The Passion before the Passion: A Maundy Thursday Meditation on Luke 22

When we speak of the Passion of Jesus, we speak of His suffering and agony.  The term is used in its older and more proper sense, identifying the pain that pierces not just the body but the mind, also.  Jesus’ Passion is something that not only causes Him pain in His flesh, but it pierces Him down to His deepest level—into His very mind and soul.  Since the Incarnation by the power of the Holy Spirit in the Blessed Virgin Mary, Jesus’ Person has united His Divine Nature with our human nature, so that we may say truly God has suffered with us.  Not just in some kind of philosophical or sophistic manner, but in the very Person of Jesus Christ.

Our Gospel reading tonight points us to something easily overlooked, as our minds press past the horrors of Holy Week to arrive safely at Easter.  Tonight, we see Jesus’ Passion in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Here He retreats with His disciples after the Passover Meal has been celebrated, and here He pleads with His disciples to pray.  Oddly enough, He does not ask His disciples to pray for Him, but rather, He tells them to pray that they might not fall into temptation.  Leaving them to pray, He goes a little way off, and prays to His Father with such fervor, that His sweat is as blood.

And what does He pray?  He asks His Father for any other path… any other cup… than the path He is about to walk, and the cup He is about to drink.  Does that make you uncomfortable?  Jesus has resolutely marched through all of human history to this garden, and here, the very night in which He will be betrayed, He begs the Father to let this cup pass from Him.  That cup, is your salvation, by the way.  Or, to be more precise, that cup is the wrath of God upon your sins—the eternal hell you are due for all your wickedness and evil.  And that cup isn’t yours alone, it is the eternal suffering of every man, woman, and child ever to be born, from the beginning of the world to its end.  Hundreds of billions of souls, each with an eternal debt of hell’s worst torments, poured into one cup.  This is the cup Jesus prays, that if there be any other way to save mankind, let it pass from Him.  But He ends His prayer, in submission to the Father, that His will be done.

Here is the Passion before the Passion.  Christ holds in His hands the salvation of mankind, and with His dual natures sees the depth of the price that must be paid.  How does someone suffer for one person’s eternal debt, let alone the eternal debts of countless billions of others?  For us, it is impossible, but for God it is not.  For God is not bound by time or space—He is the infinite and the absolute, the One who is before and after all things.  Only God could enter into the suffering of an eternity of eternities, and emerge triumphant.  Jesus’ human nature could not accomplish this, but united with His divinity, He could do what no one else could do.  He could suffer and die, bearing the eternity of eternities in hell for you, and for me.  If your eyes could behold such a cup, and see it to its very dregs, I should think you would sweat blood, too… if you didn’t die of fright at the very first glimpse.

But Jesus endures this Passion before the Passion, preparing for His journey to the Cross.  And before He goes into that eternity of eternities in hell, He leaves a sign of both His coming Passion and His Victory.  He leaves a meal, but not just any meal.  He leaves us the Passover Meal, that celebrated the Exodus of His people out of the slavery of Egypt.  Only this time, He refines the message of the Meal, showing that He is not saving us just from some temporal tyrant, but from the eternity in hell with the devil we deserve.  In this Meal, He gives us His very Body and Blood, which shall be broken and poured out upon Calvary, for you and for me.  Before He enters hell’s dark veil in our place, He leaves the sign of His Victory.

And so He goes to Golgotha, to take our place.  He lifts this unspeakably wretched cup to His immaculate and holy lips, that you might lift this blessed Eucharistic cup to yours.  Tonight, you receive the price of your salvation, the price of your grace.  Here you receive the Body and Blood of Christ, given and shed for the forgiveness of your sins.  It is a work you cannot do, but that He has already done.  He has born the Father’s righteous wrath for you, and His life He pours into you, that you might live in Him forever, forgiven and free.

Behold the Lamb of God, who goes forth to take away the sins of the world, who drinks the cup of suffering on our behalf, and endures an eternity of eternities of hell’s most vicious horrors.  Behold your salvation, believe, and live.  Amen.