Sheen - The Arrest: Passion is a Voluntary Sacrifice of Love, Not an Execution Imposed By Enemies

He could have walked away free, with the soldiers and His enemies prone upon the ground, but it was the “Hour” when Love fettered Himself to unfetter man.

Self-sacrifice seeks no vengeance. Judas and the others had no power to capture Him unless He freely delivered Himself into their hands. Giving His enemies power to stand, He, as the Good Shepherd, had only one concern, that of His own sheep:

If I am the man you are looking for,
Let these others go free.
                                    John 18:8

He must go to sacrifice alone. The Old Testament ordered that the high priest must be alone when he offered sacrifice:

No one must be there in the tabernacle
From the time when the High Priest
Enters the inner sanctuary, to make intercession
For himself and his family and
The whole people of Israel,
Till the time when He comes out again.
                                    Leviticus 16:17

This was His Hour, but not the hour of the Apostles. Later on, they would suffer and die in His name, but presently they could not understand Redemption until the Spirit had enlightened them. He would tread the wine press alone. They were not yet in a spiritual condition to die with Him; in a few moments they would all desert Him. Furthermore, they could not suffer for Christ until He had first suffered for them. The whole purpose of His redemptive death, in a certain sense, was to say to all men, “Let these others go free.”

On entering the garden, the Savior had told Peter, James, and John “to watch and pray.” Peter now decided to substitute action for prayer. . . . Though Peter’s zeal was honest, well-meaning and impulsive, yet it was mistaken in the choice of means. Our Blessed Lord first touched the ear of the wounded man and restored it; then, turning to Peter, He said:

Put thy sword back into its sheath.
Am I not to drink that cup
Which My Father Himself has appointed for Me?
                                    John 18:11

Here in contrast were set the sword and the cup; the sword wins by slaying, the cup by submission. Not the impatience of the violent, but the patience of saints was to be His way of winning souls. . . . It was a cup which contained the Father’s will that, in love for men, He should offer His life that they might be restored again to Divine sonship. Nor did He say that a sentence was laid upon Him to undergo His Passion, but rather that He Himself out of love could not do otherwise. “Am I not to drink that cup?” Furthermore, those who arbitrarily and presumptuously resorted to violence, Our Lord told Peter, would feel that violence itself. Revenge brings its own punishment. Bodies can be conquered with unsheathed swords but those same swords often turn against those who wield them:

All those who take up the sword
Will perish by the sword.
                                Matthew 26:52

. . . 

Dost thou doubt that if I call upon My Father,
Even now, He will send more than
Twelve legions of angels to My side?
                                Matthew 26:53

. . . But His refusal to summon the angels was not an involuntary bowing to a fate, or a submitting to pain that He might be purified. It was rather a quiet surrender of some of His own rights; a voluntary abstinence from the use of superior force for the sake of others, a standing unchained with perfect power to go away, and yet submitting for love of mankind—such is sacrifice at white heat.

. . .

Looking beyond all secondary causes, such as Pilate and Annas, the Romans and the Jews, Our Lord saw not enemies to be defeated by a sword, but a cup offered by His Father. Love was the motive and spring of His Sacrifice as He said:

God so loved the world, That He gave up His only-begotten Son,
So that those who believe in Him,
May not perish, but have eternal life.
                                    John 3:16

. . . The love of the Lamb had to be free; to compel the Lamb of God to suffer would be the height of injustice. Hence the affirmation of power at the moment He delivered Himself into their hands. What God permitted was as equally His will as what He appointed. Here Our Lord refused to see the hand of His enemies in His death, but passed immediately to the idea of the cup His Father gave Him. In that love He reposed even though the cup for the moment was bitter, for good was to come from it.

Ven. Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ (1958), Ch. 42: "The Kiss That Blistered"

Benedict XVI - Trial Before Sanhedrin: Jesus Inaugurates a Non-Political Messianic Kingdom

One is tempted to say that the motive for acting against Jesus was a political concern shared by the priestly aristocracy and the Pharisees, though they arrived at it from different starting points; yet this political interpretation of the figure of Jesus and his ministry caused them to miss completely what was most characteristic and new about him. Through the message that he proclaimed, Jesus had actually achieved a separation of the religious from the political, thereby changing the world: this is what truly marks the essence of his new path. 

Nevertheless, we must not be too hasty in condemning the “purely political” outlook of his opponents. For in the world they inhabited, the two spheres—political and religious—were inseparable. The “purely” political existed no more than the “purely” religious. The Temple, the Holy City, and the Holy Land with its people: these were neither purely political nor purely religious realities. Anything to do with Temple, nation, and land involved both the religious foundation of politics and its religious consequences. The defense of the “place” and the “nation” was ultimately a religious affair, because it was concerned with God’s house and God’s people.

. . .

It is an overlap that corresponds to what we discovered in the cleansing of the Temple. Jesus fights there, on the one hand, as we saw, against self-serving abuse of the sacred space, but his prophetic gesture and the interpretation he gave to it go much deeper: the old cult of the stone Temple has come to an end. The hour of the new worship in “spirit and truth” has come. The Temple of stone must be destroyed, so that the new one, the New Covenant with its new style of worship, can come. Yet at the same time, this means that Jesus himself must endure crucifixion, so that, after his Resurrection, he may become the new Temple. 

This brings us back to the question of the interweaving and the separation of religion and politics. In his teaching and in his whole ministry, Jesus had inaugurated a non-political Messianic kingdom and had begun to detach these two hitherto inseparable realities from one another, as we said earlier. But this separation—essential to Jesus’ message—of politics from faith, of God’s people from politics, was ultimately possible only through the Cross. Only through the total loss of all external power, through the radical stripping away that led to the Cross, could this new world come into being. Only through faith in the Crucified One, in him who was robbed of all worldly power and thereby exalted, does the new community arise, the new manner of God’s dominion in the world.

. . . 

Jesus accepted the title Messiah, with all the meanings accruing to it from the tradition, but at the same time he qualified it in a way that could only lead to a guilty verdict, which he could have avoided either by rejecting it or by proposing a milder form of Messianism. He left no room for political or military interpretations of the Messiah’s activity. No, the Messiah—he himself—will come as the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven. Objectively this is quite close to what we find in John’s account when Jesus says: “My kingship is not of this world” (18:36). He claims to sit at the right hand of the Power, that is to say, to come from God in the manner of Daniel’s Son of Man, in order to establish God’s definitive kingdom.

This must have struck the members of the Sanhedrin as politically absurd and theologically unacceptable, for it meant that Jesus was claiming to be close to the “Power”, to participate in God’s own nature, and this would have been understood as blasphemy. However, Jesus had merely pieced a few scriptural quotations together and had expressed his mission “according to the Scriptures”, in language drawn from the Scriptures themselves. But to the members of the Sanhedrin, the application of the noble words of Scripture to Jesus evidently appeared as an intolerable attack on God’s otherness, on his uniqueness.

Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth Part Two: Holy Week (2011), p.169-171, 180 

Pope Saint Paul VI - Touching Jesus in Our Suffering

To all of you who are visited by suffering under a thousand forms, the Second Vatican Council has a very special message. It feels on itself your pleading eyes, burning with fever or hollow with fatigue, questioning eyes which search in vain for the why of human suffering and which ask anxiously when and whence will come relief. We feel echoing deeply within our hearts as fathers and pastors your laments and your complaints. Our suffering is increased at the thought that it is not within our power to bring you bodily help nor the lessening of your physical sufferings, which physicians, nurses and all those dedicated to the service of the sick are endeavoring to relieve as best they can. 

But we have something deeper and more valuable to give you, the only truth capable of answering the mystery of suffering and of bringing you relief without illusion, and that is faith and union with the Man of Sorrows, with Christ the Son of God, nailed to the cross for our sins and for our salvation. Christ did not do away with suffering. He did not even wish to unveil to us entirely the mystery of suffering. He took suffering upon himself and this is enough to make you understand all its value. All of you who feel heavily the weight of the cross, you who are poor and abandoned, you who weep, you who are persecuted for justice, you who are ignored, you the unknown victims of suffering, take courage. You are the preferred children of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of hope, happiness and life. You are the brothers and sisters of the suffering Christ, and with him, if you wish, you are saving the world. This is the Christian science of suffering, the only one which gives peace. Know that you are not alone, separated, abandoned, or useless. You have been called by Christ and are his living and transparent image. In his name, the Council salutes you lovingly, thanks you, assures you of the friendship and assistance of the Church, and blesses you. 

Pope St. Paul VI, Address of Pope Paul VI to the Poor, the Sick, and the Suffering at the closing of the Second Vatican Council, December 8, 1965. 

Balthasar - Christ's sufferings both temporal and supra-temporal; He suffers until the end of time

Like everything in his temporal existence, the Lord’s sufferings were at the same time supra-temporal: every moment of his suffering has an “eternal” intensity, and, precisely because of this, it towers far above chronological time. Thus we can in truth say that he suffers until the end of time. The fact that at the same time he can abide in a glory from which all suffering is absent is a contradiction only for our temporal manner of thought. The most contrary currents converge “at the same time” in Christ’s supra-temporality as in an ocean.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Christ

Balthasar - Clash between “to be” and “ought to be” shows our limitations, is reconciled in Cross

Nowhere is the creaturely nature of our thought more emphatically evident than in the problem posed by the clash between “to be” and “ought to be”. Here it is clearly shown to us that there are problems we are not intended to solve, no more than Adam should have eaten the apple in paradise. For, on the one hand, we are not permitted to think that everything already is as it should be: no one has the competence to calculate sin into a stable picture of the world and thus usurp for himself the vantage point of the redemption, which God alone occupies. But neither are we entitled to doubt the fact that everything is as it should be, that is, that God’s will is absolutely superior to man’s and that it does prevail against it. The sting of this aporia makes itself keenly felt in a practical way when we must unite an absolute impatience with regard to sin with an absolute calm that trusts in God—a dead-serious desire to have the world be different with an equally dead-serious desire that nothing should be other than God wills it. Once again, the problem must be relocated, transferred into Christ. For him it was unbearable that the world should be as it was, and so he bore the unbearable in obedience to the Father. The real Passion lies at the crossroads of these two things; but there we also encounter the overcoming of the contradiction in the one and only Cross.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Christ

Boylan (2) - All united with Jesus at the Cross; He knew and died for each individual sin of our lives

[At the Cross] we were one with him. There he saw every single one of us and every single event in our lives. There he knew, in particular, every single sin of our lives, and made atonement for it, so that there is no sin which cannot be forgiven. This point is of capital importance. We can never exhaust the treasury of our Lord’s satisfaction, nor come to the end of his mercy. It is not merely that he made a general provision for what might happen; he actually satisfied for every single sin we commit. There is a deep mystery involved here. In some way, at least, by his knowledge, we were present and united to him on Calvary, in his death and in his resurrection . . . Perhaps we may glimpse the full reality, if we take literally Saint Paul’s reference to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby the world is crucified to me, and I to the world.

Dom M. Eugene Boylan, O.C.R. - from The Mystical Body: The Foundation of the Spiritual Life [quoted in Magnificat, April 2021]

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Boylan (1) - Sacraments unite us to every point in Jesus's life, especially Crucifixion

This moment [the Crucifixion] is the center of all history; it is the focus and the center of all Christian life. In a sense, it stands in juxtaposition with every moment of history, and with every event of each man’s life. One remembers how some maps of the world are drawn in Mercator’s projection so that the North Pole, expanded into a line, is due north of every point on the surface of the globe. The sacramental system has something of this power of extending its pole or center; it “extends” Christ, and also Christ’s sacrifice, so that he is in contact with every point of space and time . . . 

One can take any single moment or event in one’s own life and place it in vital contact with any single moment or event in the human life of Christ. And every single event of Christ’s life on earth must be considered as taking place in vital contact with each and every event in the lives of each and every member of his Mystical Body . . .

Dom M. Eugene Boylan, O.C.R. - from The Mystical Body: The Foundation of the Spiritual Life [quoted in Magnificat, April 2021]

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O'Brien - Jesus suffers with us

The passage below is from Michael D. O'Brien's novel The Father's Tale. In it, the protagonist of the story has been subjected to torture in an unknown foreign prison, and is near death. (Note: Alyosha is a Russian diminutive for Alexander, which is Alex's full name.)

When consciousness returned, he was alone. The bag was gone from his head. There was no noise, no light, but his senses told him he was alive. His flesh was one single wound, with blood running from his nostrils and ears. A floor beneath his body. It was ice, and blood was crystallizing on it. He was naked. He was deathly cold. His body contracted into the fetal position, shaking violently. 

His groans slid into weeping, and the weeping slid back into groans until it was all the same. Time was the skewer on which he turned, burning, burning. 

Iisus! 

He felt that he was dying and that he had only a few moments left in which to pray. He tried to speak to God, but his mind was incapable of thoughts. His lungs breathed the name of Jesus over and over, though at the root of this utterance was no thought, no fervor. The name was in his breath, and his breath was becoming the name. As long as he did not move, the breathing remained. And the name. 

Iisus! 

Slowly, slowly his heart beat—a drum, a pause, and a drum. 

Then his mind rose still further, and he sensed a presence with him. The darkness was total, but it was broken by breathing that was not his own. He now realized that someone was lying close beside him. From time to time low groans came from the other’s throat. Using the dregs of his strength, Alex moved an arm. It screamed in protest. He moved it still farther, and his fingers brushed against something. It was a hand. A hand covered with blood. 

It cost everything to roll onto his side. He gasped, cried out, then put his own hand on the arm of the other prisoner. 

For a time he rested. It was strange comfort to know that another human being was with him in that place of absolute dark. A flicker of life stirred within him, a moment of pity for the suffering of the other. He felt that he might try to encourage him somehow, to offer solace—the fraternity of the absolutely dispossessed. 

The arm of the other man moved. The man’s hand reached for his. The grip that held Alex was mangled flesh, horrible to touch. With his other hand, Alex touched the face of the prisoner. It too was covered with blood. The man’s chin and cheeks were bearded, his nose large, his eyes deep-set, pools of blood collecting in the sockets. His face was lacerated with many small cuts, and his lips were split, dry, parted. Blood ran from the corners of his mouth. 

“Who are you?” Alex breathed. 

“Alyosha”, the lips whispered in reply. 

“We are suffering, Alyosha”, Alex sobbed, placing the palm of his hand on the man’s forehead. “But we are not alone.” 

The flesh of the forehead was riddled with holes. “You”, said the prisoner, “are Alyosha.” 

“I?” Alex breathed. 

The prisoner reached up and took Alex’s right hand in both of his. He drew Alex’s hand downward across his face, over the collarbone, over the chest that was sliced in every direction, the flesh slippery with blood. He pulled Alex’s hand around the side of his chest and pressed the tips of his fingers to a large gash between two ribs. 

Alex flinched and tried to draw back, but the other’s hands gently held him. 

“My son”, said the prisoner, and drew the fingers deep into the wound beneath his heart. 

Then Alex saw a flash of light and fell into oblivion.

Later he has a similar encounter in another cell, with the one he now calls the Muchenik, or martyr. (Note: kingfisher is a name Alex uses figuratively for himself. It refers to the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem As Kingfishers Catch Fire.) 

The Muchenik took the kingfisher’s hand and drew it gently to the wound in his side, beneath his heart. And the kingfisher’s heart hammered with horror and worship, and the dissolving of every language save the language of love.

The Muchenik put his fingers into the wounds of the kingfisher—the heart wounds and the mind wounds—though he asked permission before doing so and did not use force. And the kingfisher replied yes, yes, yes . For both acts cleansed the degradation. And the nyet, nyet, nyet that had seized him during the torture withdrew for a time.

A third and final meeting is described here:

As before, he was stretched out on the ice, seeking the tormented one, reaching across the void.

“We are suffering, Muchenik,” he groaned, “but we are not alone.”

He touched the holes in the hands and feet of the prisoner. He lightly touched the face that a rifle butt had shattered. The hands of the prisoner drew his fingers to the wound in his heart, and his heart was a fountain.

I consider these to be some of the finest passages in all of literature, Christian or otherwise. They express the reality that the worse our sufferings are, the more real is the presence of Jesus with us. Alex, at the very limit of human suffering, is even privileged to experience a physical manifestation of that Presence. 

Thomas à Kempis has said, "When you suffer tribulation and your heart is filled with sorrow, you are with Jesus on the Cross." This is true literally (not usually physically, of course) because the Crucifixion, like all of Jesus's life on earth, happened both in time and outside of time. Because He is eternally crucified, and because His crucifixion contains all human suffering, Jesus literally suffers with us. This is the beginning of the answer God provides to the mystery of our suffering: He is with us in it.