THE ORIGINAL
“BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS”
There are moments in our lives when it is difficult to
pray. The pain and the sorrow are so intense that words get caught in our
throats. We feel frustrated in those moments because we know we ought to pray,
to cry out to God – we really want to – but the emotions we carry stifle our
thinking processes. If only falling to our knees and crying were a prayer.
But they
are.
And Paul
taught the Romans that the Spirit helps us in our weakness. When we do not know
what we ought to pray, the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words
cannot express (Ro 8:26).
Would it
help you to know that Jesus felt the way you do? Would it help to know that he
was so overcome with emotion and sorrow that he had trouble finding the words
to pray to his Father in heaven?
Luke
tells us that the disciples were overcome with sorrow and that sorrow was
manifested in drowsiness and sleep. Meanwhile Matthew and Mark record that
Jesus was “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” That is a heavy
sorrow. Have we ever seen Jesus so distraught?
Jesus
faced a raging storm on the Sea of Galilee that threatened to sink their boat
with confidence and composure. He faced demonic forces and satanic temptation
and the grilling of Israel’s religious leaders with amazing courage. But here
in the Garden the disciples saw something they had never seen before in their
master: they saw him writhing in agony on the ground as he prayed. Something
terrible was going to happen. Jesus knew it and the disciples sensed it.
We love
the Jesus who stood with courage and composure to face his opponents. He is our
hero and our champion. But we need this Jesus who, in his greatest trial,
revealed to us that even the perfect man could feel the crush of sorrow and
anxiety. He is our Savior. We need this Jesus who suffered and knew what it was
to wrestle with God in prayer.
1. The situation in which Jesus prayed
We read that Jesus went “as usual to the Mount of Olives”
with his disciples trailing him. This might mean that with the thousands of
pilgrims coming to Jerusalem for the three big feasts of the year, Jesus and
his disciples made their campground typically on the Mount of Olives.
What it
also tells us is that Jesus, knowing that his betrayer had gone to gather his
forces to arrest Jesus, did not change his campsite. He did not run and hide in
the valley of Ben Hinnom among the trash and refuse. He did not high-tail it to
Galilee where friends could hide him. Jesus went “as usual” to the same spot on
the Mount of Olives so that Judas could find him.
Even
though he knew what was coming, Jesus began to feel overwhelmed by the thought
of it. Matthew tells us that he took the eleven disciples and told them to
pray. Going a little further with Peter, James and John, he asked them to pray
with him and be near him. Then he went a little further by himself to pray.
Prayer played a central role in this event and in this text. Prayer was the
only thing that could get them all through this night.
Jesus
prayed for what might have been three hours. But when he periodically checked
on the disciples, they were sleeping. Jesus rebuked them, “Pray that you will
not fall into temptation,” and again, “Get up and pray so that you will not
fall into temptation.”
Have you ever wondered what
temptation Jesus referred to in this command? To sleep? To run away? To flee
the coming horror? To fight the guards coming to arrest him? The temptation is
very specific. It is not a general temptation that we can all apply to our
lives like some platitude pastors invoke. From the context of our Lord’s words
it appears that there is a very present danger the disciples could succumb to
if they don’t pray. Other gospels record that Jesus rebuked Peter for
chastising Jesus about his coming death. This gospel records that just before the
Garden event, the disciples were arguing over who was the greatest. Peter brags
that the others may abandon Jesus but he never would. But the real danger and
temptation for the disciples is that they would resist the sacrificial death of
Christ on the Cross. We see this briefly in Peter’s use of the sword on the
temple servant’s ear. To put it in simple terms, the disciples were going to be
tempted to resist the will of God for Jesus and themselves rather than submit
to it.
We can understand that very well.
When we see pain and grief in our immediate future, we want to avoid it. We may
even deny it. The temptation is very great to explain away what is so clearly
before us. But here in the coming death of Christ is the temptation to fight
the will of God. We do this when we consider ourselves and say, “I am not that
bad. Jesus did not need to die a horrible death for me. Surely our world is not
as corrupt as all that. Look at the good society has done.”
2. Why Jesus prayed
If humankind is that good, why did Jesus pray as he did?
Before we get to that we have to ask another question: Why did Jesus pray?
Last
week, a man who does not know Jesus very well, asked me that very question. I
was explaining the Trinity to him and said that Jesus is God in the flesh. When
Philip asked Jesus to show the disciples the Heavenly Father, Jesus replied, “Don’t you know me?” And Jesus continued
to say that he and the Father were one. So why would Jesus need to pray to God,
the man asked me?
The
Early Church fought heresies that declared Jesus was just a man. Jesus is God,
the church said, and proved from Scripture this was true. But in the fight we
may have forgotten the humanity of Jesus. Jesus was fully God and fully man. As
a man he was baptized with a baptism of repentance, not because he was sinful,
but because he wanted to identify with humankind in our sin. He also prayed
because as a man, Jesus was dependent on God’s power and might.
Don
Macleod said it very well. “Why is this worth reflecting on? Surely for one
thing, the very fact itself, that he prayed – that he prayed – because prayer
is impotence grasping at omnipotence, and here is Christ praying. In him there
is the reality of impotence reaching out towards omnipotence. His praying is
the greatest single indicator of his own dependentness, of his own human sense
that with his limited created resources as a real man he simply couldn’t handle
the situation that was emerging before him.
“I think
we must drive it and ram it home to the depths of our own consciousness that
awareness of being dependent on God to get by is not any sign of sinfulness; it
is a sign of humanness. It’s a reminder to us that if Jesus felt that he
couldn’t bear his load, or climb the mountain, or cross the river, or overcome
the temptation except in the strong crying and tears which he offered to God
then how before God can we hope to go through life day by day and say to God,
‘Father, it’s okay. We can handle it.’? We have to come before God in this
crushing sense of our own sheer weakness, because when Christ is praying he is
saying in the most eloquent fashion possible, ‘There is no way that in my naked
and unaided humanness I can carry this load, nor finish this work, nor bear
this burden, nor emerge from this trial.”
Luke
says that Jesus was in such anguish in his prayers that his sweat was like
drops of blood falling to the ground. When have my prayers been so earnest? I
cannot recall. But there is no way that we can face the day without prayer. We
must recognize our impotence and acknowledge the omnipotence of God through
prayer and say with all honesty “this is too heavy.”
For
Jesus, a tsunami of horror was about to crash down on his head. He was facing a
world of pain that he had never experienced, nor has anyone ever experienced
then or ever again. And so he prayed.
3. What Jesus prayed
So in regards to this horror, what did Jesus pray? If
humankind isn’t that bad why was Jesus a hot bubbling mess on the floor of the
Garden that night? What brought him to the point of near physical death right
then and there?
Jesus
prayed, “Father…” Mark says he cried
“Abba, Father…” the term of endearment. Jesus cried out to his dear Father and
begged him to hear this petition. Jesus was probing the Father’s heart to see
if there was any other way to achieve the salvation of humankind. Was there not
some other way for the sins of men and women to be forgiven?
Christ’s
death was the only way. The thought of death itself must have been agony alone.
Death is the curse of a fallen world. It is an ugly reminder that we are
subject to sin and judgment.
That’s
why Jesus prayed, “Father, if you are
willing, take this cup from me…” Give me a different cup. I don’t want to
drink this cup if I can help it. What’s wrong with this cup?
In OT terminology,
“the cup” is a reference to God’s divine judgment. God put all his wrath
against humankind into a bowl, all his righteous judgment against sin into a
cup. Isaiah spoke of this cup when he wrote, “Awake, awake! Rise up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand
of the LORD the cup of his wrath, you who have drained to its dregs the goblet
that makes men stagger,” (Is 51:17). And Jeremiah also referred to this
horrible cup when he wrote, “Take from my
hand this cup filled with the wine of my wrath and make all the nations to whom
I send you drink it,” (Jer 25:15).
Jesus
looked into the cup and said, “Eww. That is gross.” He looked into the cup and
saw the sin of David, who committed adultery and murder; he saw the sin of Paul
who murdered the saints; he saw the sins of the ages of all the people who went
their own way and disobeyed or ignored God’s good commands for us; he looked
into the cup and he saw your sin and my sin. And Jesus recoiled.
John
Calvin says that Jesus made a very human statement in asking his Father to take
the cup away. His redeeming follow-up was to say, “yet not my will, but yours be done.” It was as if he was saying, “I
know better.” Jesus was just expressing his disgust and then submitting to this
cup.
Here is
something encouraging for us as we think of God’s will. Some might say that if
we only knew God’s will for our lives it would be an easy thing to just do it.
Did Jesus find the will of God easy? It was no easier for Jesus than it was for
Paul and his thorn in the flesh. It is no use saying to Jesus or to anyone
facing a trial, “If it’s God’s will…” because it is still painful.
Jesus
did not find the will of God easy. It was not automatically comforting to know
that this was God’s will. Jesus does not tip the cup back as if it were a
smoothie. He prays and he prays earnestly and in that prayer and only in that
prayer is he able to say, “not my will, but yours be done.”
Thus
Paul could say, “He made him who knew no
sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in
him,” (2 Cor 5:21).
When you struggle on your knees in prayer and find the
words do not come, remember that Jesus struggled for you in his own prayer. Get
on your knees and in your weakness reach out to the power of God. But remember
that Jesus took all the sorrow upon himself so that your mere gesture of
reaching out to God with wordless pain is a prayer in itself. Such is the grace
of God that all we have to do is cry or sit or reach out to him in our hearts.
And
perhaps when you think of Christ’s agony, the words you see will come pouring
out of you like a stream of praise. AMEN
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