[This is the manuscript from the chapel talk I gave this morning at Harding U. Pictured above are students and President Burks]
Neglecting Complaint in the Pursuit of Courage
This summer at the Highland Church of Christ in Memphis where I preach 100 teenagers travelled to four locations in two countries and touched the lives of over 1,000 children. They descended upon Belize, Houston, Saint Louis, and Atlanta. We call these annual service opportunities T.I.M.E trips. TIME stands for Teens In Mission Experiences. During these experiences our teens minister to underprivileged children and adults and assist under-resourced congregations in a variety of ways. It is often a challenging week filled with intense temperatures, hard floors to sleep on, back breaking labor, and child after child from broken homes living broken lives. For some of these teens, it’s the hardest week of the year.
At the end of this season’s TIME trips, our youth ministers shared reports with our staff and elders. One of the common statements made in this year’s reports was this: “Our teens didn’t complain a single time.” This was shared as praise for our teens. It was, in fact, a minor miracle. Mixing 100 teenagers with hot and hard places where they spend twelve hours a day serving rather than being served and eating food they don’t like and rarely being able to text or Facebook is a potential recipe for moaning, groaning, and griping. But there was none of that this summer. Instead, the teens showed great courage as they faced challenges and focused on the mission and purpose of their trips.
The absence of complaint and the presence of courage is, I think, a virtue particularly valued in the United States.
We admire courage, don’t we? But we don’t admire complaint. We don’t want to be labeled as complainers and we don’t want our children to complain. We applaud the courageous. We condemn the complainers. We want to be like that girl in the movie.
And this perspective often finds its way into our prayers. We’d much rather demonstrate courage in a prayer than complaint in a prayer. We’re far more likely to make bold and fearless promises in prayer than we are to moan and groan and gripe in prayer.
In fact, according to Richard Beck—a professor at Abilene Christian University—many of us pursue a prayer life in which we never complain.[i] For many of us, complaint is completely absent from our prayers. Specifically, Beck writes that some of us operate with a model of prayer in which “faith” or “faithfulness” is one end of the continuum and “lament” or “complaint” is at the opposite end. Thus, if we want to be faithful to God and pray with faith, we have to be as far away from lament and complaint as possible. And, if we do lament or complain in our prayers, it’s a sign that we don’t have faith and we are not faithful Christians.
But if this model of prayer was correct, we would expect to find only positive and praise-filled prayers falling from the lips of Jesus. We would expect to find only courage and never complaint in the prayers of Jesus. But that is not what we find.
Of the ten prayers of Jesus, three are laments or complaints. There are at least ten times when the Gospels give us the actual words that Jesus prayed in a prayer. Of these ten prayers, three are easily characterized as laments or complaints.
Either this means Jesus is unfaithful and doesn’t pray with faith, or it means that our model of prayer is wrong. The latter seems more likely. These portraits of Jesus in prayer as one who groans and moans force us to consider an alternative paradigm for prayer. The fact that Jesus complains in three of his ten prayers should force us to consider that complaint is not just appropriate in prayer—it is required in prayer. It is the ultimate sign of a healthy prayer life. Complaint and lament were an undeniable part of Jesus’ prayers. They should be an undeniable part of ours as well.
The Gethsemane prayer of Jesus illustrates how courage and complaint can actually co-exist in one prayer:
Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here, while I go over there and pray.” And taking with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.” And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Again, for the second time, he went away and prayed, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.” And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. So, leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words again. Then he came to the disciples and said to them, “Sleep and take your rest later on. See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.” (Matt. 26:36-46 ESV)
This prayer finds Jesus in a deep and dark emotional state. Notice the descriptions from Matthew:
- Jesus is “sorrowful and troubled” (Matt. 26:37).
- Jesus confesses being “very sorrowful, even to death” (Matt. 26:38).
- Jesus falls on his face (Matt. 26:39).
- Jesus prays not once, but three times for the cup to pass (Matt. 26:44). It’s the only prayer we know of which Jesus repeated multiple times.
Matthew’s peers agree with his assessment of the emotional state of Jesus. Mark describes Jesus as “greatly distressed” (Mk. 14:33). Luke, the doctor, diagnoses Jesus as “being in agony” and observes that his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Lk. 22:44). Jesus is experiencing intense feelings of despair and discouragement.
Even the name of the place in which this spiritual wrestling match takes place reveals the depth of his despair. The word “Gethsemane” suggests an “oil press” where olives are squeezed until what is inside them spills out.[ii] In the same way, Jesus is now being squeezed until what is within him now spills out.
And the ultimate source of Jesus’ agony is “this cup”—“let this cup pass.” Elsewhere, Jesus speaks of his impending death on the cross as a “cup” to be drunk (Matt. 20:22). The cup image is rooted in the biblical picture of God’s “cup of wrath.”[iii] It is a terrible thing to contemplate consuming the wrath of God. And this cup—the cross—has become a circumstance which Jesus now desperately wishes were different. He does not like what he is facing. He’d rather be somewhere else. He’d rather do something else. He’s literally dying for some way out of this situation.
And what does Jesus do? Does Jesus put on a brave face? Does he play the role of the courageous warrior who laughs in the face of suffering? No. Jesus complains. In the truest biblical sense, Jesus complains. Not once, but three times. Three times Jesus prays:
“My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me!”
“My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me!”
“My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me!”
Three times Jesus groans: “I am despondent! I cannot stand this circumstance! I do not want things to be this way!”
And this appearance of complaint in a prayer from Jesus is so contrary to certain expectations that some through the ages have dismissed the Gethsemane prayer. They’ve argued that Jesus could not have prayed this prayer. The Son of God would not have stooped to such complaining.
Yet New Testament scholar Craig Keener writes that this prayer must be considered genuine because it meets “the authentic criterion of embarrassment.” That is, no Christian would have contrived this prayer. No Christian would have made up this account. Why? Because it could have brought embarrassment upon the Christian faith. The portrait of Jesus facing death anxiously is vastly different from the image of pagan heroes like Socrates or Jewish heroes like the Maccabean martyrs who all faced death calmly.[iv] Jesus deeply dislikes his circumstances and desperately begs God to change them. He does not courageously pretend nothing is wrong. Instead, he is honest with the Father about his feelings.
Mark Roberts teaches at Fuller Seminary. Writing about the psalmists who lamented, he offers this helpful image:[v]
Initially, the phrase no holds barred had nothing to do with conversation. It was a term used in wrestling to describe a match that isn’t constrained by official rules. If you’ve ever seen a serious wrestling match, in the Olympics, for example, you know that many holds are prohibited. You won’t see any strangleholds, unlike what you might observe in a “professional” wrestling free-for-all. Our typical approach to God brings to mind Olympic wrestling, in which every move is governed by detailed rules. Our communication with God is cautious, controlled, disciplined, and relentlessly boring. Fearful that we’ll do something wrong or that God won’t accept our true selves, we tame our prayers to the point that we actually hide ourselves from the Lord. We pray without energy, without passion, and without honesty…Whether crying out in agony, complaining with bitterness, begging for deliverance, or praising with joy, the psalmists consistently accepted God’s invitation to bold prayer. Whether desperate with need or bursting with thanks, they didn’t hold anything back.
Like the psalmists, Jesus held nothing back. He accepted God’s invitation to bold prayer. He prayed with energy, passion, and honesty. Jesus gives us permission to say to God, “Let this cup pass. Let this cup pass. Let this cup pass.
The LaVelle’s are a Highland family who faced their own Gethsemane last year. One warm evening a county sheriff arrived at the Lavelle home with solemn news: their twenty-year-old daughter Liz had just died in a car accident. She had been travelling from Memphis to Nashville for the start of a new college school year. She lost control of her car and died in the accident. Dozens of us immediately filled their house and surrounded the family. At one point in the darkening evening, a family member screamed out: “Can I just say that I hate this?!”
How do you pray in that situation? Do you pretend everything is OK? Do you courageously thank God for this chance to grow? Do you laugh in the face of death? No. You pray as Jesus prayed: “Change this! Stop this! Make things better!” You lament. You complain.
One summer many of us followed the saga of Sky—the eleven-year-old son of Chris Seidman. Sky had been hospitalized for weeks with meningitis, staph, and a vicious rash. On day forty-five, Sky was, in Chris’ words, “in a rage.” He was filled with anger and despair. He couldn’t stand his present circumstance. What was Chris to do? Was Chris supposed to tell his son, “Grow up! Buck up. Embrace this opportunity to grow. Be courageous. Be strong”? Was Chris supposed to tell his son to put on a brave face? Here’s what Chris did. He said, “I told him he could let God have it.” And Sky did. Chris wrote that he stood beside Sky while the boy hollered at God. Later, Chris wrote this: “Confessing one’s doubts about God to God is still an expression of faith in God.”
This is part of what the Gethsemane prayer teaches us. In a culture in which courage almost always overshadows complaint, the Gethsemane prayer teaches us the important role of true lament. Jesus models for us how to say to God the kind of things we may have thought we never could say. The fact that Jesus complains in his this prayer should force us to consider that complaint is not just appropriate in prayer—it is required in prayer.
[i] Richard Beck, ”The Psychology of Christianity: Part 5,” (7/12/2010), http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/.
[ii] “Gethsemane,” D. R. W. Wood and I. H. Marshall, I. H. (1996). New Bible Dictionary Third Edition, (IVP, 1996), 407.
[iii] Ps. 11:6; 60:3; 75:8; Is. 29:9-10; 51:17, 21-23; Jer. 25:15-29.
[iv] Craig S. Keener, A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew (Eerdmans, 1999), 633.
[v] Mark D. Roberts, No Holds Barred (Waterbrook Press, 2005), 4-7.
