In that same hour Jesus said to the chief priests and magistrates of the Temple, and the ancients and the multitude that were come to Him: "Are you come out as it were against a robber with swords and clubs and staves to apprehend me? I sat daily with you teaching in the Temple, and you did not stretch forth your hand against Me. But this is your hour and the power of darkness." Now all this was done that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled. Then His disciples, leaving Him, all fled away. And a certain young man followed Him, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body, and they laid hold on him. But he, casting off the linen cloth, fled from them naked. - Matthew 26:55; Mark 14:48-52; Luke 22:52,53
1. Again we are struck with the combination of strength and weakness manifested by Our Lord. He is able to speak to all this assembly "as one having authority," in the way He had always done before, on the Mount, in the Temple, on their own ground, as it were; and yet here He is unable to do anything for Himself. He can only permit that feature of His soul to appear which He has never refused to show; that special agony, even to weakness, that it feels with every act of ingratitude. Indignity to Him is very hard. He will complain of it again before the Passion is over, before the same night is spent, but He will complain of nothing else. And with what terrible words He concludes: "This is your hour and the power of darkness!" It is as though He knew that man could not of himself be so cruel. For this he must be allied with another power.
2. How the multitude and the leaders received His words we are not told; with conscious shame, no doubt, hidden beneath tumult and bravado, but with utter disregard of their significance. The world is a past master in the art of ignoring words which it does not wish to hear. But the disciples received the words in a stranger way, though one that need not surprise us. To them they were a knell; their hopes of years had been crushed in a moment. "We hoped that this was He that would restore the kingdom to Israel;" and now he says: "This is your hour and the power of darkness." They forget the warning; they are scandalized in Him, as He said; they fly away, every single one of them, apparently even John. And yet Our Lord had prayed for them this very night as "they who have stood with Me in My temptations."
3. One asks oneself the meaning of the episode of the man in white. Many strange details must have happened in the Passion which have not been recorded; why preserve such a detail as this? Saint Mark alone tells the story; some have in consequence surmised that it was he. Others have suggested Saint John. But him we meet again immediately after, and the linen cloth is strange. Let us conjecture; we can do no more. The Passion was above all others a time "for the resurrection and for the fall of many in Israel." Is this one of them? Is this a case of a vocation missed because of the difficulty? Had this man stood his ground, had he in some way shared with Our Lord the agony of the moment, might we not have had yet another name to add to those of Simon of Cyrene, and Veronica, and the holy women, and the penitent thief, and Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus?
Summary
1. The strength and the weakness of Our Lord before the multitude.
2. The desertion of the Apostles; the plausible reasons they would give.
3. The man in the linen cloth; is this another vocation lost?
- from The Crown of Sorrow, by Archbishop Alban Goodier