What You are Worth - Lent Journal (6/40)

Tonight we're talking about Jesus's agony in the garden at Gethsemane - specifically, the mystery of what happened in the garden while He was alone. [1]

I imagine Satan visiting Jesus in the garden to torment Him on the night of Judas's betrayal.

He shows Our Lord a vision of all the wickedness, cruelty, and malice of humanity in a single instant: past, present, and future. He sees the Crucifixion and all that leads up to that; the twelve abandoning him; the scourging and mocking; the false trial; watching His Mother witness all of it.

In this vision, Jesus witnesses the worst of who we can be - war and abandonment; racism; sexism; slavery; the Holocaust and the horrors of the 20th Century.

Jesus is then led through all the heinous acts done by those who will be members of His own Body, the Church, even cruelty done in his name. He watches one scandal after another. He sees the divisions over the past 2,000 years - the splitting of East and West, the Protestant fracturing. Sexual abuse by the clergy. The faithful leaving the Church, apostatizing and denying Him as Simon Peter would do that same night. Those who remained in the Church falling into apathy, no longer caring about the Good News.

Satan reminds Jesus all that will come about because of His sacrifice - albeit indirectly, and not by His hands, but of course the Enemy leaves out that detail. As Jesus is taking all this in, weeping and tortured by all that will happen, He collapses under the weight of all that misery and evil.

At this point, the Accuser calls Jesus to task and declares that He is a participant in all this madness, enabling - or at a minimum allowing - all this to take place.

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Finally the Devil, feeling pleased and satisfied with Himself, glances over at a defeated man covered in sweat, blood, and tears - God Incarnate, experiencing the full burden of all the madness brought about by the Fall.

He leans over and whispers - 

Is it worth it? Are they really worth it?

This thoroughly exhausted man, Jesus of Nazareth, finds one final reserve of energy; blinking through tears, He looks up at Satan - the one who abandoned Heaven an eternity ago and suffered his own Fall - and simply says:

Yes, even if it were only a single person I would still suffer this gladly.

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Beloved - the extent to which you are loved is unimaginable. You could plumb the depths for thousands of years and you wouldn't scratch the surface. Jesus says that you are worth His own death, and that is only the beginning of what He says. He says you are worth all the ugliness that has ever happened and ever will happen - all of which Our Lord took on and received in the course of an evening. Even knowing and experiencing all that you have ever done to personally betray Him [2], He says you are worthy of that love.

Of course, so is everyone else, which is such good news, but also - how do you live up to that? Can you love others the way that Jesus loves them? Can you see their worth to the extent that He demonstrates it? Can you see the full magnitude of how you are loved? Can you stand up for that dignity in all those you meet - especially those who seem the most unworthy?

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[1] We don't know the fullness of what caused Jesus's agony, so this is simply my interpretation. I would invite you to meditate on the mystery and see where the Spirit leads you as well.

[2] I can appreciate if you are uncomfortable with the suggestion that you have betrayed Jesus. One helpful suggestion is to meditate on the question: what would I have done if I had been in the garden that night? Would I have been arrested, tried, convicted, and crucified with Jesus? Or would I have run away as well?