Reflection for Holy Week

"We have to admit that the author of the Letter is clearly not referring exclusively to the night in Gethsemane, but has in mind the whole of Jesus' via dolorosa right up to the crucifixion... John speaks of Jesus' tears at the death of Lazarus, and this in the context of his being 'troubled' in spirit--for which, as we have seen, John uses the word that was to reappear in the 'Palm Sunday' passage corresponding to the Mount of Olives tradition.

"Each time, it is a question of Jesus' encounter with the powers of death, whose ultimate depths he as the Holy One of God can sense in their full horror. The Letter to the Hebrews views the whole of Jesus' Passion--from the Mount of Olives to the last cry from the Cross--as thoroughly permeated by prayer, one long impassioned plea to God for life in the face of the power of death.

"If the Letter to the Hebrews treats the entire Passion as a prayer in which Jesus wrestles with God the Father and at the same time with human nature, it also sheds new light on the theological depth of the Mount of Olives prayer. For these cries and pleas are seen as Jesus' way of exercising his high priesthood. It is through his cries, his tears, and his prayers that Jesus does what the high priestis meant to do: he holds up to God the anguish of human existence. He brings man before God."

--Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth--Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (Ignatius Press, 2011), pp. 163-164