← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis

The Dark Night of the World

Thread ID: 17432 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2005-03-21

Wayback Archive

Walter Yannis [OP]

2005-03-21 09:14 | User Profile

[URL=http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?art_id=27882]The Dark Night of the World[/URL] Part One: Three Causes of Jesus’s Pain in Gethsemane 03/21/05 The Bitter Aftertaste of Sin

Theologians and spiritual writers generally agree that there were three essential dimensions, three main causes, of Jesus’s pain in Gethsemane.

First, Christ’s suffering in the Garden was a unique internal experience of sin. Jesus Himself was free from sin. He had never given in to temptation and selfishness; He stayed faithful to the natural law and to God’s will for Him personally all through His life. This sinlessness was an essential characteristic of the Savior, prefigured by the Old Covenant requirement that sacrifices offered in reparation for sin be animals "without blemish."

In Gethsemane, however, the evil of sin is poured into His soul. He is made the scapegoat of all the sins that men and women had ever committed, and all the sins they were going to commit. He took upon Himself the responsibility for every act of betrayal and infidelity, every injustice, every crime against God, man, and nature perpetrated by the entire human race. Even people who are used to sinning feel agonizing remorse when faced with the true nature and consequences of their sinful actions. That gnawing, deadening weight of guilt was intensified almost beyond recognition in the pristine soul of the Savior, both because of His perfect love for God — which sin scorns — and because of the sheer quantity and atrocity of the crimes He was assuming. The New Testament attempts to describe this indescribable reality with a paradox: "Him [Christ], who knew no sin, He [God] hath made sin for us: that we might be made the justice of God in Him" (2 Cor 5:21).

Later, St. Paul explains the paradox more fully, linking what happened in Gethsemane to the whole course of Christ’s Passion: "And you [sinners], when you were dead in your sins…He [God] hath quickened together with Him, forgiving you all offences. Blotting out the handwriting of the decree that was against us…. And He hath taken the same out of the way, fastening it to the Cross" (Col 2:13-14).

In His Passion, which starts in Gethsemane, Christ took upon Himself the responsibility and consequences of all human sin.

For members of a fallen race, sin is a common occurrence and familiar companion, but for Christ, sin was "the scent and poison of death." The mere vision of it would have repelled Him utterly. But this was no mere vision; it was a spiritual communion, a spiritual identification with the responsibility, the guilt of all those sins. Consequently, for Jesus, this was an indescribable inner torture.

Through the centuries, other artistic renditions of this biblical scene have depicted this unfathomable burden of sin more explicitly. Some show devils and demons mocking Jesus, an in-your-face parade of sin’s grotesqueness. Such arresting images communicate the theological meaning of the moment, but create an aura of otherworldliness around Christ’s battle. Somehow, they come across as unreal, fairy-tale like images. To keep the struggle as visually real as possible — and perhaps, even more haunting — the film opts to accentuate the cosmic elements. The moon, the clouds, the earth are all caught up in a supernatural tension.

This artistic choice echoes the writers of the New Testament. They don’t describe the details of why Christ was suffering in the Garden. But they do make an allusion to cosmic symbols. One of the Gospel writers, St. John, for example, marks the beginning of the Passion with three simple but heavily charged words: "It was night" (Jn 13:30).

The Torment of Unrequited Love

A second source of Christ’s suffering in Gethsemane was His own privileged knowledge. Jesus knew how useless His self-sacrifice would be for the many individuals who would knowingly reject His offer of salvation. Jesus had nothing to gain personally from coming to earth and redeeming the human family. He did it solely out of love — a love for His Father who looked with mercy on the fallen human race. A love for every person caught in the vicious circle of selfishness. Jesus knew that sin doomed man to a deep, existential frustration. What every human heart needed above all else — intimate friendship with God — became unattainable.

Human beings were created to find meaning and fulfillment in that friendship, but original sin had shattered the possibility. Unless God renewed His offer of friendship and reached out a hand to heal those hearts mortally wounded by their compliance with evil, the world had no hope. Christ embodied the renewed offer of divine friendship with humankind. His hand could heal because it had never given in to evil. He did it out of an intense, knowing, personal love for each person. Yet during those agonizing hours in the Garden, most spiritual writers agree, God showed Jesus the countless people through the centuries who would refuse His offer and persist in their selfishness. That truth added inconsolable distress of unrequited love to the torture of biting remorse.

The film’s visual depiction of this agony is captivating, but in reality it is a mere token of the suffering that must have really taken place. The Bible describes Christ’s suffering as being "sorrowful unto death." What exactly could that mean? What is that feeling? What must that have been like? Artists — film directors included — tend to have highly sensitive temperaments that exacerbate their own sufferings and increase their capacity for empathy, but even their worst sufferings pale in comparison with what Christ must have experienced.

The Frailty of Human Nature

Taking all human sin upon Himself and knowing that, even so, many people would still reject His offer of salvation were, most spiritual writers agree, the first two causes of Christ’s suffering in the Garden. The third cause was additional privileged information: Jesus knew beforehand, vividly and viscerally, all that He would have to go through in the next twelve hours — the humiliation, the betrayal, the rejection, the injustice, the imprisonment, the beatings, the flagellation, the torture, the mockery, the crucifixion, the death.

Considering the immensity of the first two burdens, this third burden can easily seem almost inconsequential. Nevertheless, Jesus Christ was a real man, a man in His thirties, in the prime of His life. Far from alleviating the indescribable disappointment and anxiety that any man would feel facing such a painful failure (at least naturally speaking it was a failure), His divinity only enhanced it. His humanity was perfect, and therefore perfectly sensitive.

Precisely because of this third reason some people believe that the combat in the Garden must have been easy for Jesus. After all, He was the Son of God; He wasn’t weak, ignorant, and selfish like your average human. Besides, He knew that His suffering would only last a little while, and then He would rise from the dead and reign forever. Sure He suffered, but not like us; He didn’t really suffer the agony of doubt, despair, loneliness — all the real scourges of mankind’s existential precariousness.

The reality of the Passion as narrated in the Gospels disagrees. Although the human mind has difficulty comprehending exactly how the Son of God could combine His special divine prerogatives with an authentic experience of absolute human misery, it is clear that He did. The Gospel writers use the strongest words they can find to describe the experience. The film follows suit. Every element of the scene is orchestrated to communicate agonizing mortal tension. Christ is given a full awareness of what He will endure, why, and for whom; Christ sees all the victories and losses; He sees the whole drama; He sees eternity.

Contemplating deeply and prayerfully the reasons behind His suffering can help the human heart accept the truth of its incomprehensible immensity. This is the common experience of saints and sinners alike through the centuries.

[I]Fr. John Bartunek received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Stanford University in 1990, graduating cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He spent a year as a professional actor in Chicago before entering the Legionaries of Christ, a religious congregation. He is currently studying for an advanced degree in moral theology in Rome, where he resides. You can write to him at [email]fatherjohn@insidethepassion.com[/email].[/I]

Robert

2005-03-22 00:12 | User Profile

Walter, thanks for posting this article. I enjoyed reading it. Although I'm Baptist, and have strong theological differences with Roman Catholics, the article contained profound observations.

askel5

2005-03-22 00:25 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]Considering the immensity of the first two burdens, this third burden can easily seem almost inconsequential.[/QUOTE]

Save for the fact he knew his own mother would be there -- unlike his disciples who couldn't last an hour in the Garden -- to see it all.

Once upon a time I was savaged pretty badly and hid in my sister's dorm room for a week or so until I no longer looked like the Elephant Man. I will never forget the way she wept as she took photos of the damage in case they were necessary. Tears just rolled down her cheeks.

I hadn't cried, I wasn't crying and I wasn't going to cry. Mine were just flesh wounds. It was she who was wounded to the core about the whole thing.

I suppose Christ's one consolation in the certain knowledge of the sword of sorrow which would pierce her heart shortly is that she, of all people, had been spared absolutely the crushing weight of sin he had taken upon himself.

Walter Yannis

2005-03-22 09:50 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Robert]Walter, thanks for posting this article. I enjoyed reading it. Although I'm Baptist, and have strong theological differences with Roman Catholics, the article contained profound observations.[/QUOTE]

Thanks Robert & Aksel.

Here's Part II:

[QUOTE] [URL=http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?art_id=27913]The Dark Night of the World — Part Two: The Betrayal of the Savior[/URL]

03/22/05 For Holy Week, Catholic Exchange is presenting a series of condensed excerpts from Inside the Passion by Father John Bartunek. These reflections will greatly enhance your appreciation of the movie The Passion of The Christ, but even more, they are rich in theological insights into the suffering our Lord experienced for our salvation. An Unsurprising Tragedy

The Old Testament prophesied the betrayal of the Savior. In the time of the ancient Hebrew Patriarchs (circa 1800 BC), envy drove Jacob’s ten older sons to sell his eleventh son (their half-brother), Joseph, into slavery. They too did it for a handful of silver pieces. God in His Providence used that betrayal for the good of Jacob’s family — Joseph ended up viceroy of Egypt and saved his brothers and their whole clan during a famine. (You can read the remarkable story in Genesis 37-48.) The brothers were reconciled, and they became the heads of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, God’s Chosen People. In a similar way, Christians believe, God’s Providence turned Judas’s betrayal into the source of salvation for all people; Christ’s self-sacrifice provided the “bread of life” (Jn 6:35) that would relieve the spiritual famine created by original sin.

Christians also see Judas’s betrayal referred to prophetically in the Book of Psalms. Many spiritual writers even see in these passages (and others) an indication that the greatest suffering Christ endured throughout His Passion was, in fact, Judas’s betrayal.

A passage from Psalm 54 is often referred to as an especially poignant prefiguring of Christ’s sentiments in relation to this aspect of His Passion:

For if my enemy had reviled me, I would verily have borne with it. And if he that hated me had spoken great things against me, I would perhaps have hidden myself from him. But thou a man of one mind, my guide, and my familiar, who didst take sweetmeats together with me, in the house of God we walked with consent…(vs 13-15). Psalm 40 expresses the same sorrow: All my enemies whispered together against me; they devised evils to me…. For even the man of my peace, in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, hath greatly supplanted me... (vs 8-10). Those descriptions are hardly the epitome of monstrous evil; the film is true to Scripture when it portrays Judas as a complex character indeed.

The New Testament discreetly reiterates the severe wound Judas’s betrayal made in the heart of Christ. During the Last Supper, the Passover Seder that Jesus celebrated with His Apostles the night before His Passion, Jesus referred to it explicitly: “When Jesus had said these things, He was troubled in spirit; and He testified, and said: Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you shall betray me" (Jn 13:21).

And yet, to the end Jesus held out the hand of friendship to His betrayer. The film first portrays this in the way Jesus looks at Judas in the Garden. As the soldiers enter Gethsemane, Jesus stands forth, ready to fulfill His Father’s will. Judas had arranged to identify Jesus by greeting Him with a kiss, a common salutation and sign of friendship in first-century Palestine. (Some kind of sign was necessary because in the dark the guards may have had difficulty identifying Jesus, or one of His disciples may have tried to pass himself off as Jesus in order to provide a chance for their leader’s escape.) When Judas sees Jesus and the other Apostles, his initial reaction is to flee. Judas was clearly ashamed of himself in front of his friends, in front of the other Apostles he knew so well. But the guards force him to go through with his plan.

As he moves towards Jesus, you see close-ups of John and Peter, representatives of the other Apostles, looking at him with sheer contempt, while in contrast the face of Jesus is welcoming, warm, sincere till the end. His response to the betrayal, when He says sadly, “Judas, dost thou betray the Son of man with a kiss?” (Lk 22:48), is more a gentle call to repentance than an accusation....

Later, during the trial in front of the leaders of Jerusalem, Judas looks on. Finally he gives the blood money back to Caiaphas and pleads for Jesus’s release. But even then he can’t accept responsibility for his betrayal. At any time whatsoever Judas could have come back, he could have wept for his sins and Jesus would have forgiven him, but he doesn’t come back.

That’s the remarkable thing about human freedom. God won’t force-feed his love; Judas was just too proud to accept his failings and the forgiveness that he needed. Letting oneself be loved even when one is unworthy of love requires humility. Many people, like Judas, simply refuse to take that step. That’s the real tragedy of Judas: not that he betrayed Christ, but that he didn’t trust in Christ’s forgiveness....

Peter: The Other Side of the Judas Coin

The obvious parallel to Judas is Peter, who also betrays Jesus during the trial with Caiaphas, by denying that he even knows Him when some threatening bystanders accuse him of being Jesus’s disciple. It’s a similar case, but not identical, as is clear in the Gospels, and as the film brings out.

Peter’s emotions are not complicated: He was simply terrified. He saw what was going on and he thought, “Uh oh, I’m next. I’ll have my head on the chopping block, and I’m not ready for this….” He hadn’t received the courage of the Holy Spirit yet. Peter’s denial came out of his weakness. He was surprised into it in a moment of confusion when his whole world was crumbling. He didn’t nurse it and think about it and coddle it and prepare for it as Judas had done. He just fell into it. This is why Peter was able to recover when Jesus gave him that indescribable look after his third denial. Judas got the look too, but he had already hardened his heart.

Judas had his moment of truth [in the film] when Jesus fell off the bridge and gave him one last look, one last invitation to repentance. Peter gets his after his third denial, when Jesus falls to the ground under the blows of his captors and turns his head to Peter, who has also fallen to the ground. The camera shots of Jesus’s two looks are uncannily similar. The difference was in the responses. Judas had already hardened his heart too much; Peter hadn’t. When Peter runs into Mary as he flees from the place of the trial he finds the strength to accept his failure, to repent, to admit his sin. Mary’s look echoes Jesus’s, and she accepts Peter’s repentance in Jesus’s place, since Peter can’t get to Jesus to ask directly.

The Gospels don’t record this encounter, but it emphasizes the contrast between Peter and Judas, bringing into sharper relief the message of hope taught by Christ’s reactions to the betrayals.... What saved Peter from despair; why did he have the “right disposition” and Judas didn’t? The flashback that appears when Peter has made his denial provides a clue. Jesus had predicted Peter’s denial at the Last Supper (the scene of the flashback), just as He had predicted Judas’s, according to the Gospel narratives. As Peter realizes that the prediction has come true, and as he looks into Christ’s bruised and swollen eyes, it dawns on him that Jesus knew all along how weak Peter was, how arrogant and conceited. And yet, even knowing that, He had never pulled back His love. Becoming aware of Christ’s immeasurable love for him, Christ’s unconditional love for him — that’s what saved him from despair. Christ’s love bred Peter’s hope.

Good Guilt and Bad Guilt

Peter’s denial was as heart-wrenching for Peter as Judas’s was for Judas. Early Christian tradition relates that Peter wept for that denial every day for the rest of his life. But Peter used it as a springboard to grow in love and trust. It taught him that he was weak, and he accepted the lesson, along with Christ’s forgiveness. Judas didn’t.

The film’s insight into Judas’s tragic passage to despair fits in with the great spiritual writers’ understanding of the moral life. Human nature has a built-in moral gauge that impels you to adhere to what is right and avoid or reject what is wrong. Although the gauge has been damaged by original sin (and sometimes social and cultural influences aggravate the damage), it still points towards behavior marked by characteristics like fairness, loyalty, and generosity, just as the needle of a damaged compass will still slide towards polar north. The impetus to do good and avoid evil (discerning between the two is often where the damage makes things difficult) makes itself felt more acutely at two moments of every moral decision: just before and just after.

Temptations (moral interference transmitted by the forces of evil and their leader, the devil) frequently come at those moments as well. Before the moment of decision they supply reasons and alternatives against choosing what is morally right, and sometimes those reasons and alternatives show an almost irresistible force, as during Christ’s combat in Gethsemane. After the decision has been made, when the moral gauge is registering approval for a good decision or disapproval for a bad one, temptations change their tack. In the aftermath of a good decision, they often retreat to gather strength for another onslaught. In the aftermath of a bad decision, they often consist in feelings of self-deprecation and hopelessness, draining off the moral courage necessary to admit one’s failings, take responsibility for the wrong done, and reboot the moral computer.

“Guilt” is the name given to the moral gauge’s indication that a wrong decision has been made. In itself, it is morally neutral: it can lead either to repentance (as in the case of Peter) or to flight and denial (as in the case of Judas). Feeling guilt, therefore, is a sign that the gauge, however damaged it may be, is still running — the first requirement for any kind of moral or truly spiritual life. What each person does with that guilt will determine his or her moral character and spiritual strength. Everyone can be like Peter, and everyone can be like Judas. [/QUOTE]

Walter Yannis

2005-03-24 06:47 | User Profile

[URL=http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?art_id=27916]Part III[/URL]

[QUOTE]The Dark Night of the World — Part Three: Suffering in Freedom, Suffering in Silence 03/23/05 An Emphasis on Freedom

Jesus’s free acceptance of the suffering He underwent in His Passion — in spite of having the power to avoid it — distinguishes it from the rest of human suffering. Some skeptics compare the Passion with the horrendous tortures endured by prisoners of war or other victims of unspeakable violence. The intensity of the physical pain, the utter humiliation, and the psycho-emotional affliction are indeed comparable, which is one reason why people through the centuries have been able to find God’s presence even in the midst of atrocious suffering — they know that He experienced it too.

But if prisoners of war and other victims had been able to call down twelve legions of angels to free themselves from their torturers, they would have. Many of these men and women have suffered (and are even now suffering) courageously, and even heroically, but Christ suffered His atrocities voluntarily from start to finish, accepting them even though He had the power to avoid them.

One of the earliest surviving Christian liturgical texts, a third-century Eucharistic prayer (i.e. the prayer that refers to the narration of the Last Supper used by the Catholic priest during the sacrifice of the Mass), places special emphasis on this aspect of the Passion: “Before He was given up to death, a death Hhe freely accepted….” It was the freedom with which Christ accepted the “cup of suffering” that made it redemptive. He did not deserve to suffer; He had never taken part in the cause of suffering — sin, evil, selfishness. Yet He freely accepted it, out of love for the Father and love for every human soul. “Put up thy sword back into the scabbard,” He says to Peter in the Garden, and St. John records how He finished the statement, “The chalice which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” (Jn 18:11). It is the bitter cup of suffering that would become the sweet cup of salvation.

Love and Suffering

His uniquely free acceptance of suffering transformed suffering — an evil in itself, a consequence of sin — into an instrument of salvation, because salvation is linked to love, and love means self-giving, and self-giving, in a world inundated with self-indulgence and in a human nature skewed towards self-centeredness, always involves some kind of suffering, some kind of self-denial. This is how Christ defined love, as self-sacrifice for the sake of the beloved. Undergoing His Passion was one way to make sure His disciples understood exactly what He meant, to give them a visual icon of authentic love:

This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, if you do the things that I command you…. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another (Jn 15:12-14; 13:35). In Christ’s Passion, the redeeming obedience which reversed original sin and overcame the forces of evil also reversed the meaning of human suffering. From then on, any human suffering accepted with faith and hope, and thereby united to Christ’s suffering, could share in the redemptive power of the Savior’s redeeming self-sacrifice. To witness the Passion without keeping that in mind is to miss a large part of the point.

The Silence of a Lamb

Christ knows that He is innocent. He knows that He is being tried unjustly (according to the Sanhedrin’s own rules, trials at night were considered invalid) and the accusations are false. He could have outwitted them in the courtroom just as He had confounded His enemies in many previous verbal battles. But He didn’t. He remained curiously passive, virtually silent. The prophets had predicted that the Redeemer would do so; just as lambs put up no resistance before they are slaughtered, so the suffering servant, the Messiah who was to redeem Israel, would quietly accept His victimhood:

He was offered because it was his own will, and he opened not his mouth; he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53: 7). Why? He didn’t really have to defend himself. He told the truth. It was all part of the divine plan, and He knew when to stay silent, when to suffer the injustice, and when to defend himself. There’s a bundle of mysteries here, and not even the most astute theologians admit to having all the answers. In the Gospel accounts Jesus did pepper His silence with certain comments at particular times. But why those comments, and why at those moments, and why so much silence?

Jesus Himself alludes to one of the reasons: He knew they wouldn’t listen. “If I shall tell you, you will not believe Me. And if I shall also ask you, you will not answer Me, nor let Me go” (Lk 22: 67-68). But He also knew that the Redeemer had to suffer in order to merit Redemption, so He wouldn’t defend himself to the point of avoiding suffering, but only to the point of helping His persecutors see the truth of what they were doing. He had predicted His suffering to His Apostles three times, but they only understood after it was over: The Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the ancients and chief priests and scribes and be killed and the third day rise again…. [A]ll things shall be accomplished which were written by the prophets concerning the Son of man. For He shall be delivered to the Gentiles and shall be mocked and scourged and spit upon, and after they have scourged Him they will put Him to death. And the third day he shall rise again (Lk 9: 22; 18: 31-33). Jesus foresaw it, every detail of it. Therefore, each of those details has a meaning, each is a strand in this story of faith, hope, love and forgiveness.

Fr. John Bartunek received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Stanford University in 1990, graduating cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He spent a year as a professional actor in Chicago before entering the Legionaries of Christ, a religious congregation. He is currently studying for an advanced degree in moral theology in Rome, where he resides. You can write to him at [email]fatherjohn@insidethepassion.com[/email].

Deepen your journey into the unforgettable film, The Passion of The Christ, with the only authorized book that goes behind the scenes. Fr. John Bartunek, LC, provides biblical, historical, and theological insights gleaned from hours spent on the set and interviews with the director, actors, and filmmaking crew. Inside the Passion is the most complete and thorough commentary on the movie you will read. Foreword by Mel Gibson. Click here for more information or to order. [/QUOTE]