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Thursday, April 17, 2025
HOLY THURSDAY – YEAR C
Gospel Commentary
Lk 22:39-46
We enter the culmination of the history of salvation today with the liturgy of the Easter triduum. With the Easter triduum we also conclude this itinerary of deepening our understanding of the Gospel, read with the gaze suggested by St. Francis’ Laudato Si’ and by Pope Francis in the Enciclica Laudato Si’ both so deeply connected with creation. We invite you to slow down, to set aside time to deepen and pray on these verses of the Word. For this, the reading of the passages from Luke on these solemn days focus on the location of the events, all immersed in creation. An olive grove, a mountain and a garden. Tonight we find ourselves in the garden of Gethsemane, in the company of the olive trees in the hour of prayer, abandonment and the agony of Jesus.
Gethsemane, in Hebrew “gat šemanîm” means “crusher,” or,”olive press”, a place where olives are pressed to make oil. The press in Jewish tradition recalls God’s vengeance, for instance when the prophet Isaiah says, “The wine press I have trodden alone, and of my people there was no one with me. I trod them in my anger, and trampled them down in my wrath” (Isaiah 63:3). Today, through Jesus’ experience, we learn more about this crusher or press and about what God’s vengeance is. Luke’s narrative describes to us a man deeply detached from others, suffering, praying, experiencing sadness and anguish, a “suffering Christ” (Cristo Patiens). This image of the suffering Christ moves away from the image of the “glorious” Christ on the cross where it seems that God had not ever suffered the passion, knowing that He would rise again. Instead, Luke (and then the art and culture that developed from the 13th century onward) also wants to tell us about the agony, the suffering, the weeping of God in the face of hardship.
Many themes that we have already seen along this Lenten journey over the past few weeks reappear, as in the Transfiguration scene: the Father-Son dialogue, the searching for the face, the companionship of the three apostles who do not understand what they have before them. Here, almost in contrast to the light of Mount Tabor, darkness descends on this mountain. It is night and Luke’s narrative recounts each hour of the night… of the capture, of judgment, of Calvary, of loneliness, of the eclipse in which at noon it becomes dark over all the earth. It’s a night that lasts all day, full of disappointment and silence. It is the night of the old Creation, preceding the dawn of a new day. It will happen as it did in the first Creation, when there was total darkness yet, with a word, He created light. However, today we enter, after the feast at the supper table, a little drunk and a little upset, at the beginning of this very long night, into the enclosure of the olive grove.
Compared with the other evangelists, Luke’s narrative focuses on the theme of mercy. His narrative, in this most delicate passage in which all the human and divine tension of Jesus shines through, shows us the merciful face of the Father. Jesus is concerned for his disciples, more than for himself, when he says to them, “Pray that you may not undergo the test.” His thoughts go out to us too, who are in danger of not understanding what we are experiencing or what is in front of us.
“Then going out he went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives”. Jesus comes out of the cenacle, a house made of walls and from this moment on he will pass through other buildings and places of torture, into open courtyards and along roads, to end up on a mountain. From this moment on he will live outdoors, immersed in Creation and the cry generated by human justice. Luke does not even mention Gethsemane, but he tells us about the olive press (grove) by describing Jesus’ face. Every evening during this week Jesus withdrew in prayer to this very “place,” to this temple. The disciples are also with him. “Arrived at the place,” said by Luke, shows us precisely the sacred value of this olive grove, a place traditionally seen as a temple of God, everywhere else was a non-place. A ‘place’ is the space of dialogue with God where one prays. Jesus asks his friends to, “Pray,” almost pleading. He asks us on this Thursday night, within the cry that we live through every day. We must learn to pray, to ask God not for what we want, but what is good…. Pray for what?
“Pray that you may not undergo the test.” The ‘test’ refers to all the temptations that we saw at the beginning of Lent, in the wilderness: bread, power, God with a magic wand, in a nutshell the temptation to put “myself at the center,” possessing everything, even relationships with others and the planet.Prayer is fundamental in our ecological conversion process; it is not just a nice habit or something we do because the parish or diocese tells us, but it is the basis for not entering into temptation. Jesus enters the olive grove but asks us not to give in to temptation.
“After withdrawing about a stone’s throw from them”, Jesus first of all distances himself from the disciples and seeks intimate dialogue because he is “holy.” Let’s just dwell for a moment on this expression….why exactly a stone’s throw? The reference is to the flight of King David, pursued by his son Absalom (in Hebrew אַבְשָׁלוֹם, meaning “the father is peace”), who taking refuge on the Mount of Olives is attacked by a stone-throwing mob. Jesus, like David, is now “about” a stone’s throw away. He is within reach of his disciples. They can all hurt him whether by denial, loneliness or betrayal.Jesus is the lamb who allows himself to be hurt by his disciples. The deepest evil is abandonment; God’s suffering is in his loneliness in relation to man. In the Gethsemane olive press this evening, this abandonment is taken to the highest level. Jesus himself feels abandoned by the Father. Jesus, fully human, chooses to experience this immense drama that man experiences when he abandons God. In His case it is all the more acute, being a laceration of the Trinity itself and the abandonment between Father and Son. Such is God’s love for humans that he experiences his own laceration!
Unlike the other synoptic gospels, in Luke it says, “and kneeling, he prayed,” skipping the reference to terror and anguish that is highlighted dramatically in the other accounts. Jesus kneels, whereas the prayer was usually recited standing. It is a continuous prayer, defined by the verb in the imperfect tense.It is a cosmic prayer, closely in touch with Mother Earth, in which Jesus calls God “Abba,” meaning “Dad,” a word that reminds us of the creative word, a new Creation, coming out of the darkness and evil of the world. First of all, Jesus distances himself from evil, asks the Father, “Abba, Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me” that is, the cup of suffering that is wanted by humanity. God does not want evil; it is human beings who build the crosses, who inflict suffering on their brothers and sisters and on all of Creation. God suffers this evil and if He could choose, He would prefer that this chalice be taken from himself. But, He also flees the temptation of a God with a magic wand, temptation of power and immunity, praying, “still, not my will but yours be done.” The root of all evil in the world lies in the exclusion of God when we put our own egos at the center. “My” will excludes the will of God, the will of good. Jesus has a centered gaze just as Francis would later demonstrate with his vow of having “nothing of one’s own”. It is not enough to be poor, but in life one must aspire to hold nothing of one’s own because possession is the opposite of love. In Gethsemane, this becomes strikingly clear.
Having faith in God goes beyond evil and injustice. Justice, the dear ‘handmaiden’ we have walked beside on this Easter journey: Come to think of it, of course it is not right that Jesus should be condemned and killed as an innocent man, but God’s grace is even greater than obvious injustice. A human response or will would have made Jesus flee; God’s will makes him endure the suffering in the olive grove. What a great teaching Jesus gives us on this evening of solitude, silence and sorrow “let not our will be done.” Often our selfish prayers ask for good for ourselves, “my” health, “my” job or in more altruistic cases, “our” health, “our” jobs, the victory “of our” wars, the well-being “of our” cities. “Thy will be done,” as we always pray in the Our Father, is a ‘good will’ for all that exceeds our idea of justice. It is a great teaching of Jesus in the highest demonstration of his humanity: it was not only God who knew of the resurrection (rising again), but here was a man who felt completely torn in his relationship with his father while experiencing an immense injustice. In our injustices, in our prayers, we know that we have Jesus by our side, but He, on the other hand, was terribly alone.
Luke’s gospel is the gospel of mercy, of gentleness and here we see it again in this scene of anguish, darkness and loneliness, “And to strengthen him an angel from heaven appeared to him.” There is a ray of light, a glimpse in the darkness, illuminating this man kneeling a stone’s throw from his sleeping friends, an angel reminding him of the promise. In this agonising struggle, “He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently” He prayed. Prayer, the only weapon in our possession in the face of suffering, the evil of the world, wars, injustices, to remind us that the problem is not dying (rightly or wrongly sooner or later one must die anyway) but the problem is to live, without having any dialogue with God. Prayer is our opportunity for dialogue with God, for certainty of his presence by our side. In Jesus this is even more dramatic because God is Himself and in the olive press He feels the tearing apart of Himself, a pain that we ourselves cannot even imagine to the point that “his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground.” Life itself, which for the Hebrews resided in blood, falls from the body and falls onto Mother Earth, as if already foretasting burial. The sweat expresses an active life, work, our day to day living, our labors but here in the olive press, Sister Water coming out through the pores of His skin becomes a prophecy of death. Jesus is “squeezed,” like olives in the olive press and consciously sees all the evil in the world that He will receive in the coming hours. This is what God’s vengeance is as shown to us by the face of Jesus.
“When he rose from prayer and returned to his disciples, he found them sleeping from grief”. Sadness and agony. At a stone’s throw we see the great difference between the disciples and Jesus. Our humanity often lives in sadness, drowning in sorrow and prompting us to sleep. Jesus’ divinity resides in the agony and in the struggle but also in the desire to rise again. Luke uses the same verb to indicate the resurrection, a strong desire to rise again, to the point that it is repeated twice in a short time, when “he said to them, ‘Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not undergo the test’”. Get up and pray. This is what we need to do in the face of evil, even the most unjustifiable evil. This is the greatest teaching we receive, on this night, among the olive trees in the olive grove near Jerusalem.
St. Francis, in the wonderful paraphrase of the Our Father, reminds us that: “Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven: so that we love you with all our hearts, always. thinking of you; with all our soul, always desiring you; with all our mind, directing all our intentions to you and in everything seeking your honor; and with all our strength, spending all our energy and sensitivity of soul and body at the service of your love and for nothing else; and so that we can love our neighbors as ourselves, dragging everyone with all our power to your love, enjoying the goods of others as well as ours and suffering together with them and causing no offense to anyone (FF 270).
Happy Easter triduum
Laudato si’!