Meditation on Suffering

From Workshop "The Agony in the Garden as a Model of Human Suffering"

At this weekend’s Faith & Evangelization Congress (Archdiocese of Hartford), I reflected with participants on Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.  We considered what makes this story so unique:  it is a time of intense reflection between the ministry and death of Jesus; it is a period of mental and emotional struggle before the physical trial of the Cross; and it is a place where Jesus wrestles within himself, surrenders to the will of the Father, and is ultimately strengthened to move forward.  We looked closely at the parallel accounts in Matthew 26:36-46, Mark 14:32-42 and Luke 22:40-46 and closed our session with a meditation on suffering.  Some participants asked if this last part of the presentation could be made available, and I’m happy to share it here.  Though the meditation begins by asking the question of why we suffer, I suppose it really more closely addresses the question, What does it mean? 

I’d like to offer a brief meditation to wrap up our thoughts on suffering and what we have learned from Jesus’ Agony in the Garden.  Even though we have talked about how we can learn from and take comfort in this Gospel account of Jesus’ mental and emotional turmoil, we are still left with the perennial human question:  Why do we suffer?  I am not about to unlock the mysteries of the universe, but this is a topic worth revisiting, because rarely a day goes by that we do not suffer in at least some small way, and some days (some weeks, some months, some years), we suffer very much. 

So why do we suffer?  I don’t believe that God inflicts suffering upon us, but it is a fact that he allows it.  We can easily see that the way God cares for us is not by protecting us from all bad things.  But a great lesson of the Cross of course is that God brings great good out of the inevitable suffering of human life.  And because we are a resurrection people who have faith in one who beat back even death itself, who conquered sin once and for all, and who showed us a way to live – we have a perspective on suffering that can offer comfort, hope and meaning.

First, think of suffering not only as an event or as something that happens to you but as a place.  Suffering brings us to a crossroads.  It offers us a difficult choice between two paths.  On both paths, we suffer – there is simply no avoiding that.  But one path is a road that leads right back into ourselves.  When we choose this path, we are alone.  We fret, we become bitter, we stagnate, we go nowhere.  We just get stuck.  The other path before us is the one that turns us outward – in our suffering, we embrace people and relationships.  We open ourselves to God.  We choose to have faith in one who is with us when we suffer.  When we allow suffering to open us up this way, despite our pain, we are free.  We go places.  We may even flourish.  This is why St. Paul wrote, “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10).  Because when we already feel strong, when we already are strong, we have no need of God or his transforming presence.  You may recall an itinerant preacher of the 1st century who wisely said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician” (Lk. 5:31).  When I am weak, then I am strong – Why?  Because now it is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me (Gal. 2:20).  When we are weak, it is then that the “power of Christ” dwells in us (1 Cor. 12:9). 

Of course we know that suffering changes us.  We all know that we are pruned and shaped by the aches and pains of this life.  It does hurt, but if we allow it, we can be transformed.  No human being escapes the pruning shears of suffering, not even the Christ.  His pruning – the pruning of the Master we follow and imitate – brought forth new life and redefined suffering forever.

Friends, we are a part of this “re-definition” of suffering.  The one who suffered in the Garden and died on the Cross invites us near, very near.  So near that we can smell the dirt of the Garden, so near that the nails pierce our hands too.  He never promised we would not suffer.  He simply said, “Follow me.”  He invites us to follow, he invites us close so that we can be like him, so we can be one with him, so we may say with St. Paul:  “I have been crucified with Christ; it is now no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.  And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me” (Gal. 2:19-20).

When we suffer, Christ is near.  And the surrender of Christ is perhaps the greatest lesson of all – about suffering and how to make peace with it, about love and how to give and receive it, about God and how much he loves us.  Your wrestling matches in your Gardens of Gethsemane, your journeys to Golgotha, the nails in your own hands and feet, the swords that pierce your heart – you have a share in this great lesson, in this great truth, in this awesome surrender of Christ. 

It may seem that surrender would weaken us, make us vulnerable.  But in actuality it strengthens us for anything that may come our way.  We have not “given up.”  We have “surrendered.”  There is a big difference.  Our surrender is not a frustrated throwing up of our hands.  That is not the Christ we see in the Garden.  No, our surrender is deliberate, it is an intentional “giving over” of ourselves and our own will to God because we trust him – we trust him with our bodies, with our minds, and with our futures.  Our surrender is to finally and decidedly speak the words:  Not my will but yours be done.

For when we finally take up our crosses as he told us to – every single day as he told us to – we find in this surrender a way of profound peace.  In our surrender we have finally trusted our God – not to take our pain away, but to be present there with us; not to explain our pain away, but to make of it a time for giving and receiving love; not to ignore our pain, but to help us make of it a place where we can lie with Christ in the dirt of the Garden or hang with him upon the Cross.  It is Jesus who taught us that unless a grain of wheat falls down to the earth and dies, it remains just a seed.  But if it dies, it bears much fruit (Jn. 12:24).  What better place to fall down to the earth and die with Jesus, to be a seed trampled and buried, than in the Garden of Gethsemane?  This is where we are meant to be, for he also said:  “Where I am, there will my servant be also” (Jn. 12:26). 

I close with a final thought.  St. Paul said quite simply:  If we die with him, we will rise with him (Rom. 6:8).  We do not just suffer for the sake of suffering.  We are never left to wait endlessly in a Garden or to hang forever on a Cross.  No, we will rise up from prayer in the Garden, we will be brought down from the Cross.  There is a glory to come – a sharing in the glory of Christ.  Now we have only a foretaste of that glory, when we suffer with him, when we surrender with him, when we place ourselves in the loving hands of God with him.  Yes, we could choose other Masters that might be easier to follow.  But as disciples we would find no greater love and no greater peace; we would hear no richer promises.  So let us join him in the Garden – in the dirt if we must – but always remembering that in our agony we are not alone – we are never alone – we will bear fruit and we will be raised – we who have surrendered with Christ.  

Agonia Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, in the pages of Scripture, I read the story of your suffering.  It is a story that begins with the rebellion of humankind and plays out over the pages and over the centuries, from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Gethsemane, from the long road out of Eden to the burdened path to Golgotha.  In the world around me, and in my own life, I see your suffering continue.  Though I find strength within myself and comfort in the support of others, there are times when my self-reliance becomes hollow; there are times when I am alone.  In those times of true agony, I enter the Garden.  I throw myself to the ground before you.  There is nothing left to hide.  There is nothing left to cling to.  I only see the cup before me and the agonia within me.  In my struggle, bring me to a place of peace and surrender:  not my will but yours be done.  Strengthen me to rise from this earth.  Remain with me in this Garden of struggle and surrender, and I will drink this cup:  Into your hands, Lord, I commit my spirit!  Amen.

Garden of Gethsemane by Merab Abramishvili

God and Storms

Do you ever pray about the weather?  “Pray for good weather this Sunday for the church picnic.”  While there’s certainly nothing wrong with praying for this sort of thing, it may create legitimate questions in our minds:  If God would arrange good weather for our church picnic, why wouldn’t he arrange for hurricanes to avoid heavily populated areas, or for monsoons to stop before they become devastating floods, or for rain to fall on drought-stricken farms?  Why not redirect a polar vortex or subdue a tsunami?

Can God control the weather?  Of course.  But does he?

In this way, earth’s storms are not unlike the storms of life.  We can and we should pray about the difficulties and devastations we face.  We must always communicate with, and lean on and believe in, our loving and powerful God.  But we are well aware that he does not always intervene when it comes to “bad weather.”  Could God control every aspect of our lives, create a wall around us, protecting us from every bad thing?  Perhaps.  But does he?  He most certainly does not.

Perhaps it comes down to a question of how God protects us.  There are times in life when we feel miraculously protected – walking away from a car accident, being thrown from a horse and standing up good as new.  But for the most part, we get tossed around by life with scars to show for it – there are injuries, illnesses, heartbreaks, sleeplessness, stress and death – for all of God’s children.  The rain falls on everyone, and some even seem to get more than their fair share.  God does not always shield us from these things.  And yet he remains our powerful protector.  He protects not with a power that interferes with each event, but a power that gathers us in, and pulls us near, and makes and keeps promises about being with us.  It is a power that may strike us as a bit too subtle at times, and yet as time passes, we recognize how awesome, and how essential, and how real it actually is.

As a parent, I do not want my children to suffer, and I am naturally tempted to smooth their paths in whatever way I can.  But even more than I may want an easy life for them, I want a great life for them.  I want them to be great.  And the fact is that great people have suffered.  They have experienced the storms of life without always bailing out into the nearest shelter.  They have learned the most important things by being brought down low.  Storms transformed them and made them strong, wise, clearheaded and serene.  Wounded?  Yes, that too.  But we can be wounded and still be great.  It is much harder to be utterly unscathed and be anything more than mediocre.

God allows bad weather – really bad weather – and he allows life’s storms.  Sometimes the storms are so bad that our wounds don’t heal.  For those times we may simply have to surrender:  “Lord, I know you may not change this storm, but you are always willing to change me.  So if you must, make me great!”

Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) -- The Morning After the Deluge by William Turner, 1843.

Agony in the Garden

The Agony in the Garden is a remarkable piece of the Passion of Christ.  It is poised between his life and his death – between the Last Supper and the Way of the Cross.  Here we have a story that sends a chill down our spines when we read it – first, because the suffering of Christ touches us.  But we are also disturbed by the passage because it touches something very close to home for each one of us.  The agony of Christ is a familiar struggle – between life and death, between his will and the will of the Father, between the past and the future.

Only Luke uses the word “agony” (sometimes translated “anguish”) in his account of the scene at Gethsemane:  “In his anguish, he prayed more earnestly” (Lk. 22:44; NRSV).  The Greek word here is agonia – its original meaning carried the connotation of the athlete’s struggle, conjuring images of a determined runner on his last legs, or the physical and mental pressures faced by a competitive wrestler.  Reflecting this meaning, one Lukan scholar gives a literal translation of the passage as:  “Entering the struggle, he continued to pray even more eagerly” (Luke Timothy Johnson, Sacra Pagina).  Does this athlete struggle up a sweat?  Yes, he does – “and his sweat became like great drops of blood, falling on the ground” (22:44).

The agonia of Christ in the Garden offers us a meditation on all kinds of human struggles.  Jesus was not only experiencing the very human dread of suffering and death.  He also faced the “sleepiness” of friends in the midst of his anxiety, the betrayal of one close to him, and the impending desertion of the rest.  Thus he was not only facing death but utter loneliness.  And certainly, in expectation of his death, he naturally looked back at his life – an exercise that in all of its humanity must have included questions and conflict (we know, for example, that Jesus felt conflicted about leaving his followers behind; see Jn. 17:12-15).  Finally, Jesus was clearly being crushed in the all-too-familiar crucible of discernment between his own will in that moment and the eternal will of the Father. 

The command of Christ – “Follow me!” – includes walking with him to Gethsemane.  It is a place we go before every Golgotha of our lives.  It is the place of inner turmoil and agonia.  Here we struggle with him, and we watch him, to see what he does and imitate him.  We see him throw himself to the ground and lie in the dirt of the Garden.  Isolated by the sleepiness of his friends, he turns all the more earnestly to the Father.  He prays fervently and honestly.  And the Father, who never deserts his children, does not change the past nor does he remove the trajectory of suffering from his Son’s life.  But he sends an angel to minister to him, and he gives to his Son a resolute spirit.  Here in the Garden, Jesus is strengthened to do what he is called to do, to go where he is called to go, to drink from the cup the Father has given him.   We see him arise from prayer ready to face the hour at hand.  He awakens his friends with a renewed calm and a serene acceptance of his situation:  “My betrayer is at hand.”

Our own betrayers are probably not human foes.  We are more likely to simply feel betrayed by the natural circumstances of life – illness, loneliness, failed relationships, financial distress, the death of a loved one, anxiety over our children, the burden of old wounds that won’t heal.  When we carry these burdens, we really have no choice but to follow the Master to the Garden and allow the agonia to play out.  And if we follow him closely, we throw ourselves to the ground and pray honestly.  We accept the quiet comfort the Father offers, rise with a resolute spirit, and drink deeply from the cups that do not pass.

* * * * *

For my full article on The Garden as a Place of Agony written for The Bible Today, click here.

 The account of Jesus’ struggle at Gethsemane/Mount of Olives is found in Mt. 26:36-46, Mk. 14:32-42, and Lk. 22:39-46.  John’s Gospel refers to Jesus’ presence in the garden at the time of his arrest but does not narrate Jesus’ anguish (though at his arrest he uses similar language, saying to Peter, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” Jn. 18:11).

When It Hurts, Remember You Are an Eternal, Living House

C.S. Lewis has a special way of explaining things….

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."