between life and death itself – the critical moment of decision in human history.” That this was the critical moment of decision in human history is an idea to which we shall return.
Cantalamessa considers, with discretion and respect, the confrontation of spiritual antitheses of which these torments were the direct result: “Sin’s nearness provokes God’s remoteness or, more accurately, God’s withdrawal as its consequence: the horror of his going away, disappearing, not answering anymore. The cry, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? – with what follows in Psalm 22: far from my prayer, from the words of my cry – Jesus carried in his heart from Gethsemane onwards.”
At this point, all of our usual ways of thinking about the immanent Trinity are turned upside-down; we finally have the fullest context in which to place Benedict’s monumental observation: “God’s passionate love for his people is… so great that it turns God against himself.” Cantalamessa continues: “The infinite, loving attraction between Father and Son is now thwarted by an infinite repulsion, since God has an infinite hatred of sin. There are no similes to describe such an experience. If the mere clash of atmosphere between a cold air current and a hot air current can convulse the sky with terrifying thunderclaps, flashes of lightning, and thunderbolts, what must Jesus’s state of soul have been when the supreme holiness of God came in conflict with the supreme malice of sin?”
Of the union of polarizing extremes, John of the Cross teaches that “it so disentangles and dissolves the spiritual substance – absorbing it in a profound darkness – that the soul at the sight of its miseries feels that it is melting away and being undone by a cruel spiritual death. It feels as if it were swallowed by a beast and being digested in the dark belly.” Here, the prophecy in late Zechariah finds fulfillment: 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 – as if to signify the yawning of the very abyss of Sheol. John of the Cross: “What the sorrowing soul feels most is the conviction that God has rejected it, and with abhorrence cast it into darkness… it sees hell and perdition open before it. These are the ones who go down into hell alive.” While this is far beyond the scope of this post, one wonders if this mystical descent justifies Balthasar’s intuition of Christ’s nadir of suffering in the underworld, over and against the traditional imputing of pure triumph after the Crucifixion and before the Resurrection. Indeed, John of the Cross names this affliction the “sepulcher of dark death.”
He advanced a little and fell prostrate in prayer. This is the posture expressive of the utmost submission. The body is the visibility of the soul, and so this profound gesture is itself revelatory of our Lord’s inner state. But also: Christ’s supremely beautiful face, the theandric manifestation of the Word, is pressed to the earth. It is as if he absorbed the curse which befell the serpent: but I am a worm, not a man. Indeed: For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin.
Image; Giovanni Bellini, Agony in the Garden, detail. Wikimedia Commons Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147849
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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/
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