Not by eastern windows only

 A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 26: 36-42) is yet another passage which shows us, like the gospel on Tuesday, the relationship between the Son and the Father. Jesus has arrived at the garden of Gethsemane, and there goes aside to pray with Peter, James, and John. Watch, He tells them, before hurling Himself into a prayer which, at least in its first part, we have all echoed in our own lives: Father, please do not let this happen. Nevertheless, thy will be done. He then reproaches his disciples for falling asleep before returning once more to the same prayer and arriving again at the same conclusion: if this cannot pass, thy will be done.

We saw in our last reflection the priestly prayer of Jesus, that the love of the Father for the Son should be in us. Yet it would be wrong to assume that even His most magnificent of prayers exhausted His priestly ministry. St Paul tells us that every high priest is appointed among men in the things that appertain to God, but it is not just petition that priests must concern themselves with; it is also sacrifice.

What is that mechanism of the sacrifice in the life of the priest, or indeed in the lives of any of us? It is, as it were, a reversal of the original disobedience that our first parents worked on behalf of us all. Their sin of disobedience was actually a sin of theft first and foremost, or an attempted theft of the honour and reverence due to God, their Creator. In that moment, man tried to hold the world without holding on to God, tried to wrestle and twist the gift of Creation out of His hands, and make it subservient to his own will. And so now, it is fitting that our lives must involve some kind of sacrificial giving back to God of something that we prize and hold dear but which we surrender to Him. But here’s the problem: until the coming of Christ, there was no sacrifice we could offer that could mend the damage of the original theft.

Having severed himself from God, man was not empowered but disempowered, not expanded but crushed, not liberated but enslaved. Thinking he was choosing freedom, he chose instead enthralment to himself and to all the unruly forces of hell that were then unleashed within him. Where once God’s beauty and order had dwelled, now demonic ugliness and disorder left him weak, such that even when the spirit was willing, the flesh remained feeble. What was needed at that point was not only a Saviour who could ask for what man was no longer entitled to, who could repair what no human could fix, but also a teacher and an example who could enter into the inner darkness and chaos in the human soul to make the crooked straight and retrain the devastated vineyard, to graft the branches torn from their stock, and lift up the flowers crushed by the heavy tread of sin. If we do not recognise these signs in us, we do not yet know ourselves. Behold Jesus now in the darkness of Gethsemane come not only to show us Truth but to be the Way and the Life of all us broken ones.

And now we can understand better what it means for the love of the Father for the Son actually to dwell in us: it means now a counter rebellion, an uprising against the uprising, a pushing back of the revolution, not by our power alone but by His power in us, He who Is acting in we who are not; indeed, by His power with which we cooperate to such an extent that St Paul will say: I live; now not I but Christ lives in me. Gethsemane in this light takes us back to the original place of our desertion and also to the deepest recess of our soul where everything is despair, where we can only watch ourselves sliding towards the abyss, and it says in that darkness the words that need to be spoken again: Father, let your will be done in me.

How then can the love of the Father for the Son dwell in us? By Jesus’ prayer? By all means. But most especially when we allow Him to come and say that prayer in us; to say His yes and His thank you, like His Mother Mary, to the Father of all, when we allow that grace of Her Annunciation to catch by anticipation a glimmer of the fire lit in Gethsemane where Jesus begins to consummate in sacrifice – starting with the sacrifice of His will – the very meaning of His prayer of restauration: that the love of the Father for the Son may be in the disciples.

And then His victory, which is yet to be fulfilled, is laid in seed, anchored on the rock which is Christ, and dug about with a promise of organic fruitfulness in spite of the lifeless, hopeless soil that surrounds it. And the conviction that things are about to change and the dawn about to break are brought home to us once more:

Say not the struggle nought availeth,

     The labour and the wounds are vain,

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

     And as things have been they remain.

 

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

     It may be, in yon smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,

     And, but for you, possess the field.

 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

     Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

     Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

 

And not by eastern windows only,

     When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

     But westward, look, the land is bright.