In the Agony in the Garden, Christ submitted His human will to His Divine will according to both the Pope Emeritus and the origin of the insight, Maximus the Confessor, one of my favorites.
Maximus understood that Christ's natural will submitted to His filial will, His Will as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.
Amazing insight that the human will is ordered to the Divine Will.
Adam and Eve were given that order as well, being made in the image and likeness of God, but, as St Bernard writes, keeping the image but losing the likeness, sanctifying grace.
Their human wills were ordered to submit to God's Will. And, they both turned against this created order. They willed disorder. I repeat, they willed disorder.
Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, I can extrapolate, shows us that we can re-order our wills through His Sacrifice, His Passion, His Redemptive Act.
In other words, what Christ did in the Garden of Gethsemane undid the curse of Adam and Eve, the curse of the disordered will.
Therefore, we, too, with Christ's help and grace, can submit our human wills to God's Will.
"Thy Will be done, " in all things.
The loss of Eden becomes the gain in Gethsemane.
Gethsemane returns the lost grace to the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve with the "Fiat" of Christ.
Luke 22:42Douay-Rheims
42 Saying: Father, if thou wilt, remove this chalice from me: but yet not my will, but thine be done.
Christ shows us the way back to Eden, to heaven, to perfection by stating "thine be done."
But, for us, in sin and the tendencies to sin, the way back is through the darkness of facing our predominant faults, our habitual venial sins. all which must be cast into the fire of purgation, with Christ standing by us, leading us through the pain to victory of self and sin.
I remind you of the postings on the rectitude of the will.
To be continued....
