It’s Good Friday morning so our thoughts move toward our Lord’s anguish as he mentally prepares for Golgotha. We know what He will face externally: the scourging, the insults, the rejection by His friends, and finally the nails and cross. Less is available in Scripture about the suffering He experienced internally during this time, though we get some clues:
He took with him Peter, James, and John, and began to be troubled and distressed. Then he said to them, “My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch.” He advanced a little and fell to the ground and prayed that if it were possible the hour might pass by him; he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.” Mk 14:33-36
He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground. Lk 22:44
I believe I’ve posted this before but it bears continual re-reading: Blessed Cardinal Newman’s “Discourse 16. Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion.” Some excerpts:
Pic by Fergal Mac Eoinin
I now proceed because the religious usage of the Church requires it, and though any individual preacher may well shrink from it, to direct your thoughts to a subject, especially suitable now, and about which many of us perhaps think very little, the sufferings which our Lord endured in His innocent and sinless soul…
Thus He became perfect man with body and soul; and as He took on Him a body of flesh and nerves, which admitted of wounds and death, and was capable of suffering, so did He take a soul, too, which was susceptible of that suffering, and moreover was susceptible of the pain and sorrow which are proper to a human soul; and, as His atoning passion was undergone in the body, so it was undergone in the soul also.
As the solemn days proceed, we shall be especially called on, my brethren, to consider His sufferings in the body, His seizure, His forced journeyings to and fro, His blows and wounds, His scourging, the crown of thorns, the nails, the Cross. They are all summed up in the Crucifix itself, as it meets our eyes; they are represented all at once on His sacred flesh, as it hangs up before us—and meditation is made easy by the spectacle. It is otherwise with the sufferings of His soul; they cannot be painted for us, nor can they even be duly investigated: they are beyond both sense and thought; and yet they anticipated His bodily sufferings. The agony, a pain of the soul, not of the body, was the first act of His tremendous sacrifice; “My soul is sorrowful even unto death,” He said; nay; if He suffered in the body, it really was in the soul, for the body did but convey the infliction on to that which was the true recipient and seat of the suffering…
Now apply this to the sufferings of our Lord;—do you recollect their offering Him wine mingled with myrrh, when He was on the point of being crucified? He would not drink of it; why? because such a portion would have stupefied His mind, and He was bent on bearing the pain in all its bitterness. You see from this, my brethren, the character of His sufferings…If He was to suffer, He gave Himself to suffering; He did not come to suffer as little as He could; He did not turn away His face from the suffering; He confronted it, or, as I may say, He breasted it, that every particular portion of it might make its due impression on Him. And as men are superior to brute animals, and are affected by pain more than they, by reason of the mind within them, which gives a substance to pain, such as it cannot have in the instance of brutes; so, in like manner, our Lord felt pain of the body, with an advertence and a consciousness, and therefore with a keenness and intensity, and with a unity of perception, which none of us can possibly fathom or compass, because His soul was so absolutely in His power, so simply free from the influence of distractions, so fully directed upon the pain, so utterly surrendered, so simply subjected to the suffering. And thus He may truly be said to have suffered the whole of His passion in every moment of it.
Without making this post too long, I’ll just recommend a slow reading. I’ve only taken excerpts from about the first half of the discourse, so there is much more that can and should be meditated upon.
I couldn’t help thinking of the Agony in the Garden as I observed the happenings this week vis-a-vis the Supreme Court hearings on same-sex “marriage.” If you have a diverse set of Facebook friends, you were probably struck by how many red equal signs showed up in your newsfeed. As I lamented how our society seems to be increasingly headed toward insanity, reflecting on our Lord’s Agony put things in perspective. We may agonize over the sins of our culture and our powerlessness against it, but that is nothing compared with the weight of the sins of all mankind that pressed on Jesus’ sinless shoulders and soul.
Hopefully I’ll see some of you at the Veneration of the Cross service. If you plan to go, please read Cardinal Newman beforehand.