The Sadness of Christ
See now, when Christ comes back to his apostles for the third time, there they are, buried in sleep, though he commanded them to bear up with Him and to stay awake and pray because of the impending danger; but Judas the traitor at the same time was so wide awake and intent on betraying the Lord that the very idea of sleep never entered his mind.
Does not this contrast between the traitor and the apostles present to us a clear and sharp mirror image (as it were), a sad and terrible view of what has happened through the ages from those times even to our own? Why do not bishops contemplate in this scene their own somnolence? Since they have succeeded in the place of the apostles, would that they would reproduce their virtues just as eagerly as they embrace their authority and as faithfully as they display their sloth and sleepiness!
For very many are sleepy and apathetic in sowing virtues among the people and maintaining the truth, while the enemies of Christ in order to sow vices and uproot the faith (that is, insofar as they can, to seize Christ and cruelly crucify Him once again) are wide-awake – so much wiser (as Christ says) are the sons of darkness in their generation than the sons of light. (Lk 16:8)
But although this comparison of the sleeping apostles applies very well to those bishops who sleep while virtue and the faith are placed in jeopardy, still it does not apply to all such prelates at all points. For some of them – alas, far more than I could wish -do not drift into sleep through sadness and grief as the apostles did.
Rather they are numbed and buried in destructive desires; that is, drunk with the new wine of the devil (Aa 2:13), the flesh, and the world, (1Jn2:15-16), they sleep like pgis sprawling in the mire. Certainly, the apostles’ feeling of sadness because of the danger to their master was praiseworthy, but for them to be so overcome by sadness as to yield completely to sleep, that was certainly wrong……
For if this is not the case, if sorrow so grips the mind that its strength is sapped and reason gives up the reins; if a bishop is so overcome by heavy-hearted sleep that he neglects to do what the duty of his office requires for the salvation of is flock – like a cowardly ship’s captain who is so disheartened by the furious din of a storm that he deserts the helm, hides away cowering in some cranny, and abandons the ship to the waves – if a bishop does this, I would certainly not hesitate to juxtapose and compare his sadness with the sadness that leads, as St Paul says, to hell; indeed, I would consider it far worse, since such sadness in religious matters seems to spring from a mind which despairs of God’s help.
(translated from the Latin)