Listen live here or on your local EWTN affiliate at about 6:50 a.m. Central, 7:50 a.m. Eastern.
As More notes, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with Him to be closer during His Agony. More also reminds us that these three Apostles were with Jesus on Mount Tabor during the Transfiguration and at the raising of the daughter of Jairus.
Jesus selected them to be with Him at crucial times and we know that He had selected Peter, formerly Simon, to be the leader of the Apostles and the Rock upon which He founded His Church.
Yet, these three, the Rock and the Sons of Zebedee, failed Jesus at this crucial time.
As you may expect, St. Thomas More finds special significance to this failure, especially since they had seen Jesus in His Glory and at His most powerful, raising a little girl from the dead.
As all three Synoptic Gospels note, Jesus asks Peter, James and John to come along with Him and stay awake while He goes further away to pray, and then He comes back and finds them asleep.
Citing Matthew and Mark, More quotes this passage at the beginning of the next section:
And He said to Peter, "Simon, are you sleeping? Could you not stay awake one hour with me? Stay awake and pray that you may not enter into temptation. For the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."
Noting how "forceful" this brief speech is, More offers another imaginary soliloquy of Jesus:
Simon, no longer Cephas [Peter/Rock], are you sleeping? . . . I singled you out by that name because of your firmness but now you show yourself to be so infirm that you cannot hold out even for an hour against the inroads of sleep.
And the soliloquy repeats the question"Simon, are you sleeping?" again and again: Jesus has honored him; Simon Peter had boasted that he would die with Jesus, that he would never betray or abandon Jesus; he should know that the betrayer is coming soon (or at least that Jesus is in danger), but "Simon, are you sleeping?" (pp. 25-27)
More notes that the rest of Jesus' actual words apply to John and James as well--and to us:
Here we are enjoined to be constant in prayer, and we are informed that prayer is not only useful but also extremely necessary--for this reason: without it, the weakness of the flesh holds us back . . . until our minds, no matter how willing to do good, are swept back into the evils of temptation. . . .
Christ tells us to stay awake [not for pleasure or play] for prayer. He tells us to pray not occasionally, but constantly. . . . He exhorts us to devote to intense prayer a large part of that very time which most of us usually devote entirely to sleep. . . . Finally our Savior tells us to pray . . . that we may not enter into temptation. (pp. 27-28)
More answers objections that some might raise to how Jesus prays three times to the Father to take the cup away from Him but will certainly do the Father's will if He must drink from the cup; how He returns to the three Apostles three times to find them asleep and remonstrates with them, by noting that "nothing He did was done in vain". (p. 33)
It is in this context of the sleeping Apostles that More mentions their successors, the Bishops, saying that by checking on the Apostles three times and hoping to find them awake Jesus
demonstrated His anxious concern for His disciples and also by His example gave to the future pastors of His church a solemn injunction not to allow themselves the slightest wavering, out of sadness or weariness or fear, in their diligent care of their flock but rather to conduct themselves so as to prove in actual fact that they are not so much concerned for themselves as for the welfare of their flock. (p. 33)
The Bishops should be like Jesus; in the midst of His suffering He is still vigilant over His flock, the Apostles. More will later contrast the sleeping Apostles (and their successors the Bishops of his own day) and the active and alert Judas, on his way to the Mount of Olives with a cohort to betray the Son of God with a kiss.
Saint Thomas More also devotes a few paragraphs to how we even know from the Gospels about the sadness of Christ. He declares that all these details about the prayers and the checking on the sleeping Apostles had to come from Jesus Himself. Since the three Apostles couldn't stay awake, they could not hear His prayers and they certainly did not see the blood which flowed like sweat, or the Angel who came to comfort Him.
Therefore, More reasons, after the Resurrection, He must have given the Apostles and His Mother "a detailed account, point by point, of His human suffering". Otherwise, we would not know those details: ". . . which no one could have recounted except Christ Himself. . . . in His kindness [He] made known His own affliction . . ." for their meditation and ours. (pp. 31-32)
As we've noted before, St. Thomas More had obviously meditated often on these passages from the Gospels describing the Agony Jesus endured. He had considered the objections some readers might raise--often because of confusion about the Mystery of the Incarnation and the Person of Jesus--and considered answers to those objections. He had thought out the implications of each action and prayer of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane in the context of the events of the Passion and in their moral and spiritual meaning and application to himself and his contemporaries.
Saint Thomas More, pray for us!
Image credit (Public Domain): The Transfiguration (Pietro Perugino, c. 1500)
Image credit (Public Domain): The Raising of the Daughter of Jairus (William Blake)
No comments:
Post a Comment