The Agony in the Garden.
First Sorrowful Mystery
The Agony in the Garden
Not the Fear of Death, but the Weight of an Unfinished Mission
The Agony in the Garden is the Gospel passage for the Wednesday of Holy Week according to the 1962 Roman Missal, and it appears in the Passion readings across the three liturgical years of the current missal.
Everything about Christ was foretold in prophecy, and He had a mission to complete in this life. From the moment of His Incarnation, His birth, His Presentation in the Temple, and His public ministry were all part of His divine mission, all of it foretold. Being born perfect, He had a perfect desire to complete His mission out of love for us.
St. Catherine of Siena, a Dominican tertiary and one of the four female Doctors of the Church, wrote a great deal on the life of prayer and on suffering with Christ, and she was blessed with the stigmata (invisible in her lifetime, by her own prayer). In her Dialogue, the series of visions and conversations she had with Christ, she spoke with Him about His Agony in the Garden. His prayers there, as revealed to her, were not in fear of what was to come but in the longing for His mission to be fulfilled.
He knew the pains to come, and He knew the eternal reward awaiting those who would follow and obey Him. Br. La Grange draws the point out from her writings:
He suffered for us not only in His sacrificial offering but throughout His life among us. He bore our sinful natures, our ignorance and arrogance, our unfaithfulness, God Himself standing before us and telling us how to live, while so many failed to see it. So when He prayed in the Garden, it was not to ask a reprieve from the coming death but to let His mission reach its end, that He might offer Himself as a sin-offering, in the pattern of the Levitical Law, for the forgiveness of all mankind. And yet, if it were the Father's will, He would go on bearing us still.
It is no accident that the Passion begins in a garden. Salvation history turns on two gardens, and the second undoes the first. In Eden a man was asked to trust the Father's will and refused; in Gethsemane the New Adam is asked the same and consents, and where the first "no" brought death into the world, the second "yes" begins to drive it out.
This is the redemptive obedience the whole Sorrowful set turns on. The promise made to Adam and Eve after their banishment, that the woman's seed would crush the serpent (Genesis 3:15), begins to be kept here in the dark of an olive grove, in a single sentence of surrender.
The fruit of this mystery is conformity to God's will, seen when Christ completes His prayer:
Meditating on this mystery helps us to look always to the Father in our own sufferings, and to be willing to go on bearing them if He should will it for some divine purpose. To be conformed to His will is not to stop feeling the weight of the cup, but to add, even so, "yet not my will, but yours."
Pray each verse, then the Ave Maria, letting the Gospel of the Agony carry the decade. (Scripture here follows the RSV-2CE.)
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