[Machine transcription]
Jesus said,
“My soul is very sorrowful even unto 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.”
Amen. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear saints, our reading tonight takes us from the upper room where Jesus instituted the New Testament in His blood and gave us the holy sacrament of the altar in which we eat and drink His body and His blood for the forgiveness of our sins.
Fantastic. And then He went with His disciples outside the upper room, outside into Jerusalem, outside the city walls, down through the Kidron Valley, across the brook, and up the other side of the Mount of Olives into a garden.
There’s an olive tree garden, the garden of Gethsemane; Jesus, the text tells us, would often go there with His disciples. It’s a curious thing that, and I read this somewhere in one of the old Bible commentaries, that during the time of the Passover, which this was, during the time of the Passover there were so many lambs being slaughtered in the temple of Jerusalem which drained down into the Kidron Valley. There were so many slaughters happening that the brook Kidron would run red with the blood of the lambs.
So you can imagine that Jesus and His disciples are passing through this bloody brook to get over to the garden, singing a hymn as they go. And then they come into the garden and Jesus tells the disciples to wait here, sit down here and wait, and He takes three of His inner circle, Peter and the sons of Zebedee, James and John, and He goes with them a stone’s throw away, and He says, “You watch with Me, pray.”
And then Jesus goes a little distance from them, and He falls on the ground, His face to the ground, pressed into the dirt. He told His disciples, now imagine this, He told His disciples, “My soul is very sorrowful even unto death.” And so earnest were His prayers and so deep was His suffering that He was sweating blood.
You have to see it: the blood starting to show up in His hair and in His robes as He’s in such fantastic distress that an angel has to come and strengthen Him so that He can finish His prayers. He prays for a while and comes back and finds the disciples asleep. He wakes them up.
“The flesh is weak, the Spirit is willing. Watch and pray that you won’t fall into temptation.”
In other words, if you can’t stay awake to pray for me, stay awake and pray for yourselves. He goes away and prays a second time and comes back and finds them sleeping again. He lets them sleep and goes back to have this earnest communion with His Father.
And then His prayers ended, He stands up. I just think you have to see it with the mud made out of the dirt and the blood already pressed into His face where He was on the ground, and He stands up and He comes to His disciples and He wakes them up.
Now it’s the middle of the night and He says to them, “Stand up, my betrayer is at hand.” And as they start to stir from their sleep, they notice that Judas is leading a band of thugs. They came with lanterns and swords and pitchforks. They weren’t Roman soldiers. Maybe they were rented-out Roman soldiers, but most likely they were kind of temple guards that had just been raised that night to do this dirty work—a little mob, and Judas leads them to Jesus.
He had given them a symbol, a signal. He said, “Whoever I kiss, that’s the one, arrest him.” And so he comes up to Jesus and says to him, “Rabbi,” and he kisses him on the cheek.
So they step forward to arrest Jesus. “Who are you seeking?” Jesus says.
“Jesus of Nazareth.”
And Jesus says, “I am.” I think it says in the text, “I am He,” but in the Greek it’s “ego, a me.” I am. It’s the divine name. When Moses said, when the Lord said to Moses in the burning bush, “My name is I am,” same.
Jesus says, “I am,” and they all fall backwards, just knocked over by the power of His Word. So, they all kind of stand back up, and I imagine they advance a little more tenuously the second time, knocked over once already, and Jesus asks the same question again, “Who are you seeking?”
And I imagine they were a little more timid when they answered, “Jesus of Nazareth,” and He says the same… Now, look at this. He says the same words again, “I am,” and nothing happens. They don’t fall over, they stay standing.
And it’s Jesus’ way of saying, “I’m letting you have Me. I’m not going to use My divine authority to protect Myself. It’s for this hour I’ve come into the world. If you seek Me, let these go.”
John tells us that that fulfilled the prophecy, that none whom You gave were lost, but instead of running for it, the disciples stand there, and Peter with his kind of tempestuous boldness pulls out his sword and he goes to swipe at one of the guys, and instead of hitting him on the head, he hits him in the ear, cuts off his ear, his right ear.
In fact, the text is so detailed at this point, we wonder why. It not only tells us what ear he cut off, his right ear, not his left ear, it even tells us the man’s name, Malchus. It makes us wonder if Malchus used his healed right ear to hear the word of Jesus and become a Christian.
Later on, he cuts off his ear, and Jesus immediately touches his ear, and He heals it, and He says to Peter, “Put away your sword. Don’t you know that those who live by the sword die by the sword?” And then these words, Jesus says, “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given Me?”
And so the disciples run, and Jesus, if you could see it in your imagination, Jesus is bound with ropes, His hands tied behind His back so they could drag Him back to the city for His trials.
Now in these readings, there’s a lot of talk about cups. Jesus took the cup when they had supped and when He had given it to them, He said, “Take and drink. This is the cup of the New Testament of My blood which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.”
And then Jesus goes into the garden and prays three times about the cup, “Let it pass from Me.” There’s a cup that He was to drink that He did not want to drink, and then at last at the very end, He says, “Shall I not drink this cup that the Father has given Me?”
Now we talked about this cup in the sermon a couple of weeks ago, that this cup—I mean we have to ask the question, what’s in the cup? What’s in the cup is your sin and mine, what’s in the cup is God’s wrath and anger over our transgressions, what’s in the cup is hell itself, and Jesus doesn’t want to taste it; He doesn’t want to drink it. But He does.
So that the cup of God’s wrath is empty; there’s none left. Look, when you think that God has given you to drink from the cup of His anger, when you think that He’s giving you to drink from the cup of His wrath, you just have to know that Jesus finished that. That’s what He said on the cross, “It’s finished.” That cup is empty; there’s no more anger.
If you’re drinking a cup that you don’t want to be drinking, it might be a cup of this fallen world; it might be a cup of your own mistakes; it might be a cup of God’s discipline, perhaps, but it is not the cup of God’s wrath. Jesus drank that cup.
But there’s one word that I want to focus on tonight that I want to make sure that we do not miss. It’s the word, if. Jesus says, “My Father, if it be possible, if it be possible, let the cup pass from Me.”
Now, I do not know, dear saints, how it can be that Jesus doesn’t know that He has to drink the cup. I don’t understand it, and I don’t think anybody can understand it. But in the mystery of the divine nature combined to the human nature of Christ, in the mystery of the incarnation, there is a way that Jesus, who knows everything, cannot know something.
And at this moment in the garden, when He’s on His face praying for relief, when He’s in the dirt begging the Father that the cup would pass from Him, the knowledge that His suffering and death, that His drinking the cup is the only way to win the salvation of the world—that knowledge is gone from Him.
He’s hidden it from Himself; he’s arranged so that he wouldn’t know it. So that Jesus doesn’t know if there’s another way to accomplish man’s salvation. He doesn’t know if there’s another possibility; he doesn’t know if there’s another plan that they could put together to make it all happen. He just doesn’t know it, so he prays,
“Father, if at all possible, if there’s any other way, if we can come up with any other plan, if we can make any other arrangements, could we please do that? But not my will, but Your will be done.”
In other words, your Jesus was willing to do whatever it took to rescue you. The book of Hebrews says it like this: It says that Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame for the joy that was set before Him.
Dear saints, Jesus didn’t want the cross; He didn’t desire the cross; He didn’t want the beatings and the floggings. He most especially did not want to taste the wrath of God and the forsakenness of the Father and the beating that would be brought down upon Him by divine justice.
He did not want the shame; He despised that, and yet He was willing to drink the cup. He was willing to endure it all because there was a joy that was set before Him. And, dear saints, that joy is you, it’s you, and your life, and your salvation, and the forgiveness of all of your sins.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had to pick up a cup full of something so disgusting that it made you wrench just the smell of it. Can you imagine Jesus looking at the cup filled with God’s wrath, thinking, “I don’t want to even get close to it,” and yet, “If this is what it takes, this is what I’ll do for you.”
So God be praised that Jesus, your Lord Jesus, has humbled Himself to do the Father’s pleasure here, to drink the cup of the wrath of God down to the very dregs in order to have you as His own dear child.
And then He gives you a cup filled not with wrath but with peace, filled not with anger but with joy, filled not with hell but with heaven itself. He says, “Take and drink; your sins are forgiven.”
May God grant it, Amen. The peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
