Gethsemane - The Place to Give Up Resentment

As we approach Easter, I came accross this challenging article by Father Ron Rolheizer which I would like to share with you.

One of the struggles of Jesus in Gethsemane was that he was asked to give up his life and freedom for something higher and, like all of us, he felt a fierce resistance. None of us easily and naturally gives himself or herself over to the deeper demands of love, duty, and service.

It was only after having prayed was Jesus finally able to say: “Yet not my will, but yours, be done”. When he says this, his gift is pure, and he is able to give himself over without resentment.

Jesus is victimized, but never a victim. When Pontius Pilate tries to intimidate him by telling him: “I can save your life or I can take it”, Jesus responds: “Nobody takes my life from me, I give it up freely!” That translates: “You can’t take from me by force what I have already freely given over out of love!”

If we are sensitive and good-hearted, love will frequently become duty, and an invitation to sacrifice ourselves for someone or something else. Always there will be someone or something making demands on us: children who need us, family obligations, a spouse with an illness, a crisis at our workplace, a church that needs volunteers, and obligations of every kind that come from being sensitive to the demands of God, family, church, country, morality, and the poor.

Anyone who is sensitive and good is burdened by duty. The world is divided up between those who are burdened with duty and are resentful about it and those who are burdened with duty and are not resentful about it.

Jesus prepared himself to meet death by being willing to die without resentment, without making anyone feel guilty about it, and with a heart that was warm rather than cold, forgiving rather than bitter, and large and understanding enough that it didn’t have to demand its due. In the face of bitter duty, he took his life and his love and made them a free gift.

That’s our greatest struggle we have in love. We’re good people mostly but all too often we nurse resentment, even as we do all the right things.  We need, at some point, to say: “Not my will, but yours, be done.” If we say that and mean them, we will taste for the first time ever, real freedom.