IIC 109: Jesus’ Psychological Agony in the Garden

We explore the inner experience of Jesus and the psychological, emotional, relational, and bodily anguish He suffered in His humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane as the drama of of salvation history unfolded. We also explored the reactions of the apostles Peter, James, and John to the experience of Jesus’ agony.

[00:00:00] Gethsemane

The Lord is in the garden, weeping —
prostrate, anguished — all alone.
Not far away His friends are sleeping,
using pillows made of stone.

There in the darkness, time is fleeting —
racing toward His destiny.
His weary voice is heard repeating,
Father, take this cup from Me.

More fervently the Lord is pleading —
mouthing words without a sound.
From sorrow, He has started bleeding
crimson droplets on the ground.

Disciples — one by one — awaken.
Jesus tells them as they stand,
The Son of Man will soon be taken.
Rise, the hour is at hand.

Bright torches in the distance — nearing;
shouts and voices pierce the night.
Then Judas walks into the clearing —
soldiers to his left and right.

To Judas and the crowd behind him
Jesus asks, Whom do you seek?
All eyes await the sign to bind Him —
Judas kisses Jesus’ cheek.

A glint of steel — a blade is wheeling —
Peter cuts off someone’s ear.
A call for peace — a touch of healing,
Jesus’ friends run off in fear.

Surrounded by the priests and soldiers —
centered in His Father’s will.
The world’s weight upon His shoulders —
stretched out on Golgotha’s hill.

[00:01:29] The poem titled ‘Gethsemane,’ by poet Robert Hawkins at TheHawksQuill.com, used by permission. Welcome to the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. I’m Dr. Peter Malinoski, passionate Catholic, clinical psychologist, bringing to you the best of human formation resources grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person. I am very pleased to share with you a special edition of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast for Holy Week. This is episode 109, titled Jesus’ Agony in the Garden, and it is released on April 3, 2023, the Monday of Holy Week. Interior Integration for Catholics is part of our broader outreach, Souls and Hearts, at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about overcoming the psychological and human formation issues that keep us from a deep, personal, intimate relationship with God, our spiritual Father, Mary, our spiritual Mother, Jesus, our brother and Savior, and the Holy Spirit who sustains us. Today we are getting to know Jesus much better, especially in those moments in the Garden of Gethsemane. Much has been written about Jesus’ physical wounds in his passion, the beating, the 39 lashes, the carrying of the cross, the crucifixion itself. Much less has been explored and understood about the psychological aspects of that suffering, the emotional and relational aspects of his passion.

[00:03:14] So Jesus’ psychological distress and suffering has been very underappreciated. Even less understood, even less appreciated are the apostles’ inner experience of what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane. This is a huge omission, and our lack of understanding and appreciation keep us from knowing our Lord even more deeply, they keep us from loving our Lord more deeply. So in a partial remedy for that omission, I want to walk you through the events in the Garden of Gethsemane as recounted in the four Gospels with a special focus on the inner experience of the major players. To set the stage, I invite you to think about how, when we consider the passion, we generally come nowhere near to appreciating the full inner experience of our Lord Jesus Christ, what he actually suffered for us. We become quasi-Docetists. Docetism is a second century heresy that taught that Jesus only appeared to have a body. He was not truly incarnate. He just seemed to have a body. He was like a ghost. By denying the incarnate reality of Jesus’ body, Docetists essentially deny Jesus’ human nature. Jesus was true God and true man. Many Gnostics believed this Docetist heresy. And St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Irenaeus, and St. Hippolytus refuted it soundly and it was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D.

[00:05:02] In Hebrews 4:15, we are told, “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted, as we are, yet without sinning.” In the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, in paragraph 22, describes Jesus this way: “By his Incarnation, the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind, acted by human choice, and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like us in all things but sin.” Pope St. John Paul II, in his general audience from February 3, 1988, elaborated on this passage from Gaudium et Spes. He said, “Today we shall pay particular attention to this last statement which brings us to the heart of Jesus’ psychological life. He truly experienced human feelings of joy, sadness, anger, wonder, and love.” And Pope John Paul II cited many examples in the Gospels to reflect all of those human experiences, including other experiences too: amazement, admiration, disappointment, frustration. Jesus got tired. He needed sleep, sometimes during storms while boating. He also got thirsty, he touched others, he was touched by others. In other words, Jesus really is true man. And when he went through his passion, when he went through the struggles in the Garden of Gethsemane, he did so in the fullness of that humanity, as an embodied man, with all the psychology of a man, with all the emotions of a man, with all the distress of a man, with all the inner experiences of a man. As Vatican II tells us, he has truly been made one of us, like us in all things but sin. So not only is Jesus a man, but he is the perfect man, a sinless man, the exemplar of what it means to be a man. For 30 years in his family home he worked on his human formation, first as a boy, then as a man. Immediately after recounting the story of finding the 12-year-old Jesus in the temple, Luke tells us in 2:52, most likely on the authority of Mary, that Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man. 

[00:07:49] In his humanity, as a boy and a man, Jesus increased in wisdom and stature. In his humanity, Jesus grew up, not only physically, but also in acquiring knowledge and experience through the natural use of his human faculties, through his senses and his imagination, just like we do. Remember, he was like us in all things but sin. And in Hebrews 5:8, we read that, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.” In his human nature, Jesus learned obedience. He was like us in all things but sin. So as we begin, I want to give you a brief primer on human stress responses. If we’re going to understand what our Lord and his apostles went through in the Garden of Gethsemane from a psychological perspective, we need to understand stress responses in human beings. So let’s talk about two stress responses. The first stress response is sympathetic arousal, and the second one is the dorsal vagal response. So let’s start with sympathetic arousal. What is that? What is sympathetic arousal? That happens when our sympathetic nervous system is activated. We are all about survival. That’s familiar to us as being in the fight or flight mode. In the fight mode, the human body is mobilized for aggressive action. We have very high levels of energy in this state. We have an adrenaline rush. The Klaxons are going off inside. We’re rushing to battle stations. There’s not a lot of relationality. When you are in fight mode, you breathe faster, your heart rate rises, your heart pounds hard in your chest, blood pressure rises, you sweat. It’s hard to think. You can feel overwhelmed. There’s a potential for rage. We disconnect from others. Again, there is no time or space or energy for connecting in relationships. We are outside of our window of tolerance.

[00:09:59] In the flight mode, we are hypervigilant, on high alert. There is no sense of security. We act like a hunted animal. Our pupils are dilated, letting in more light, looking for danger. There is no sense of safety; rather, there is a sense of impending danger. There’s a potential for panic, for disorganized fleeing. We make desperate efforts to escape from the perceived danger. We disconnect from others. Again, there is no time or space or energy for connecting in relationships because we are outside our window of tolerance. And we can’t learn new things. Fight or flight is not a sustainable state because your adrenaline is up, your cortisone is up. Your body cannot take it for long periods of time. Your heart could not stand it. And in that space, when you are in that sympathetic arousal, that fight or flight state, your capacity for complex, flexible reasoning is very much reduced. Confusion can predominate. Can you imagine playing a good game of chess on your smartphone when you’re in fight or flight mode? You know, like when you’re running away from a tiger or facing three assailants in a dark alley? Could you make good moves on the chessboard? Absolutely not. So that’s a brief summary of the sympathetic arousal, the fight or flight mode, the hyper-arousal.

[00:11:17] But there’s another stress response that people often don’t recognize, and that’s called the dorsal vagal response, sometimes known as the freeze response. And all of this I’m getting from polyvagal theory by Stephen Porges. I really like the way that Deb Dana presents polyvagal theory. But just to give you a little background, if you want to learn more about the dorsal vagal response, this often follows sympathetic arousal. This is the freeze response. This is where we collapse into a kind of lifelessness. The dorsal vagal system takes over within us and shuts us down. This is the freeze response. Everything goes offline. Almost all of our brain goes offline and we shift into a conservation mode. We do this like instinctually. It’s a response to what seems inescapable. Because we can’t fight and because we can’t flee, we numb out, we disconnect, we dissociate, we space out. We feel disconnected from the present, like we’re untethered or floating. There’s fogginess, fuzziness, there’s a sense of collapse, and we can feel really alone, lost, unreachable, invisible. We can lose our sense of identity. Safety and hope seem to be lost. And we can go unconscious altogether. There’s this intense lethargy. Often people in this freeze response feel really lethargic, like you’re heavily sedated, this feeling of being stuck or frozen. And there can also be this deep despondency, a great sorrow that overwhelms us. 

[00:12:59] It can be dark and silent and cold inside like a rock. Like I’m an island. This is all about protection, self-protection. And this is what happens when you see animals playing dead, like playing possum. There’s just a loss of nearly all cognitive and relational abilities when you are in this dorsal vagal response. We can’t listen to others very well. We can’t share very well. We have very little agency. We can’t focus. And the story, the narrative inside, is one of despair, a message that the world is cold, empty, uninhabitable, messages that I’m unlovable, invisible, lost and alone, and in such danger that my best course of action is to shut down. Okay, so those are the two stress responses in a nutshell. The sympathetic response, which is the fight or flight response, and the dorsal vagal response, which is the freeze response. And so now with that little bit of background, I want to walk you through what I imagine happened inside of Jesus and his apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane. Now, some cautions here. There’s possibilities — I don’t think they’re highly likely — but it’s possible that some people could have parts get activated as we discuss this, there could be some triggering going on here. And so I want you to be really mindful of what’s happening inside of you with your parts as we dive into the experience of our Lord in his humanity and the experiences of his apostles in their humanity.

[00:14:33] So if you find that this is too much, that you need to take a break, if you find that you’re leaving your window of tolerance, that you’re moving into fight or flight mode, going into hyper-arousal, that’s the sympathetic nervous system activation, then take a break, slow it down, reground yourself. Or if you find that you’re dropping into hypo-arousal, exiting your zone of tolerance to the downside, when you’re getting into that freeze response, you’re numbing out, you’re beginning to dissociate things like that. Well, we want to titrate that. We want to regulate that. So it’s a good thing to stop the podcast episode for a while. Let yourself regroup. Okay? We want to honor our humanity and our human capacity to take things in and to not rush things. So I’m going to be using the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition for the Scripture passages in this episode, unless I say otherwise. And I’m going to be focusing on Matthew chapter 26, Mark chapter 14, Luke chapter 22, and John chapter 18. Those are the accounts of the Garden of Gethsemane and what happened there that the Gospels provide us. So let’s just start with a little bit of background on Gethsemane. The word Gethsemane comes from the Hebrew gat-shemanim, which means oil press, which suggests that the Garden of Gethsemane was really a grove of olive trees with an oil press nearby.

[00:16:07] And that’s significant in my opinion, because in this moment, in the Garden of Gethsemane, this is the scene of the greatest drama ever. Gethsemane. This was the key moment in all of human history, the moment when Jesus decided irrevocably to give himself up to the most terrible, agonizing suffering in order to redeem us from our sins. All of our human existence turned on this decision of our Lord in his humanity, in the Garden of Gethsemane. It’s that significant. It’s that important. But let’s go back in time just for a little bit. Let’s go back for a minute to original sin. Remember original sin? Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and ruptured our relationship with God. That all happened in a garden. That all happened in the Garden of Eden. That’s where we lost our relationship with God. We lost our harmony with God. We lost our harmony with each other. We lost the harmony within ourselves. All those losses happened in a garden, the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Gethsemane, which I believe, for all intents and purposes, was the start of the passion, that was the place where Jesus committed himself to carrying out all of what his Father asked him to do in order to save us. The Garden of Gethsemane. That was the decision point when Jesus embraced it all and accepted it all at such a great cost, such a great psychological cost.

[00:18:04] And Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, two biblical scholars and theologians, they said, “It is no exaggeration to say that this is the defining moment of Jesus’ early life. It all came down to the decision Jesus made in the Garden of Gethsemane.” So let’s walk through the sequence of events in the garden from the very beginning in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Jesus gives his disciples the command to pray. He says, “Sit here while I go yonder and pray.” And Luke, he gets more specific right off the bat. Luke quotes Jesus saying, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” And then Jesus goes off and prays. He’s modeling the prayer that he has commanded his disciples to do. It’s interesting, Jesus does not ask the disciples to pray for him. He commands them to pray for themselves and to pray specifically that they do not enter into temptation. That’s going to be really significant in just a little bit because there’s a real implication as to whether they prayed or didn’t pray.

[00:19:16] Now, a side note here. There is no mention of Satan’s presence in the Garden of Gethsemane in any of the Gospel accounts. Many people just assume Satan was there. And that may be in part because of the impact of Mel Gibson’s 2000 film, The Passion of the Christ, with Rosalinda Celentano acting in the role of an unforgettably creepy and scary Satan. But Mel Gibson or no Mel Gibson, it’s also reasonable to assume that Satan was lurking in the garden near at hand, especially with Jesus’ command to his apostles, that they pray that they don’t enter into temptation. It makes a lot of sense that Satan was present. So let’s just speak a little bit about temptations, because this is an area that I deal with a lot as a clinical psychologist. Remember that St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that grace perfects nature. It doesn’t destroy it. In my experience, when clients of mine or others that I’ve worked with in various ways, when they experience external temptations, ones that might have a demonic influence to them, those external temptations focus on the weakest links in the person’s natural human formation. The weakest links in our natural human formation tend to be where Satan, where the demons focus their efforts. Satan and the demons look for weak spots within our human natures, within our human formation, and try to exploit those weaknesses in our parts.

[00:20:56] And let me just define parts here for a minute. This is according to Internal Family Systems thinking by Richard Schwartz. Parts are those separate, independently operating little personalities within us, each with its own prominent needs, roles in our lives, emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, interpersonal style and worldview. Each part also has an image of God. And parts who are not in right relationship with our innermost self have a very limited vision and understanding. The parts of us that we reject within ourselves, those are the parts that demons want to connect with. The parts of us that we condemn, that we deny, the demons want to accept those parts and relate with those parts that we reject in ourselves. Satan and the demons, for example, can use our shame against us. And so what I’m saying here is let’s not separate the natural realm and the spiritual realm when we are addressing the question of temptation. Temptation is not just a spiritual thing. Discalced Carmelite Abbot Marc Foley writes that, “One…misconception is that the spiritual life is an encapsulated sphere, cloistered from the realities of daily living…we have only one life composed of various dimensions. Our emotional life, intellectual life, social life, work life, sex life, spiritual life are simple ways of speaking of the different facets of our one life.” We have one life. Just one life. We don’t have a spiritual life that is separate from our emotional life or our psychological life. We have one life, and if we are tempted, that affects our whole life, not just the spiritual side of us.

[00:22:51] Now, I also want to make a distinction between impulses and temptations. Impulses are what some people call inner temptations. Impulses arise within us. They are desires toward something that isn’t good for us, but they come from within our own humanity, from our parts, not from the devils. I think of temptations as coming from outside of us, from demonic influences, coming from demons, and impulses from within us. So let’s just for a moment talk about the apostles, Peter, James, and John. St. Matthew describes how Jesus took Peter, James and John aside with him in the garden. And just from a psychological perspective, what were these men like? Remember Peter? Peter, who could be dominated by parts who are bold and impetuous, self-confident and courageous, but also inconsistent, hardheaded, and prone to insist on their own ideas, even to the point of contradicting Jesus. Peter was outgoing, prone to intense emotions, and a man with the natural capability of inspiring other men to follow his leadership. And James and John, like Peter, they were fishermen from Galilee, accustomed to hard labor and hard circumstances. Remember, not only were these two brothers sons of Zebedee, they were the Boanerges, the Sons of Thunder, likely due to their intense, powerful, rough-hewn characters. They never backed down from a fight. They have firefighter parts who are quick to anger, willing to call fire down from heaven on those who didn’t accept Jesus’ message. They have ambitious and grandiose parts who coveted the honor of sitting at Jesus’ right and left hand in the kingdom of his glory. In their self-assurance, these parts assumed that they could drink the cup of suffering that Jesus would drink.

[00:24:54] So in this moment, at the beginning, Jesus was asking his apostles to prepare for what was about to happen, to ask for the virtues of faith, of perseverance, of fortitude, of courage to seek, to be strengthened by God the Father. Jesus’ admonition to pray must have reminded the apostles of when Jesus taught them to pray, giving them the Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus said, “When you pray, say, our Father who art in heaven,” and then of course, the rest of the prayer. Jesus wanted his apostles to enter into a relationship with God the Father as beloved sons. This was really, really clear and really startling. The intimacy of the relationship that we are called to have with God the Father. So that’s what Jesus commanded his apostles to do, to pray, to pray to their God as father, to pray as beloved sons. And in my opinion, it’s pretty clear that the apostles didn’t do it. They didn’t pray enough. And we’ll talk about that in just a little bit. So now we’re going to address Jesus’ sorrow and distress. So taking with him Peter, James, and John, Matthew tells us, “Jesus began to be sorrowful and troubled. And he said to them, ‘My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch with me.'” Mark tells us that Jesus “was greatly distressed and troubled,” and he repeated, “my soul is very sorrowful, even to death.”

[00:26:40] Now if you look at the Greek words to describe the intensity of this psychological experience, Dr. Mary Healy brings this up in her Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture on Mark. She says that these verbs, these Greek verbs are so forceful, they imply anguish, alarm. It’s hard to put in words the intensity of the suffering that our Lord was experiencing here. He is distraught in his humanity. This is not some kind of Jewish hyperbole, exaggeration, you know, creative license and poetic language. No, he’s sorrowful even unto death. The crushing weight of sorrow. Sorrow for every sin, every sin, large and small, from spitballs in the seventh grade to genocides. Sins committed by every man, every woman and every child in the entire history of the world, and the entire future of the world. Every sin. And Jesus was sorrowful unto death. That implies a dorsal vagal shutdown going on in the body. That’s how I look at that. 

[00:27:50] You know, think about the intensity of carrying all the sins of every single man and woman and child throughout all of human history and the entire future of the world. That includes that time when you pulled that girl’s hair in third grade. You remember that? That includes all those harsh words that you said to your siblings, all the times you fought in the car on those long car trips. You remember that? All of those things that you’ve done in your adulthood that divided you from other people, that impaired or harmed or even severed your relationship with God. All of that, all of the sins of every human being. And the crushing weight of Jesus’ sorrow for all those sins is beyond imagining. Jesus said, “Watch with me.” Jesus asked his disciples to watch with him. Now let’s shift gears and take a look at what happened to Jesus’ posture in the Garden of Gethsemane. The usual way, the normal way to pray for Jews was to stand. You prayed standing on your feet when you addressed God. But in Luke 22, it says, “Jesus knelt down.” That’s an unusual position for prayer. And the way that I interpret this is that Jesus sank to his knees. He sank to his knees. And then Mark goes further, he says, “Jesus fell to the ground.” And Matthew then goes even further, “Jesus fell on his face.” A prostrate position. Fell on his face, Jesus’ face, not even turned to the side. This is a very uncomfortable, unnatural position. His face on the ground, prostrate. And what that position means is that Jesus is so burdened, so nearly completely overcome, lacking vitality, lacking the power to rise.

[00:29:48] This prostrate position, face on the ground. This is a position of distress, of exhaustion, of extreme physical weakness, of duress, the sins of the world bearing down on him, crushing him, the anticipation of his suffering, weighing on him because he was seeing what it would take in order to carry out his Father’s command, what it would take for the redemption of your soul, what it would take for the redemption of my soul and the souls of everyone else. And he prayed. And what did he pray? According to Mark: “Abba, Father.” Abba, Daddy. “All things are possible to thee. Remove this cup from me.” Remove this cup from me. The cup of suffering. Praying this with his face on the ground. The intensity of the suffering. And then Luke, the physician, he adds a gruesome detail that’s not included in the other Gospels. He adds that there was sweat like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground. Great drops of blood falling down upon the ground. Well, this is a medical condition called hematidrosis. That’s a condition in which the little capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands, that nourish the sweat glands, that’s when those little blood vessels rupture. The blood pressure is so high, the intensity inside is so high, the heart is pumping so hard that those blood vessels rupture and it causes blood to exude through the sweat glands. It happens under conditions of extreme physical or emotional stress. So lots of documented cases of this.

[00:32:10] But, you know, the interesting thing is that when you look at the medical literature on hematidrosis, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at that medical literature, almost always the condition is described like a pink sheen on the face or on the hands. That’s not what Luke is describing. Luke is talking about great drops of blood falling on the ground. That’s what it looked like. And that can happen when you are in sympathetic arousal because again, remember, your heart races, your blood pressure rises. The blood pressure became so great within our Lord that it burst the blood vessels in his skin. His precious blood flowed into his sweat glands and his blood flowed out of him, falling in great drops to the ground. Now this is my own speculative Malinoski theology here, so caveat emptor, buyer beware. But I see this bloody rolling sweat as another wound for Jesus, the unrecognized wound. The first wound of his passion that didn’t get counted among our Lord’s five wounds. You know, the five wounds, the nail wounds in his hands and his feet and the spear wound in his side. I think this hematidrosis is the first of the wounds of his passion. The first wound that drew blood and that first wound came from inside Jesus, from his inner experience, from his inner distress. Jesus’ internal distress was just so great that it forced his precious blood from his sacred body. Think about that. The intensity of the distress that had to be there to cause that to happen. Sorrowful unto death.

[00:33:59] There is nothing in the suffering that we experience that our Lord doesn’t know from his own personal experience as a man. Anything that at least does not stem from sin because he’s like us in all things but sin. And an angel came from heaven to strengthen him. St. Luke tells us, “Being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly.” He prayed more earnestly. So in spite of the way that his body is reacting, in that sympathetic nervous system arousal, in that fight or flight mode, he is still engaged with his Father. He is still connected with his Father. He is still relationally engaging. He hasn’t retreated or withdrawn into a protective mode. That’s what typically happens in a fight or flight response. When your body is that worked up, you move into a protective mode. That’s what happens psychologically. But did that happen with Jesus? No. His human formation allowed him to stay engaged in deep relational connection and intimacy with his Father. I can’t imagine being able to hold on to that and not dropping into some numbed out, dissociated place. But our Lord stayed with it. He had dedicated his life to his human formation. He had grown in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man, he had learned obedience through his previous suffering. And Jesus took for himself the same advice that he had given his apostles. He was prepared. He had prayed. The apostles were not prepared. Jesus was prepared for this temptation, this moment when he’s bleeding from his face and his hands, when his heart is racing, when he is so crushed by the intensity of his suffering. This, more than anything else in the psychological realm, proves his humanity. This was a man. Jesus was a man. The Docetists were totally wrong. Jesus was truly a man. He was truly human in his suffering.

[00:36:05] And because he had the same attachment needs and the same integrity needs as any man or woman, God sent an angel to comfort him. Luke tells us, “And there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him.” That angel wasn’t strengthening Jesus in his divinity. Jesus’ divinity did not need strengthening. The angel was there to strengthen Jesus in his humanity. That angel was sent by God to help Jesus when no one else was there to help him. And I think it was there to help with the attachment needs and the integrity needs that Jesus had, that each of us have in our humanity — that need to have a felt sense of safety and security, the need to be seen and known, the need to be reassured and comforted and other needs, the need for somebody to be with. But let’s broaden our perspective for a minute. What was going on with the apostles at this time? Let’s go back. Remember, our Lord had commanded Peter, James, and John to watch and pray that they would not enter into temptation. Indeed, “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” our Lord says in Luke. He goes back to them and he says, “Why do you sleep? Rise and pray that you enter not into temptation.” Matthew and Mark talk about how the apostles’ eyes were heavy with sleep.

[00:37:27] And sometimes the apostles get criticized in the Garden of Gethsemane for being sleepy, for being fatigued, with the implication of being lazy, of being slackers, of being out of touch with what’s going on, totally clueless about what’s happening with Jesus. There’s a sort of implicit criticism in our Lord’s words to Simon Peter. He says, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.” But I don’t believe for one minute that this was just laziness on the part of the Apostles. Our Lord never said it was laziness. I think looking at this as just laziness or just fatigue is a total mischaracterization, a total misunderstanding. The idea that the apostles didn’t know what was going on with Jesus — I think that’s a gross misunderstanding. I think parts of the apostles knew exactly what was going on and they couldn’t bear it. They couldn’t take it. They weren’t prepared. The apostles saw the blood flowing, dripping from our Lord’s face and dripping from his hands. They saw him shuddering. They saw him staggering under the weight of the burden of the sins of the world. They saw him sink to his knees and then fall face down on the ground. And then Luke, the physician, tells us that the disciples were “sleeping for sorrow.” Sleeping for sorrow, not sleeping out of laziness or fatigue, but sleeping for sorrow. Again, powerful Greek words here in the Scripture. If we go back to the original language, they indicate dorsal vagal shut down. The apostles couldn’t handle it, they dropped into a freeze response. They didn’t follow our Lord’s command to pray. They didn’t pray sufficiently. They weren’t strengthened enough by God’s grace. They weren’t open enough to God’s grace to stay present under these extreme circumstances, under these dire circumstances. These self-confident and brash apostles, Peter the Bold and the Sons of Thunder, they relied on their own human strength, and in the end, they couldn’t bear it. They shut down. They shut down. They collapsed into a dorsal vagal shutdown response under the pressure.

[00:39:40] Remember disconnection numbing out, conservation mode, fuzziness, collapse, loss of identity, loss of consciousness all together. All that happens in a dorsal vagal shutdown response because the situation is so desperate, so extreme. They don’t know that there’s anything that they can do. They forget what the Lord told them. Their systems are going offline, their brains are shutting down, and the storyline is one of despair. The Apostles had put so much trust in their idea of Jesus, in their mistaken understanding of Jesus. They had seen the miracles, healing the lame, giving sight to the blind, even raising the dead. They saw Jesus command demons and the demons had to obey. Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee. For fishermen, this was extraordinary. Like, who can do that? Jesus was the Son of God. He was the I AM. He had outwitted his enemies at every turn. He was so clever and powerful and confident and resourceful. And he had just returned to Jerusalem in glory, in a triumphant procession, riding on a donkey about to carry out the Old Testament promises of a Messiah. So many Israelites thought Jesus was the Messiah, the Savior, the one who could free them from the yoke of Roman imperialism and restore them to their land, to their heritage. And now, now in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus looks like a shaking thing, trembling, staggering bloody wreck in great distress. Peter, James, and John don’t understand what’s going on. How can this be? They’re confused. It’s not making sense. This is not what they were expecting. This is not what Peter imagined he would have as the rock, the foundation of Jesus’ Church. This is not what James and John bargained for when they sought to sit at his right and left hand in the kingdom. What was going on?

[00:41:46] Remember our Lord was focused on loving the disciples. He was trying to prepare them for this. He ordered them three times to pray, to resist temptation. He understands the weakness of their flesh. He’s gentle with them in spite of the agony that he’s going through. Three times our Lord prayed that the cup of suffering may be taken from him. Three times he affirms that he accepts the cup of suffering from his Father. And it’s in that third affirmation. It’s in that third affirmation that he says yes and he triumphs. “Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” That was the moment. That was the defining moment. That’s when Jesus won the battle within his humanity. Because in that yes to his Father, in the consent of his human will, every part of his humanity joined in the assent, joined in the inner victory. Jesus accepted everything that was going to happen to him in his passion. The rest of the passion was just executing against what he had already accepted in that moment. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he won his battle within. He won his battle within with that third affirmation in the Garden of Gethsemane. And yes, that implied the cross. Yes, the cross was absolutely essential. But the battle was won in the Garden of Gethsemane.

[00:44:01] And now he comes back to the Apostles. Now he is ready. Now his human body is in a ventral vagal state. Now he is calm. He has connectedness, he has relationality, he has flexibility, he has resilience, he has the ability to attune deeply to others in the present moment. He can engage all of his brain completely. His faculties are all immediately available to him. Again, the time of acute crisis has passed. Jesus’ body has calmed down, his body is back in the window of tolerance. He can bring others goodness, and peace, and joy, and a depth of love the world has never seen from a man. And that was the moment when Judas shows up. That is the moment when Judas arrives with the authorities, with those who would arrest him. John 18:3, “So Judas, procuring a band of soldiers and some officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees went there with lanterns and torches and weapons.” The soldiers were Romans, and the officers were from the temple guard. Let’s take a look at this word ‘band’ that the RSVCE uses in translation. This word is really inaccurate. When I think of a band, I think of three, four, five guys, maybe a maximum of ten guys. But the Greek word here is ‘spira,’ and spira directly translates to a military cohort. And the actual size of a Roman military cohort is 300 to 600 soldiers. If you look at more literal translations of the Gospels like the NASB and a few others, you find spira translated as cohort. And in an article titled “How Many Soldiers Does It Take to Arrest One Man?”, Rick Renner writes, “Matthew 26:47 says it was ‘a great multitude’ of soldiers, using the Greek words ‘ochlos polus’ to indicate that it was a huge multitude of armed men. Mark 14:43 calls it ‘a great multitude,’ using the Greek word ‘ochlos,’ indicating that it was a massive crowd. Luke 22:47 also uses the word ‘ochlos’ to indicate the band of soldiers that came that night was enormous.”

[00:46:51] This was a major military operation. We know the Roman soldiers and the officers of the chief priests and Pharisees carried torches and lanterns and weapons. This was a demonstration of shock and awe, designed to signal that resistance was futile in the face of such a large force. Professional soldiers in full armor, armed and ready if Jesus was in fight mode. The lanterns and torches would aid in the manhunt if Jesus tried to escape in flight mode. Jesus, in his ventral vagal state, he comes back in full control. Jesus is in full command of the situation. How does he respond to the cohort? How does he respond to the officers and the great show of force? Judas kisses him, the sign of betrayal. And how does Jesus greet Judas? Does he condemn Judas? No. Jesus reaches out to Judas. He calls Judas by name. He says Judas. And he also refers to Judas as friend. Jesus is fully self-possessed. His body is in a ventral vagal state. He is calm, connected, compassionate with clarity and courage and confidence. He can reach out in love to the one who betrayed him. To reach out to Judas in love and offer him hope, even in these most extreme circumstances. That connection, still offering friendship to Judas. Jesus knew all that was about to befall him. He had gone through it all moments before in his agony in the garden. He had chosen it and he had chosen it with the entirety of his being with complete interior integration in his humanity. Now in these moments, Jesus is the one in charge of the situation. Jesus commands the scene. In John, he asks the authorities, 300-600 men, “Whom do you seek? And the answered him, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘I am he.’ And when he said to them, ‘I am he,’ they drew back and fell to the ground.” That was a theophany a visible manifestation of God to humankind, I AM. There Jesus was, in the fullness of his humanity and the fullness of his divinity. And the soldiers and officers are leveled to the ground.

[00:49:48] And Jesus is the one who’s giving the commands. “He asks again, ‘Who do you seek?’ And they said, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ And Jesus answered, ‘I told you, I am he. So if you seek me, let these men go.'” Do you notice who’s in charge here? Who is in command of the situation? It is our Lord. Let these men go. The apostle John, eye witness to all these events, he writes in his Gospel, “This was to fulfill the word which he had spoken of those whom thou gavest me. I lost not one.” Jesus is calling the shots. Jesus then heals the high priest’s servant, Malchus. His ear was severed by Peter, who had recovered from his dorsal vagal shutdown freeze response and is back in a sympathetic hyper arousal fight mode, ready to take on the entire Roman cohort by himself. Jesus is doing miracles in this place where there was very little faith at that time, very little faith but Jesus’s own faith, the faith possessed by his own humanity. And he’s teaching Peter and the other apostles, showing them by lived example the need for the cup of suffering, the need for the passion, the cross, admonishing them not to get in the way of a sacrificial gift of self by wielding swords. Jesus was ready. Jesus was prepared. Jesus had won the battle within. And then all the apostles run off in fear. They’re in flight mode. But in those moments, in dealing with Judas, the love and compassion and the power of his presence, Jesus is truly God. For me at an experiential level, this is the greatest proof of Jesus’ hypostatic union, that he was both true God and true man. Such humanity, such fragility, such neediness in his prayer, on his face, on the ground, such power afterwards, such perfection, such love as he encounters Judas and the authorities.

[00:52:09] Now my podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics is all about overcoming the natural level impediments to a deep and abiding relationship with our Lord and our Lady. And I wanted to mention that you can connect with this podcast on any of the major podcast players, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, all of them. You can go to our website, soulsandhearts.com/iic, to check out a few episodes that are relevant to what we talked about today in this episode. Before we do that, though, a special note. I am including a bonus experiential exercise in two days on Wednesday, April 5, 2023, there will be Episode 110 titled Being with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. This is really all about helping you and your parts accompany Jesus in his suffering and checking out within you the human formation blocks that keep you from connecting more deeply with our Lord and his suffering. That would be a great one to listen to on Holy Thursday evening.

[00:53:25] So back to some other podcasts that are relevant to what we covered today. If you want to learn more about stress responses, check out episode 89, which is called Your Trauma, Your Body: Protection vs. Connection. There’s a lot more about polyvagal theory and our stress responses in that episode. If you want to learn more about Internal Family Systems, more about the parts within us, episode 71 is for you, A New and Better Way of Understanding Myself and Others. That will help you to understand Internal Family Systems and parts much better. And I talk about my own parts, ten parts of me in that episode. There’s also episode 73, which is titled Is Internal Family Systems Really Catholic? where we look at how to harmonize Internal Family Systems and parts with a Catholic understanding of the human person. Episode 37 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast launches a 13-episode series on shame. Shame is such a critical driver of so much human decision making and distress. And as part of that series, episode 37, we get into how Satan seeks to use our shame against us. If you want to learn more about how I understand the experience of Judas, the inner experience of Judas and the role shame played in his life and his decisions, check out episode 46, Shame and Tragedy: Judas Iscariot and You. That would be a great one to listen to on Wednesday of Holy Week, traditionally called Spy Wednesday. And then one of my favorite episodes, episode 47, Shame and Redemption: St. Peter and You. My namesake, St. Peter and I have so much in common, so many characteristics in common. And so in episode 47, we really get into St. Peter’s internal experience of his relationship with our Lord.

[00:55:31] And then episode 48, that’s titled St. Dismas, Shame and Repentance. It’s all about St. Dismas who is the good thief, the one who died on the cross next to Jesus. All of these episodes are relevant to us in our days here of Holy Week as we come up into Good Friday and Easter, all these episodes that I’m sharing with you focus on the central role of shame and how much shame drives the impulses within us that are harmful to our relationship with God, to our relationship with others, and to our relationships within ourselves. But the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast is just a small part of Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. That’s our online outreach to bring the best of psychological and human formation resources to you. That’s our little corner of the vineyard, human formation. And we have podcasts, shows, blogs. I do a weekly email reflection. There’s all kinds of resources. They are all about preparing the way for the Lord in our human formation. That’s why St. John the Baptist is our patron. He prepared the way for the Lord. So I’m going to invite you to check out all of that at soulsandhearts.com. It’s all free. And remember again, there’s an invitation to get in touch with me about the themes and the content of these podcast episodes and of my weekly reflections. Please remember I don’t do crisis interventions or provide clinical services during these conversation hours. I can’t do that; I’m not licensed as a psychologist outside the state of Indiana. I’m not going to get into your personal history and your symptoms and your mental health issues. For crisis situations, call the Catholic Crisis Hotline at the Upper Room at 1-888-808-8724. That line is staffed 24/7, or go to their website at catholichotline.org.

[00:57:25] Every week I get a dozen or more requests if I can do therapy with listeners or with readers of the Weekly Reflections and I’m totally booked. I can’t take on new clients. I take on new clients very, very rarely, and all of those clients live in Indiana, where I am licensed. If you need help finding a therapist, go to soulsandhearts.com, check out our free 90 minute video course titled A Catholic’s Guide to Choosing a Therapist. It’s under the Courses tab at soulsandhearts.com. It has all our tips and recommendations. But if you want to discuss the content of these podcast episodes with me or the content of the Weekly Reflections, feel free to call me on my cell any Tuesday or Thursday, 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM EST. (317) 567-9594, that’s my cell number. Now I won’t be doing conversation hours during Holy Week, but I will start again after Easter. You can also email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com, but do keep the emails short if you’re going to email me. It’s hard to get emails that are, you know, 3-5 pages long. Keep the emails short. You’re much more likely to get a rapid response if you keep the email short. Now I want to thank you for your attention for being with me today on this journey. Please spread the word about our Souls and Hearts resources, including this episode of Interior Integration for Catholics. Please let those who might benefit know about this episode. That’s our best marketing. It’s word of mouth for Souls and Hearts. And finally, and this is the most important thing, please pray for us. Please pray for me and for all of us at Souls and Hearts. Prayer is what fuels our entire enterprise. And know that we are praying for you as well. And with that, we will invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.