It’s 3am and I’m awake. I’m sitting in my study, spending yet another sleepless night pondering what has become of my life. I’m listening to one of the great tenors of our age sing one of the most stirring pieces of music I’ve ever heard. I’m moved by this composition and even though the words are foreign to me, I’m captivated by the angelic sweetness of the singer’s voice. I do not speak the language but still I’m moved to tears by the passion of the music and the performance.

While listening, I’m meditating on God and a story from his word. In a way, I don’t speak this language, either. It’s translated, of course – I’m a little rusty in my Hebrew – but the author is from a different time and a different place, and simply converting words from one language to another doesn’t really do the trick.

Even still, I am moved by the story just as much as I am by the music, touched by the clarity of the voice and by the beauty of the words. Some of it eludes me, to be sure, but I get the gist of it. It moves me because I sense that it, like the song, is serious, significant – even ultimate. The message beckons to my soul as deep calls unto deep. The heart, passion, and sincerity all come through.

On one level these experiences don’t tell me much at all; they are not full of information, like operating instructions or a recipe. I am learning, perhaps, but not the sort of thing one might encounter in a lecture or textbook. It’s more like I’m being changed, subtly but certainly, and in some way I will never be the same, nor do I want to be. A profound peace overcomes me as I feel an undeniable and ineffable connection to the author behind it all.

As I listen to the music and ponder the story it is not syntax which speaks to me, but soul. I am overcome by a sublime current, not of emotion, necessarily, but what we might call an emoting, the eking out of a response in my soul. I feel connected to the voice, to the music, to the story. In some mysterious integration, I’m receiving them and yet it seems they have included me all along.

 

This is the way of art; without my response the piece is somehow incomplete. In a very real sense this moment is mine alone. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said you can’t step twice into the same river, and this is one of those moments. I could listen to the same song and read the same story and the experience would be different next time. And I can’t share it, exactly, because even my attempt to describe it is simply the creation of a different moment for you, a different experience.

The dance is mutual.

My spirit is up and on the move.

 

I’m by myself, but not alone.

 

A veil is lifted, the kind of lifting that seems to only happen at 3am; only in the depth of the night can we find stillness enough to hear these voices.

As with all art, the degree I allow myself to be given to such artistry determines the degree to which I am touched by it. As the song concludes, I get the sense that the message, which transcends the words, has been delivered. I’m immersed in pure excitement knowing that the great tenor, like the great God of the story upon which I’m reflecting, has many more songs to sing and stories to tell. And because I’ve been included in these songs, these great stories, I’m eager to enter in again and again as I open myself more fully to being transformed by them.

If I were to sit down and write the story of Israel during the time of the book of Judges, I would be tempted to begin with the famous words of the beloved Peanuts cartoon character, Snoopy: “It was a dark and stormy night...”

Night or day, they really were dark and stormy times – this was one of the most violent, hopeless, chaotic and threatening periods in Israel’s history. The text probably says it best in Judges 21:25: “all the people did what was right in their own eyes.”

God often chooses times like these to make himself known. Sometimes the darkest times are those when it’s easiest to see the luminous presence of God, to allow his light – radiant, warm, comforting – to suffuse the deepest places of our cold and barren hearts. When all seems lost, Abraham is delivered from the futility of his faithless choices. When times are dark, Moses is freed from his misplaced fear of the Pharaoh. When the way is unclear, Noah is rescued from seeking options other than God, and Jonah from the darkness of his rebellious intent to run from God. In every instance God is at his best when these people of Scripture are at their worst. God shines as these fallen heroes are facing their bleakest moments. When they are confronted with dilemmas that seem insurmountable, God works events to their benefit and to his glory. They are delivered, but this deliverance is always a process.

Sometimes we cut this process short. My heart aches for a friend’s brother who was trying to deal with the unrequited love of a girlfriend. He was only twenty years old but had convinced himself he would never again know the intensity or goodness of such love. He clung to this self-composed story until he lost all hope. He lost his capacity to see the goodness of life and, seeing no other option, he took his own life.

We are tempted, like the Israelites, to do what is right in our own eyes. We persistently cling to our own power even when faced with certain failure because we’re afraid to trust God. We find our own resources inadequate to the task and our coping skills altogether lacking, so we quit. Some choose suicide; some choose emotional withdrawal and alienation. Either way, the end is death. But neither quitting nor death is the story of Gethsemane, and quitting isn’t the story of Hannah, an unlikely player in Jesus’ biography.

“The hand that rocks the cradle,” goes the famous poem, “is the hand that rules the world.”^[1] Perhaps more accurately, we might say that God rules the world through the hand that rocks the cradle. Brave and faithful mothers are an integral part of the Biblical story, and Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is no exception. Her son, conceived and born of God’s gracious intervention would grow to become one of Israel’s greatest and most influential prophets.

Like so many courageous women of Scripture, Hannah’s story comes to us as a light in the midst of great darkness – both via Hannah’s personal life and Israel’s national life. As we begin reading Hannah’s story, we discover that both she and Israel are powerless to transform their circumstances. Both Hannah and Israel find themselves barren—to use the Biblically evocative word. Both Hannah and Israel know the sting of tyranny and exploitation within their own house. Everything is hopeless.

 

Hopelessness breeds despair. When we enter our Gethsemanes, we encounter hopelessness that can tempt us to lose heart altogether. That is why preparing ourselves for Gethsemane is wise. We can remind ourselves now that God does not abandon us in the dark garden. Instead, the gloom of the darkness assures us that God’s light will shine as we persevere. Recognizing this at the beginning can help us to bear up under dark times.

We don’t meet up with hopelessness when life is going well: when we’re getting promotions at work or when the kids are making the honor roll at school. No, we meet with hopelessness when something breaks down, when our families are disintegrating, our health is failing, or our faith seems fleeting and weak. We meet with hopelessness when our financial struggles overtake us and we can find no way out. Hopelessness greets us when after thirty years of marriage our spouse informs us that the love has vanished or when we are left baffled by the choices of our children.

We meet hopelessness in Gethsemane.

Even in despair (or perhaps especially in despair) we can find reason to believe that hope is near. The message of Gethsemane is a message of hope that we are not alone, that we are never alone. In Gethsemane we meet a human Christ to whom we can relate, one who walks with us because he has walked this path ahead of us. In Gethsemane we walk with the Jesus who is the one inclusive person who gathers us up into his story: a story not unlike our own, especially in times of our deepest despair.

I believe, however, there is a crucial difference between his Gethsemane and ours. His is a story that is completed on our behalf, and as such, it is a story that allows us to find the hope for which we are so desperately searching—the hope that tells us that where we presently find ourselves is not the end. Painful though it may be, Gethsemane is not something from which there is no recovery. Dark as it may be, Gethsemane is an innate feature of life’s journey, a non-negotiable aspect of our very humanity. It is something that God knows and knows well. It is something Jesus knows intimately, and not something that takes the divine by surprise and throws the Godhead into a panic.

Paradoxically, Gethsemane assures us that there is hope. This hope introduces us to another way of interpreting and then dealing with our failures, fears, and the horrible misfortunes that find their way to our door. It matters little whether these come uninvited or are the products of our own feebleness and frailty, whether they are some random catastrophe or poignant tragedy. Hope, that “thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson put it, speaks to us and reminds us that God is good, and there is still much more life for us to discover, live and embrace. Hope reminds us to live life outwards in service to others instead of turning inward and crippling our souls.

Hannah exemplifies hope and gives us strength to face our Gethsemanes. She faces hopelessness head on, settling for nothing less than divine intervention as she tearfully pleads with God. In response, God works through the powerlessness of a barren woman whose sole desire is to give birth to a son. Though her story begins in hopelessness, it ends in the affirmation of God’s new creation. It arouses within us a renewed hope that God is always present, listening, and engaged in our lives.

When Christ wept in the garden, I believe he drew courage directly from Hannah’s story as he looked for and received God’s power in bringing about new and abundant life. Hannah’s story, perhaps more than any other, inspired a young peasant woman who would give birth to God’s Son. God rules the world through the hand that rocks the cradle.

Hannah’s story is told at the beginning of the book of First Samuel. We discover Hannah living under the impossible circumstances of a polygamous relationship. Her husband, Elkanah, has two wives, Hannah and Peninnah. Peninnah is blessed with both sons and daughters, Hannah has none, as the story informs us, because “the Lord had closed her womb.”^[2] 

In our society with myriad medical options, infertility does not carry the stigma that it did in ancient times. In Israel’s culture, barrenness presented a woman with a dreadful crisis. Though it sounds crude to our ears, the value of a woman lay in her ability to bear children – especially male heirs – to her husband. Fertility was linked with God’s favor; the more children a woman bore the more blessed she was believed to be. Childlessness was not perceived as an indication of a physical condition. Instead, it signified an internal, spiritual imperfection – a flaw upon one’s soul.

To make matters worse, Hannah is provoked by her rival, Peninnah. The mockery and humiliation reached a zenith each year as the extended family journeyed to offer sacrifices at the tabernacle in Shiloh. Perhaps this religious pilgrimage made Hannah more sensitive to her plight. Maybe the thought of worshipping God, being faithful to God, loving him and being careful to follow his commands and yet still finding herself unable to conceive led Hannah to question, “What more do you want from me, God?”

We’ve all felt this way – it’s as if God isn’t living up to his part of the relationship. I pray, read Scripture,
live as best I can, but sometimes I remain stuck in what I feel is an impossible situation. “Where are you, God?” I ask.

This is how I see Hannah as she bears the weight of her emptiness. While the text does not provide us with Hannah’s self dialogue, we are told that Penninah’s chiding was relentless and that, “this went on year by year; as often as [Hannah] went up to the house of the Lord… therefore Hannah wept and would not eat.”^[3]

Though our specific circumstances may be different we can readily relate to Hannah’s angst: Times of stress when we, too, could not eat or sleep; times we questioned how we could even live to face the darkness of another day. The universal emotion of Hannah’s particular story paves the way for us as we enter our Gethsemane.

Hannah’s season of hopelessness begins to change as she goes up to the tabernacle at Shiloh to pray. “Hannah rose and presented herself before the Lord,” the Bible tells us, “She was deeply distressed and prayed to the lord, and wept bitterly.”^[4] 

Even when we don’t know the rest of the story, we can see some clues indicating her spirit and how she will respond as her circumstances begin to appear. Hannah first “presents” herself to God, makes herself available. She shows up. This is the perfect place to begin when facing life’s greatest dilemmas – in a place where we acknowledge our need to present ourselves to God. After all, we are not our own. We have been brought forth to bring glory to God. Mary, the mother of Jesus, recognized this as she responded to the angelic herald announcing God’s plan for the birth of Jesus, “Let it be with me according to your word.”^[5]

Hannah’s faith led her to a place of giving before she appeared before God asking. Her request was singular: Bless me with a male child and I will give him back to you. Giving is more blessed than receiving, and Hannah finds the blessing in the giving of herself and her son to God who gave him in the first place. As a Levite, Hannah knows her child will be bound for tabernacle service between the ages of twenty and fifty. So determined is she to bear a son, however, that she vows to give him to God all the days of his life.

We resonate with the depth of Hannah’s plea as we hear her pouring herself out in prayer. She empties herself. Without pride, she makes her request known to God. She cares nothing for how she may appear to others. Even Eli, the imperceptive resident priest, believes her to be intoxicated. Eventually Eli understands Hannah’s outpouring of emotion and, moved by her devotion, says to her, “Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.”^[6]

At this point we might see the blessing Hannah receives as a reward for her single-minded devotion. As the story is often told, Hannah does such a good job of pouring herself out in prayer that God rewards her. But this raises the question: What if God had not granted Hannah a son? What if he refused to answer her prayer? Would Hannah have ceased to be present to God? Is God required to respond mechanistically to our manipulations?

Sometimes these questions get lost in our telling of Hannah’s story, especially since we in the West tend to buy into a quid pro quo system of obedience and reward. But is this really what we’re seeing transpire in this account? Aren’t we invited to see that Hannah’s motives are pure and that her life is given to God regardless of the outcome of her prayers?

In Hannah, we witness a woman who first vows to give herself to God – even before vowing to dedicate the son she so desperately asks God to give her. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of this remarkable woman’s character. Whether it is herself, her son or her love for her husband Elkanah, Hannah knows that the greatest blessings are the ones we give away. What she has, she gives. She lives outwardly toward others. Hannah has learned the way of love and extends love to others; this is the greatest of all gifts from God. Regardless of the outcome of her prayer, Hannah chooses not to be full of self, but to be full of God – whether God grants her a child or not.

Perhaps the point of the story is that Hannah is blessed not because of what she has already given, and not because of what she vows to give if God grants her request for more. Instead, Hannah is blessed in her giving.

“In due time,” the Biblical record continues, “Hannah conceived and bore a son. She named him Samuel, for she said, ‘I have asked him of the Lord.’”^[7] What adds to the intrigue of the story is that the Hebrew word “asked” is also the word for “borrowed.” Hannah realizes that life, if it is anything at all, is a gift borrowed from the hand of God. Whether the life is hers, her son Samuel’s or each citizen within the Israelite nation, Hannah speaks to one of the central truths of our lives – we are not our own.

This is why I believe Hannah would continue giving herself to God and others regardless of whether God grants her request to bare a son. And this is what we must take from this story. Hannah gives us light from darkness because she first gives herself.

By the goodness of God’s mercy, the prayer of Hannah is granted and her son Samuel is born. True to Hannah’s vow, after the child is weaned she returns to the tabernacle at Shiloh and presents him for service. On this occasion Hannah’s timeless prayer of thanksgiving is delivered as a song that would remain central throughout the history of God’s people.

            My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in my God.

Realizing that her barrenness has been removed, Hannah breaks into rejoicing. Once again God has brought forth hope out of hopelessness. Through the birth of Samuel, God has delivered joy out of the deadness of Hannah’s womb.

The story of the nation of Israel is being played out in the life of this humble and faithful woman. Hannah realizes that a God-ordained revolution is underway. She sees that wrongs are being set right; that the mighty are being broken while the feeble are given strength. As one author put it, in the story of Hannah “we are able to see the dangerous social implications of resurrection faith. This is the real ‘raising’ Yahweh will do, raising to power and social responsibility… all present social distinctions and political disproportions are overcome and dismissed… All it takes to change these arrangements of tyranny and exploitation in the imagination of Israel, however, is one clear doxology. All it takes for a new possibility is one act of Yahweh, besides whom there is no other.”^[9]

This is why this story continues to speak to us today. It’s a story about patience and faithfulness, of hope and trust, of God’s ability to bring life and joy from impossible circumstances. It speaks of the radical reordering that comes about through our resurrection faith. It tells us that when things are beyond dark, beyond hopeless, even when things do not exist at all, that God is at work to bring forth hope out of despair, life out of barrenness.

Hannah’s song is filled with prophetic insight. She proclaims that the Lord will “give strength to his king and exalt the power of his anointed.”^[10] At the time this song is composed, Israel has no king, but this does not mean that the Davidic Kingdom is not already in the mind of God and unfolding on the pages of Israel’s story. Importantly, when the time is right, it will be Hannah’s son Samuel who will anoint Israel’s first king. With this anointing, the blessing of God for all the nations of the earth will be one step closer to becoming a reality.

Little does Hannah know that her song of praise will give birth to what God is preparing to do for humanity through this barren nation of Israel. Even less can she imagine how her worship will find its way to the lips of a woman who will not be born for another thousand years; and like Hannah, this woman will give the great gift of her self and her son to the service of God and his world.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, followed in Hannah’s steps. She inclined herself to God and willingly received what God bestowed upon her. At the word of her imminent conception Mary responds, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”^[11]

Like Hannah, her initial response is to give herself. Before God works, before the vast potential of our resurrection faith can be realized, we must first give ourselves. If nothing else, we need give ourselves to the possibility that the God of all faithfulness desires to speak a word of new creation into our life. As Hannah did so many generations before, so Mary opens herself to the will and the ways of God.

To see the effect Hannah’s song has on Mary, all we need do is read Mary’s words as recorded in the gospel of Luke:

            My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

This seems awfully literate for an obscure 1^st-century Palestinian peasant. This song, with its obvious echoes of Hannah’s song, is called the Magnificat, and it has been set to music over two thousand times. That’s more times than Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” has been recorded – talk about peasants being put on high.

The important thing here is the imagination, the vision, of Mary’s song. The things she says had not actually come to pass, and in many ways they still haven’t. But for Mary, just the knowledge that the Messiah was conceived meant that those things were as good as done. God would be faithful to his covenant, to his character. The mighty would fall and the lowly would be raised up – were being raised up even as the child moved in her womb.

When we give ourselves to God regardless of what he is working in our lives, we find our response to be the same as Hannah’s and Mary’s – we break forth in praise. And why does God work through Hannah and Mary and us? Because he recognizes our lowliness, our humility, our smallness. And perhaps more important still, it is because we have come to see the same. In this, God acts by walking with us through the details of our lives, no matter how distasteful they may be.

God does this because he is holy and patient, kind and longsuffering. He is the one with the larger story that begs us to be caught up in all of the good things with which he busies himself. His is the story that bids we relinquish our self-obsessions long enough to realize that we can actually have intimate fellowship with the maker of heaven and earth.

When Mary grasps this she verbalizes it by saying that “his mercy is for those who fear (hold in awe) him from generation to generation.” What incomprehensible news! God is with us from generation to generation. He lives with Hannah, Mary and us all in the present. For the eternal One, nobody resides in the past; there is no forgetting with God. When we awaken to this amazing realization of walking in the present, we see all of these biblical characters walking along side us, very much alive in the presence of God’s sight. Perhaps this is what the writer of the book of Hebrews meant when he acknowledged that “we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.”^[13]

Though the story of Hannah is now some three thousand years old, it can live within us. Though the story of Mary is now some two thousand years old, it can still be present with us. This is the living heritage in which you and I are privileged to walk because God relentlessly pursues us. And most of all, these are the realizations I believe Jesus holds near as he walks through the darkest moments of his life.

In Gethsemane, Jesus finds himself at a crossroads. He is confronted with a future that seems as hopeless and barren as that of Hannah’s—one where the only future seems to be no future at all. He is facing death. As he faces the greatest dilemma of his life, he realizes his real struggle is against himself. If he insists on grasping hold of life’s reigns, of remaining in control, he looks for an escape. When he gives himself into the hand of God, he can pray, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Jesus knows and is living out before us the dawning realization that death is but one small step in our path; none of us, ultimately, is destined to live in a place, but in an everlasting relationship. The greatest blessing we can experience lies in giving ourselves to this reality.

Jesus knows that the only way to defeat hopelessness is by letting go of any future that goes against the higher purposes of God. He understands what we long to embrace: by yielding to reality and giving himself fully to the moment, rather than expending physical and emotional energies trying to escape or change it, he can stand strong. When we are receptive in this way, God can bring forth life out of a situation that seems mired in death. Even when we feel we have reached the end -- the end of our dreams, our hopes, our best laid plans, the end of ourselves -- God is present and God is at work. But we have to listen.

In the great song of our lives we don’t always have to understand the language to feel included in its embrace, to be moved by its unfolding presentation. In Gethsemane the dance is mutual. Always.

The Spirit of God is up and on the move.

We, like Jesus, are by ourselves but we are not alone.

A veil is lifting. The kind of lifting that happens only in the deepness of the night.

God only asks that we join with the Christ in giving ourselves to the story he has for us. The song is concluding. The message has been delivered. There is excitement in knowing that the great God of Gethsemane has a place for us in his plans, for there are many more songs to sing and stories to tell. And because we, like Jesus, have been included in these songs, these great stories, we can greet the new day with an eagerness to give ourselves more fully to being transformed by them. And why not? The greatest blessings are the ones we give away.

The barrenness is past; new life has begun.

This article is part of an ongoing series by Tim King. If you missed any of the articles, here are links to all installments:

• Jesus, Gethsemane and Us: Part 1
  
• Jesus, Gethsemane and Us: Part 2
• Jesus, Gethsemane and Us: Part 3
  
• Jesus, Gethsemane and Us: Part 4
  
• Jesus, Gethsemane and Us: Part 5
  
• Jesus, Gethsemane and Us: Part 6
  
• Jesus, Gethsemane and Us: Part 7
  
• Jesus, Gethsemane and Us: Part 8

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URL: http://www.presence.tv/cms/per_jesus-gethsemane-us-part-7.php

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