The
Agony of the Savior
Who Bore the Sins of
the World
.
by Fulton
J. Sheen
There
is only one recorded time in the history
of Our Blessed Lord when He sang, and that
was after the Last Supper when He went out
to His death in the Garden of
Gethsemane.
And so they sang
a hymn And went out to Mount Olivet.
Mark
14:26
The
captives in Babylon hung their harps
upon the willows, for they could not
bring a song from their hearts in a
strange land. The gentle lamb opens not
its mouth when led to the slaughter, but
the true Lamb of God sang with joy at
the prospect of the Redemption of the
world. Then came the great warning that
they would
all be shaken in their confidence in
Him. “The Hour” was rapidly approaching
about which He had often spoken; when it
would strike Him, they would be
scandalized: if He was God, why
should He suffer?
Tonight
you will all lose courage over Me.
Matthew
26:31
He
Who would be the cornerstone of their
faith in days to come, now warned that
He would also be the stone of their
stumbling. He had called Himself their
“Good Shepherd,” and now it was the hour
of laying down His life for His sheep.
Reaching back centuries into their
prophecies, He now quoted to them
what Zacharias had foretold:
Smite the shepherd, and his flock shall
scatter.
Zacharias
13:7
For
Christ to be a Savior, He must be a
sacrifice. This is what would scandalize
them. Actually, an hour later, the
Apostles all forsook Him and fled. But
since He never spoke of His Passion
without foretelling His Resurrection, He
immediately added words which they did
not understand:
But
I will go before you into Galilee,
When
I have risen from the dead.
Matthew
26:32
Such
a promise was never made before; that a
dead man would keep an appointment with
His friends after three days in a tomb.
Though the sheep would forsake the
Shepherd, the Shepherd would find His
sheep. As Adam lost the heritage of union
with God in a garden, so now Our Blessed
Lord ushered in its restoration in a
garden. Eden and Gethsemane were the two
gardens around which revolved the fate of
humanity. In Eden, Adam sinned; in
Gethsemane, Christ took humanity’s sin
upon Himself. In Eden, Adam hid himself
from God; in Gethsemane, Christ interceded
with His Father; in Eden, God sought out
Adam in his sin of rebellion; in
Gethsemane, the New Adam sought out the
Father and His submission and resignation.
In Eden, a sword was drawn to prevent
entrance into the garden and thus
immortalizing of evil; in Gethsemane, the
sword would be sheathed. The garden was
called Gethsemane because of the presence
of a press which crushed olives. It was
not the first time Our Lord had been in
that garden.
Jesus and His
disciples had often gathered in it.
John
18:2
Furthermore,
He had often spent the night there:
Each day He went
on teaching in the temple;
And
at night He lodged on the mountain
Which
is called Olivet.
Luke
21:37
Judas
had already gone forth on his dirty
business of betrayal. Eight of the
Apostles were left near the entrance to
Gethsemane; the other three, Peter, James,
and John, who had been His companions when
He raised the daughter of Jairus, and when
His face shone as the sun on the Mount of
Transfiguration, He
took with Him into the garden. It is as
if, in that last contest in the valley of
the shadow, His human soul craved for the
presence of those who loved Him best. For
their part, they were strengthened for the
scandal of His death, since they had seen
the prefigurement of His glory in the
Transfiguration. On entering the garden He
said to them:
Sit down here,
while I go in there and pray.
Matthew
26:36
Beginning
to grow “dismayed and distressed,” He said
to the three Apostles:
My soul is ready
to die with sorrow;
Do
you abide here and watch with Me.
Matthew
26:38
Isaiah
had foretold that there would be laid upon
Him the iniquity of us all. In fulfillment
of that prophecy. He tasted death for
every man, bearing guilt as if it were His
own. Two elements were inseparably bound
together—sin-bearing, and sinless
obedience. Falling on His face, He now
prayed to His Heavenly Father:
My Father, if it
is possible,
Let
this chalice pass Me by;
Only
as Thy Will is, not as Mine is.
Matthew
26:39
His
two natures, the Divine and the human,
were both involved in this prayer. He and
the Father were One; it was not “Our
Father,” but “My Father.” Unbroken was the
consciousness of His Father’s love. But on
the other hand, His human nature recoiled
from death as a penalty for sin. The
natural shrinking of the human soul from
the punishment which sin deserves was
overborne by Divine submission to the
Father’s will. The “No” to the cup of the
Passion was human; the “Yes” to the Divine
will was the overcoming of human
reluctance to suffering for the sake of
Redemption. To take the bitter cup of
human suffering which atones for sin and
to sweeten it with little drops of “God
wills it” is the sign of One Who suffered
in man’s name, and yet One Whose suffering
had infinite value because He was God as
well as Man.
This scene is shrouded with the halo of a
mystery which no human mind can adequately
penetrate. One can dimly guess the
psychological horror of the progressive
stages of fear, anxiety, and sorrow which
prostrated Him before even a single blow
had been struck. It has been said that
soldiers fear death much more before the
zero hour of attack than in the heat of
battle. The active struggle takes away the
fear of death which is present when one
contemplates it without action. But there
was something else besides the quiet
anticipation of the coming struggle which
added to the mental sufferings of Our
Blessed Lord. It is very likely that the
Agony in the Garden cost Him far more
suffering than even the physical pain of
Crucifixion, and perhaps brought His soul
into greater regions of darkness than any
other moment of the Passion, with the
possible exception of the one on the Cross
when He cried:
My God, My God,
why hast thou forsaken Me?
Matthew
27:46
His
mental sufferings were quite different
from the sufferings of a mere man, because
in addition to having human intelligence,
He also had a Divine intelligence.
Furthermore, He had a physical organism
which was as perfect as any human organism
could be; therefore it was much more
sensitive to pain than our human nature,
which has been calloused by crude emotions
and evil experiences.
This agony can be faintly portrayed by
realizing that there are different degrees
of pain felt at the various levels of
creations. Humans very often exaggerate
the pain of animals, thinking that they
suffer as do humans. The reason that they
do not suffer as keenly as man is because
they do not have an intellect. Each
pulsation of animal pain is separate and
distinct, and unrelated to every other
pulsation. But when a man suffers pain, he
can go back into the past with his
intellectual memory, add up all his
previous aches, and pull them down on
himself, saying: “This is the third week
of this agony” or “This is the seventh
year that I have suffered.” By summarizing
all the previous blows of the hammer of
pain, he makes the one-hundredth stroke
almost combine within itself the
multiplied intensity of the previous
ninety-nine. This an animal cannot do.
Hence a man suffers more than a beast.
In addition to that, the human mind not
only can bring the past to bear upon the
present, it can even look forward and
bring the future to bear upon the present.
Not only can a man say: “I have suffered
this agony for seven years,” but also “The
prospects are that I will suffer with it
for seven more years.” The human mind
reaches out to the indefinite future, and
pulls back upon itself all of this
imagined agony that yet lies in store for
it, and heaps it upon the present moment
of pain. Because of this ability of the
mind, not only to throw itself under the
heap of the continued sufferings from the
past but also under the pile of the
imagined tortures of the future, man can
suffer far more than any animal. Man loads
himself with what has happened and what
will happen. That is why, when we bring
relief to the sick, we generally try to
distract them; by interrupting the
continuity of their pain and by relaxing
their mind, they are less likely to add up
their agony.
But with Our Blessed Lord, two differences
from ourselves may be mentioned. First,
what was predominant in His mind was not
physical pain, but moral evil or sin.
There was indeed that natural fear of
death which He would have had because of
His human nature; but it was no such
vulgar fear which dominated His agony. It
was something far more deadly than death.
It was the burden of the mystery of the
world’s sin which lay on His heart.
Second, in addition to His human
intellect, which had grown by experience,
He had the infinite intellect of God which
knows all things and sees the past and the
future as present.
Poor humans become so used to sin that
they do not realize its horror. The
innocent understand the horror of sin much
better than the sinful. The one thing from
which man never learns anything by
experience is sinning. A sinner becomes
infected with sin. It becomes so much a
part of him, that he may even think
himself virtuous, as the feverish think
themselves well. It is only the virtuous,
who stand outside the current of sin, who
can look upon evil as a doctor looks upon
disease, who understand the full horror of
evil.
What Our Blessed Lord contemplated in this
agony was not just the buffeting of
soldiers, and the pinioning of His hands
and feet to a bar of contradiction, but
rather the awful burden of the world’s
sin, and the fact that the world was about
to spurn His Father by rejecting Him, His
Divine Son. What is evil but the
exaltation of self-will against the loving
will of God, the desire to be a god unto
oneself, to accuse His wisdom as
foolishness and His love as want of
tenderness? He shrank not from the hard
bed of the Cross, but from the world’s
share in making it. He wanted the world to
be saved from committing the blackest deed
of sin ever perpetrated by the sons of
men—the killing of Supreme Goodness,
Truth, and Love.
Great characters and great souls are like
mountains—they attract the storms. Upon
their heads break the thunders; around
their bare tops flash the lightning’s and
the seeming wrath of God. Here for the
moment was the loneliest, saddest soul the
world has ever had living in it, the Lord
Himself. Higher than all men, around His
head seemed to beat the very storms of
iniquity. Here was the whole history of
the world summed up in one cameo, the
conflict of God’s will and man’s will.
It is beyond human power to realize how
God felt the opposition of human wills.
Perhaps the closest that one can ever come
to it is when a parent feels the
strangeness of the power of the obstinate
will of his children to resist and spurn
persuasion, love, hope, or fear of
punishment. A power so strong resides in a
body so slight and a mind so childish; yet
it is the faint picture of men when they
have sinned willfully. What is sin for the
soul but a separate principle of wisdom
and source of happiness working out its
own ends, as if there were no God?
Anti-Christ is nothing else but the full
unhindered growth of self-will.
This was the moment when Our Blessed Lord,
in obedience to His Father’s will, took
upon Himself the iniquities of all the
world and became the sin-bearer. He felt
all the agony and torture of those who
deny guilt, or sin with impunity and do no
penance. It was the prelude of the
dreadful desertion which He had to endure
and would pay to His Father’s justice, the
debt which was due from us: to be treated
as a sinner. He was smitten as a sinner
while there was no sin in Him—it was this
which caused the agony, the greatest the
world has ever known.
As sufferers look to the past and to the
future, so the Redeemer looked to the past
and to all the sins that had ever been
committed; He looked also to the future,
to every sin that would be committed until
the crack of doom. It was not the past
beatings of pain that He drew up to the
present, but rather every open act of evil
and every hidden thought of shame. The sin
of Adam was there, when as the head of
humanity he lost for all
men the heritage of God’s grace; Cain was
there, purple in the sheet of his
brother’s blood; the abominations of Sodom
and Gomorrah were there; the forgetfulness
of His own people who fell down before
false gods was there; the coarseness of
the pagans who had rebelled even against
the natural law was there; all sins were
there: sins committed in the country that
made all nature blush; sins committed in
the city, in the city’s fetid atmosphere
of sin; sins of the young for whom the
tender heart of Christ was pierced; sins
of the old who should have passed the age
of sinning; sins committed in the
darkness, where it was
thought the eyes of God could not pierce;
sins committed in the light that made even
the wicked shudder; sins too awful to be
mentioned, sins too terrible to name: Sin!
Sin! Sin!
Once this pure, sinless mind of Our Savior
had brought all of this iniquity of the
past upon His soul as if it were His own,
He now reached into the future. He saw
that His coming into the world with the
intent to save men would intensify the
hatred of some against God; He saw the
betrayals of future Judases, the sins of
heresy that would rend Christ’s Mystical
Body; the sins of the Communists who could
not drive God from the heavens but would
drive His ambassadors from the earth; He
saw the broken marriage vows, lies,
slanders, adulteries, murders,
apostasies—all these crimes were thrust
into His own hands, as if He had committed
them. Evil desires lay upon His heart, as
if He Himself had given them birth. Lies
and schisms rested on His mind, as if He
Himself had conceived them. Blasphemies
seemed to be on His lips, as if He had
spoken them. From the North, South, East,
and West, the foul miasma of the world’s
sins rushed upon Him like a flood;
Samson-like, He reached up and pulled the
whole guilt of the world upon Himself as
if He
were guilty, paying for the debt in our
name, so that we might once more have
access to the Father. He was, so to speak,
mentally preparing Himself for the great
sacrifice, laying upon His sinless soul
the sins of a guilty world. To most men,
the burden of sin is as natural as the
clothes they wear, but to Him the touch of
that which men take so easily was the
veriest agony.
In between the sins of the past which He
pulled upon His soul as if they were His
own, and the sins of the future which made
Him wonder about the usefulness of His
death—Quae utilitas in sanguine meo—was
the horror of the present.
He found the Apostles asleep three times.
Men who were worried about the struggle
against the powers of darkness could not
sleep—but these men slept. No wonder,
then, with the accumulated guilt of all
the ages clinging to Him as a pestilence,
His bodily nature gave way. As a father in
agony will pay the debt of a wayward son,
He now sensed guilt to such an extent that
it forced Blood from His Body, Blood which
fell like crimson beads upon the olive
roots of Gethsemane, making the first
Rosary of Redemption. It was not bodily
pain that was causing a soul’s agony; but
full sorrow for rebellion against God that
was creating bodily pain. It has been
observed of old that the gum which exudes
from the tree without cutting is always
the best. Here the best spices flowed when
there was no whip, no nail, and no wound.
Without a lance, but through the sheer
voluntariness of Christ’s suffering, the
Blood flowed freely.
Sin is in the blood. Every doctor knows
this; even passers-by can see it.
Drunkenness is in the eyes, the bloated
cheek. Avarice is written in the hands and
on the mouth. Lust is written in the eyes.
There is not a libertine, a criminal, a
bigot, a pervert who does not have his
hate or his envy written in every inch of
his
body, every hidden gateway and alley of
his blood, and every cell of his brain.
Since sin is in the blood, it must be
poured out. As Our Lord willed that the
shedding of the blood of goats and animals
should prefigure His own atonement, so He
willed further that sinful men should
never again shed any blood in war or hate,
but would invoke only His Precious Blood
now poured out in Redemption. Since all
sin needs expiation, modern man, instead
of calling on the Blood of Christ in
pardon, sheds his own brother’s blood in
the dirty business of war. All this
crimsoning of the earth will not be
stopped until man in the full
consciousness of sin begins to invoke upon
himself in peace and pardon the Redemptive
Blood of Christ, the Son of the Living
God.
Every soul can at least dimly understand
the nature of the struggle that took place
on the moonlit night in the Garden of
Gethsemane. Every heart knows something
about it. No one has ever come to the
twenties—let alone to the forties, or the
fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies
of life—without reflecting with some
degree of seriousness on himself and the
world round about him, and without knowing
the terrible tension that has been caused
in his soul by sin. Faults and follies do
not efface themselves from the record of
memory; sleeping tablets do not silence
them; psychoanalysts cannot explain them
away. The brightness of youth may make
them fade into some dim outline, but there
are times of silence—on a sick bed,
sleepless nights, the open seas, a moment
of quiet, the innocence in the face of a
child—when these sins, like spectres or
phantoms, blaze their unrelenting
characters of fire upon our consciences.
Their force might not have been realized
in a moment of passion, but conscience is
biding its time and will bear its stern
uncompromising witness sometime,
somewhere, and force a dread upon the soul
that ought to make it cast itself back
again to God. Terrible though the agonies
and tortures of a single soul be, they
were only a drop in the ocean of
humanity’s guilt which the Savior felt as
His own in the Garden.
Finding the Apostles asleep the third
time, the Savior did not ask again if they
could watch one hour with Him; more awful
than any reprimand was the significant
permission to sleep:
Sleep and take
your rest hereafter;
As
I speak, the time draws near
When
the Son of Man is to be betrayed into
the hands of sinners.
Matthew
26:45
The
fatigued followers were allowed to sleep
on until the last moment. Their sympathy
was needed no longer; while His friends
slept, His enemies plotted. It is
conceivable that there may have been an
interval of time between His finding them
asleep and the approach of Judas and the
soldiers. That time they could continue to
pass in sleep. The Hour which He had
ardently yearned for was now at hand. In
the distance was the regular tramp of
Roman soldiers, the uneven and hurried
treading of the mob and the temple
authorities with a traitor in the
front.
Rise up, let us
go on our way;
Already,
he that is to betray me is close at
hand.
Matthew
26:46
[This article is
excerpted from Life in Christ,
chapter 41, Copyright 1958 by Fulton
Sheen, and first published in Great
Britain 1959 for Peter Davies Ltd by The
Windmill Press Ltd, Kingswood, Surrey.]
top image: Waiting for the Word -
Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane,
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Archbishop Fulton
J. Sheen (1895-1979) was an American theologian
and bishop, first in New York City and then in
Rochester, New York. He became well-known for
his preaching, especially on television and
radio. He hosted the night-time radio
program The Catholic Hour for
twenty years (1930–1950) before moving to
television and presenting a weekly program
called, Life Is Worth Living. The
show ran from 1951 until 1957, drawing as many
as 30 million people on a weekly basis. He wrote
73 books and numerous articles and columns.
Mother Theresa of Calcutta always kept a copy of
Sheen’s book, Life of Christ, with
her wherever she traveled for daily reflection
and meditation.
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