Jesus Before Pilate
Few things sit as deep within us as does the desire for freedom. We are not always sure exactly what freedom means, but we are ever resistant to whatever restrains, limits, or coerces us. We do not like being forced to do things, being told what to do, or having outside forces limit our choices. We value, more deeply than most anything else, our freedom.Or, at least so it would seem. On the surface, this is true. At a deeper level, however, our desire for freedom is obfuscated by many things, especially by the fact that, too often, we have freedom confused with emancipation. Our struggle for freedom is focused rather narrowly on those forces outside of us which unfairly bind or limit us. But victory over these forces, emancipation, is only a small step towards genuine freedom. Today, in the Western world, we are, for the most part, emancipated, but we are far from free. We have been able to throw off most of the shackles of external tyranny, but we remain very much the prisoner of our own fears, our own wounds, our own angers, our own attachments, and our own obsessions. We are emancipated, but not free. Let us look at a picture of a rare freedom: Jesus, at his trial, standing, bound and stripped, before Pontius Pilate. In all of literature, nowhere do you see an image of a freer human being. Not even in Socrates before his accusers, or in the illustrious, stoic heros and heroines of great literature, nor indeedeven in the deaths of martyrs, do we see anyone more free. Jesus stands before Pilate as a truly free human being. And there is a great paradox in this. Jesus stands before Pilate in chains, captive, bound, whipped, despised, ridiculed, humanly impotent, unable to do a single thing to free himself. Yet he is free in a way that even his critics envy. One of those critics is Pilate himself and he too, ironically, ends up admiring the man he condemns. Pilate has an interesting exchange with Jesus. When he first begins to question him, Jesus refuses to answer. Pilate then tries to intimidate him: “Don’t you know that I have power over you, that I can put you to death or set you free?” Jesus, bound, externally powerless, answers in words that might aptly be paraphrased this way: “You have no power over me whatsoever. You do not adjudicate death and freedom. That power lies beyond you. You have no power to kill me or to set me free because, first of all, in my case, I am already dead … and free from you because of that! In the garden of Gethsemane, I gave my life away, gave it away of my own accord. Nobody takes my life from me. I lay it down and I take it up. God, alone, is Lord of life and freedom and once a person submits to that then no human person, no tyrant, no despot, no Hitler, can take his or her life and freedom away. You can kill me … but I am already dead!”Pilate, to his credit, understood and the Scriptures tell us that, afterwards, he was anxious to free Jesus. Jesus, before Pilate, was free, but not emancipated. We, today, are emancipated, but not free. As we struggle for freedom, we might well contemplate that image of rare freedom, Jesus before Pilate, externally bound but internally free, telling the world that no human power can ultimately coerce the heart. However as we contemplate that image, we need to follow through on why Jesus was free in this deep way. Pilate had no power to take his life from him only because he had already given his life to his Father. Through obedience he became free, through submission to the God of heaven heescaped the power of the gods of earth. Too often today our notions of freedom are too adolescent to understand this. We are emotionally resistant to all notions of obedience, submission, another’s will, and sometimes even to the very idea of Someone being above in such a way that puts us below. But until we give ourselves over in obedience to what is ultimate, higher, we will constantly find ourselves at the mercy of lesser gods whose altars perennially demand human sacrifice. C.S.Lewis once said: The harshness of God is kinder than the softness of human beings and God’s compulsion is our liberation. We see exactly how true that is when Jesus appears before Pilate
T H E D E S E R T – T H E P L A C E O F G O D ’ S C L O S E N E S S
The Desert – the place of God’s Closeness In her biography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day shares how, shortly after her conversion to Catholicism, she went through a painful, desert time. She had just given birth to her daughter and her decision to have the child baptised, coupled with her profession of faith, meant the end of her relationship with a man she deeply loved. She suddenly found herself alone. All her old supports had been cut off and she was left with no money, no job, few friends, no practical dream, and no companionship from the person she loved the most deeply in this world. For a while she just stumbled on, trusting that things would soon get better. They didn’t. She remained in this desert.
One day, not knowing what else to do, she took a train from New York to Washington to spend a day praying at the National Shrine of Our Lady. Her prayer there was wrenching, naked. She describes how she laid bare her helplessness, spilling out her confusion, her doubts, her fears, and her temptations to bitterness and despair. In essence, she said to God: “I have given up everything that ever supported me, in trust, to you. I have nothing left to hold on to. You need to do something for me, soon. I can’t keep this up much longer!” She was, biblically speaking, in the desert – alone, without support, helpless before a chaos that threatened to overwhelm her – and, as was the case with Jesus, both in the desert and in Gethsemane, God “sent angels to minister to her.” God steadied her in the chaos. She caught a train back to New York and, that very night, as walked up to her apartment she saw a man sitting there. His name was Peter Maurin and the rest is history. Together they started the Catholic Worker. We should not be surprised that her prayer had such a tangible result. The desert, scripture assures us, is the place where God is specially near. Martin Luther King shares a similar story. In, Stride Towards Freedom, he relates how one night a hate-filled phone call shook him to his depths and plunged him into a desert of fear. Here are his
words: An angry voice said:”Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” I hung up, but I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point. I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hand, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t take it alone.” At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. God sends his angels to minister to us when we are in the desert and in the garden of Gethsemane. This incident in Martin Luther King’s life demonstrates how. The desert, as we know, is the place where, stripped of all that normally nourishes and supports us, we are exposed to chaos, raw fear, and demons of every kind. In the desert we are exposed, body and soul, made vulnerable to be overwhelmed by chaos and temptations of every kind. But, precisely because we are so stripped of everything we normally rely on, this is also a privileged moment for grace. Why? Because all the defense mechanisms, support systems, and distractions that we normally surround ourselves with so as to keep chaos and fear at bay work at the same time to keep much of God’s grace at bay. What we use to buoy us up wards off both chaos and grace, demons and the divine alike. Conversely, when we are helpless we are open. That is why the desert is both the place of chaos and the place of God’s closeness. It is no accident that Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King felt God’s presence so unmistakably just at that point in their lives where they had lost everything that could support them. They were in the desert.Scripture assures us that it is there that God can send angels to minister to us.
Finding the Strength To Reach Across Differences
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We are rarely at our best. Too often what shows forth in our lives is not what’s best in us: love, generosity, a big heart. More often than not, our lives radiate irritation, pettiness, and a small heart. Too often, we find ourselves consumed by petty irritations, conflicts, frustrations, and angers. Each of these might be small in itself but, cumulatively, they take the sunshine and delight out of our lives, like mosquitoes spoiling a picnic. Then, instead of feeling grateful, gracious, and magnanimous, we feel paranoid, fearful, and irritable and we end up acting out of a cold, irritated, paranoid part of ourselves rather than out of our real selves. Why do we do that? Because we are asleep to who and what we really are, asleep in a double way: When St. Luke describes Jesus’ agony in the garden, he tells us that after Jesus had undergone a powerful drama, sweating blood so as to give his life over in love, he turned to his disciples (who were supposed to be watching and praying with him) and found them asleep. However he uses a curious expression to describe why they were asleep. They were asleep, he says, not because they were tired and it was late, but they were asleep “out of sheer sorrow”. That says a couple of things: First, that the disciples are asleep out of depression. Depression is what is preventing them from seeing straight. But they are also asleep to what is deepest inside of them, namely, that they carry the image and likeness of God. Jesus was not asleep to that and, because of this awareness, was able precisely to be big of heart.
As Christians we believe that what ultimately defines us and gives us our dignity is the image and likeness of God inside us. This is our deepest identity, our real self. Inside each of us there is a piece of divinity, a god or goddess, a person who carries an inviolable dignity, with a heart as big as God’s. And that great dignity is not meant to be a source of wrongful pride and a justification for making an unhealthy assertion with our lives. Sadly, too often it does and a rather simple commentary on the state of our planet might be to say that this is what things look like when you have six billion people walking around with each one of them thinking himself or herself as God. But our great dignity, the Imago Dei inside each of us, is meant rather to be a center from which we can draw vision, grace, and strength to act in a way that, ironically, precisely helps us to swallow our pride. We see this in Jesus. In a famous text, St. John tells us that at the last supper, Jesus got up from the table and began to wash the feet of his disciples, against their protests. That gesture, washing someone else’s feet, has classically been preached on as an act of humility. It was that, but in the context of the Gospel of John, it is something more. It was a particular kind of humility, one that requires having a huge, huge heart and swallowing a lot of pride. When Jesus washes his3/28/2014 Finding the Strength to Reach Across Differences disciples feet in John’s Gospel and tells us he is setting an example for us to imitate, he is inviting us to have the strength to bend down in understanding and wash the feet of those whom, for all kinds of reasons, we would rather not have anything to do with. It is akin to having Pro-Life and Pro-Choice, strident conservatives and strident liberals, fundamentalists and atheists, wash each others’ feet. Normally we don’t have the strength to do that, there is too much pride and desire for righteousness at stake.
So how could Jesus do it? He could do it because he wasn’t asleep to who and what he was. In a stunning description of what is going on inside of him when he got up and took the basin and
towel to do this. John writes: “Jesus, knowing that he had come from God and was returning to God, and that the Father had put everything into his hands, got up from the table and removed his outer garments.” (John 13,3-5). Jesus took off his outer garments (which symbolize precisely all those things, including our everyday irritations and angers, which block the view of our deeper selves) to show us his deeper reality, namely, the fact that he had come from God and was going back to God. On the strength of that awareness, he could swallow all the pride that he needed to in order to reach out in understanding, forgiveness, and love, beyond wound, irritation, and moral righteousness. When we are in touch with that fact that we too have “come from God and are going back to God” then, and only then, can we too swallow enough pride to be genuinely loving.
Gethsmane – The Spirit is Willing But The Flesh is Weak
(Fifth in a six-part Lenten Series)
“Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you!” Leonard Cohen coined that phrase in a melancholic poem, Hallelujah, and it reflects how certain things can seduce us so that we end up breaking our word, our commitments, and even our integrity. Lot of things, it seems, can overthrow us. Beauty, sex, ambition, jealousy, fear, tension, wounds, anger, despair, impatience, frustration, hatred, tiredness, and even misguided religious fervour can overthrow us. The spirit is willing, says Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, but the flesh is weak. And it is! The simple fact is that too often we cannot actualize ourselves as we would like. We’re never as good as we’d like to be, never as stable as we’d like to be, never as much at peace as we’d like to be,never as bright as we’d like to be, and never as beautiful as we’d like to be. We always fall short somehow. One shortfall is moral: When we’re honest we know the truth of St. Paul’s words: “I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the things I hate.” (Romans 7, 15-16)
How true! We’re a mystery to ourselves and, often, a disappointment as well. There’s a universal truth in the old Protestant dictum: “It’s not a question of are you a sinner, it’s only a question of `What’s your sin?’” But it isn’t always about sin. The flesh is also weak in terms of simple adequacy. A generation ago, Anna Blaman put it this way: “I realized that it is simply impossible for a human being to be and remain `good’ or `pure’. If, for instance, I wanted to be attentive in one direction, it could only be at the cost of neglecting another. If I gave my heart to one thing, I left another in the cold. … No day and no hour goes by without my being
guilty of some inadequacy. We never do enough, and what we do is never well enough done. … except being inadequate, which we are good at, because it is the way we are made. This is true of me and of everyone else.” Henri Nouwen, speaking more for our generation, has a gentler, though not-less clear, expression of this: “One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like over packed suitcases bursting at the seams. In fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, and unrealized proposals. There is always something else we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations. We’re weak and we fall short, not so much in intention as in execution. Generally it’s not because of ill will that we end up experiencing what St. Paul, Anna Blaman, and Henri Nouwen so accurately describe. We don’t want to be unfaithful, unreliable, neglectful, irresponsible, or inadequate. What’s truest inside us wants to keep watch with Jesus in Gethsemane, wants to possess the moral greatness of a Mother Teresa, and wants to be known and respected for fidelity, reliability, and adequacy. The spirit, mostly, is willing, but, as Jesus warns in the Garden of Gethsemane, “the flesh is weak”. What’s to be learned from this? What does the Garden of Gethsemane have to teach us as we struggle with weakness and inadequacy? That we don’t overcome our inadequacies by willpower alone, by simply willing that we might be better. We change our lives through grace and community. In the Garden an angel came and strengthened Jesus. That same angel has to come and strengthen us. In Gethsemane, Jesus didn’t just warn us about the never-ending struggle between good-intention and good execution, between desiring to be good and actually being so. He underwent the struggle himself. His spirit was willing, but his flesh, like ours, was full of resistance. Ultimately he triumphed. However that triumph did not come about simply because he willed to remain faithful (though he did and that was a necessary part of the triumph) but because “an angel came and strengthened him”, that is, divine power eventually did for him what he could not do for himself. A lot of things can, and do, overthrow us, despite the fact that we want to be good. One of the lessons of Gethsemane is that we cannot overcome this simply by renewed willpower and good intention. We need, in the struggle, to surrender to grace and community in such a way that God’s angels can come and give us what we can’t give ourselves, namely, goodness, wholeness, and adequacy.
GETHSEMANE – THE SPIRIT IS WILLING BUT THE FLESH IS WEAK
(Fifth in a six-part Lenten Series)
“Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you!” Leonard Cohen coined that phrase in a melancholic poem, Hallelujah, and it reflects how certain things can seduce us so that we end up breaking our word, our commitments, and even our integrity. Lot of things, it seems, can overthrow us.
Beauty, sex, ambition, jealousy, fear, tension, wounds, anger, despair, impatience, frustration, hatred, tiredness, and even misguided religious fervour can overthrow us. The spirit is willing, says Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, but the flesh is weak.
And it is! The simple fact is that too often we cannot actualize ourselves as we would like. We’re never as good as we’d like to be, never as stable as we’d like to be, never as much at peace as we’d like to be,never as bright as we’d like to be, and never as beautiful as we’d like to be. We always fall short somehow.
One shortfall is moral: When we’re honest we know the truth of St. Paul’s words: “I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the things I hate.” (Romans 7, 15-16)
How true! We’re a mystery to ourselves and, often, a disappointment as well. There’s a universal truth in the old Protestant dictum: “It’s not a question of are you a sinner, it’s only a question of `What’s your sin?’”
But it isn’t always about sin. The flesh is also weak in terms of simple adequacy. A generation ago, Anna Blaman put it this way:
“I realized that it is simply impossible for a human being to be and remain `good’ or `pure’. If, for instance, I wanted to be attentive in one direction, it could only be at the cost of neglecting another. If I gave my heart to one thing, I left another in the cold. … No day and no hour goes by without my being guilty of some inadequacy. We never do enough, and what we do is never well enough done. … except being inadequate, which we are good at, because it is the way we are made. This is true of me and of everyone else.”
Henri Nouwen, speaking more for our generation, has a gentler, though not-less clear, expression of this:
“One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like over packed suitcases bursting at the seams. In fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, and unrealized proposals. There is always something else we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations.”
We’re weak and we fall short, not so much in intention as in execution. Generally it’s not because of ill will that we end up experiencing what St. Paul, Anna Blaman, and Henri Nouwen so accurately describe. We don’t want to be unfaithful, unreliable, neglectful, irresponsible, or inadequate. What’s truest inside us wants to keep watch with Jesus in Gethsemane, wants to possess the moral greatness of a Mother Teresa, and wants to be known and respected for fidelity, reliability, and adequacy. The spirit, mostly, is willing, but, as Jesus warns in the Garden of Gethsemane, “the flesh is weak”.
What’s to be learned from this? What does the Garden of Gethsemane have to teach us as we struggle with weakness and inadequacy?
That we don’t overcome our inadequacies by willpower alone, by simply willing that we might be better. We change our lives through grace and community. In the Garden an angel came and strengthened Jesus. That same angel has to come and strengthen us.
In Gethsemane, Jesus didn’t just warn us about the never-ending struggle between good-intention and good execution, between desiring to be good and actually being so. He underwent the struggle himself. His spirit was willing, but his flesh, like ours, was full of resistance. Ultimately he triumphed. However that triumph did not come about simply because he willed to remain faithful (though he did and that was a necessary part of the triumph) but because “an angel came and strengthened him”, that is, divine power eventually did for him what he could not do for himself.
A lot of things can, and do, overthrow us, despite the fact that we want to be good. One of the lessons of Gethsemane is that we cannot overcome this simply by renewed willpower and good intention. We need, in the struggle, to surrender to grace and community in such a way that God’s angels can come and give us what we can’t give ourselves, namely, goodness, wholeness, and adequacy.
G E T H S E M A N E – As the Place We Are Put To The Test
(Fourth in a six-part Lenten Series) http://www.ronrolheiser.com./
“A common soldier dies without fear, but Jesus died afraid.” Iris Murdoch wrote those words and they teach one of the lessons of Gethsemane. The Garden of Gethsemane is also the place where we are put to the test. What does this mean? The great spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, once wrote a book (In Memoriam) within which he tried to come to grips with his mother’s death. The manner of her death had surprised him and left him struggling with some painful doubts and questions. Why? His mother had lived a full life; she’d died surrounded by a loving family and friends, and in her final illness had been made as comfortable and pain-free as possible by the best of modern medicine. What’s troubling about that? She’d died struggling, it seemed, with her faith, unable to find at the most crucial moment of her life consolation from the God she’d loved and served so faithfully her whole life. His mother, as he explains at the beginning of the book, had been a woman of exceptional faith and goodness. He was teaching aboard when he received the phone call that she was dying.
Flying home to be with her, he mused naively how, painful as it was going to be, his mother’s
death would be her final gift of herself and her faith to her family. A woman who had given them the faith during her life would surely deepen that gift by the way in which she would face her death. But what he met in his mother and her struggles as she died was, at least to outward appearances, very different. Far from being peaceful and serene in her faith, she fought doubt and fear, struggling, it seemed, to continue to believe and trust what she had believed in and trusted in her whole life. For Henri, expecting that someone of such deep faith should die serenely and without fear, this was very disconcerting. “Why”, he asked, “Would God do this? Why would someone of such deep faith seemingly struggle so badly just before her death?” The answer eventually came to him: All her life, his mother had prayed to be like Jesus and to die like Jesus. Shouldn’t it make sense then that she should die like Jesus, struggling mightily with doubt and darkness, having to utter, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” Jesus didn’t die serenely, but struggling with doubt. Shouldn’t his most committed followers expect a similar struggle? The great mystics called this struggle “the dark night of faith”, an experience within which God purifies us by seemingly withdrawing all sense of his presence so that our thoughts and feelings run dry and we can no longer imagine God’s existence. We become, in our hearts and heads, atheists at that moment, though something in our souls knows another reality. And it’s an awful feeling, one of the worst pains possible. Darkness, chaos, and fear overwhelm us and we stand, literally, on the brink of nothingness, of non-existence, sensing our finitude, littleness, and loneliness in a way we never sensed them before. We feel exactly what it would mean to live in a universe where there is no God.
The great doctors of the soul tell us that, while nobody is immune from this trial, it is generally experienced in so radical a way only by those who are the most mature in the faith and thus more ready to be purified by its particular fire. It’s not surprising then that it is experienced so strongly by people like Henri Nouwen’s mother. The rest of us tend to get it in bits and pieces. Little doses of what Jesus experienced on the cross appear in our lives, reveal the fearful edges of nothingness, and let us taste for a moment what reality would feel like if there were no God. Part of the darkness and pain of that (and why it feels as if we are suddenly atheists) is that, in that experience, we come to realize that our thoughts about God are not God and how we imagine faith is not faith. God is beyond what we can feel and imagine and faith is not a warm feeling in the heart or a certainty in the mind, but a brand in the soul – beyond thought and feeling. One way or the other, all of us have to learn this. But we’d like the lesson to come to us a bit more gently than how it came to Jesus in his last hours. Whenever we pray the Lord’s Prayer and say, “Do not put us to the test”, we’re asking God to spare us from this night of doubt. When Jesus walked into the Garden of Gethsemane, he told his disciples: “Pray not to be put to be put to the test.” We need to pray for that because real faith can sometimes feel like doubt and serenity can too easily turn into dark fe
G E T H S E M A N E – The Place of Moral Loneliness http://www.ronrolheiser.com./
(Third in a six-part Lenten Series)
Our deepest loneliness is not sexual, but moral. More than we yearn for someone to sleep with sexually and emotionally, we yearn for someone to sleep with morally. What we really want is a soul mate. What does this mean? Ancient philosophers and mystics used to say that, before being born, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always, in some dark way, remembering that kiss and measuring everything in relation to its original sweetness.
Inside each of us, there is a dark memory of having once been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent imprint inside us, one so tender and good that its memory becomes a prism through which we see everything else. Thus we recognize love and truth outside of us precisely because they resonate with something that is already inside us. Things “touch our hearts” because they awaken a memory of that original
kiss. Moreover, because we have a memory of once having been perfectly touched, caressed, and loved, every experience we meet in life falls a little short. We have already had something deeper. When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated, or enraged it is because our outside experience does not honour what we already know and cling to inside.
And that dark memory, of first love, creates a place inside us where we hold all that is precious and sacred. It is the place we most guard from others, but the place where we would most want others to enter; the place where we are the most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of compassion and the place of rage. The yearning and pain we feel here can be called moral loneliness because we are feeling lonely in that precise place where we feel most strongly about the right and wrong of things, that is, we feel alone in that place where all that is most precious to us is cherished, guarded, and feels vulnerable when it is not properly honoured. Paradoxically, it is the place where we most want someone to enter and yet where we are most guarded. On the one hand, we yearn to be touched inside this tender space because we already know the joy of being caressed there. On the other hand, we don’t often or easily let anyone penetrate there. Why? Because what is most precious in us is also what is most vulnerable to violation and we are, and rightly so, deeply cautious about whom we admit to that sacred place. Thus, often, we feel wrenchingly alone in our deepest centre. A fierce loneliness results – a moral aching. More deeply than we long for a sexual partner, we long for moral affinity, for someone to visit us in that deep part where all that is most precious is cherished and guarded.Our deepest longing is for a partner to sleep with morally, a kindred spirit, a soul mate. Great friendships and great marriages, invariably, have this at their root, deep moral affinity. The persons in these relationships are “lovers” in the true sense because they sleep with each other at the deepest level, irrespective of whether they have sex or not. In terms of feeling, this kind of love is experienced as a “coming home”, as finding a home, bone of my bone. Sometimes, though not always, it is accompanied by romantic love and sexual attraction. Always, however, there is a sense that the other is a kindred spirit, one whose affinity with you is founded upon valuing preciously the same things you do. But such a love, as we know, is not easily found. Most of us spend our lives looking for it, searching, restless, dissatisfied and morally lonely. It’s this kind of loneliness that brought Jesus to his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane. The blood he sweated there is the blood of a lover, one betrayed, morally betrayed, hung out to dry in all that was precious to him. Nikos Kazantsakis once wrote that virtue is lonely because, at the end of the day, it is jealous of vice. “Virtue,” he writes, “sits on its lonely perch and weeps for all it’s missed out on.” Not quite, though perhaps that’s what it feels like. But the pain of virtue, while not immune to jealousy, is a whole lot deeper than Kazantsakis (and conventional wisdom) suspect. It’s the pain of Gethsemane, of moral loneliness, the ache of not having anyone to sleep with morally. One of the lessons of Gethsemane is that when we sweat our moral aloneness (without giving in to compensation or bitterness) we undergo a moral alchemy that can produce a great nobility of soul. “What’s madness,” Theodore Roethke asks, “but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?” True.
And that madness intensifies loneliness, even as, more than anything else, it opens the soul to the possibility of finally finding a kindred spirit.
Gethsemane – A Place to Learn a Lesson
(Second in a six-part Lenten Series)
There’s nothing wrong with wanting health, success, beauty, power, glamour, money, or fame. Of themselves, these are good and can, if used properly, help God’s glory shine through in ordinary life. But they can also be dangerous and can just as easily corrupt, inflate, and weaken rather than strengthen character. We want these things, but they aren’t always good for us. Ironically, the reverse is also true: We don’t want failure, humiliation, sickness, powerlessness, poverty, or inferiority of any kind. Yet these, more than success and glamour, are what produce character and depth inside us. We see this, for instance, in a family who has a handicapped member. It’s this person who gives the family character and depth. The son or daughter who’s the professional athlete or the wonderfully beautiful fashion-model bring glory to the family, but not necessarily character. Character comes from something else.
If we examine ourselves with courage and honesty, we will see that almost all the things that have made us deep and given us character are the very things we’re often ashamed of: a plain body that won’t let us stand out in a crowd; a quirky family whose habits can only be understood from the inside; a frustrating job where our real talents can never emerge because we don’t have the right education or the right opportunities; a troubled history within which there have been too many instances where we were the dumb one, the weak one, the sick one, the excluded one, the fat one, the slow one, the one chosen last when sides were drawn up, the one without a date on a Friday night, and the one who got beaten up on the playground. Beyond that, we’ve also been forever the frustrated one, the one who, despite the burning ache for greatness, has never and will never create the masterpiece, write the symphony, or dance on a world stage. But character and depth aren’t given for scoring goals in the World Cup, for winning Oscars in Hollywood, or for being so successful or beautiful that you become an icon for an adoring public. Character and depth are given for coping with powerlessness, inferiority, and humiliation, that is, for finding that deeper place inside of you where you can make a happy peace with the fact that your mother is too fat, that your father never blessed you, that you were abused, that the school bully humiliated you in front of your friends, that you were always the outsider, and that even today you live a life of quiet desperation wherein sickness, addictions, dark family history, loneliness, and inadequacies of every kind are barely kept at bay. There’s an innate connection between attaining a certain level of depth and having experienced a certain level of humiliation. That’s one of the lessons of Gethsemane. When Jesus walks into the garden of Gethsemane, he asks his disciples “to watch”. They’re meant to learn a lesson there, to see something illustrated. But, as Luke tells us, they missed the lesson because they fell asleep “out of sheer sorrow”, were blinded by simple depression, and were unable precisely to stare humiliation in the eye. That’s why on the morning of the resurrection, when Jesus meets two disciples walking away Jerusalem (the church, the faith, and the place of towards Emmaus (a Roman Spa, a place of human consolation) he has to point out to them the necessary connection between humiliation and depth: “Wasn’t it necessary that the Christ should have to suffer in this way so as to enter into his glory?” What they’d missed seeing in the Garden, missed seeing Jesus struggling with and eventually accepting, was precisely the innate link between the experience of humiliation and the resurrection of character. Resurrections come after crucifixions, Easter Sundays after dark Fridays, and depth of soul after the kind of pain that one is ashamed of.
However, just like power and success, failure and humiliation are also dangerous. Power can
corrupt, but so can powerlessness. Many are the acts of violence that issue forth when people
feel powerless and humiliated. Sometimes failure and frustration build character, but sometimes they build monsters and murderers. Feelings of inferiority drive us into the deeper parts of our souls, but demons, not just angels, lurk in those depths. That’s why Gethsemane is drama without a pre- written ending. Not everyone will handle things like Jesus did. The feeling of humiliation can make or break us, pushing us either into greatness or perversity. In Jesus’ case, it pushed him into greatness. How he handled his humiliation was perhaps his greatest gift to us and his deepest revelation of wisdom. By accepting humiliation and powerlessness (without resentment, but as a gift that can used to give something deeper back to the community) he taught us one of the deep secrets inside the very DNA of love itself, namely, that only when the private ego is crucified do real love, community, and character emerge.
Gethsemane as Liminal Space
(First in a six-part Lenten Series)
There’s never a good time to die, to bid final good-byes, to lose health, to have a heart attack, to be
diagnosed with terminal cancer, to lose friends, to be betrayed, to be misunderstood, to lose
everything, to be humiliated, to have to face death and its indescribable loneliness. That’s why
there’s a powerful resistance inside us towards these things.
We can take consolation in knowing that this was the case too for Jesus. He didn’t face these
things either without fear, trembling, and the desire to escape. In the Garden of Gethsemane “he
sweated blood” as he tried to make peace with his own loss of earthly life.
The Garden of Gethsemane is, among other things, “liminal space”. What is this? Anthropologists
use that expression to refer to special times in our lives when our normal situation is so uprooted
so that it is possible precisely to plant new roots and take up life in a whole new way. That’s
usually brought about by a major crisis, one that shakes us in the very roots of our being.
Gethsemane was that for Jesus.
It’s significant that Jesus didn’t go straight from the last supper room to his crucifixion. He first
spent some time readying himself. What’s incredible in his story is that he had only one hour
within which to do this inner work.
Imagine this scene: You’re relatively young, healthy, and active. You’ve just enjoyed a festive
dinner with close friends, complete with a couple of glasses of wine. You step out of the dining
room late at night and you now have one hour to ready yourself to die, one hour to say your final
good-byes, to let go, to make peace with death. Sweating blood might be a mild term to describe
your inner turmoil. This would surely be an intense hour.
And so it was for Jesus. That’s why his liminal time is often called his “agony in the garden” (an apt
term to describe real “liminal space”.) What’s interesting too is what scripture highlights in his
suffering in Gethsemane. As we know, it never emphasizes his physical sufferings (which must
have been pretty horrific). Instead it emphasizes his emotional crucifixion, the fact that he is
betrayed, misunderstood, alone, morally lonely, the greatest lover in the world, with God alone as
his soul mate.
And what’s burning up his heart and soul in Gethsemane? Jesus, himself, expresses it in these
words: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me!” His resistance was to the necessity of it. Why
death and humiliation? Couldn’t there be some other way? Couldn’t new life somehow occur
without, first, dying?
In the Garden, Jesus comes to realize and accept that there isn’t any other way, that there’s a
necessary connection between a certain kind of suffering, a certain letting go, a certain
humiliation, and the very possibility of coming to new life.
Why that necessity? What do we ultimately sweat blood over? Perhaps Job put it best: “Naked I3/8/2014 Gethsemane As Liminal Space | Ron Rolheiser
http://ronrolheiser.com/gethsemane-as-liminal-space/?print=1 2/2
Why that necessity? What do we ultimately sweat blood over? Perhaps Job put it best: “Naked I
came into this world and naked I leave it again.” We are born alone, without possessing anything:
clothing, a language, the capacity to take care of ourselves, achievements, trophies, degrees,
security, a family, a spouse, a friend, a reputation, a job, a house, a soul mate. When we exit the
planet, we will be like that again, alone and naked. But it’s precisely that nakedness, helplessness,
and vulnerability that makes for liminal space, space within which God can give us something
new, beyond what we already have.
There are times when we sense this, sense its necessity, and sense too that one day, perhaps
soon, we will, like Jesus in the Garden, have to make peace with the fact that we are soon to exit
this life, alone, but for our hope in God. That’s Gethsemane, the place and the experience.
Our own prayer there, I suspect, will be less about necessity than about timing: “Lord, let this cup
be delayed! Not yet! I know it’s inevitable, but just give me more time, more years, more experience, more
life first!”
To feel that way is understandable and, if we’re young, even a sign of health. Nobody should want
to die or want to give up the good things of this life. But Gethsemane awaits us all. Most of us,
however, will not enter this garden of liminal space voluntarily, as did Jesus (“Nobody takes my
life, I give it up freely!”). Most of us will enter it by conscription, but just as really, on that day
when a doctor tells us we have terminal cancer or we suffer a heart attack or something else
irretrievably and forever alters our lives.
When that does happen, and it will happen one way or the other to all of us, it’s helpful to know
that we’re in liminal space, inside a new womb, undergoing a new gestation, waiting for new birth
– and that it’s okay to sweat a little blood, ask God some questions, and feel resistance in every
cell of our being.