Passing through Gethsemane...
Good Friday 2007
Texts:
Luke 22:39-46
Luke 23:13-56
It is a story seldom touched by preachers. Why? because it’s hard. Most of the time we read and hear the story of the last supper, of how Judas betrayed Jesus to the powers-that-be, and how the crowds that once cheered him on, called for his death only five days later. Before Jesus his burdened with a cross, before he suffers that physical torment of a most degrading and horrifying death, there is a critical part of the story that we so often miss. Between the Last Supper, and when Jesus is arrested, there is a defining moment of our faith. In this moment, we see Jesus in all of his humanity… grieving… afraid… feeling abandoned and alone… looking for some way… any way to escape his impending fate.
Welcome to Gethsemane.
In many ways, this story is more powerful than the cross itself. Not because it overshadows the suffering and death of Christ, because it certainly doesn’t. It is more powerful because of a simple thing called choice. From the moment in which Jesus is arrested, his ability to choose has now gone. It’s stripped away. From here on in, his death on the cross is inevitable… but the Garden of Gethsemane is different… because it’s the last moment that Jesus has a choice. It is in this moment that we see Jesus in all his humanity.
Following the last supper, Jesus comes to the garden with his disciples. They lie down to sleep… but Jesus can’t. Judas has already gone… and Jesus knows that when Judas returns, he won’t be alone. Ominously he tells his disciples, “pray that you’ll be spared the time of trial…” and goes off to pray.
Yet this isn’t any sort of trite prayer. Jesus is genuinely distraught… in the midst of his prayer, Jesus is wrestling with God, wrestling with himself.
“God, if it is possible, there’s got to be another way! They’re going to crucify me! I’m alone, I’m afraid… I don’t want to die!”
This is not a picture of Jesus that we like to see. We like to see Jesus calm and in control… and yet here, he’s anything but. In Luke’s telling of the story, there’s even this line of an angel appearing to him to give him comfort… and yet in the oldest and most reliable manuscripts we have, those verses are missing… which is why in the copies we have now there are brackets around those verses. It means that somewhere along the way, an early scribe was so uncomfortable with seeing Jesus in such distress, that he penned in his own imagining of an angel giving him comfort.
As we originally know this story, Jesus finds himself all alone. The disciples aren’t any help… back there, snoring away. He reached out to them in his pain, in a moment of vulnerability. Not only were people out there seeking his life, his closest friends aren’t much help either… at least one of them has already betrayed him, and these others will bolt once the soldiers come.
Jesus was afraid.
Whoa… Wait a second! Jesus? Afraid? How could Jesus possibly be afraid if he was God incarnate? We have developed this mental picture that somehow Jesus would be immune to the more fragile side of human nature. We look around at all our stained glass, of a serene, peaceful Jesus. We have a hard time seeing him as being afraid… of being vulnerable. Even our stained glass window that depicts Jesus in the garden is a peaceful one, where he is calmly kneeling with hands together, and his halo untarnished. Yet in the Biblical stories, in Mark, in Matthew, in Luke, Jesus in Gethsemane is much different… lying on the ground, crying that he might somehow escape his fate. It’s not hard to see why we tend to skip this story. We are uncomfortable seeing our Saviour exposed and desperate, crying out for answers while the whole world seems silent.
And yet, the vulnerability of Jesus is why our faith matters.
In all of our creeds, we affirm that Jesus was fully divine… but we also say that he was fully human. Jesus lived life with all the same emotions and feelings that we have. If he didn’t… if he was not fully human, then his death upon the cross is meaningless. Jesus would be nothing more than some sort of robot carrying out some prearranged series of events. We forget that Jesus could and did make choices… and with any choice that we make there is always some kind of struggle. When it comes to facing one’s own death, the choices are much harder, and the struggle even greater.
Gethsemane reminds us that Jesus was free to make the choices that he did. Think about this… Jesus actually had the choice not to be there when Judas returned with the soldiers. While the disciples were sleeping, he could have easily slipped away into the darkness, never to be seen again. He had the choice to stay or leave… This was the last temptation that Jesus faced… and as a part of that, it is a defining moment, if not the defining moment of Holy Week: the last genuine moment of choice.
Let’s be honest. Gethsemane does not portray Jesus in a very favourable light. We don’t see Jesus as a hero of the faith here. He is not someone who refuses to flinch, even when faced with the severest torture… nor is he portrayed as some powerful mystic who can rise above pain, numbing his own sense in a concentrated adoration of God. Instead, he appears as a normal human being, just like you or I, capable of feeling fear and anxiety. Jesus has no trouble expressing his own emotions about this. In Jesus, we see God’s human face… that at a very fundamental level, God truly understands our own fears, our own anxieties… and that resonates with us very deeply.
Maybe it’s a revelation for us… that Jesus is truly free to make the choice that he does. At any time he could have made the choice to escape the cross. Through his prayer, he asks, “If there is another way, let it be… yet if there is no other way, not my will… but yours… I know what must be done...” This doesn’t make it any easier… there’s no “oh well” about this. Jesus does not resign himself to this.
His question is serious. Is there any other way? Is there any other way to save the world than to become its victim? God is all powerful, isn’t there some way to destroy evil and injustice without Jesus having to die? It seems that the answer to this troubled question is “no.” Why? Jesus began to understand what many of us still miss even today… in order to show how powerless the powers-that-be really were Jesus would become a victim. He would become a victim of injustice and oppression, dying the most humiliating and degrading death that the Romans had yet devised. He would be reduced to nothing by their standards… and yet they would not get the final word.
Finally Jesus begins to understand. Through his feverish prayer, he makes the choice. He will stay… he will be here when Judas and the others arrive. He would not run… he would not slip away in the night… he would be here to receive that dreaded kiss from Judas. Jesus truly understood in this moment that injustice, evil and death do not get the final word over who were are. To show this, Jesus realized that he needed to take everything that they could throw at him… including a most degrading and horrifying death… trusting that once it was all over… that at the very moment when the powers-that-be think that they have won… that God has something else to say.
…but we need to wait for three days…
Luke 22:39-46
Luke 23:13-56
It is a story seldom touched by preachers. Why? because it’s hard. Most of the time we read and hear the story of the last supper, of how Judas betrayed Jesus to the powers-that-be, and how the crowds that once cheered him on, called for his death only five days later. Before Jesus his burdened with a cross, before he suffers that physical torment of a most degrading and horrifying death, there is a critical part of the story that we so often miss. Between the Last Supper, and when Jesus is arrested, there is a defining moment of our faith. In this moment, we see Jesus in all of his humanity… grieving… afraid… feeling abandoned and alone… looking for some way… any way to escape his impending fate.
Welcome to Gethsemane.
In many ways, this story is more powerful than the cross itself. Not because it overshadows the suffering and death of Christ, because it certainly doesn’t. It is more powerful because of a simple thing called choice. From the moment in which Jesus is arrested, his ability to choose has now gone. It’s stripped away. From here on in, his death on the cross is inevitable… but the Garden of Gethsemane is different… because it’s the last moment that Jesus has a choice. It is in this moment that we see Jesus in all his humanity.
Following the last supper, Jesus comes to the garden with his disciples. They lie down to sleep… but Jesus can’t. Judas has already gone… and Jesus knows that when Judas returns, he won’t be alone. Ominously he tells his disciples, “pray that you’ll be spared the time of trial…” and goes off to pray.
Yet this isn’t any sort of trite prayer. Jesus is genuinely distraught… in the midst of his prayer, Jesus is wrestling with God, wrestling with himself.
“God, if it is possible, there’s got to be another way! They’re going to crucify me! I’m alone, I’m afraid… I don’t want to die!”
This is not a picture of Jesus that we like to see. We like to see Jesus calm and in control… and yet here, he’s anything but. In Luke’s telling of the story, there’s even this line of an angel appearing to him to give him comfort… and yet in the oldest and most reliable manuscripts we have, those verses are missing… which is why in the copies we have now there are brackets around those verses. It means that somewhere along the way, an early scribe was so uncomfortable with seeing Jesus in such distress, that he penned in his own imagining of an angel giving him comfort.
As we originally know this story, Jesus finds himself all alone. The disciples aren’t any help… back there, snoring away. He reached out to them in his pain, in a moment of vulnerability. Not only were people out there seeking his life, his closest friends aren’t much help either… at least one of them has already betrayed him, and these others will bolt once the soldiers come.
Jesus was afraid.
Whoa… Wait a second! Jesus? Afraid? How could Jesus possibly be afraid if he was God incarnate? We have developed this mental picture that somehow Jesus would be immune to the more fragile side of human nature. We look around at all our stained glass, of a serene, peaceful Jesus. We have a hard time seeing him as being afraid… of being vulnerable. Even our stained glass window that depicts Jesus in the garden is a peaceful one, where he is calmly kneeling with hands together, and his halo untarnished. Yet in the Biblical stories, in Mark, in Matthew, in Luke, Jesus in Gethsemane is much different… lying on the ground, crying that he might somehow escape his fate. It’s not hard to see why we tend to skip this story. We are uncomfortable seeing our Saviour exposed and desperate, crying out for answers while the whole world seems silent.
And yet, the vulnerability of Jesus is why our faith matters.
In all of our creeds, we affirm that Jesus was fully divine… but we also say that he was fully human. Jesus lived life with all the same emotions and feelings that we have. If he didn’t… if he was not fully human, then his death upon the cross is meaningless. Jesus would be nothing more than some sort of robot carrying out some prearranged series of events. We forget that Jesus could and did make choices… and with any choice that we make there is always some kind of struggle. When it comes to facing one’s own death, the choices are much harder, and the struggle even greater.
Gethsemane reminds us that Jesus was free to make the choices that he did. Think about this… Jesus actually had the choice not to be there when Judas returned with the soldiers. While the disciples were sleeping, he could have easily slipped away into the darkness, never to be seen again. He had the choice to stay or leave… This was the last temptation that Jesus faced… and as a part of that, it is a defining moment, if not the defining moment of Holy Week: the last genuine moment of choice.
Let’s be honest. Gethsemane does not portray Jesus in a very favourable light. We don’t see Jesus as a hero of the faith here. He is not someone who refuses to flinch, even when faced with the severest torture… nor is he portrayed as some powerful mystic who can rise above pain, numbing his own sense in a concentrated adoration of God. Instead, he appears as a normal human being, just like you or I, capable of feeling fear and anxiety. Jesus has no trouble expressing his own emotions about this. In Jesus, we see God’s human face… that at a very fundamental level, God truly understands our own fears, our own anxieties… and that resonates with us very deeply.
Maybe it’s a revelation for us… that Jesus is truly free to make the choice that he does. At any time he could have made the choice to escape the cross. Through his prayer, he asks, “If there is another way, let it be… yet if there is no other way, not my will… but yours… I know what must be done...” This doesn’t make it any easier… there’s no “oh well” about this. Jesus does not resign himself to this.
His question is serious. Is there any other way? Is there any other way to save the world than to become its victim? God is all powerful, isn’t there some way to destroy evil and injustice without Jesus having to die? It seems that the answer to this troubled question is “no.” Why? Jesus began to understand what many of us still miss even today… in order to show how powerless the powers-that-be really were Jesus would become a victim. He would become a victim of injustice and oppression, dying the most humiliating and degrading death that the Romans had yet devised. He would be reduced to nothing by their standards… and yet they would not get the final word.
Finally Jesus begins to understand. Through his feverish prayer, he makes the choice. He will stay… he will be here when Judas and the others arrive. He would not run… he would not slip away in the night… he would be here to receive that dreaded kiss from Judas. Jesus truly understood in this moment that injustice, evil and death do not get the final word over who were are. To show this, Jesus realized that he needed to take everything that they could throw at him… including a most degrading and horrifying death… trusting that once it was all over… that at the very moment when the powers-that-be think that they have won… that God has something else to say.
…but we need to wait for three days…
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