December 1st

The Agony in the Garden

So yeah, these are going to be hard. They also might not be regularly updated this weekend depending on my access to the Internet.

I berate myself a lot when I have this decade. I imagine Jesus praying the Garden, seeing how His followers can't even be bothered to concentrate (or, indeed, say the decade all together as I had to cut off halfway through because class was starting and pick up after rehearsal hours later).

But today I found myself focusing on the appearance of the angel to comfort Him. What does it mean that even God in human form needed help? Or at least help to do the right thing? Presumably the obvious, that even those who are strong need someone's helping hand, that the most optimistic need a moment of their faith in people rewarded. That we can't expect people to be fine even if they are strong and good.

But then, an Angel is a different thing than if James or Peter or Matthew had stumbled over and prayed with Jesus. He had to be reminded of other beings, beings who are Servants of God in a very different way than humanity (there are Bible verses that spell this out, yes?). I wonder sometimes, one of the ways I nod toward an answer of the unanswerable questions, if the reason we have free will is because love doesn't count the same way otherwise. And God wanted beings that would choose Him.

And paying the price for that is what Jesus was contemplating in the Garden. So was the Angel a reminder, not so much of the worth of humanity or the love of The Father, but a reminder that He made creations fundamentally flawed so that they could aspire to better, that He made children that could turn away from Him so that when they turned to Him it would mean something? That this was a bed of His own making, and presumably it was therefore still worth the sacrifice He made.

But I certainly don't understand God's mind and I am probably doing everyone a disservice by trying to psychologize Him, but those are my thoughts on this verse for today. It's sad to be going into the Sorrowful Mysteries as I head home for a joyful wedding this Saturday, but perhaps it's the right balance. In Fulton J. Sheen's Life of Christ, every event of Jesus's life is about His death. Perhaps His death, then, is about our life in the same way. In the rest of our lives, in this new world after the breaking of death, every moment of joy or sorrow is about His death. Perhaps joy and unification more than sorrow and despair.

Perhaps that's just the Angel in Gethsemane. Perhaps the same way there was a Shadow of Calvary, of the Choice of Gethsemane, in the Wedding at Canaan.

Perhaps it wasn't any display of our overall, in balance, goodness - or even, as I thought fleetingly today, our collective steps forward as a people, as a Body of Christ - that the Angel brought Jesus to help Him find the strength - in that moment when He was so human He thought of resisting divine will - was nothing about our own decency. Perhaps it was a reminder or a vision of our joy, of the gift that He was giving us not only in heaven to come but here on Earth as well. The world He was changing for the better for us.

But the only thing not "perhaps" about my things today is that I don't know what happened with that or why. But there was an Angel that came down to comfort Jesus in the Agony in the Garden, and Angel of the Lord because all of His disciples fell asleep and he wept tears of blood in human fear and regret and desperation and rebelliousness, and comfort was sent Him from above. And when the Angel had come, He had the strength to go wake His followers.

That really is quite a thing that happened, that we will probably never be capable of understanding.