The agony in the Garden of Gethsemane
The agony in the Garden of Gethsemane
Supper is now over, and Jesus has finished his instruction of the apostles. He has urged them to abide in him, as the branches abide in the vine. He has warned them of the opposition of the world, yet encouraged them to bear witness to him none the less, remembering that the Spirit of truth will be the chief witness. He has also prayed – first for himself that he may glorify his Father in the coming ordeal, then for them that they may be kept in truth, holiness, mission and unity, and lastly for all those of subsequent generations who would believe in him through their message. Probably now they sing a hymn, and then together they leave the upper room. They walk through the streets of the city in the stillness of the night, and in the soft light of the Paschal moon, cross the Kidron Valley, begin to climb the Mount of Olives, and turn off into an olive orchard, as its name ‘Gethsemane’ (‘oil press’) suggests. It is evidently a favourite retreat for Jesus, for John comments that he ‘had often met there with his disciples’ (18:2). Here something takes place which, despite the sober way the evangelists describe it, simply cries out for an explanation, and begins to disclose the enormous costliness of the cross to Jesus. We rightly call it ‘the agony in the garden’.
Leaving most of the apostles behind, and urging them to watch and pray, he takes Peter, James and John – the intimate three – a stone’s throw farther into the olive grove with him, shares with them that he feels ‘overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death’, and asks them to keep watch with him. He then goes on a little farther alone, falls prostrate with his face to the ground and prays: ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.’ Returning to the apostles, he finds them sleeping and remonstrates with them. Going away a second time, he prays: ‘My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.’ Again he finds the disciples sleeping. So he leaves them once more and prays the third time, saying the same thing. After this third season of prayer he returns to find them asleep again, for they cannot enter into the fathomless mystery of his suffering. This is a path he has to walk alone. At some point, Luke says, he was ‘in anguish’ (or ‘agony’), and prayed yet more earnestly, so that ‘his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground’.14
As we approach this sacred scene, we should first consider the forceful words which Jesus and the evangelists used to express his strong emotions. We have been prepared for these a little by two of his earlier statements. The first, which Luke records, was that he had ‘a baptism to undergo’ and felt ‘distressed’ (or ‘pressed’, even ‘tormented’, synechō) until it was completed. The second was a saying which John records that his heart was ‘troubled’ (or ‘agitated’, tarassō), so that he even wondered if he should ask his Father to save him from ‘this hour’. It was an anticipation of Gethsemane.15
B. B. Warfield wrote a careful study entitled ‘On the Emotional Life of Our Lord’, in the course of which he referred to the terms employed by the Synoptic evangelists in relation to Gethsemane. Luke’s word agōnia he defines as ‘consternation, appalled reluctance’. Matthew and Mark share two expressions. The primary idea of ‘troubled’ (adēmoneō), he suggests, is ‘loathing aversion, perhaps not unmixed with despondency’, while Jesus’ self-description as ‘overwhelmed with sorrow’ (perilypos) ‘expresses a sorrow, or perhaps we would better say, a mental pain, a distress, which hems him in on every side, from which there is therefore no escape’. Mark uses another word of his own, ‘deeply distressed’ (ektham-beomai), which has been rendered ‘horror-struck’; it is ‘a term’, Warfield adds, ‘which more narrowly defines the distress as consternation – if not exactly dread, yet alarmed dismay’.16 Put together, these expressive words indicate that Jesus was feeling an acute emotional pain, causing profuse sweat, as he looked with apprehension and almost terror at his future ordeal.
This ordeal he refers to as a bitter ‘cup’ which he ardently prays may, if possible, be taken from him, so that he does not have to drink it. What is this cup? Is it physical suffering from which he shrinks, the torture of the scourge and the cross, together perhaps with the mental anguish of betrayal, denial and desertion by his friends, and the mockery and abuse of his enemies? Nothing could ever make me believe that the cup Jesus dreaded was any of these things (grievous as they were) or all of them together. His physical and moral courage throughout his public ministry had been indomitable. To me it is ludicrous to suppose that he was now afraid of pain, insult and death. Socrates in the prison cell in Athens, according to Plato’s account, took his cup of hemlock ‘without trembling or changing colour or expression’. He then ‘raised the cup to his lips, and very cheerfully and quietly drained it’. When his friends burst into tears, he rebuked them for their ‘absurd’ behaviour and urged them to ‘keep quiet and be brave’.17 He died without fear, sorrow or protest. So was Socrates braver than Jesus? Or were their cups filled with different poisons?
Then there have been the Christian martyrs. Jesus had himself told his followers that when insulted, persecuted and slandered, they were to ‘rejoice and be glad’. Did Jesus not practise what he preached? His apostles did. Leaving the Sanhedrin with backs bleeding from a merciless flogging, they were actually ‘rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name’. Pain and rejection were to them a joy and a privilege, not an ordeal to be shrunk from in dismay.18
In the post-apostolic period there was even a longing to be united with Christ in martyrdom. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch in Syria at the beginning of the second century, on his way to Rome, begged the church there not to attempt to secure his release lest they should deprive him of this honour! ‘Let fire and the cross,’ he wrote, ‘let the companies of wild beasts, let breaking of bones and tearing of limbs, let the grinding of the whole body, and all the malice of the devil, come upon me; be it so, if only I may gain Christ Jesus!’19 A few years later, in the middle of the second century, Polycarp the eighty-six-year-old Bishop of Smyrna, having refused to escape death either by fleeing or by denying Christ, was burnt at the stake. Just before the fire was lit, he prayed, ‘O Father, I bless thee that thou hast counted me worthy to receive my portion among the number of martyrs.’20 As for Alban, the first known British Christian martyr during one of the severe persecutions of the third century, he was first ‘cruelly beaten, yet suffered he the same patiently, nay rather joyfully, for the Lord’s sake’, and was then beheaded.21 And so it has continued in every generation. ‘O the joy that the martyrs of Christ have felt’, cried Richard Baxter, ‘in the midst of the scorching flames!’ Although made of flesh and blood like us, he continued, their souls could rejoice even ‘while their bodies were burning’.22
Of many examples which could be given from the twentieth century I choose only those mentioned by Sadhu Sundar Singh, the Indian Christian mystic and evangelist. He told, for instance, of a Tibetan evangelist, flogged by tormentors who then rubbed salt into his wounds, whose ‘face shone with peace and joy’, and of another who, sewn into a damp yak skin and left in the sun for three days, ‘was joyful all the time’ and thanked God for the privilege of suffering for him. It is true that the Sadhu sometimes embellished or romanticized his stories, yet there seems no reason to doubt his testimony, from his own experience and others’, that even in the midst of torture God gives his people a supernatural joy and peace.23
We turn back to that lonely figure in the Gethsemane olive orchard – prostrate, sweating, overwhelmed with grief and dread, begging if possible to be spared the drinking of the cup. The martyrs were joyful, but he was sorrowful; they were eager, but he was reluctant. How can we compare them? How could they have gained their inspiration from him if he had faltered when they did not? Besides, up till now he had been clear-sighted about the necessity of his sufferings and death, determined to fulfil his destiny, and vehement in opposing any who sought to deflect him. Had all that suddenly changed? Was he now after all, when the moment of testing came, a coward? No, no! All the evidence of his former teaching, character and behaviour is against such a conclusion.
In that case the cup from which he shrank was something different. It symbolized neither the physical pain of being flogged and crucified, nor the mental distress of being despised and rejected even by his own people, but rather the spiritual agony of bearing the sins of the world, in other words, of enduring the divine judgment which those sins deserved. That this is the correct understanding is strongly confirmed by Old Testament usage, for in both the Wisdom literature and the prophets the Lord’s ‘cup’ was a regular symbol of his wrath. A wicked person was said to ‘drink of the wrath of the Almighty’ (Job 21:20). Through Ezekiel, Yahweh warned Jerusalem that she would shortly suffer the same fate as Samaria, which had been destroyed:
‘You will drink your sister’s cup,
a cup large and deep;
it will bring scorn and derision,
for it holds so much.
You will be filled with drunkenness and sorrow,
the cup of ruin and desolation,
the cup of your sister Samaria.
You will drink it and drain it dry;...’
(Ezek. 23:32–34)
Not long afterwards this prophecy of judgment came true, and then the prophets began to encourage the people with promises of restoration. Describing Jerusalem as ‘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’, Isaiah summoned her to wake up and to get up, for Yahweh had now taken the cup out of her hand and she would never have to drink it again. Nor was the cup of the Lord’s wrath given only to his disobedient people. Psalm 75 is a meditation on the universal judgment of God: ‘In the hand of the Lord is a cup full of foaming wine mixed with spices; he pours it out, and all the wicked of the earth drink it down to its very dregs.’ Similarly, Jeremiah was told to take from God’s hand a cup filled with the wine of his wrath and to make all the nations drink it to whom he was sent. The same figure of speech recurs in the book of Revelation, where the wicked ‘will drink of the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath’, and the final judgment is depicted as the pouring out of ‘the seven bowls of God’s wrath on the earth’.24
This Old Testament imagery will have been well known to Jesus. He must have recognized the cup he was being offered as containing the wine of God’s wrath, given to the wicked, and causing a complete disorientation of body (staggering) and mind (confusion) like drunkenness. Was he to become so identified with sinners as to bear their judgment? From this contact with human sin his sinless soul recoiled. From the experience of alienation from his Father which the judgment on sin would involve, he hung back in horror. Not that for even a single instant he rebelled. His vision had evidently become blurred, as a dreadful darkness engulfed his spirit, but his will remained surrendered. Each prayer began ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me’, and each prayer ended ‘yet not as I will, but as you will’. Although in theory ‘everything is possible’ to God, as Jesus himself affirmed in Gethsemane (Mark 14:36), yet this was not possible. God’s purpose of love was to save sinners, and to save them righteously; but this would be impossible without the sin-bearing death of the Saviour. So how could he pray to be saved from ‘this hour’ of death? ‘No,’ he had said, he would not, since ‘it was for this very reason I came to this hour’ (John 12:27).
From his agony of dread, as he contemplated the implications of his coming death, Jesus emerged with serene and resolute confidence. So when Peter drew his sword in a frantic attempt to avert the arrest, Jesus was able to say: ‘Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?’ (John 18:11). Since John has not recorded Jesus’ agonized prayers for the cup to be removed, this reference to it is all the more important. Jesus knows now that the cup will not be taken away from him. The Father has given it to him. He will drink it. Moreover, bitter and painful though the draining of the cup will be, he will yet find that to do the will of the Father who sent him and to finish his work will be his ‘meat and drink’ (as we might say), deeply and completely satisfying to his thirst (John 4:34).
The agony in the garden opens a window on to the greater agony of the cross. If to bear man’s sin and God’s wrath was so terrible in anticipation, what must the reality have been like?
We may not know, we cannot tell,
What pains he had to bear;
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.