Sunday
Sunday
The Agony in the Garden
He [Jesus] began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them.
Mark 14:33–34
Jesus’s agony in the olive orchard provides a vivid example of the paradox of his person. On the one hand, we see his human hunger for the companionship and prayer support of his friends, together with the recognition that his will could be distinct from his Father’s (“Not my will, but thine, be done” [Luke 22:42 KJV]). On the other hand, even in the midst of his pain, he spoke to God in the unique intimacy of the address “Abba, Father” (Mark 14:36).
But what was his distress? The Greek words deserve to be more vividly translated than they are in the NIV. The REB is better. It reads, “Horror and anguish overwhelmed him, and he said to them, ‘My heart is ready to break with grief’” (vv. 33–34). And Luke alone adds, with his medical interest, that “his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44). Jesus referred to his coming ordeal as a “cup” from which he shrank in dread. Was it simply death? Socrates met his end in the prison cell in Athens in a very different mood. He drank his cup of hemlock, Plato wrote, “without trembling … very cheerfully and quietly.” So was Socrates braver than Jesus? No, all the evidence is against this. Jesus’s physical and moral courage had not for a moment wavered. In that case their cups must have been filled with different poisons. The cup that Jesus ardently longed to avoid was neither the physical pain of crucifixion nor the mental anguish of desertion by his friends but the spiritual horror of bearing the sins of the world. In the Old Testament the cup was a regular symbol of God’s wrath. For example, Isaiah described Jerusalem after its destruction as having “drunk from the hand of the LORD the cup of his wrath” (Isa. 51:17).
From the agony in the garden Jesus emerged with a resolute determination to go to the cross. Though John does not include an account of Gethsemane, he does include a saying that the other evangelists do not: “Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?” (John 18:11).
For further reading: Mark 14:32–42