[This is the manuscript of the message I delivered today in chapel at Harding U]
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)
Jesus’ prayer not only addresses the low value we place on complaint, especially in our prayers. It also addresses the way we so often pray for happiness—the kinds of things we believe will fulfill us, rather than for holiness—the kinds of things God might wish to do in us or through us.
Philip Yancey writes about a Japanese friend who visited him in the United States.[i] The friend told Yancey that he was shocked by the directness of our prayers. The American who prays, he told Yancey, “resembles a person who goes to Burger King and orders a ‘Whopper well-done, but hold the pickle and lettuce—with extra ketchup, please.’” By contrast, the friend told Yancey, the Japanese are “more like the tourist who walks into a foreign restaurant unable to read the menu. He finally communicates, with gestures and reference to a phrase book, that he would like the house specialty.” In other words, he cannot ask for what he really wants so he just tells the host to bring what he thinks is best.
There is something direct about our prayers in America. Directness is isn’t always wrong. It can be very appropriate in the right circumstances. But our directness often results from the fact that our prayers have one focus: our happiness. Too often prayer is about me getting exactly what I want in exactly the way I want it. It is me seeking what I believe will fulfill me. And one thing I know is that pain and suffering will never fulfill me. I would never ask for those things in prayer.
Yet in the Gethsemane prayer we find something wonderfully different. Jesus not only prays, “Let this cup pass. Let this cup pass. Let this cup pass.” Jesus also prays, “Your will be done. Your will be done. Your will be done.” Jesus is praying for something that will not bring happiness. He’s inviting the pain of the cross into his life. Why? Because he believes that through this suffering God’s will, God’s plan, God’s story will be furthered. Though Jesus laments, ultimately what matters most to Jesus is not his happiness but holiness. At its root, holiness is about being set apart for God’s purposes. Holiness has to do with what God wants to do in and through a person. And though Jesus was not happy about this and complained about it, in the end, what mattered most was being set apart for God’s use—even if it involved suffering.
If happiness was Jesus’ primary goal, the prayer would have ended after the third “Let this cup pass.” Instead, it continues: “Your will be done. Even though it will be painful, your will be done.” Jesus’ “your will be done” is him saying no to personal happiness and yes to God’s plans and purposes, even the most painful ones. Ultimately, the Gethsemane prayer is about learning to say yes to God, even when it hurts. It’s about embracing the pain which may be necessary in order for God’s plans and purposes to be fulfilled.
Jesus shows there are two possible ways of praying. The first prayer sounds like this: “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour?’” (Jn. 12:27 ESV) One way to pray when passing through a painful time is to say, “Save me from this hour.” Rescue me. Deliver me. Save me from this hour. Jesus prays something similar to this in the Garden: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me” (Lk. 22:42 ESV). This is another way of saying, “Save me from this hour.”
And that is a legitimate prayer. Those are permissible words to say when the hour draws near. When doing the right thing is going to demand a high price, it is appropriate to want a divine discount. When a doctor delivers a tough diagnosis, it is expected that we’d ask God for a second opinion. When a phone call brings fearful news, it is OK to beg God for this to be the wrong number. And when slipping into one of life’s tough transitions, it is fitting that we’d ask God to keep it from happening.
But there is a second possibility. One that is rarely taken. One demanding deep faith. Yet one that can change everything about our experience in moments of misery. This is the path Jesus takes as he prays about his hour. We hear it first in Jn. 12: “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name” (Jn. 12:27-28 ESV). Facing his hour, Jesus asks, “Father, glorify your name.” Jesus repeats this prayer later in Jn. 17: “When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you’” (Jn. 17:1 ESV).
This is what Jesus prays in the second half of the Gethsemane prayer. The Gethsemane prayer challenges us to acknowledge the role that suffering plays in the purposes of God. John Ortberg recently wrote about participating in a survey on spiritual formation.[ii] He and thousands of others were asked to identify a time in life when they grew most spiritually and to identify what contributed to that growth. He writes,
“The number one contributor to spiritual growth was not transformational teaching. It was not being in a small group. It was not reading deep books. It was not energetic worship experiences. It was not finding meaningful ways to serve. It was suffering. People said they grew more during seasons of loss, pain, and crisis than they did at any other time…One line of thinking is that adversity can lead to growth. Another line of thinking is that the highest levels of growth cannot be achieved without adversity. It may be that somehow adversity leads to growth in a way that nothing else does.”
Ortberg then asks us to imagine that we’re going to have a child. Imagine—you’re about to have a child! And God hands you the script of your newborn child’s life. He lets you see everything that will happen in her life before she lives one day of it. We read that she will have a learning disability in grade school. Reading, which comes easily for some, will be difficult for her. In high school, she will make many good friends. But one of them will die of cancer. After high school, she will get into her college of choice, but while there, she’ll lose a leg in a car crash. The loss will send her into deep depression. A few years later she’ll get a fantastic job but then lose that job in a recession. She’ll get married, but then go through the grief of separation.
Imagine that God hands you this script for your child before she is born. Now imagine that he hands you an eraser. He says, “You have five minutes to edit out anything you wish.” You have five minutes to change the script any way you want. You can remove anything you don’t like from that script. What would you do? Our gut reaction might be to erase all the pain—the reading disability, the loss of the friend to cancer, the car accident, the recession, and the marital separation. We’d probably want to erase all the suffering. Yet upon further reflection, we might ultimately leave it in. We might say, “Your will be done.” Why? Because we might realize that true, deep, lasting spiritual formation might not happen without that pain. We might remember that it was some of the pain in our own lives that allowed God to work most powerfully in and through us. We might finally recognize that it’s holiness and not merely happiness which matters in life.
The Gethsemane prayer reminds us that the greatest work of God—Jesus on the cross—only happened because Jesus said yes to pain in his prayer. Every time we are on the brink of season of suffering and we pray “Your will be done” we acknowledge that some of the greatest work of God in us or through us may lie only through that pain.
What enabled Jesus to pray as he did in the Garden? How could Jesus say “Let this cup pass” and “Your will be done”? In his volume Praying With Jesus George Martin argues that Jesus’ view of God as “Abba, Father” gave him the ability to utter this prayer.[iii] The Gethsemane prayer is the only prayer in which Jesus addresses God as “Abba.” Mark provides the details:
And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mk. 14:35-36 ESV).
Jesus could honestly scream “Remove this cup from me!” because he could also cry “Abba, Father.” Jesus could boldly state “Your will be done” only because he trusted in God as “Abba, Father.”
John W. Fountain is a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was formerly a national correspondent for The New York Times. This is his testimony in the NPR series, “This I Believe”:[iv]
I believe in God. Not that cosmic, intangible spirit-in-the-sky that Mama told me as a little boy “always was and always will be.” But the God who embraced me when Daddy disappeared from our lives—from my life at age four—the night police led him down the stairs, away from our front door, in handcuffs. The God who warmed me when we could see our breath inside our freezing apartment, when the gas was disconnected in the dead of another wind-whipped Chicago winter, and there was no food, little hope, and no hot water.
The God who held my hand when I witnessed boys in my ‘hood swallowed by the elements, by death, and by hopelessness; who claimed me when I felt like “no-man’s son,” amid the absence of any man to wrap his arms around me and tell me, “everything’s going to be okay,” to speak proudly of me, to call me son.
I believe in God, God the Father, embodied in his Son Jesus Christ. The God who allowed me to feel his presence—whether by the warmth that filled my belly like hot chocolate on a cold afternoon, or that voice, whenever I found myself in the tempest of life’s storms, telling me (even when I was told I was “nothing”) that I was something, that I was his, and that even amid the desertion of the man who gave me his name and DNA and little else, I might find in Him sustenance.
I believe in God, the God who I have come to know as father, as Abba—Daddy.
It wasn’t until many years later, standing over my father’s grave for a conversation long overdue, that my tears flowed. I told him about the man I had become. I told him about how much I wished he had been in my life. And I realized fully that in his absence, I had found another. Or that he—God the Father, God my Father—had found me.
May our hope in God as “Abba, Father” lead us to embrace and practice the Gethsemane prayer of Jesus. May we too learn to pray, “Let this cup pass” and “Your will be done.”
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[i] PhilipYancey, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? (Zondervan, 2010), 107.
[ii] John Ortberg “Don’t Waste a Crisis” Leadership Jan. 31, 2011, www.christianitytoday.com
[iii] George Martin, Praying With Jesus (Loyola Press, 2000), 96.
[iv] Excerpted from “The God Who Embraced Me,” All Things Considered, www.npr.org (posted 11-28-2005)
