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OUR SHARE IN THE PASSION
OF CHRIST
 HOLY
AND GREAT MONDAY
HOLY AND GREAT
TUESDAY
HOLY AND GREAT
WEDNESDAY
HOLY AND GREAT
THURSDAY
HOLY
AND GREAT FRIDAY
Some people feel guilty about their
anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They
are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so
take them, our share in the Passion of Christ. For the beginning of the
Passion - the first move, so to speak - is in Gethsemane. In Gethsemane
a very strange and significant thing seems to have happened.
It is clear from many of His sayings that Our Lord had long foreseen
His death. He knew what conduct such as His, in a world such as we have
made of this, must inevitably lead to. But it is clear that this knowledge
must somehow have been withdrawn from Him before He prayed in Gethsemane.
He could not, with whatever reservation about the Father's will, have prayed
that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that it would not. That
is both a logical and a psychological impossibility. You see what this
involves? Lest any trial incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments
of hope - of suspense, anxiety - were at the last moment loosed upon Him
- the supposed possibility that, after aall, He might, He just conceivably
might, be spared the supreme horror. There was precedent. Isaac had been
spared: he too at the last moment, he also against all apparent probability.
It was not quite impossible . . . and doubtless He had seen other men crucified
. . . a sight very unlike most of our religious pictures and images.
But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent
tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps He would not have been
very Man. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man.
At the end, I know, we are told that an angel appeared 'comforting
Him. . . . 'Strengthening' is more the word. May not the strengthening
have consisted in the renewed certainty - cold comfort this - that the
thing must be endured and therefore could be?
C. S. Lewis - Letters to Malcolm, ch. 8 |
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