Q: In two different foreign-language translations of the Bible, Jesus’ agony in the garden is referred to as his dying moments. I know he sweat blood and said “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death”, but was he really dying then?
It is clear that Jesus died only once, on the Cross on Good Friday. But His suffering in the garden the night before was so intense that it was almost as if He were dying. When He said that His soul was “sorrowful, even to death” (Mt 26:38), He meant His suffering was so overwhelming, so overpowering, that He was practically dying.
St Luke describes it graphically: “And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground” (Lk 22:44).
St Luke uses the Greek word agonia, meaning struggle, and Jesus was struggling inwardly very intensely. When we use the word agony in English we mean not only suffering but extreme suffering or struggle.
Why was He suffering so much? It is customary to think that because Jesus was God and knew the physical suffering he was about to undergo, including the scourging, the crowning with thorns, and His death by crucifixion, He suffered at the very thought.
He did, and this suffering would have been very great. But there is much more to it than that.
We recall the words of Isaiah: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with His stripes we are healed” (Is 53:4-5).
St Paul takes up this idea, writing to the Corinthians: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21).
Jesus, who was without sin, perfect God and perfect man, took upon himself all the sins of humankind, every sin that every human being – you and I – would commit from Adam and Eve until the end of the world.
He came before the Father as a great sinner, burdened with all our sins. It was as if he were the thief, the murderer, the adulterer, the liar… all at once.
The love He had for the Father, contrasted with the weight and filth of the sins he had taken upon himself, made him suffer so intensely that it caused him to sweat blood.
This was truly an agony of sorrow, a sorrow unto death.
Compounding this sorrow was the fact that he was bearing it alone. Peter, James and John, whom he had called to be with him to support him in his agony, had fallen asleep. As we so often do, when we should be comforting him in our prayer. In contrast, Judas wasn’t asleep in his treachery. In addition, in taking our sins upon himself, Jesus knew that so often we would not even be sorry for them. We would blame others, or circumstances, or our nature for our sins. We would not be aware how much these sins offended him.
Only God truly understands this – and Jesus was God. This was an added cause of his intense suffering in the garden.
But that is not all. Jesus knew that in spite of the love that led him to suffer unspeakably for our sins, many souls would reject him at the end of life and be lost forever.
He wanted all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (cf 1 Tim 2:4), and for that reason he became man and suffered and died for us. In spite of this outpouring of love, the fact that many souls would be lost must have made him suffer especially intensely in the garden.
We should not forget either that a special cause of Jesus’ suffering was the sins down the ages of those he had called to be closer to him, from Judas and the other apostles to consecrated souls, to all those who at least try to love him more.
The offences of a loved one are always a motive of greater sorrow.
Finally, Jesus suffered intensely for Mary his mother. Because she had such a refined soul and so much love for him and the Father, Mary would suffer more than any other human being in the Passion. This increased Jesus’ suffering all the more.
Since mental suffering is often harder to bear than physical suffering, it is possible that Jesus suffered more in the garden than he did on the Cross. Truly, it was a “sorrow unto death”.