"And going away again, He went the second time, and prayed, saying the self-same words: O My Father, if this chalice cannot pass except I drink it, Thy will be done. And He cometh again and findeth them asleep; for their eyes were heavy with sorrow. And He said to them: Why sleep you? Arise, pray, lest you enter into temptation. And they knew not what to answer Him." - Matthew 26:42,43; Mark 14:39,40; Luke 22:45,46
Undoubtedly the first ingredient of Our Lord's cup of sorrow was the sense of the sin of the world, the sense that in some way it was His own, the sense that in Him it was to be expiated. But this was intensified by many others. There was the intensity of His love. The more we care for others, the more we suffer for them and with them: what, then, must have been the measure of the suffering of Our Lord for us? Again, there was the determination that He would not be out-done in generosity; safely, then, we may say that the greatest sufferer in the world does but approach to the suffering of Our Lord. Again, there was the fact of His refined and perfect nature. The more perfect the creature, the more keenly does it feel; what, then, was the suffering of the nature of Our Lord?
In these and countless other ways may we grow in the understanding of the Agony in the Garden, considering only the perfection of His human nature. There is yet another, of which we human beings can only catch a glimpse; it is contained in that word "Abba, Father." For if He could be so broken at the thought of man, because He loved man, because He was Himself Man, because man had done so ill, what must have been His agony, His amazement, on the side of God, when He thought of God His Father, whom man had defied; when He thought of Himself, God the Son, whom man had so ignored, and was soon to do to death; when He felt His love for the Father so insulted well up within Him, and the love of the Father encompass Him all about? We human beings can only guess at the meaning of all this. We trv to express it by the term "the wrath of God," and speak of it as being visited on Our Lord. But we mean almost the opposite; we mean the love of God unrequited, insulted, the love of God devouring Our Lord, so to speak, in its effort to win back the love of man. Whatever language we use must always seem extravagant, for we are dealing with a love, and therefore a suffering, which human words can never express.
Lastly, there was His own part in this drama. It was an increase of agony to Himself that His Sacred Humanity should meet with so much ingratitude, and neglect, and forgetfulness. It was an increase of agony to know that for so many His sufferings were to bear so little fruit; that while He was to be for the resurrection of many, there were also many for whom He was to be the fall. It was an increase of agony to know that in His mystical Body, the Church, the Passion was to be continued; that not only "this night," but through all time, man would be scandalized in Him through her, men would take offence because of her seeming weakness. It was an increase of agony to foresee the treatment He would receive in His Sacramental Life, the insults through all time.
- from The The Crown of Sorrow: Meditations on the Passion of Our Lord, by Archbishop Alban Goodier, SJ. It has the Nihil Obstat of Canon Franciscus M Wyndham, Censor Deputatus, and the Imprimatur of Canon Edmund Surmont, Vicar General, Diocese of Westminster, England, 16 May 1918