The intractable sense of an ending: Gethsemane’s Prayer on the Tragic Stage

If the anguish Jesus faces in the Garden of Gethsemane turns on the opposition between the human will not to die and the divine will that offers itself to death, then the possibility of redemption anticipated in everything assumed by the Incarnation reaches a climax there and then. At stake is nothing less than God’s action in history and its purchase on the human condition. Jesus prays ‘My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass me by’, indicating a gravitational pull away from the will of the Father. Inconceivably, we are left to reckon with the possibility that Jesus in his humanity dissents from divine prerogative.

This chapter reframes the Aristotelian concept of catharsis and argues that the proleptic note buried in the downbeat drama of Gethsemane interrogates the tragedy’s claim on the irredeemable and irreversible, exposes it fatally to the light of hope, and in the process makes space for faith as nothing less than audience participation in the drama of salvation.