NOTES ON GETHSEMANE
1. See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. by John W. Harvey, 2nd edn (London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press), p. 179: “does not the distinguishing character of Christianity consist in just this—that God is near us, that we can possess and apprehend Him, and that man himself is His image and likeness?”
2. Gilbert. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, n.d. [1909]), p. 255. According to Chesterton, the scandal of Gethsemane is temptation: “In a garden Satan tempted man; and in a garden God tempted God.” The words of Jesus’ prayer suggested to Chesterton that “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist” (ibid.).
3. Quoted by Kevin Madigan, “Ancient and High-Medieval Interpretations of Jesus in Gethsemane: Some Reflections on Tradition and Continuity in Christian Thought”, Harvard Theological Review vol. 88 no. 1, January 1995, 157–73: 158.
4. Ibid., p. 160.
5. Archimandrite Sophrony, We Shall See Him as He Is (Essex: Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1987), p. 198.
6. See 1 John 4:12: “God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (ὁ Θεὸς ἐν ἡμῖν μένει καὶ ἡ ἀγάπη αὐτοῦ τετελειωμένη ἐστὶν ἐν ἡμῖν).
7. Blaise Pascal, “The Mystery of Jesus”, in Pensées (1670), trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 289. “The Mystery of Jesus” is a fragment, not always included in editions of the posthumously published Pensées.
8. Hermann Hesse, “Thoughts on The Idiot by Dostoevsky” (1919), in My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, ed. Theodore Ziolkowski, trans. Denver Lindley (St Albans, Hertfordshire: Triad Panther, 1978), p. 87. See also Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927), trans. Basil Creighton, rev. Walter Sorell (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 76: “His tendency is to explain Mozart’s perfected being, just as a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether […] that loneliness of the garden of Gethsemane.”
9. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human, trans. R. M. French (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), p. 11.
10. The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Gospel of St. Matthew (Oxford: John Henry Parker; London: F. and J. Rivington, 1860), p. 1097.
11. Contrast 1 John 5:4, which changes the emphasis from not-belonging within the world to victory over the world: “For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith” (ὅτι πᾶν τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ νικᾷ τὸν κόσμον· καὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ νίκη ἡ νικήσασα τὸν κόσμον, ἡ πίστις ἡμῶν).
B. Jesus’ lonely suffering in Gethsemane is harsher in Matthew and Mark than in Luke; John omits it altogether. So in this instance the idea of infirmity is downplayed and then lost in the later gospels. The suppression of divine vulnerability paved the way for what one scholar called the patristic “embarrassment with this weak and passible figure” of Jesus,4 a distaste which continues in Orthodox writing to this day. “Drawn by the Spirit of God to prayer for the whole world, to share in the Lord’s prayer in Gethsemane,” Archimandrite Sophrony wrote, “we suddenly behold in ourselves a Divine miracle—a spiritual sun rises in us, the name of which is persona. It is the beginning in us of a new form of being, already immortal.”5 This joyous celebration of a newborn, God-given solar soul invokes the name of the garden but at the same time it erases everything that is heartbreaking in Gethsemane: the forsakenness, the failure of friendship, the quiet and fearful night. Archimandrite Sophrony follows John both by brightening up Gethsemane and, in the claim to immortality and divine in-dwelling,6 by refusing what is relationally the saddest and most mysterious part of the episode: Jesus’ abandonment.
C. By contrast, modern writers outside Orthodoxy have dwelled on the pathos of Gethsemane without embarrassment. Consider Blaise Pascal: “Jesus is alone on earth, not merely with no one to feel and share his agony, but with no one even to know of it. Heaven and he are the only ones to know.”7 In this reading, what matters is precisely the lack of either sharing or revelation: the lonely ordeal’s holiness is connected to its emptiness. Hermann Hesse likewise emphasised the breakdown of relationship at Gethsemane’s darkest hour: “now in the moment of unbearable agony he turns toward [his] companions, the only ones he has; and he is now so openly and wholly human, so much the sufferer that he might come closer to them than ever before […] but no, they are not there, they are sleeping”.8 While these writers’ feeling for the poignancy of Gethsemane may be at odds with mainstream Orthodoxy, it does connect to the emphasis on suffering to be found in a writer such as Nikolai Berdyaev: “A purified knowledge of God must recognise the mysteriousness, the incomprehensibility of the crucified God, that is of the God Who stands in need.”9 Here the controversial idea of divine infirmity was expressed unapologetically by an Orthodox philosopher.
D. How Christianity relates to the pain and division which afflict all human life is not always easy to define. In the New Testament there are, on the one hand, simple affirmations of the holiness of suffering. There are also, on the other hand, numerous clear promises of joy. In Paul’s letters, there is a tension between suffering and faith, between worldly torment and the promise of salvation. Verses 35–9 of Romans chapter 8 can serve as an example of the tension. The apostle’s confident starting point of intimacy—“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (τίς ἡμᾶς χωρίσει ἀπὸ τῆς ἀγάπης τοῦ Χριστοῦ)—soon gets reaffirmed in even stronger terms, but not before there has been a sobering reminder of tribulation and danger made all the more intense by the inclusion of Psalm 44’s terrible words. A passage such as this is both fundamental and ambiguous: it must be interpreted. Some will say it confirms the triumph of Christian faith over horror and anguish, and certainly other statements in Paul’s letters would support this claim. Others may say that the anguish recalled in the passage is its true centre of gravity, and that the “groanings too deep for words” (στεναγμóι ἀλαλήτοι, Rom. 8:26) of which Paul also speaks is at the heart of Christian faith. The difference between these interpretations resembles the difference between the pathos of the Gethsemane pericope in Matthew and Mark, on the one hand, and its toned-down counterpart in John, on the other.
E. Although much more can be said in psychological or social terms about Christian perspectives on the relation between pain and promise, the question has other dimensions as well. In one respect, Gethsemane is above all a mystery of personal feeling and interpersonal crisis—what matters is the combination of Jesus’ extreme anguish and the disciples’ exhausted inability to accompany Him. In another respect, what happens in Gethsemane goes beyond psychology and personal relationships—what matters is that a kind of cosmic upheaval occurs. St. John Chrysostom’s homily has this description of the disciples in the garden: “they were so drowned in despondency, as not to have any sense even of His Presence”.10 This comment can be read alongside Jesus’ daunting declaration recorded by Matthew: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Περίλυπός ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή μου ἕως θανάτου, Matt. 26:38, also Mark 14:34)—with Περίλυπός (perilupos) conveying an engulfing, all-encompassing apartness of sorrow. There is the sense of spiritual cataclysm: a drowning flood, a devouring earthquake. It is enough to split the mountain into two utterly separate worlds of grief.
F. The radicalism of the Christian view is that the personal and the ontological intersect. Moreover, with the Resurrection, the earthly and the eternal cross; time is crucified. With the Resurrection, access is granted to a world beyond the human world and a time beyond human time. However, the resulting predicament is that the eternal world beyond has not yet replaced this fallen world, not yet ended earthly time. The beyond remains beyond. So it is that Jesus prays: “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one” (οὐκ ἐρωτῶ ἵνα ἄρῃς αὐτοὺς ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου, ἀλλ’ ἵνα τηρήσῃς αὐτοὺς ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ, John 17:15). Christian being-in-the-world is in these terms more an estrangement than a belonging; the Christian is, like Paul, set apart, separated (ἀφωρισμένο, Rom 1:1); the Christian is a sojourner (παρεπίδημος, πάροικος, Heb. 11:13, 1 Pet. 2:11).11 The Christian life looks forward to face-to-face unity (πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον, 1 Cor. 13:12), but it must endure for the time being a Gethsemane-like apartness.
G. If human time and eternity now intersect, then history cannot any longer be simply chronological. Chronologically, the ordeal in the garden happened long ago—once upon a time—and by this reckoning its connection to human life hundreds or thousands of years later can only be faint and distant. But if the idea of eternity crossing human time has real meaning then it must be that Gethsemane is still present. This proposition would be significant both for eschatology and for any church doctrine which privileges promise too much over pathos.