NOTES for Mar 14:32-52

After the Passover meal Jesus went with His disciples to the village of Gethsemane. There He asked the disciples to wait while He prayed. Jesus often withdrew for prayer, but now He took the disciples closest to Him, Peter, James, and John, to support Him. On the Mount of Transfiguration they had witnessed the divine glory of the Teacher (Mark 9:3-8). This time the Savior's human nature is revealed to them in its fullness; for the first time the Teacher stands before them as One who needs ordinary human support. But they were unable to give it: drowsiness overcame them.

Jesus knew what awaited Him. His hour was drawing near, and everything human in Him rose up against it. Falling to His knees, He prayed that, if possible, this hour might pass from Him. The heaviness of the struggle the Savior experienced between human feelings and the divine will remains a mystery forever. "Yet not what I want, but what You want," Jesus was able to say. Returning to the three disciples, He finds them sleeping and says: "Watch and pray, that you may not fall into temptation: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Going away from the disciples, He prayed again, saying the same words, until love for the Father strengthened Him.

The Gospel then tells how one of the twelve betrayed the Teacher with a kiss, how Jesus, with the words "but let the Scriptures be fulfilled," gave Himself into the hands of the soldiers who had come to arrest Him, and how all the disciples fled in complete confusion. Yet in a special way Christ's words, spoken also to us, reach us: "Watch and pray, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Only by watching and praying will we be able, overcoming all our fears of the future and of what we do not understand, to say together with Christ to our Heavenly Father: "Yet not what I want, but what You want."

The betrayal has taken place, and a raid has been organized against Jesus as against a robber. The attempt of one of the disciples to defend Christ according to the rules of this world is stopped by Him Himself.

Those who arrested Him probably did not themselves believe that Christ would begin actively resisting. But their precautions reveal another fear: fear of the unknown, fear of the other life brought by this incomprehensible preacher, and finally fear of looking into oneself and recognizing one's own wrong. It is fear that makes people attribute the most monstrous absurdities to their victim, just to drown out the voice of conscience.

The flight of the apostles during Jesus' arrest is usually explained by fear and cowardice. Meanwhile, we have no grounds to think that all of them were so cowardly, at least the Gospel accounts do not testify to this. Quite the opposite: some of them, and above all Peter, were very resolute. The same Peter, for example, at the moment of the Teacher's arrest seized a sword, and if Jesus had approved him, it is quite possible that if not all, then most of the disciples would have supported Peter in one way or another. The apostles were ready for an uprising and for war; they were ready to fight, defending their Teacher, and in this war they were ready to die for Him.

The problem was that no war lay ahead. Jesus was not going to fight; He was not even going to defend Himself from the people who came to arrest Him. The messianic war for which the apostles were inwardly preparing existed only in their imagination, and this was the main problem. They prepared for one thing, while in reality something entirely different happened to them; in such a situation a spiritual breakdown is not only possible but almost inevitable.

More precisely, it is inevitable to the extent that a person is immersed in his imagined reality, and to the extent that he spends much, or conversely comparatively little, spiritual effort in order to exist in it. For the disciples, the picture of the messianic war they had drawn was so real that they could not even imagine any other development of events. Peter grabs the sword precisely because his picture of reality in the situation that arose allowed only one possible course of action. Meanwhile, Jesus acts completely differently, not as the apostles expect.

At that point they are lost: what indeed remains for soldiers to do when their commander not only does not try to resist, but himself, completely voluntarily, surrenders? Surrender together with him? This is absurd and cannot fit into consciousness. The reality constructed by the apostles collapses before their eyes, and they run away because in such a situation nothing else remains for them. Jesus, seeing their spiritual state, had no doubt even during the Last Supper that everything would be exactly so, for in the fallen world all this is so understandable and so human.

In reflecting on today's Gospel reading, let us focus on Peter's denial. Let us try to experience this event with Peter. Let us not hurry to say that we never even thought of denying Christ, because we love Him more than anything in the world. By speaking this way, we show that we do not know what love is. If someone wants to understand the words from the First Epistle of John (1 John 4:8), that God is love, he should first of all think about what Peter felt and experienced in the moments of denial and during the three days that followed. Why is this so?

What is most frightening to us when we love? The most frightening thing is that the beloved person will die. And when he dies, literally as soon as his life goes out, we begin to understand how much we did not do for him that we could have done, but now it is no longer possible to do it, because he is no more. We cannot come to him, embrace him, and beg forgiveness for all the bad that happened and for all the good that did not happen.

What did Peter experience, not yet knowing about the Resurrection? A fierce pain of repentance and the impossibility of asking forgiveness. And if we think about it, his denial is not much better than Judas' betrayal. But Judas cannot endure the feeling of guilt, while Peter endures it. What is the difference? Perhaps by understanding the difference, we will understand what love is.

When reading the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper and of everything that followed, one cannot help asking: could it have been otherwise? And if it could not, if "the Son of Man goes as it is written of Him," does this not mean that no one is guilty of anything, that all the participants in those events were merely acting out a drama, not written by them, predetermined in advance so that none of them could change anything in it? But why, then, does Jesus Himself, speaking of the inevitability of what is happening, immediately add: "but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed"? Perhaps, after all, there is inevitability and there is inevitability. Indeed, after the fall, the earthly path of the Messiah could not be without obstacles; one way or another it had to end in suffering and death. And yet, even in such a state of affairs, everyone is free to make the decision he considers right. Yes, in a fallen world every community inevitably has its own Judas; but this does not predetermine the specific choice of a specific person, and for that very reason responsibility for the choice he has made is not removed from him. Besides, none of the participants in that drama was, quite obviously, thinking about any predestination. Beautiful stories in the style of Leonid Andreyev are out of place here, and this is perhaps the most frightening thing of all. Jesus simply got in the way of many people, for different but entirely earthly reasons. And if so, then however sorrowful it is to admit, any of us could potentially have found ourselves in the place of His persecutors. The choice always remains. The main thing is for it to be the right one.