Gethsemane and the Last Supper
God So Loved the World by Elizabeth Goudge
“He saw the moon rise, silvering the olive trees, and prayed under the canopy of the bright stars, and he heard the cock’s crow and the trumpets calling at dawn from the temple walls, and watched the sunrise over the beloved city of Jerusalem. There is so much for a man to watch who knows his death is near. The beauty of earth is not lost for those who die, for all beauty exists in God, and God is never lost, but the dying know that they will never again see it in just this way, out of these eyes, touched with this hand that will soon be dust, the warm air soft upon his body. They watch each fall of a leaf and want to hear the song of the birds just once more. Our Lord was true man. All that the dying feel he felt during those nights of waiting.”
Elizabeth Goudge, God So Loved The World
Human and divine
I know many of you are still treasuring our March reading of God So Loved the World as we walk through Holy Week. I’ve been slowing reading these last chapters, not wanting it to end, as I often also feel about her novels. I’m continually asking myself what it is that is so magical about this narrative retelling?
I keep coming back to her ability to see and describe the movements of the human heart, both in its frailty and it’s strength. Somehow she always holds these two opposites together. Her description of the disciples fleeing from the garden of Gethsemane is so heart wrenching, so full of the knowledge of basic human reactions. We are there with them, feel their shame and also see that they did their best. Every scene here is a lectio divina which helps us to enter the story.
The last supper
“And then came words they had not heard before.
‘Take, eat; this is my Body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’
They must have looked up, startled. What did he mean?
They must have looked at his body, and remembered how ceaselessly it had been spent and given in the toil of love ever since they had known him. How his body would be given for them on the cross, broken for his children at every Eucharist until the world's end, they could not know yet, but as they took the bread that he gave them, and ate it in wonder and reverence, there must have been a confused prayer in their hearts that their bodies too might become bodies of love to live and die for him.”
Elizabeth Goudge, God So Loved the World
Jesus prays
“Silently he turned away from them and went back to the terrible place under the trees where the stones were stained with his blood. Perhaps the agony now was chiefly that of waiting through the slow minutes that seemed like endless hours for the thing to happen, waiting alone in the darkness, and the cold that could be severe at night in the month Nisan, with his sweat-drenched garments clinging to his shivering body. But he managed to pray the same prayer again. ‘Not my will. Thine.’ He had reached complete acceptance, both of the physical death of his body and of the second death, and death accepted became the angel of death strengthening him.”
Elizabeth Goudge, God So Loved the World
These paintings of Carl Bloch which you have shared are remarkable - they seem to draw my soul into the scene that they depict. And the light around Jesus and the angel! Oh, my. Thank you so much for sending beauty on this solemn day. May you be blessed in the lovely and strengthening grace of Jesus.
Beautiful! Blessings to you all as well.