“My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” (Jesus, in Mathew 26:38)
For those of us who are Christian, it is the Lenten season, which gets at the very heart of what God is for us. It is the time leading up to the Passion, which recounts the sufferings that Jesus endured from the beginning of his beseeching prayer on the Mount of Olives to the crucifixion. And passion it is. The brief quote above embraces the entire journey, from the sorrow for the sufferings that Jesus foresaw, to the treachery of Judas, to the cowardice of the apostles, to the hatred of his own people at the trial, to the whole bloody journey, right on through to his death on the cross. It is followed by Easter, which encompasses the miraculous resurrection and the promise of paradise for all who die believing in the saving divinity of the Christ.
Most of us are at familiar with at least a bit of this, regardless of one’s faith or lack thereof. Such has been the guiding myth (I use that word as a general definition for a culture-wide guiding spiritual story) of Western civilization from the time of the late Roman Empire to today, however dated it may now seem for many. So I leave it to others to relate the greater story or to relive it themselves. Rather, I want here to concentrate on the particular words themselves, “sorrowful, even to death” to get a notion of just what this means about the creator of the universe, and of what this says about our place and our destiny within this unfathomable creation.
I write this not as some dry dissertation, even as it may have started as such, but rather as a reflection of an experience I had recently that made me very sorrowful, if not unto death, than at least unto discomfort and emotional pain.
It had to do with someone who I have known all my life, someone with whom I shared strong roots, but with whom I later veered well away on my own path. That veering away itself has become a continual thorn in the side of our relationship, particularly concerning politics and the cultural shifts that much of these politics have endorsed. Even with this, the relationship had already been strained by our differing emotional groundings that have led to different lifestyle choices. For him, they have led to great personal sorrows and even tragedy. Combined with the personality that led to these sorrows and the political views, my sympathies for him have long been constrained. In other words, I have seen him as a pain in the ass for whom an eye-role and a “you gotta be kidding me” are (with the exception of the great tragedy) appropriate responses. Until, that is, an instant a few days ago.
It must’ve been due to the season of the passion, for it simply came out of nowhere. It was this: suddenly, I felt his pain and suffering, and in that, felt my own heart-breaking response that might have been hiding there all along. Suddenly, my care for him became manifest in a compassion that I did not think I had for anyone, not just him. It was profound and devastating and unwanted. As uncomfortable as it was, however, it somehow hinted at a growing sense of fulfillment. It brought alive Christ’s words at the beginning of his passion, of ‘sorrowful, even to death,’ and with that, the heart of the relationship that we have with the creator.
It is breathtaking. As stated in the beginning, the sorrow encompasses the whole journey to the crucifixion. There is human fear, as all humans would have before such a premonition, but there is also in his pain the pure, direct voice of God expressed perfectly. In this sorrow is not the thunderous and punishing god that so many have rejected in our century of material ease, but rather the broken-hearted God of love that we have heard about but find impossible to understand. What is this love? It is certainly not erotic, and it seems to be something that is far beyond whatever “love” we may have in friendship. But that, the latter, is what it is.
It is this genuine love of ‘brother’ that is God’s love. It is what I had felt and learned from. It is different from what we usually feel because we have become hardened from hurt and are fearful of expressing the compassion that is the true reflection – the image – of God. God is not afraid of anything. He does not dissimulate or hide behind anything or try to impress or save face or any of the other techniques that we have perfected for self-protection. ‘Be like these little ones,” the children, admonished Jesus, not because they are ignorant, but because they have not yet formed their shields; because they still retain shreds of what our relationship to God should be - and to what God’s relationship to us still is, and always will be.
This relationship is about complete openness, absolute honesty, and the all-seeing of our hidden hearts; and more: with this comes pure, unfiltered compassion. In Christ’s lament in the Garden where he sweats blood, he is broken-hearted by the betrayal of mankind. There is no room, none, for hatred, just as there never has been from divinity. At the core of the entire passion is a caring for us that total. He sees into the pain of our hearts, the wounds that have been passed on from generation to generation, and the hate and resentment they have formed. He knows how we are made and how we should be; he knows of the absolute open relationship that we as a species once had for him, and is sorrowful to death that this has been broken. This sorrow is for him as well as for us, as mutual as it was for the human and god figure in Christ that he sent, both human and divine. The sorrow is devastating because it is unshielded. However, this sorrow, too, is mutual, for we cannot obliterate who we truly are. Even with all the negative passions and resentments and wounds, we hurt just as God does Were we to have the courage to be absolutely honest and open, we, too, would feel the sorrow unto death that is there, hidden and turning within.
This sorrow is behind all our atrocities both big and small. The passion of Christ was intended to open our minds to the depth of our heart, where our true compassion and courage lie – courage even unto death. For that was our true nature at creation. When the link to God was ruptured, so, too, was our consciousness of our true nature. Christ came to heal the rupture. As part of this healing, where he literally sweats blood, he accepted the burden of the greatest love that can be given: that of giving one’s life.
What is being conveyed here has been said so many times before. The difference for me has been the grounding experience I had through this certain person. It exposed in deep personal terms my own rocky heart, and the compassion that I should have. It also exposed what the true nature of God’s love is, and what we are called to be. It is not a call to simply be a nice guy. Rather, it is a call to reflect the relationship that God has with us, as expressed through the agony in the garden, as far from “niceness” as the ocean is from a bathtub. In realizing the depths of this love, we see that we have been cut off from our very life. Without the open and continual relationship with God, we are like zombies, like the ‘dead who bury the dead’ as Jesus once noted. Without it, we are without our central purpose, and deep within we know it. In this secret knowledge of our loss is outrage and self-hate. In this lies the seed of all the evil of the world.
We cannot open our hearts entirely by ourselves, just as - as the Buddhists say - the tongue can’t taste the tongue. So this bridge, the god-human, was made. And that is why all of history is drawn around the Agony, where Christ’s soul is “very sorrowful, even to death.” For there is our link, were we only to see it. There in the Passion is our link and the revelation of God’s essential nature, which radiates such pure compassion that it renders the heart. Here is where the beginning lies, where our rendered heart of stone is replaced with a heart of flesh. Such is the depths of the Passion, such is its sorrow, and such is its hope: to bring us back to the relationship in which we share in the glory of the divinity and of all creation.
The sweating of blood is no exaggeration. There on the Mount of Olives, all of our evils and sufferings and despair were brought forth, all there because we have cut off our roots to the divine. And from there, all of those evils were suffered by the Christ so that we might become aware that we are broken; so that from there, we might allow ourselves to be repaired.
It is no small thing, this sharing of the suffering of another that was handed to me. In fact, it has been handed to all of us 2,000 years ago, in every detail, from beginning to end. How broken must I have been to not understand? And how broken must I be that I will no longer understand tomorrow?
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