Lent 5 C, March 28, 2004

Text: Mark 14:32-42

Jesus in Gethsemane: The Battle for Mankind

We began the season of Lent with Jesus in the wilderness. There, in his temptation by the Devil, he said “yes” to the way His Father had chosen for him. There he declined the Devil’s offer of a way that would avoid the cross. But this rejection would exact a heavy payment—a payment so huge that we cannot begin to fathom it.

Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ” gives a realistic picture of Jesus’ physical tortures. Yet, it only scratches the surface of what Jesus actually suffered, the agony of His soul. This ordeal began in earnest as Jesus prayed in Gethsemane. So, as we near the end of Lent, it is appropriate that we have a look at the enormous bill He had to pay for our sins.

To begin to understand what Jesus went through, we need to clarify the meaning of the words employed here: Verse 33 describes Jesus: “He began to be filled with horror and deep distress.” In the original Greek these words paint a picture of the highest possible degree of immense horror and suffering. Jesus also tells his disciples, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death” (v. 34).

Then Jesus “fell face down on the ground” and prayed. Here we do not have a kneeling Jesus—as we see it pictured in so many pious religious paintings—with His face serenely lifted to the sky. No! Jesus is on the ground with his face in the dirt. His body is shaking for fear and sweating drops of blood as He cries to His Father. It is as the writer to the Hebrews describes it: “While Jesus was on earth, He offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the One who could deliver Him out of death” (5:7). The distress of Jesus’ heart is like no other ever faced by mankind. Jesus “prayed that, if it were possible, the awful hour awaiting Him might pass Him by” (35).

Jesus’ hour had come. It is, however, the hour of the Tempter, of Satan. As Judas nears with the soldiers, Jesus says: “The hour has come. I, the Son of Man, am betrayed into the hands of sinners” (41). This hour is the hour of the power of darkness (Luke 22:53). This hour Jesus speaks of is the time for which He came into the world and the point at which His earthly life reached its climax. He is led into this hour by none other than His own Father. In this hour He faces the power of darkness. In this hour hell wins control over Jesus. In this hour Jesus is delivered over to Satan and in it hangs the fate of all mankind.

In this hour, Jesus will be all alone. As He prays, there will be no audible answer from His Father; no “this is by beloved Son whom I love.” There will only be silence.

Into this hour Jesus brings His disciples. He brings them witness the sheer terror He experiences as His Father withdraws Himself. Jesus asks them: “Stay awake and watch with me” (37). Two reasons they must watch: In order to be witnesses of Christ’s hour of anguish and in order to overcome temptation in this hour of darkness. For the fate of mankind will be determined in this hour as Satan unleashes His fury upon the Son of Man. Through staying awake with Jesus and praying they are to accompany Him in His hour of trial. But what happens? They sleep!

Jesus chose the way of the cross three years before when He declined the Tempter’s suggestion to take another way to fulfill His mission. Jesus had made His decision and was finished with the Tempter and His smart ideas. But Satan is not yet finished with Him. In a certain sense, Jesus is now presented with the bill for that which He had turned down back there in the wilderness. Now He has to pay for the consequences of His choice back then. For the weapons of the Devil are not just sly words, as in the wilderness, but also great power, as Jesus encountered it in Gethsemane.

Now Jesus will experience what it means to turn your back on the Prince of this world. Now He will see what the world really looks like which He came to redeem. What Jesus sees in Gethsemane no one has ever seen before nor will anyone ever see again. We human beings simply cannot see it because we have all made our decision against God. The Prince of this world does not have to bring all his might to bear against us because we already listen to his voice and willingly entertain his ideas.

As Jesus faces the Devil He prays. He does not pray, questioning where God is, or whether God exists. No, He prays because He knows that it is His Father who has brought Him to this hour of distress. And even if His Father should hide His face from Him and withdraw His helping hand, yet it is still His Father who does it. In this hour Jesus’ heart does not turn to doubt or despair. We see that in the earnest request He makes to His Father: “Please take this cup of suffering away from me” (36). This cup is the Judgment of God over all mankind. The Satanic attack against Jesus and the wrath of God are one and the same. That is the bitterness of this hour, the immense severity of what God has poured into the cup and which the Son must drink to its bitter dregs.

This is not a trap. God is still the One in control. For that reason Jesus prays as a child addressing His Father. Jesus prays a prayer of faith, knowing that “everything is possible” for His Father. Neither He nor His Father have been cornered into a difficult dilemma. Nor are they under any obligation to follow through with this plan. And so Jesus asks His Father if there is any other way to complete this mission: “give me anything, but this.” This plea is in the form of a request and not an order. Jesus adds: “Yet, not what I will, but what You will.” Three times Jesus prays but He is met with silence.

Does this mean that Jesus did not receive an answer to His prayer? That is unlikely, for after He is finished praying, the terror and anguish that tormented Him is gone. Instead we see in Jesus a clear, decisive and determined will to take hold of the cross because this is the will of His Father. After each prayer He returned to His disciples. It is here that He found God’s answer to His prayer. While Jesus is wrestling with death and the forces of hell, His disciples sleep. Three times He has to tell them to stay alert and pray, but to no avail. Confronted with the powers of darkness Jesus finds His disciples helpless and hopeless. Though they are willing, their flesh is weak. They can offer no resistance to the Devil. He has them in His hands. They are of no help in the work Jesus must do. In the end Jesus must suffer the agony of our sins alone. In a few minutes His trusted disciples will all flee and desert Him.

So what is Jesus going to do? Is He going to repay His disciples in kind? Is He going to accept the fact that all His efforts of teaching them had failed? Is He going to call it quits? No, as Jesus sees the pathetic helplessness of His disciples, He is moved to compassion. In spite of desertion, denial and betrayal, the Scriptures say that He loved His own to the very end (John 13:1). Seeing their complete inability to stand up to Satan, Jesus has the answer to His prayer. He must stand for them. Indeed, only He is able to deal with death and the power of darkness. In the end, it is His love for His disciples that impels Him to continue on His mission.

Let me now draw a couple of connections to us from what transpired at Gethsemane. First, Gethsemane has something to say about our understanding of the world. While our world is the wonderful handiwork of the Creator, there is also an eerie dark side to it. Yes, our world is far more troubling than we expect or can imagine and experience. But God does not choose to show us the horrors of our world directly. We see them only as they are reflected on the face of His Son, lying there on the ground. The horrible truth about our existence, the reality of our utter lost-ness, shows itself here. Instead of letting us experience the horrors of being forsaken by God and left all alone to contend with death and hell, God shows it to us on the face of His Son. He experienced it for us that we might not be the ones who are forsaken.

Secondly, what we see here in the disciples is a picture of the church. As Jesus wrestles in this hour, the church sleeps. The hour that the church is asked to watch and pray is not the hour of Jesus’ passion. It is the hour of His imminent return. It is the hour in which God’s judgment will break upon our world. Are we ready for this? Are we obeying Jesus’ call to watch and pray that we might not fall into temptation? We are warned of terrible consequences that might happen to those who do not exercise themselves in watching and praying.

But to the sleeping church we must add that it is the same Christ who is returning who saw His disciples sleeping in the hour of decision. As then, Jesus continues to battle the forces of darkness that threaten His church and that threaten us today. Let us then not be shaken, but prayerfully watch and pray with our Lord as we joyfully await His return in glory. Amen.

 

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