THE ANGUISH OF CHRIST

The entry of Jesus into Jerusalem starts the passion of Christ as he journeys to his crucifixion. John traces the emotions of Christ,

 “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father,save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!”———-  And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.(John 12:27-33)

We see Jesus beset with anguish at the very prospect of facing his death. Yet he grinds through the pain and submits himself to God’s will, facing his destiny and the very purpose for which he came down to earth. 

What lay before was hardly appealing. Jesus knew that he would be manhandled and killed in a most heinous fashion and he repeatedly told his disciples so. Jesus was uniquely fully God and fully man. That fact that he was God gave him divine knowledge much deeper than a man would ever have had. And so he was burdened with an accurate foreknowledge of the events to unfold and this filled him with anguish. The fact that he was God does not give him immunity from the anguish that was created though within his heart because he was also fully human. 

The oft criticized statement, ‘take this cup away’is only a verbal representation of the pain that Jesus felt as a man. More than the miracles he performed and the power he demonstrated over creation, diseases and demons, it is in his anguish as a human that he most identifies with man in his own journey of life beset with sufferings. It is during suffering that man truly looks for a savior who he can identify with, who has experienced what he experienced and who can understand him. In Christ, man finds such a savior who not only knows but who also provides deliverance.

The anguish of Christ however was much deeper because he was taking on the sin of the world as a savior. What happened on the cross was theologically astounding- Jesus who was sinless and who was fully God takes on the sin of the world and becomes the sin offering for man. On the cross he bore the sins of the entire mankind and when that happened there could be at that point, no union between God the father and God the son. Even though there was never any separation between the Father and the Son from the beginning of all time, this was a moment when that perfect union was ruptured, because the sinless God cannot look upon sin and co-exist with it. The anguish of that rupture is not fathomable from a human perspective and Jesus’ pain from that rupture would have been far beyond the physical pain he anticipated on the cross.

Yet, despite anguish, he never sins because he stoically accepts God’s will for him and submits to him when he could well have walked away from it. And because he died, man has hope; because he lives, man can face the future.

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