much anguish as they could cause an ordinary man. He therefore testified to His heavenly Father that His human nature abhorred its fearful torments, and wished to be freed from them; the thrice repeated prayer: “Take this chalice from Me!” shows this to us.
The causes of our Lord’s profound sadness and terrible agony of mind were as follows:
1. He saw before Him the many and inhuman torments which awaited Him. He pictured all these terrible sufferings, enduring them in anticipation. How would you feel at this moment if you were told that you were to be slowly tortured to death tomorrow? Human nature shrinks from death, and especially from a violent death. The most painful as well as the most ignominious of deaths awaited our Lord, the prospect of which filled His Soul with horror, for He was truly man, like to us in all things, sin only excepted. As Man, He prayed to His Father: “Let this chalice pass”; but there being no sinful rebelliousness in His human will, it remained in full submission to the divine will, and He added: “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt”.
2. Our Blessed Lord took the sins of men on Himself, so as to offer satisfaction to the divine justice in their stead. Now that He was on the point of completing His work of Redemption, the horrible mass of evil, abomination and guilt came before His holy Soul and filled it with abhorrence and aversion. “Him, that knew no sin, for us God hath made sin, that we might be made the justice of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5, 21). What a horror it must have been to the Most Holy, the Most Pure One, to feel Himself laden with the sins of the whole world, the sins of pride, lust, avarice &c.! If sorrow for the shameful ingratitude of sin could make Magdalen and Peter weep bitter tears, what a detestation of sin must He have felt who alone knew its malice to the full! “Jesus saw all our individual sins, and grieved over them as if He Himself had committed them, for He had taken on Himself the burden of them all. Truly, the grief of this alone would have killed Him, if He had not held back His soul, in order that He might endure still more, and drink the chalice of suffering to the very dregs. He would not die on the Mount of Olives, because His life was to be sacrificed on Calvary; but He shed His Blood, the bloody sweat of His agony in order to show us that sin alone, without the help of any executioner, was sufficient to strike His death-blow” (Bossuet). Many indeed are the tears which have been caused, since the Fall of our first parents, by sin and the consequences of sin, but never such tears as these; for “His sweat became as drops of blood trickling down upon the ground”. No one can understand, as did our Blessed Lord, the utter malice, baseness, and ingratitude of sin. Oh, would that the sweat of blood, forced from our dear Lord’s veins by His sorrow for the sins of men, could serve to make us more sorry for having sinned, and more determined to hate and avoid sin for the future!
