Reflecting on God’s plan to save His people by dying in reparation for their sins, also called Salvation History, naturally fills us with immense sorrow for our transgressions and a burning love for God. But did He truly want to suffer and die for us, or did the Lord only do this reluctantly? God gives meaning to our lives by His love and mercy, so if He did not unconditionally want to endure His Passion, He did not unconditionally love us. Perhaps even more importantly, if the Lord had reservations, He seemingly could not be God, for He would not be perfect. How can God, Who has dominion over all, Who is perfect fear anything?
But we know that God is Love, and therefore that He does everything out of willing the good of His creation, of which humans are the epitome. Of course, then, He truly wanted to suffer and die for us, and this answer should be enough. But there are serious objections that suggest that God did not unconditionally want to undergo His Passion, even in Scripture!
In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ supplicated His Father: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Mt 26:39).
Jesus Christ, God incarnate, retains His divinity while taking on humanity, and therefore is all-loving. Therefore, whatever He did, He did with perfect (complete) love. Christ’s love did not have any ulterior motives. Indeed, if Christ did not want to undergo His Passion, then we could not say that He loved perfectly, for Christ, being one with the Father, knows and comprehends all things, for He has created all things. Thus, He would have known that to undergo His Passion and Death was the most perfect, the most loving way to “do the will of Him Who sent” Him (Jn 6:38). Consequently, if Christ did not want to suffer His Passion, He did not want to perfectly fulfill the Father’s will, even if He would not have sinned through this choice. Therefore, Christ cannot be perfect, for He would have wanted something less than what God wanted. But how can God contradict Himself? He cannot, and therefore it is wrong to say that Christ did not want to undergo His Passion.
To understand how this can be, we need to first understand some things about the Person of Christ. The Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, the Son of God, the Word, became man by taking flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The “Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). We refer to Christ as the Word because He personifies the Lord’s revelation to us. Now, if the Word, Jesus Christ, wanted to reveal Divine Revelation to us, it makes sense that He would take flesh, rather than reveal truths only in a spiritual manner, for by revealing truth in a corporeal manner, we need much more faith to believe these truths. A voice speaking from seemingly nothingness is probably going to convince many more people of a teaching than a person who looks like you and me teaching the same thing. If Christ was only pure spirit, He would not be able to suffer and die for us. Instead, He became man so that He could endure what we endure, take on all our sins, and die for our eternal salvation.
Even though Christ took flesh to reveal Divine Truth by word to mankind If He had, He became man principally so that “all who believe in Him may not perish, but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). Before Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, we were all dead in sin. Sin costs a lot, more than we could ever pay. Only the blood of Christ can remit sin. The blood of the passover lambs of the Old Covenant was acceptable to God, but it was imperfect and merely foreshadowed the Blood of the Lamb of God Who was to come. If Christ had not become man, He could have preached everything He did, but He could not have suffered. It was only by taking flesh that Love could fully reveal Itself to the world.
When Christ became man, He did not give up being God. While you and I, being body-soul composites, have one nature in one person, Christ has two natures united in one Person. He was 100% God and 100% man. Christ had a human and a divine nature, united in one Person. This union of these two natures is called the Hypostatic Union. We know that the Hypostatic Union is true in light of the Deposit of Faith.
Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, meaning He is God. But He also is man, for He “became like us in all things but sin” (Eucharistic Prayer IV). He is God, and therefore has always been God, but He became man. The Son was not always Jesus Christ, but became incarnate by becoming Jesus Christ. While “the Word became flesh,” the “whole fullness of deity [dwelt] bodily” in Christ, meaning that Jesus Christ was simultaneously fully God and fully man (Jn 1:14; Col 2:9). St. Paul says that we will “reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:17). Jesus is only one man. Therefore, there must be some way that He is one man, but simultaneously fully God and fully man. Without taking on a human nature, Christ could not have suffered, for only someone with a human nature can experience human realities, including suffering as a rational creature (ST III, 14.1 res.). By similitude, based on our understanding of human nature, we can say that a divine nature is required to exercise divine attributes. Therefore, Christ has a divine and a human nature united in one Person. The natures are perfectly united in Him because God “cannot deny Himself” (2 Tim 2:13).
Because having a will is proper to every nature, Christ has two wills – a human will and a divine will. Because Christ’s two natures never contradict each other, His wills do not either. But Christ sometimes speaks in accordance with one of His natures – something that was proper to one of the natures, but not the other. Often, He speaks in accordance with His human nature alone.
For example, “Jesus wept” (Jn 11:35). He was truly sorrowful, but since Christ is not capable of suffering in His divine nature, He expresses genuine sorrow according to His human nature. However, because His human and His divine natures are united in One Person, we can accurately say that Jesus wept, not that Jesus’ human nature wept – natures do not weep, people do. Jesus’ weeping does not contradict His divine nature,
In other instances, Christ again engages in a human act, but does so primarily for the purpose of teaching us something. Because He is fully man, He truly prays to the Father. His prayer is not merely for show. However, He is God, and so is One with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and does not become more aware of God’s presence when He goes off to a quiet place to pray. However, we need to frequently seek out quiet places, so that we can quiet our hearts and minds, to orient them towards the Lord. Therefore, He gave us an example when He “went out to the mountain to pray” or to “go yonder and pray (Lk 6:12; Mt 26:36). Likewise, Christ shows tremendous humility when He does these things and glorifies the Father because He goes the extra mile to give us an example of how to obey the Father. The same concept applies to the content of the prayers, as in when Jesus thanks the Father for hearing Him regarding Lazarus being raised from the dead (Jn 11:41). He even says in the next verse that He thanked the Father vocally so that “the people standing by…may believe that [the Father] didst send” Him (Jn 11:42). Christ’s existence is thanksgiving to the Father, for He is a perpetual testament to the glory of God. Thus, He does need to vocally thank the Father. He does so for our benefit.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ truly fears and dreads His Passion. He does not pretend. Christ truly suffered on Calvary – otherwise there would be no such thing as redemptive suffering. According to his human nature, then, Christ really did want to avoid His Passion and Death, but He did not want to only avoid the physical torture He was to endure. He wanted to avoid the mental torture as well. But the most painful, indeed the very greatest ever, suffering He was to endure, was His existential suffering (S.T. III, q.46, a.6). He Who was without sin truly took on all sin that had ever been committed and ever would be committed, so that by “dying He [could destroy] our death[, and] by rising restore our life” (CCC 1067). According to Christ’s words on the Cross, the Father did forsake His Son insofar as the Father forsook sin. Thus, Christ, while not sinning, had become as sin, even to the Father, in the manner that final impenitence (blasphemy against the Holy Ghost) renders one abhorrent to God. Therefore, Christ’s suffering was not limited to His human nature, but as St. Thomas says, Christ’s whole self suffered (S.T. III, q.46).
But Christ did not for a split-second, in His Heart of Hearts, want to avoid His Passion. For, “the whole soul can be understood both according to its essence and according to its faculties” (S.T. III, q.46, a.7, 8). Each soul has lower and higher faculties. Christ suffered in His lower faculties, but not in His higher ones, because God cannot suffer in His Divinity. In fact, Christ was the happiest man ever when He endured His Passion, for He was accomplishing the Father’s will to its maximum. No act has ever nor will ever please the Father as much as the Paschal Mystery did. But while Christ was the happiest man ever, He was the most sorrowful man ever because He endured the greatest suffering it is possible to endure in creation. “Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow” (Lam 1:12).
In the Garden of Gethsemane, then, Christ does not want to avoid His Passion. Rather, He loves us so much that He wills to go to the limit of not only human, but divine love, in order to save us. He was stripped of all things, so that Love could show its power.
We can use the same approach, regarding Christ’s words on when the world will end. The Lord says that “that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mk 13:32). How do we interpret this verse? Is Christ not omniscient? If He is not omniscient, then He cannot be God. We could interpret this passage that way. But we could also interpret this as Jesus lying in order to prevent people from questioning Him further. But that would mean that Christ cannot be Truth itself, for He cannot deny Himself, and thus He cannot be God. Or we could interpret this passage in light of other biblical passages where Christ speaks in a similar manner regarding His apparent subordination to the Father: “to sit at my right hand and at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father” (Mt 20:23).
But there are also many biblical passages which testify to the Divinity of Christ: “Amen, Amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM” (Jn 8:58). “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev 22:12-13). So, how do we reconcile these two descriptions of Christ? We do so by understanding that Christ takes on the form of a servant on Earth, and thus humbles Himself: “Though he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself, and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil 2:6-7). Therefore, speaking in His “servant” form, He was not privy to when the world would end. However, in His “God” form, He knows everything, and thus knows when the world will end.
This does not mean that there are two Christs. No, there is only one Christ, Jesus the Lord. Christ has two natures, united in one Person, Himself. Therefore, Christ, by the faculties of his human nature, does not know when the world will end, but Christ, by His divine faculties, knows when the world will end.