| Gethsemane |
 When we hear the name most of us remember this painting made popular when we were growing up, depicting the standard "white" Jesus in regal looking robes kneeling at a rock somewhere and looking more like He is having a pleasant chit-chat with God than struggling under a very real temptation to avoid God's will with regards to the cross - a temptation so profound that Christ is near crushed beneath the weight of it - sweating as it were, great drops of blood in the effort to obey.
Not that a more exacting and bloodied image - a more "precise depiction" of that event could generate anything more than sentiment, pity, or empathy. Surely we might cast our eyes upon a perfect rendition of some peasant Jew agonizing in prayer, and agree that this image captures something of what it may have been like - but whatever image we present we will immediately project into it the cause of that agony, the burden of that prayer. Whatever fetch we use to focus our thoughts about what happened there - most of us will simply think that Christ agonized in prayer, his agony had to do with submitting Himself to the cross, and we make a mental footnote about it, that this happened just prior to Judas and the soldiers and whatnot coming to get Him.
It becomes just one scene in the greater story, and some of us have been inclined in the past to romanticize the whole scene - turning it into something to be admired because of its poetic and perfect nobility. We picture it, so that we can admire it.
But how many of us understand that none of us can go to the cross and be crucified with Christ if we don't agonize in prayer along with Christ in Gethsemane? Do we imagine that we can avoid what Christ could not? Do we imagine that obedience will spring up in us without a struggle? That surrender will come to us without agony?
Think well on Gethsemane my brothers and sisters - for I fancy that no one goes to the cross who hasn't spent a long night in the Garden at Gethsemane. |
posted by Daniel @
1:47 PM
 
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| 2 Comments: |
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Amen. In many ways the battle was fought and won in the garden - the dreaded cup of God's wrath was looked into...imagine the sheer horror of seeing the raging fury of the wrath of the living God and knowing that to drink it meant to 'drain the dregs of the goblet that makes men stagger...'(Isaiah 51)
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Amen, brother. We indeed have a cross to bear—not the one Jesus bore—and it is just as much a struggle for us to say "Thy will, not mine, be done."
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Amen. In many ways the battle was fought and won in the garden - the dreaded cup of God's wrath was looked into...imagine the sheer horror of seeing the raging fury of the wrath of the living God and knowing that to drink it meant to 'drain the dregs of the goblet that makes men stagger...'(Isaiah 51)