Jesus (50 page)

But the church wasn't as much of a draw for me (or the other pilgrims) as something else: the
Hortus Gethsemani
, as the sign on the gate read, the Garden of Gethsemane.

Perhaps from seeing too many movies I expected the Garden to be an expansive place, a veritable forest filled with trees and flowers, where one could wander freely. But today it is compact, with just a dozen or so olive trees. They are, however, impressively old. Perhaps not two thousand years old, but old. Bearing small, thin, greenish-gray leaves, the gnarled olive trees stood silently as the tourists peered over the fence that separated us from the ancient garden.

Before visiting the Holy Land, I never could have imagined how close the Garden was to Jerusalem, only a short walk away. As he rested in Gethsemane, Jesus must have stared at the holy city and the nearby graves for a long time, reflecting on his future. What would he do? Just a few minutes' walk in the other direction would bring him into the open desert, an easy escape from his enemies.

Why didn't he take that route? More to the point, how was he able to decide on his path?

T
HE ONLY
G
OSPEL THAT
does not include Jesus praying in Gethsemane is John, who again chooses to emphasize Jesus's command over events as a manifestation of his divinity. Perhaps any mention of his doubt or anguish would have seemed discordant. In John's account Jesus and the disciples go to “a place where there was a garden,” a spot Judas knew, as Jesus had brought his friends there frequently. But no praying occurs, only the betrayal.

Not so for the Synoptics. Let's turn to Mark, which is almost identical to Matthew, and also includes a bit more explanation than Luke.

Mark moves directly into Jesus's prayer in the Garden: “They went to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I pray.'” Matthew begins differently, saying, “Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane.” As Harrington notes, by naming Jesus first Matthew highlights that Jesus is directing the events of the Passion. But both point to an almost instantaneous change in his emotions. Jesus takes with him three people from his innermost circle—Peter, James, and John, three of the earliest disciples—and he “began to be distressed (
ekthambeisthai
) and agitated (
adēmonein
).”

Those two words indicate extreme emotions, and translations vary from “sore amazed . . . and very afraid” to “grieved and agitated.” Raymond Brown, in his book
The Death of the Messiah
, perhaps the most comprehensive study of the Passion narratives, expounds on those two powerful words:

Only when Jesus is alone with three close friends do his emotions surface. Often when we are straining to withhold our emotions, it is not until we are with those closest to us that we can “let go.” At the wake before my father's funeral, I remained relatively unemotional, until one of my closest friends entered the room, smiled, and hugged me. A surge of sadness overtook me, and I wept. Somehow the presence of my friend enabled me to be myself and to honestly express how I felt. Here Jesus, shielded from the larger group of disciples, is able to share himself. His emotions well up as soon as he is alone with his friends. They must have been very close to him, and he to them.

Episodes such as this and the story of Jesus's weeping at Lazarus's tomb reveal that Jesus is not a cool, distant sage, but a flesh-and-blood human being. The time in the Garden gives us an extraordinary window into his heart.

Then he confides in his three friends: “My soul is sorrowful unto death (
Perilupos estin hē psychē mou heōs thanatou
).”
⁷
Jesus may be echoing the words of Psalm 42: “My soul is cast down within me.” Or perhaps he is thinking of a passage from Sirach that expresses the feelings of a person betrayed: “Is it not a sorrow like that for death itself when a dear friend turns into an enemy?”
⁸
Brown suggests that if Jesus had intuited his friends' coming betrayal and their scattering after his death, it must have weighed on him terribly. Thus not only his arrest, but their coming betrayal may have caused him intense sorrow. The very thought of this, writes Brown, may have felt as if it were enough to kill him.
⁹
Overall, the meaning seems to be: My sadness is so intense that it feels as if it may kill me.

The disciples were probably terrified to hear his words, and they may have found themselves “deeply grieved” as well. Imagine what it must have been like for them to see Jesus visibly upset. The calm teacher upon whom they depended to help them in every situation—a terrifying demoniac, a frightening storm at sea, an immense crowd asking for food, two sisters grieving over their brother's death—now admits to being “greatly distressed.” Seeing the one in control lose control is always destabilizing.

At this point, perhaps knowing that the disciples would be too distraught to think clearly (Jesus had seen their responses in times of peril before) or simply craving their company in his difficult time, he asks them to stay with him, and to stay awake.

Then something perhaps more striking is described. Matthew and Mark say Jesus “threw himself on the ground and prayed.” Some scholars describe this as the normal way to begin prayer: prostrating oneself in reverence before God was attested to in the Old Testament. But others see a kind of collapse as a result of the intense stress Jesus was experiencing. Michael Casey, a Cistercian monk and spiritual writer, calls it “an astonishingly graphic moment.”
¹⁰
It would not be surprising if Jesus, crushed by grief, collapsed in the Garden, overwhelmed with emotion. Luke uses the vivid word
agōnia
, which occurs nowhere else in the New Testament.
¹¹

Now Jesus begins to pray. It's important to remember that the Gospels depict Jesus as praying frequently—both privately, when he withdraws from the disciples, and publicly, as when he teaches his disciples how to pray and when he prays outside the tomb of Lazarus. He does not turn to God simply in times of distress. Luke's Gospel, sometimes called the Gospel of Prayer, shows Jesus praying at the most important moments of his public ministry—in the desert of course, but also after his first miraculous healings, before choosing the twelve apostles, before Peter's confession of Jesus as the Messiah, and now after the Last Supper. As Harrington notes, “If you want to know what Luke regarded as the most important moments in Jesus's life, look at his mentions of Jesus at prayer.”
¹²

In this grave hour, he utters a simple prayer: “
Abba
, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

In the Garden Jesus shows both his utter humanity and his complete divinity. He begins his prayer with an affectionate address of God as
Abba
, a word often used by a child for his or her father. One day while I was walking through Jerusalem, outside the Damascus Gate, a young girl ran across my path in pursuit of her father. “Abba! Abba!” she called out in her young voice. It was both startling and moving to hear the exact expression Jesus used.

Thus Jesus's prayer begins on a note of intimacy. Remember that when we are presented with an Aramaic word preserved in the Greek text it is almost certain to have come from the lips of Jesus. (That is, Mark does not use the Greek
patēr
, but the original Aramaic.) The word
Abba
was Jesus's highly personal way of speaking to the Father.

And as Michael Casey notes, even in this awful moment, when we could forgive him for being distracted or confused or angry, Jesus grounds his relationship with the Father. It is the starting point for all that Jesus does, even now. “By these words Jesus reaffirms the relationship of intimacy that exists between him and God.” Such intimacy enables him not to ignore the impending danger but, as Casey says in a beautiful image, “fix his gaze on the One on whom his selfhood depends.”
¹³

But Jesus is human, and so he prays that what now seems inevitable will not come to pass. “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me,” he says bluntly. In the Old Testament the “cup” was sometimes used by the prophets to refer to suffering.
¹⁴
Jesus's very human words here invite us to consider (at least) three important things.

First,
Jesus was not courting death
. In the previous sentence, Mark tells us that after falling on the ground, Jesus prays that “if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.” Both of his statements—“if it were possible” and “remove this cup”—are not so much expressions of doubt, as a hope that God's mind be changed somehow. Jesus does not wish death for its own sake; much less does he seek out physical suffering for its own sake. His question is artfully summed up by Raymond Brown: “Could not the Father bring about the kingdom in some other way that did not involve the horrendous suffering of the Son delivered into the hands of sinners?”
¹⁵

Or, more simply, “Do you really want this, God?” How many of us have asked the same, when confronted with a terrible inevitability. “Please, God, not this.”

Second,
not only is he not courting death, it seems that Jesus at this point also does not want to die.
In Luke, he asks for the cup to be “removed.” (The Greek
parenenke
is “to cause to pass, divert, take away.”
¹⁶
) At roughly thirty-three years old, after gathering together so many followers, after seeing the results of his ministry—people healed, reconciled, even raised from the dead—perhaps Jesus still holds out hope for a few more years of ministry. Yes, he could foresee that last week's events would trigger a Roman reaction and earn him the enmity of some Jewish leaders, but now, in Gethsemane, he does not want to die. This makes his ultimate acceptance of death even more meaningful.

Third,
Jesus's blunt prayer shows that God desires our honesty.
In any intimate relationship, if a person says only what he or she thinks he or she should say, the relationship will grow cold, distant, or false. In the Garden, Jesus follows the tradition of many of the psalms: he laments. He says what he desires: he does not want to suffer, if that is at all possible. And he expresses, in a sense, his confusion. Barclay says bluntly, “He did not fully understand why this had to be.”
¹⁷
An intimate relationship with the Father means transparency at all times, especially in times of distress.

But that is not the end of his prayer. Jesus does not simply ask for the removal of suffering or for God to change God's mind. He says something more important than what has gone before: “Yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

One cannot separate Jesus's actions into human and divine; the two “natures” of Jesus are always united. But this passage may offer us a privileged glimpse of both natures. “Remove this cup” is an utterly human request. “Yet, not my will, but yours be done” is an indication of Jesus's complete union with the Father. Anything one can say about Jesus's humanity and divinity will fail to explain this great mystery. But here, even in the midst of unimaginable psychological torment, which almost drives Jesus to the ground, one might say he expresses human emotions while being fully united with the Father's will. The human person is united with the divine will, and the divine one expresses human emotions.

In his hour of decision Jesus turns to the Father. It would have been easy for him to rise, dust himself off, and walk away. None of his disciples would have condemned him for saying, “I don't want this cup,” or for escaping into the nearby Judean wilderness with the explanation, “Let's leave and fight another day.”

Given Peter's remonstration when Jesus predicted his suffering, if Jesus had chosen to flee, they would have probably
praised
him for his canny assessment and followed him. After all, Jesus had done the same before. In Nazareth, when an angry crowd was about to hurl him off a cliff after he declared that the messianic benefits would not come to people in his hometown, he passes “through the midst of them.” This is not the only time he escapes when threatened. In the Gospel of John after Jesus declares, “Before Abraham was, I am” (in other words, “I am God”), the crowd makes ready to stone him. “But Jesus hid himself,” says John, “and went out of the temple.”
¹⁸

Why doesn't he hide himself now? Why doesn't he pass through their midst? Why doesn't he do what the disciples must have wanted? Because at this moment, he was able to see that, as far as he could tell, this was what the Father had in mind. This was the future that God had in store, and it was to this that he now surrendered. Once he was able to discern this, he decisively chose to remain on that path. Lohfink writes, perceptively: “The ‘will of God' is not that Jesus should be killed in Jerusalem, but that Israel everywhere, including in the capital city, should be confronted with the Gospel of the reign of God.”
¹⁹
And if this means death, Jesus accepts it.

That answers only the question of how he was able to discern the Father's will. How was he able to
carry out
that decision? That's the more difficult question. Sometimes we see the right thing to do, the generous thing, the charitable thing, but feel unable to do it, unequal to the task, unwilling to pay the price. We feel that we cannot make the sacrifice and say yes to what God seems to be asking.

For Jesus, however, it was more than a matter of sacrifice. And it was more than a matter of obedience to the Father's will. It was a matter of trust. Jesus had an intimate relationship with
Abba
, and so he trusted him. He trusted that, if he did what the Father was asking, no matter how mysterious, confusing, or terrifying, he would not go wrong. So with his Father's help, he was able to do it.
²⁰