On his last night, Jesus enters a garden he has visited many times before. He has gathered three of his closest friends and urges them to watch and pray. Meanwhile, he slips into the distance to face the greatest crisis of his life.

 

Gethsemane translates roughly to “oil press.” It is a place of treading, pounding, and grinding—all apt metaphors for what Jesus is about to undergo. On this night, Gethsemane transforms from a place into an event. It becomes a divine appointment. The course of history perilously teeters upon this time of reckoning. Heaven’s collective breath is drawn in anticipation of what Jesus will do, of what he will choose, of which way he will turn. The ramifications of Gethsemane are monumental; without Gethsemane there will be no Cross.

 

While scripture presents Jesus as a lone voice crying out in anguish, Christ’s voice becomes the voice of us all. Listen carefully. You can hear your words and mine: “Father, do I have to be here? Do I have to go through this? Must it come to this? Please, God, is there another way?” We’ve all wished that we could just snap our fingers and be a year removed from a particular crisis. “Anything else,” we cry to God, “just don’t make me go through this. Not now—please!”

 

The circumstances of our Gethsemanes differ and may seem insignificant compared to his. But Jesus never discounts our pain, our life experiences. In the midst of our agony we can relate to Jesus because Jesus related to us. Sadness and sorrow, tears and sweat, exhaustion and blood are common to us all.

 

Try as we might, Gethsemane will not—cannot—be postponed. The demands of this inflexible season would not delay its arrival even for the Jesus who commands the winds to silence and the waves to rest. And so it is for us. There is no delay. Gethsemane comes, and it is coming.

 

Some of us enter Gethsemane more often than others, but eventually we all make the journey and share in the agony. Gethsemane compels us to face the central issues in life that we habitually repress, ignore, or attempt to avoid: the death of a spouse; the soul-rending fractures of a divorce; the uncertainty of employment; the unrelenting shame of addiction. Gethsemane comes to us when we lose our health or when someone we love presses us to deal with our stubborn attitudes. Gethsemane lays waste to our carefully constructed existence and fabricated façades. Gethsemane strikes at the core of what we fight hardest to preserve – our selves.

 

So with Jesus in Gethsemane we lay prostrate, broken and exposed. Gethsemane is agony.

 

Always.

 

We know that God pulls us onward, yet like Jesus we cast about for alternative solutions. We long for anything to deliver us from the anguish of a journey that takes us to an unknown place, to a destination greatly feared because we have not yet experienced it. Gethsemane brings us at long last to the end of ourselves, and this is exactly where God wants us to be. We have arrived at the place where God’s will can have its gracious way. We have entered into a season calling us to reckon with everything that has been sown so that we might embrace everything that is to be reaped. Gethsemane awakens us to the reality of a life in the hand of God. This is the purpose of Gethsemane.

 

His last night before execution was not the first time Jesus had come to the Garden. The Gospel of John suggests that he often retreated to Gethsemane for rest and reflection. These were occasions to release, meditate and pray. Feeling the strain of life, the sting of rejection and the weight of loving others prompted him to seek solitude in the garden of prayer.

 

You and I share this in common with this human Jesus. Like Christ, we enter into Gethsemane regularly—perhaps far more frequently than we would like. His times of retreating to the garden began early in his ministry, and our trips to Gethsemane start early in our lives. They begin in childhood as we mature and become self-aware. Soon, we discover that we are not the center of the universe. We perceive our siblings to be receiving more attention from our parents than we are. In times of frightful reflection we permit ourselves to contemplate, “Am I loved less?” Though too young to know it, we were taking our first steps into Gethsemane.

 

These questions continue into our preteen years as we seek acceptance from our peers. Being unable to escape the onslaught of puberty and the physical challenges of this awkward time presents a Gethsemane for us all.

 

My son Zac first entered into Gethsemane at the ripe old age of twelve. He had the wild, wiry hair common to adolescent boys—the kind of hair that yields to the comb with all the willingness of a prairie mustang acquiescing to the saddle. A pair of tragically un-hip glasses framed his little buck-toothed face—a face that, as they say, only a mother could love. At that stage of his life, Zac was the walking, talking epitome of awkwardness – the living essence of a geek. A trip to the orthodontist revealed that Zac needed braces. Upon hearing this diagnosis his desperate response indicated that he was entering Gethsemane as he pleaded, “Are you kidding me? I’ll look like a dork!” My wife and I traded glances as we struggled to keep our faces from betraying our true thoughts: he already looked like a dork! Every now and then our family reminisces over the pictures of that era as we recall those days with fondness, a chuckle and a little good-hearted-ribbing. We all looked… well, pretty dorky. We can laugh now, but at the time, Zac had entered Gethsemane.

 

It might be easier if life’s Gethsemanes ended in our middle school years, but they don’t. As we grow into our teens we experience the pressure of learning new subjects in school, undergoing physical changes and maintaining delicate social structures. These early feelings of being displaced in the world intensify as we wonder why we weren’t good enough to make the team, the club or the clique. We shrink inside as we ponder why we received no invitation to a party hosted by someone more popular than us.

 

It’s a wonder that any of us makes it through these early seasons of life, since so few of us (if any) were equal to the task of traversing such a frightful world. Most of us were not significantly grounded in our relationship with God during those formative stages to know where to put our pain, so we swallowed it whole. As a result, our struggles became permanent features of our inner landscape.

 

My friend Tom Jennings and I were high school freshmen together. Tom was quiet and somewhat of a loner. When he did speak, it was usually about his father, who was his idol. The two of them lifted weights together, and they loved talking football. Tom developed physically much earlier than the rest of us and seemed more like a man than a boy. Even as a ninth grader Tom had gained a reputation for his exceptional strength, and his prowess on the football field had created a buzz among the locals.

 

I’ll always remember a blustery Monday morning when I heard that Tom’s father had died of a sudden heart attack over the weekend. Tom was devastated. We all were. After school our group of friends visited him at his house, but none of us knew what to say. So we didn’t say much at all. We weren’t any more equipped to speak to Tom of a life grounded in a heavenly father than he was ready to hear it. But I still wonder if I could have said something—anything—that would have made a difference. Could I have at least assured him that I was watching with him as he entered his Gethsemane?

 

Two days after his father’s funeral, Tom used his strength to strap a bolder to his chest and walk off the end of a pier at the local lake. He didn’t know what else to do with the crushing pain of his loss. Just that quickly his life was over. He was gone.

 

Tom dealt with his pain by drowning himself. You and I may not have done the same thing physically, but we turn aside from dealing with the reality of our anguish by attempting to drown it in dozens of other ways. We drown ourselves in addictions, in work, or even in religion. Our countless diversions constitute futile attempts to keep us from entering into the real garden of decision and doing business with the Father.

 

Most of us sense that our early feelings of loneliness and rejection are too visceral and too familiar to simply write off as childhood memories. They pursue us relentlessly into adulthood where we find ourselves battling adult obstacles. Some of us are single while our friends are getting married, having children and getting on with life. We’re left haunted by a lifetime of voices reminding us of all of the reasons why nobody wants us. We feel different, less-than, and not as attractive as everybody else. We struggle to maintain an outward appearance of togetherness as inwardly we grapple with loneliness and undesirability.

 

Many of us feel as if we have been enveloped in a kind of “loser karma” where, like it or not, over and again we are forced to explore the true source of our worth. We ask questions that we’d rather not ponder: “Does my life count? If I were to suddenly disappear would anybody notice? Would they care? When I breathe my last, will I have accomplished anything of value on this earth? Do I matter at all?”

 

These Gethsemane questions frighten us because of what we might discover. However, we cannot escape them. Daily living provides ample opportunity to recall our failures, inadequacies and doubts of whether we’re going to be able to press forward. Because we’re aware of this anxiety, we’ve begun to realize, if only subconsciously, that we are already on our way to the garden. By asking these excruciating questions, we have already entered into a dialogue concerning issues that lay deep within us. Like it or not, Gethsemane has once again found its way to the door of our soul.

 

Gethsemane can be so lonely and piercing that it seems poetically appropriate that it often happens at night. During those wee hours when we can’t sleep, we ache with all of the nagging, gnawing questions that churn deep within us. In Gethsemane, we become enshrouded by a darkness that knows no light. For me it’s because this darkness mirrors the deep-seated fear in my heart. Maybe you can relate? The Germans called it “angst;” maybe the best English word for this sensation is “dread.”

 

All of this angst and dread compels us to draw nearer to the human Jesus of Gethsemane, for it is in his Gethsemane that we find the one who stripped himself of everything that he might model for us a fully human way to traverse a divine path, especially because that path entails suffering.

 

Gethsemane may be agonizingly dreadful, but the darkness only hides the blessing. In Gethsemane, as in no place else, we awaken to our true selves, our true identity—and it is always love. Jesus lives this out before us as his soul writhes in anguish. In Gethsemane Jesus lays no claim to his former glory as he becomes love-incarnate to the world – even though this means being despised and rejected by others – even though it means having nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.^[1] In becoming like us he makes no claim to be anything other than a servant to others. In turn, in our Gethsemane, he helps us discover the blessing of emptying ourselves in order to be filled with love so that we can become love to our world.

 

This is not a journey easily made, but it is the only way to discover the highest form of life Jesus came to bring. And through his pain we do indeed come to see the great extent to which he was willing to go to relate to us, to walk a path of anguish not all that dissimilar to ours. That’s what love does.

 

Most of us have heroes, special people who have worked to change the course of history. These difference-makers, through their actions, played a part in transforming the world. Personally I admire Coretta Scott King, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa.

 

We are drawn to our heroes and try to understand what events occurred early in their lives. To discover what experiences formed them and what forces shaped them, we read their biographies. We want to know where they were born, how they were raised, what took place along the way to mold them into the people they became. We seek to learn everything we can about their life setting, about those who influenced them most, what they were seeing and hearing and encountering during their formative years. In short, we want to know what made them become great so we might find the strength and insight to be like them.

 

By reading their biographies we find the origins of King’s heart for the oppressed, Mandella’s determination to walk in peace in the midst of seemingly insurmountable odds, and Mother Teresa’s boundless compassion. Appreciating their stories enables us to invite them into ours that we might live similar lives of courage and hope and victory. By studying their background, we better understand what was going on i
their minds as they contributed their story to history’s larger story.

 

To discover the Jesus of Gethsemane we also must explore the background and life setting that influenced him.  But where do we begin? Does the biography of Jesus start from his birth in Bethlehem or from pre-time eternals? 

 

If we focus on his co-existence before and beyond time with the Father, we risk stripping him of his humanity. But if we limit his biography to his biology, we risk stripping him of his divinity. I believe that there is another way to read the biography of Jesus that helps us discover the mystery of Gethsemane. This way allows us to see a human Jesus whose story resonates with ours more fully so that we might have the divine strength to endure the Gethsemanes of our lives too. This third way shows us the process of stripping off our false selves so that we might be clothed with the same glory and oneness with God for which Jesus prayed on our behalf.^[2]

 

To discover this way, we don’t need to turn to a novel. Instead, we can go to the apostle Paul. In 1 Corinthians 15:45, he provides us with an evocative way of framing the biography of Christ. “Thus it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam became a ‘life-giving spirit.’”

 

When Paul speaks of Jesus as “the last Adam,” he is telling us that humanity’s true identity is summed up in Christ. In other words, Jesus isn’t “another” Adam or a “second” Adam. Instead, Jesus is the last, final, and fullest expression of humanity. In Jesus we become what we were always meant to be. He first becomes like us in every way so that when we look at Jesus we’re seeing every man, woman and child as presented in Scripture. Through his decision in Gethsemane, he will become them all that he might provide a solution for them all.^[3] Humanity is drawn into him that we might live freely in the larger story of his spirit-giving-life. In this story, at long last, do we ‘find ourselves,’ the Christ in all of us.

 

In this way the entire Old Testament is the biography of Christ—from Adam to the summation of all that Adam was meant to be. This way of reading the biography of Jesus helps us envision what Jesus might have been thinking when facing the decision to give his life on behalf of all of us. He isn’t merely drawing on his divinity to say “No big deal, I know how this all plays out. Let’s roll.” Nor is he only reflecting on a life begun in Bethlehem and carried over from Nazareth to Jerusalem. No, in Gethsemane we meet the Jesus who looks back over the collective life of the human race as he ponders whether he will follow the way and the will of the Father forward or not.

 

Gethsemane, then, gives us the Jesus who lived through the catastrophe of Eden. The human Jesus in Gethsemane saw the wickedness of Sodom and learned the lesson of the flood. He witnessed the faithfulness of the God who set Israel free from Egyptian captivity only to see their faithless cries turn into lives of rebellion. In Gethsemane we meet the man who walked with Elijah and trembled with David at the hands of those seeking to take his life. Here we encounter the one who experienced the limited and ineffectual sacrifices of Leviticus, lived out the discouragement of Job and poured out his soul in the words of the Psalmist.

 

As Jesus collapses to his knees under the unbearable weight of Gethsemane, he does what you and I do in our times of crisis. He reflects on the course of his life. He draws upon the past to find strength to create the future.

 

Seeing the Old Testament as the biography of Christ lures us into that story. In the process, we find ourselves shaped by the accounts of all those encountering God and wrestling with him in their own Gethsemanes. The entire Old Testament can come alive and burst forth with new and fresh significance. Steadily, like Jesus, we begin to embrace their pain as our pain, their questions as our questions, and their passion for God as our passion for God.

 

By reading these Old Testament stories as the biography of Jesus, we will learn to embrace the one who has walked in the steps of us all – the last Adam. We will find that life can be gracious, resolute, and admirable. We will also see that it can be selfish and faithless and in shambles. Most importantly, in Gethsemane we will find the human Jesus and discover the divine mystery that empowers him to move forward into a larger story worth living.

 

When we enter into this mystery, many of our questions will be answered and our lives can take on new meaning as Jesus and his Old Covenant biography shapes us. We gain crucial insight as we walk with Jesus into his ancient past, sit with him in Gethsemane, and then – with eyes wide open – enter into the most powerful revelation ever delivered from the One who is the ground of all being.

 

The answers to how the human Christ transforms our lives come from understanding his biography; and they come from traveling with Jesus to a secret garden. Here we will find the mystery of the one both human and divine, the one inviting us to enter fully into our humanity that we might become alive and awakened to his invitation to become partakers of something higher and greater, to a life filled with divine love.

 

These will be the broad brushstrokes in our quest for the authentic Jesus. Deciphering the balance between Jesus’s humanity and divinity may be as simple as following a story—but not just any story. It is the biography of the one who invites us to watch with him for a few moments of a prayerfully agonizing decision, and when we do, we will discover the greatest mystery for living ever revealed.

 

 

URL: http://www.presence.tv/cms/per_jesus-gethsemane-us-part-2.php

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