In the garden of Gethsemane what inflicted the most suffering on Our Lord was His vision of the world’s sins. Despite all He would suffer for love of men, He foresaw the unfathomable number of sins they would continue to commit.
Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and He said to His disciples, “Sit here, while I go over there and pray.” And taking with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, He began to be troubled and full of grief. Then He said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with Me.” Then going a little farther, He fell on His face and prayed.
Matthew 26:36–39
Those who would ponder the passion of our Lord must begin, as do the Stations of the Cross, in the Garden of Gethsemane. The physical torture He endured at the hands of His executioners began only after His arrest. But long before the whips had ever carved crosses in His back, Jesus’ exquisite interior suffering began as He wrestled in prayer on the dark slopes of Mount Olivet. He was “sorrowful, even to death”; even then, before the thorns and the nails, the grief alone came close to killing Him.
What extraordinary burden could weigh Him down so low that hell itself seemed in sight? What massive weight could press Him so fiercely that blood burst through His skin? In part, Anne Catherine Emmerich tells us, Jesus was crushed by horror at a hideous sight: the sins whose price He had to pay.
The holier the soul, the deeper the revulsion to evil. How, then, can we begin to fathom the consequences for the soul of a perfectly holy Man when the wretched gravity of an entire planet—the sin of a whole world—came crashing down upon Him?
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When Jesus left His disciples, I saw a number of frightful figures surrounding Him in an ever-shrinking circle. His sorrow and anguish of soul continued to increase, and He was trembling all over when He entered a grotto to pray, like a way-worn traveler hurriedly seeking shelter from a sudden storm. But the awful visions pursued Him even there, becoming increasingly clear.
This small cavern appeared to contain the awesome picture of all the sins that had been or were to be committed from the fall of Adam to the end of the world, and of the punishment they deserved. Jesus fell on His face, overwhelmed with unspeakable sorrow, and all the sins of the world displayed themselves before Him, under countless forms and in all their real deformity. He took them all upon Himself, and in His prayer offered His own Person, worthy of adoration, to the justice of His heavenly Father, in payment for so awful a debt.
But Satan, who was enthroned amid all these horrors, filled with diabolical joy at the sight of them, let loose his fury against Jesus. He displayed before the eyes of His soul increasingly awful visions, addressing His humanity in words such as these: “Do You take even this sin upon Yourself? Are You willing to bear its penalty? Are You prepared to satisfy for all these sins?”
And now a long ray of light, like a luminous path in the air, descended from heaven; it was a procession of angels who came up to Jesus and strengthened and reinvigorated Him. The remainder of the grotto was filled with frightful visions of our crimes. Jesus took them all upon Himself, but His heart, so worthy to be adored, so filled with the most perfect love for God and man, was flooded with anguish and overwhelmed beneath the weight of so many abominable crimes.
The Dolorous Passion
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This article is taken from a chapter in The Passion: Reflections on the Suffering and Death of Jesus Christ by Paul Thigpen which is available from TAN Books.
