The prayer in Gethsemane
1. Sharing the prayer of Jesus
In this meditation we are going to return to a subject already spoken of: prayer. But this time, rather than talking about prayer, I would like us - as far as is humanly possible, and with the aid of grace - to share in the prayer of Christ himself.
We know how often he used to pray completely alone, withdrawing from the company of his disciples and keeping himself totally free to converse with the Father. More oftenthan not he did this while the others were resting: “And he spent the whole night in prayer” — “pernoctans in oratione Dei” (Lk 6,12), as we read in the Gospel. On one occasion only did Jesus specifically ask the Apostles to share his prayer with him, and that was in Gethsemane where the Master had gone, together with them, on Holy Thursday night. All that Jesus had said and done in the course of the last supper was still fresh in their minds and hearts. And then, leaving most of them behind on entering Gethsemane, he took just three of them with him: Peter, James and John, the ones he had taken to Mount Tabor, and said to them: “Stay here and keep vigil with me”. And then, moving a short distance away from them, he prostrated himself and prayed (cf Mt 26,38-39). It was all a clear appeal to them to share his prayer.
Why at that specific moment? Why on that occasion only? Perhaps because he had already made them sharers in his mystery in one way: he had given them bread to eat saying: “This is my body offered in sacrifice for you”
(Lk 22,19), and wine to drink saying: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood shed for you’, charging them to “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk 22,19-20). In so doing he had made them sharers in his mystery at its most profound level.
2. Great understanding of mankind
Jesus begins to pray. Moving a short distance away from the three, he begins to converse with the Father — as on so many other occasions. This time, however, his prayer is decisive: it originates in the depths of his soul and discloses the whole truth of his human nature, not only showing his acute anxiety at this particular moment in his life as Son of man but also bringing together, so to speak, all the anxieties felt by the one who said of himself: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives his own life for his sheep” (Jn 10,11). Jesus embarks on this prayer with an immeasurable universal concern for each and every one: “I know my sheep and my sheep know me” (Jn 10,14). This prayer reflects Jesus’s great knowledge and understanding of man and the whole of human nature, sunk in the abyss after the first sin and subsequently straying further and further from the will of the Father, with consequences more frightening than those of the original disobedience.
This prayer is the prayer of great understanding of mankind, for it was uttered by the one of whom scripture says: “He had no need of any man’s testimony concerning another, for he knew very well himself what was in each one” (Jn 2,25).
3. “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass me by”
What are the words he uses in this prayer? We know them very well: they are few but unforgettable, simple but highly charged with the emotion of the hour — the hour in which the servant of Yahweh must fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah by saying his ‘Yes’. “Jesus Christ was not ‘Yes’ and ‘No’: in him there was only *Yes’” (2 Cor 1,19).
Christ’s words in Gethsemane are very simple, wholly appropriate for expressing the most profound of truths and the most important of choices. Jesus says: “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass me by; nevertheless, not my will but yours be done” (Mt 26,39). We may remark that by this time it was no longer possible for the cup to pass him by, because it had already been passed on by him to the Church and had become “the cup of the new and everlasting covenant”, the cup of the blood “which will be shed” (Mk 14,24). And yet, in spite of all that, Jesus says: “If it be possible, let it pass me by ...”’.
What is the meaning of: “If it be possible”? Is this not the prayer of the Son of God who, in all the truth of his human nature, “sees into all things, even the depths of God” (1 Cor 2,10) in the Holy Spirit? Since he shares to the full the mystery of God’s freedom, he knows that events do not necessarily have to take this course; but at the same time he shares God’s love, and so he knows that there is no other way. He had in fact come to Gethsemane in order to receive the death sentence that had long ago been pronounced, in eternity no doubt (Col 2,14). So, having come, he fell on his knees and prayed — as if that death sentence, already pronounced in eternity, had to be pronounced there, at that very hour. “If it be possible, may this cup pass me by ...”.
Prayer is always a wonderful reduction of eternity to the dimension of a moment in time, a reduction of the eternal wisdom to the dimension of human knowledge, feeling and understanding, a reduction of the eternal Love to the dimension of the human heart, which at times is incapable of absorbing its riches and seems to break.
The sweat which appeared like drops of blood on the face of Jesus as he prayed in Gethsemane is a sign of the acute torment he suffered in his human heart. “And Christ, in the days of his flesh, offered prayers and supplications to him who could save him from death ...” (Heb 5,7).
4. A meeting between the human will and the will of God
This prayer is in fact a meeting between the human will of Jesus Christ and the eternal will of God, which at this moment can be seen as the will of the Father concerning his Son. The Son had become man in order that this meeting might express all the truth of the human will and the human heart, anxious to escape the evil and the suffering, the condemnation and the scourging, the crown of thorns, the cross and death. He had become man in order that this truth might then serve to reveal all the grandeur of the love that expresses itself in a “gift of oneself’, in sacrifice: “God loved the world so much that he sacrificed his only-begotten Son” (Jn 3,16). In this hour that “eternal Love” has to give proof of itself by the sacrifice of a human heart. And it does indeed give proof of itself! The Son does not shrink from giving his own heart, for it to become an altar, a place of complete self-abnegation even before the cross was to serve that purpose.
The human will, the will of the man, meets the will of God. The human will speaks by means of the heart and expresses the human truth: “If it be possible, may this cup pass me by”. But at the same time the human will surrenders itself to the will of God, as if passing beyond the human truth, beyond the cry of the heart: it is as if it were taking unto itself not only the eternal judgment of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit, but also the power that flows from God, from the will of God, from the God who is Love (1 Jn 4,8).
All prayer is a meeting between the human will and the will of God; for this we are indebted to the Son’s obedience to the Father: “Your will be done”. And obedience does not mean only renunciation of one’s own will; it means opening one’s spiritual eyes and ears to the Love which is God himself, God who loved the world so much that for its sake he sacrificed his only-begotten Son. ‘Here is the man”. After his prayer in Gethsemane Jesus Christ, Son of God, rises to his feet fortified: fortified by the obedience which has enabled him once again to attain to Love, as gift from the Father for the world and for all mankind. He rises to his feet and goes back to his disciples saying: “‘Look, my betrayer is close at hand” (Mk 14,42).
5. The mystery of Redemption
This is the third time he has broken off from prayer and gone back to them. And, just as before, he finds them asleep. He had reproached them already: “Could you not keep vigil with me for one hour? Stay awake and pray so as not to give way to temptation: the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (Mt 26,40-41). But even that warning had not kept them awake. Peter, James and John did not know how to respond to his call to prayer addressed to them as they entered Gethsemane. The words Jesus now speaks for the second and third time become a reproach, a reproach of concern to every disciple of Christ.
In one way the Church still hears those same words: the reproach addressed to the three Apostles is accepted by the Church as if it were addressed to herself, and she tries to fill the gap left by that lost hour when Jesus remained completely alone in Gethsemane. The Apostles did not know how to respond to the appeal to share the prayer of the Redeemer, and they left him completely alone. This showed that the mystery of redemption required the Son to remain alone in intimate converse with the Father. This total solitude creates a dimension fully appropriate to the divine mystery, which at the same time is a human activity on the part of the Son of man.
And now the Church still seeks to recover that hour in Gethsemane—the hour lost by Peter, James and John—so as to compensate for the Master’s lack of companionship which increased his soul’s suffering. It is impossible to reconstruct that hour in all its historical veracity: it belongs in the past and remains for ever in the eternity of God himself. Yet the desire to recover it has become a real need for many hearts, especially for those who live as fully as they can the mystery of the divine heart. The Lord Jesus allows us to meet him in that hour - which on the human plane is long since past beyond recall - and, just as he did then, invites us to share the prayer of his heart: “Cogitationes cordis eius in generationem et generationem, ut eruat a morte animas eorum et alat eos in fame” (Entrance antiphon, Mass of the Sacred Heart of Jesus). And when “from generation to generation” we enter into the designs of his heart, from that sharing there flows the mystical unity of the Body of Christ.
How rich in meaning that “Stay awake!” now becomes: “Stay awake, so as not to give way to temptation!” Christ hands over to us that hour of great trial, which always has been an hour of trial for his disciples and his Church.
“I am the vine ...” says the Lord, and these words are most appropriate to the situation in Gethsemane. “I am the vine and you are the branches ... As the branch cannot of itself bear fruit unless it remains joined to the vine, so also not one of you, unless you remain in me...” (Jn 15,5). “lam the true vine, and my Father is the vine-dresser. Every branch in me that bears no fruit he cuts right out: and those which do bear fruit he prunes, so that they may bear more fruit still” (Jn 15,1-2).
The prayer of Gethsemane goes on to this day. Faced with all the trials that man and the Church have to undergo, there is a constant need to return to Gethsemane and undertake that sharing in the prayer of Christ our Lord. That prayer— according to the standards of human reckoning—remains unanswered. But at the same time, in virtue of the principle: “My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not your ways” (Is 55,8), it marks the beginning of the great victory, the beginning of the redemptive work on which man and the world still draw and always will draw, because the Redemption makes manifest the nature and extent of God’s love for mankind and for the world (cf Jn 3,16).
And so the prayer of Gethsemane is not left unanswered.
Karol Wojtyla, Sign of Contradiction (1977) p. 147-153