Jesus enters the garden with three prominent disciples of his, Peter, James, and John. Jesus goes off to be in prayer and we learn from the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the following:
Jesus pleads three times for the Father to let this cup pass if it be His will. Yet the Father permits this Cup of Pain to remain. While in the garden, Jesus experienced such pain that tears of blood ran down His face. He then endured the greatest pains of human existence: the pain of the Cross: betrayal, rejection, humiliation, torture, and finally execution.
Bizarre yet brilliant how God's plan unfolds in the Passion of our Lord, Jesus Christ. The Father permits pain to remain, even for His beloved Son, so that we may understand the depths of His sacrificial and redemptive love for us. God suffers like we suffer, separated from Himself just as we are separated from Him. Only because God is Trinity can this be possible. Only through God witnessing to us the reality of the worse pain, separation from Him, can we acknowledge the source of all pain.
Pain is never the root cause but always a symptom--an outward sign of something within. Scripture teaches us that the root cause of pain is sin, and its ultimate root cause is evil. Just as God permits pain, He permits sin and evil, not because He desires evil upon us, but because He desires us to turn away from sin and return back to Him. So the pain we experience in this earthly life reminds us that there is something wrong with us: We are not with God as He created us to be. We do not love as we ought. God created us for Love and the path to return to Love is that Way of the Cross, which always includes this Cup of Pain. We must acknowledge this Cup of Pain, accept it so as to accept the reality that we are not fully with God.
The Church teaches that there is such a thing called material evil (CCC 309-311). The existence of material evil explains the mortality of our bodies and by extension our physical, emotional, and mental brokenness. Sadly we continue to deny the fragility of our existence. Modern science profits on the continuous denial of our fragility, brokenness, and mortality. In doing so, we now seek to self-identify as anything but mortal, fragile, or broken.
We seek not redemption but renewal. We seek this modernist, renewed identity that continues to seek not the Will of the Father but our own will. And this is contrary to who we are.
We are not made for ourselves, but for God. We are in a "state of journeying" (CCC 310). God permits the Cup of Pain to remain until we are fully with God in eternity.
