Today we are beginning a new phase of Lent. Last week we enjoyed the brief interlude of Rosy colour to celebrate Laetare Sunday. Now, not only has the sombre purple returned but it is even more intense with the veiling of the cross and statues in purple. This signifies for us the beginning of Passiontide. From now on until the Holy Triduum of our Lord’s Passover, from Maundy Thursday until the Easter Vigil, we enter into the last few days of our Lord’s life on earth, not in order merely to remember it, nor in order to try and imitate it, but to live in Him, as members of His body. As He, who is our head, prepares to suffer for us, we remember that we, too, must suffer not only like Him, but with Him and in Him. As members of His body, it is our place, even our privilege if we could learn to see it in this way, to suffer with Him in some way that He chooses. As He says in the words we heard sung before the Gospel: ‘If a man serves me, he must follow me; wherever I am, my servant will be there, too.’ The Church as a whole in every time and place must take her part in this suffering, for unless we take part in Christ’s suffering, we can have no part in His resurrection and glory.
One of the events of our Lord’s final days which we probably have too little time to think of, because it comes and goes between very significant liturgical services on consecutive days, is the Agony in Gethsemane. It follows so hard on the heels of the Last Supper, with all that happened there, in which we take our part in the Mass which began on Maundy Thursday night, and is followed so breathtakingly fast by our Lord’s arrest, His trials before the Chief Priests, Pilate and Herod, and His scourging and condemnation to the death of crucifixion, that we may perhaps only notice it without reflection.
We will hear of our Lord’s Agony in the Passion Gospel of St Mark next Sunday, but then we will have no time to pause. Today offers us a unique opportunity to do just that. For we have just heard an extraordinary passage from St John’s Gospel which, although not taking place in Gethsemane after the Last Supper, is in many ways the nearest St John comes to telling us about the Agony of spirit our Lord suffered before His Passion, as He naturally recoiled from the forthcoming suffering He had to face. What else can those words mean, ‘Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say: Father save me from this hour?’ Admittedly, John does not tell us of the bloody sweat, but he does tell us of this moment of deep perturbation: ‘My soul is troubled.’ There can be no stronger indication of His agony at the thought of what was coming to Him. Hence this question which He asks of the Father, which can be rephrased like this: ‘in this moment of extreme distress, shall I pray to my Father to save me from all that is about to befall me?’ Surely that is the same prayer as ‘Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass me by.’ So too the answer He supplies Himself is strikingly similar: for as in the Garden He says: ‘Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done’, here He seems to pray in the same way, saying: ‘But it was for this very reason that I have come to this hour.’
The important thing to note is that our Lord was bewildered not only at what awaited Him in a short time, but at what He saw in His mind’s eye at that moment; ‘My soul is troubled.’ Can it be that his Father truly wants Him to suffer and die? Can it be that He must endure all this knowing that not only in the near future, but throughout all the centuries to come, so many of His followers will forsake Him, or betray Him, or will fall far short of what they should live up to, or will give a terrible example, or again, many will bring shame and disgrace on His name and on His Church? Knowing all that as He did, it is not surprising that even He should have been ‘troubled’ and overwhelmed with grief and sorrow.
Just as His prayer in the Garden became: ‘nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done’, so in today’s Gospel He says: ‘Father, glorify your name.’ Then we are told that a voice came from heaven to comfort, that is, to strengthen Him, saying: ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ Moreover, it was this divine message of strengthening that was heard by some as a clap of thunder, and by others as the voice of an angelic messenger, in a way which recalls St Luke’s account of the Agony in Gethsemane, when he tells us that at the end of the Agony ‘an angel came and ministered to Him’.
In Gethsemane we are told that He returned to His sleeping Apostles and roused them to witness His arrest, which is His solemn entry into His Passion. Here, in St John’s account, we have heard Him foretell His crucifixion: ‘when I am lifted up from the earth, I shall draw all men to myself.’ So, St John concludes, ‘by these words He indicated the kind of death He would die.’ The crisis had passed, and He was able to say: ‘Now sentence is being passed on this world; now the prince of this world is to be overthrown.’ From these words, announcing confidently the defeat of Satan, the prince of this world, we can guess that a struggle had just taken place between our Lord and Satan once again. As they had fought in the desert during our Lord’s forty days’ fasting, and as we are told that the devil left Him ‘until a favourable time,’ so we may understand that this Agony was just that time of bitter trial caused by Satan, greater even than anything He had faced in the wilderness. Did Satan reveal to Him all the failures His work, His Passion, His death, would leave behind? He surely foresaw Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial, each of them the first of so many in the Church down the many centuries still in the future. No wonder the divine voice spoke to strengthen Him. Once that trial had been faced and overcome, Satan’s overthrow was at last assured. Christ would face His Passion. He would be lifted up from the earth, and He would draw all to Himself, implying that precisely on the cross He would draw all men away from Satan’s power and all Satan’s empty promises. No wonder Satan tried so hard to make Christ despair and walk away from the cross.
All this must also help us to interpret the passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews which we heard in the second reading: ‘during his life on earth, Christ offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death, and he submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard.’ But note that these words ‘his prayer was heard’ do not mean that God saved our Lord from facing the cross and death, but rather that God made the cross and death of His Son the answer to His prayer for the salvation of mankind. For if Christ had not endured the shame and agony of the cross and death, we would quite simply not have been saved, not have been taken out of the power of Satan, not have been made sharers of Christ’s victorious resurrection. That is what the Second Reading means when it concludes that ‘having been made perfect, [Christ] became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation.’
One more question remains here, and that is, what does the Letter to the Hebrews mean by saying that Christ was ‘made perfect’? Was He not already perfect? What this perfection means is found in today’s Gospel event. For it is in facing down the possibility of escaping Satan’s rage by avoiding death, that we are told Christ was made perfect. It was, to put it another way, by learning ‘to obey through suffering’ that He became perfect as a man. Satan hoped to intimidate the humanity of Christ, to overwhelm Him with horror and despair in the face of terrible suffering and apparent failure. But this would prove to be a lie. Christ’s death would not represent a failure, but a victory – and Satan feared it. Christ’s suffering was Satan’s overthrow, not Christ’s; Satan’s failure, not Christ’s.
And so we end where we began, recognising that we must share in that suffering, so as to share in His overthrow of Satan. We must share in His cross, so as to bring about Satan’s failure in his attempt to destroy us. Our victory is not yet certain, we should not need to be fighting for it if it were. But if we are prepared to suffer with Christ and be united with Him and in Him, then our victory will indeed be assured. Christ will prove to be just what the Letter to the Hebrews said, ‘the source of eternal salvation’. That is what we are about to relive in our own lives, in our minds, hearts, souls and wills, during this Passiontide and Easter feast now fast approaching. Let us join our Lord there! Amen!
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