This week we’ve been looking at the final week of Jesus’ life. He knew this was it, so everything he did was with tremendous meaning and intention. On the final night, he prayed a prayer that my human mind has trouble comprehending. He asks if God can save me and you in any other way than the agony he himself faced. He grieved over what was to come, and he fully submitted to God’s will even when it was the hardest thing he would ever do.
Today, we will read that prayer together, then we will dive deeper into the feelings of Jesus on that final night. Through this, may we fully recognize the sacrifice Jesus made specifically for each of us, the unfathomable price that was paid for our souls, and the perfect example Jesus has set for us when facing hardships we wouldn’t have chosen.
What does Jesus do? He prays. He asks others to pray with him, but he himself prays. He goes to his father. He honestly lays his feelings down before God, then he surrenders to God’s divine will.
Will we do the same? Even when we don’t want to? Even when we’re facing unfair hardship? Even when we know it will hurt? Will we seek God’s will over our own and surrender in prayer?
Matthew 26: 36-46:
In the garden of Gethsemane, “Jesus bowed with his face to the ground, praying, “My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”
A second time he prayed, “My Father! If this cup cannot be taken away unless I drink it, your will be done.”
Then he went to pray a third time, saying the same things again.”
To understand the emotions of Jesus, I will share pieces of a reading from a website called Biblecourses.com.
Sometime around midnight, Jesus entered the garden of Gethsemane, a place were olives were crushed and pressed to process their valuable oil within. Jesus rarely spoke of the emotions that surged at times within his soul. Remember, Jesus was fully God, but he was also fully human. He felt. He hurt. In Gethsemane, we see the heart of Jesus as never before.
In this garden, Jesus experienced something that He had never before encountered during His earthly life and ministry. We cannot understand fully what was happening, but let’s try to imagine it.
The struggle Jesus experienced involved intense sorrow. He told the three friends He had taken with Him that His soul was “deeply grieved”. As He drew closer to the time when He would carry that awful burden of sin upon His soul at the cross, He became overwhelmed. The world’s guilt was descending upon His pure, innocent mind and heart with a crushing force. The weight of all my sin was on him. The burden of all your guilt was his to carry. It must have been overwhelming. It must have been so heavy.
The battle for the salvation of the human race loomed large, dark, and frightful. His humanity was depressed by it; His divine spirit groaned over it. He groaned over me. He groaned over you. We were on his mind.
His struggle was so severe that it began taking his physical body down to death itself. Matthew 26:38 says his soul was “deeply grieved, to the point of death,”. His sorrow and grieve were so consuming that there was a danger his body couldn’t bare it. An angel from Heaven came and strengthen him. Had he not received this strength, he wouldn’t have been able to offer his body on the cross for us. He would have collapsed before the cross.
I’ve always imagined the pain of the cross, but never had I been aware of the agony of Gethsemane. As Jesus prepared His soul for the conflict over the souls of men, he entered into an agony that no one can comprehend. Luke 22:44 says, his sweat became “like drops of blood, falling down to the ground”.
His struggle involved the satanic forces of evil in a way that he had not confronted them before. After Jesus’ period of temptation at the beginning of his ministry, the devil left him “for a season” . In the garden the devil came against him with the mightiest army he could muster. This confrontation with Satan held the terrors of the world of darkness with tenacity.
No one can fathom the depths of grief our Lord experienced in this garden. We see his humanity rising to the challenge of the great strain, but we also see his divine nature. The holy Son of God was preparing to become an atoning sacrifice for the world’s sin.
At his time of great sorrow, Jesus sought to be with God. By his retreat to the garden, he tells us, “When you are in your deepest valley, your greatest conflict, be alone with your Father. Go to a quiet place, and lay your heart open before Him.”
What we see in the garden of Gethsemane is the biggest battles of life were won the day before they even took place. Jesus met with his Father and settled in advance what he was going to do and how he was going to do it when he reached the cross. After Gethsemane and Jesus crying out to God, we see nothing but serenity and absolute confidence in our Jesus. He bore our sufferings without complain. He prayed his way through them.
What Jesus did in that garden was for us. He accepted the cup he prayed could pass from him. And he drank a cup of wrath without mercy, that we might drink a cup of mercy without wrath.
I’ll never think of the garden of Gethsemane the same.
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