Grief is the Price We Pay for Love

The Monday Mystery Part 11: The Agony in the Garden

“He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground” -Luke 22:44

Welcome to the eleventh entry of The Monday Mystery. Each week I will write a reflection on a mystery (i.e. an episode in the life of Jesus or Mary) from the Rosary. My hope for this series is to provide fuel and inspiration for your own meditations. When you finish reading the reflection, I encourage you to do a ‘test run’ of the mystery by praying a decade of the Rosary (i.e. one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory Be) while meditating on the mystery.

This week we enter into a grim leg of the Rosary. These next five mysteries are called the Sorrowful Mysteries, because they unfold the passion and death of Jesus. Last week we reflected on the topic of sacrifice; Jesus offered his body up for us at the last supper. This week begin to see what this entailed for him; a brutal death preceded by crushing betrayal, grisly torture, demeaning mockery, and heartbreaking abandonment. To properly understand why Jesus endured this harrowing ordeal, we must keep the theme of sacrifice in our minds.

What is a sacrifice? In short, you sacrifice something when you give it up because you’ve decided that something else is more important. Our culture is most familiar with sacrifice in a military context - the ultimate sacrifice. How do we explain the actions of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to shield his comrades from its deadly shrapnel? There is no other explanation except that the soldier decided he was willing to give up his life for the sake of his friends.

Jesus teaches that this type of sacrifice represents the very height of love. He says “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). In much the same way, Jesus decided that he was willing to give up his life for our sake. He possessed an unfathomable love for us, and an unshakable conviction that we were worth it.

But that didn’t make ‘it’ any easier.

In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was overwhelmed by fear and dread of his approaching trial. Down through the centuries, those who have studied Jesus’ life have understood his agony to be so great that many have speculated that he literally sweated drops of blood onto the ground.

The fact that even Jesus felt such fear is a great ‘hope for the rest of us’ moment. We are bombarded with so many advertisements and messages which give the impression that if we feel fear, it’s our fault. The standard messaging tells us that if only we could toughen up, eat the right diet, get enough sleep, find the right job, do yoga, and save enough money, then our life would be free from worry and fear.

You don’t have to be a yogi meditating on top of a mountain to figure out that money and hipster lifestyle aspirations won’t solve all of your problems. You just need to listen to the never ending stream of westerners returning from third world countries astounded by how happy the people are in the midst of extreme deprivation and dire circumstances. But as many times as these people might lap us when it comes to true happiness, they too experience suffering and fear.

As much as many spiritual teachers make it their trademark to point out the absurdity of the modern world’s mentality toward happiness, they too can push equally absurd attitudes. So often we hear that if we are afraid, it’s somehow our fault: we’ve bought into an illusion; we lack virtue and self discipline; we’re too attached to the things of this world. If we were truly enlightened - so the thinking goes - then nothing would phase us. If we follow the right teaching and practices, eventually we’ll turn into an unflappable Jedi monk-warrior.

Today’s mystery unmasks this myth. No one was, or could possibly ever become more enlightened than Jesus. No one was more brave, more disciplined, more detached from the things of this world. And yet in spite of all his knowledge, all his training, and all his virtue, he felt fear. Jesus came to Earth and made himself equal in all things but sin. The next time you reach a point where you can’t hold it together, you can take comfort that even Jesus experienced this. He knows exactly what you’re going through because he knows exactly what it’s like.

What explains this? Why did he feel fear even though he’s God? The best explanation for this is love. You may have heard the phrase, ‘grief is the price we pay for love.’ Here we might add that fear is the price we pay for caring. When we love, we leave the safety of our solitude and self sufficiency, and we put ourselves in a position where we can be hurt.

Jesus did not have to go through what he went through. As one sermon I listened to explained, Jesus was in total control of the situation. Being God, he could have uncreated the entire Roman army with a single thought. He could have commanded the earth to open up and swallow the Pharisees alive, and led a vengeful campaign across the face of the earth until everyone who opposed him was indisputably humiliated and defeated.

Better yet, he could have not bothered with us at all. Knowing that we would betray him so egregiously, and that he would have to suffer so greatly to save us, Jesus could have stayed in heaven for all eternity. Grief presents us with the question: is life worth it? Is love worth it? Death takes every happy memory we have of someone and uses it to fuel our misery when they are gone. It spits in the face of life and mocks us for thinking we could hold on to those we love.

This question is the reason Paul teaches that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is the lynchpin of Christianity. In his first letter to the Corinthians he writes

For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all (1 Cor 15:16-19).

If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, he was a tragically deluded romantic. No amount of poetic flourish could erase the fact that the universe slammed the door in his face, the cruelty swallowed up his love, and that death had, and always will have the last word.

These are deep and painful questions, and I’m sorry if this post has been a bit of a downer. But if you feel sad or deflated by what I’ve written, I again remind you that Jesus wrestled with the exact same feelings you had in the garden. He loves you, he understands you, and he’s not disappointed or uncomfortable with your pain and doubt. He allowed himself to experience the very depths of desolation. He did this not just to redeem us, but also to set an example for us. If it happened even to him, we have nothing to be afraid or ashamed of when we experience fear and shame.

When you do your test run, place yourself in the garden, and imagine yourself watching Jesus pray in the darkness. What do you feel when you see him in such distress? Why did he want his disciples to be with him to see him like this? May God bless you as you pray.