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PRAY! JESUS DID - A SERMON ON LUKE 22: 39-46
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E. D.
Trueblood is one of my favourite Christian philosophers.
He wrote a book called A Place to Stand. He
describes the book as "the outcome of more than
forty years of mental struggle" as a Christian who
is also a philosopher. One of those struggles had to do
with prayer. Here is how he starts his chapter on the
reality of prayer: |
Graham Cole has been Principal of Ridley College
since 1991 and begins lecturing |
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Only in maturity did there dawn upon me the
tremendous significance of the fact that Jesus prayed.
This came finally as something which tipped the balance
in my intellectual struggle. Though I already felt deeply
the importance of prayer, I felt to an equal degree the
obstacles involved in its practice. . . . But when I
realized that Christ actually prayed, all was different.
The record shows that He prayed at each serious crisis of
His public career . . . (p. 82). |
at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School,
Illinois, in the New Year. |
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One of
those serious crises took place in the Garden of
Gethsemane as Luke tells us in Luke 22: 39-46. The
context is the Passion Week. Soon Jesus will be betrayed.
Soon He will be tried. Soon He will be killed. This is
how the passage runs in the NRSV: |
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39 He
came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of
Olives; and the disciples followed him. 40 When he
reached the place, he said to them, "Pray that you
may not enter the time of trial [ or temptation]."
41 Then he withdrew from them about a stone's throw,
knelt down, and prayed. 42 "Father, if you are
willing, remove this cup form me; yet not my will but
yours be done." 43 Then an angel from heaven
appeared to him and gave him strength. 44 In anguish he
prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great
drops of blood falling down to the ground. 45 When he got
up from prayer, he came to his disciples and found them
sleeping because of grief, 46 and he said to them,
"Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may
not come into the time of trial [or temptation]." |
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Let me ask
two questions of our passage. What may we learn of prayer
from this story from Luke? What may we learn of the Son
of God who so prayed? |
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Prayer and
Adversity |
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Let's
start with prayer and adversity. Recall the context. As
early as v. 3 we are told that Satan had invaded Judas'
life who then engineers the betrayal of His master. Then
in v. 15 we find Jesus Himself, in the context of that
first Lord's Supper, speaking of His coming sufferings.
Next in v. 24 we see the disciples squabbling over their
status in the corporation as it were. Finally in v. 31
Jesus tells Peter that Satan had targeted Peter and the
other disciples. Indeed Peter would soon deny His Lord
(v.34). |
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This then
is the backdrop to our passage: conspiracy, betrayal,
squabbling and denial or in other words, adversity.
Against this backdrop Jesus says, "Pray!" (v.
40). For what do you do when the oven is turned up to 500
degrees and you're lying on the baking tray? What do you
do when the pressure of opposition to the will of God is
such that the temptation is to shift your ground? What do
you do when the heat is on? According to Jesus, Pray! Put
another way when the heat is on, you relate all the more
deeply to your God in prayer. Just as Jesus relates all
the more deeply to His heavenly Father in prayer in the
garden. |
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Significantly
it seems to me our Lord's prayer and the prayer He
encourages from His disciples is not about escaping
adversity. It is not about asking God to turn the heat
off. Rather prayer becomes a strategy for staying aligned
with the will of God in the face of trail and the
temptation that comes with it. We stay aligned when the
forces of darkness want us to shift ground and enter into
the temptation to abandon the will of God. |
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Does not
each of us know something of that pressure to shift
ground? Of course, only a fraction's worth compared to
Jesus' own experience, but for us, no less real. Don't we
know something of it when our spouse or our parents or
our friends subtly or blatantly make us feel
uncomfortable because of our Christian commitment? As
Paley said, "Who can refute a sneer?" I
remember vividly the day when I told my late father that
I was going to train for the ministry. He put his head in
his hands and lamented, "O God, not a bishop in the
family!" |
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What do we
see in our Lord's case? He knows the pressure. Indeed it
was there much earlier in Luke's story when Jesus was
tempted in the wilderness in Luke 4, tempted three times
in fact and now in Luke 22 here it is again. See how very
human Jesus is in the face of the pressure. "Father,
if possible, another way please." There is no
religious fanaticism here, no Tom Cruise "Mission
Impossible" heroics. There is no obsession with
martyrdom but instead a full realization of the horror of
the cross to come. |
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So then,
adversity is the context of this prayer in the garden.
But not just adversity. |
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Prayer
and Possibility
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Let's note
Jesus in the garden also explores prayer and possibility. |
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Jesus
lives in an open universe, not a closed one. A universe
open to human decision-making which makes a difference. A
universe open to devilish decision-making which makes a
difference. And one open to divine decision-making which
makes all the difference. |
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Christian
philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, " A man's life
is lived forwards, but only understood backwards." I
wonder if it is because of this reality that we tend to
look back and read an inevitability into human affairs
that's misleading. So we look back after nearly 2,000
years to the cross and see only inevitability, only
necessity. But Jesus in the garden was open to other
possibilities. As He said in one of the other gospels,
"Don't you think that I cannot right now appeal to
my Father and He will at once send twelve legions of
angels to rescue me?" (Matt. 26:53). |
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We must be
careful as Christians not to so accent the sovereignty of
God over human affairs that we reduce ourselves, though
we bear the divine image remember, to cartoon strip
characters. As though we simply play out a script written
elsewhere, fully drawn elsewhere, fully produced
elsewhere but only now playing in time. But as I
understand the Bible, the living God is engaged in a
living way with His creation. There is divine
decision-making. Of course there is. But there is also
openness. |
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What a
revolution in our prayer life it might cause if we really
believed that our prayers may be part of the divine
remaking of creation. As Pascal said, "God has
instituted prayer that we might have the dignity of being
causes in His world." Jesus explores both that
openness and exhibits that dignity. |
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And yet
having said that I must immediately go on to speak of
prayer and necessity. |
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Prayer
and Necessity
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"Prayer
and possibility" is only part of the story. Because
Jesus having explored the possibility of another way,
another godly way, affirms, "yet not my will but
yours be done" (v.42). Jesus really is the godly Son
of God for whom the bottom line is the Father's will and
in that will there is no other way than the way of the
cross. That way means nothing less than draining the cup
of God's judgement upon human sin as spoken of in the
Psalms (like Psalm 75:8) and the prophets (like Isaiah
51:17). |
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Jesus
makes it plain that there was a prophetic necessity about
His coming death. Indeed the cross and the death He was
to die there were to be the fulfillment of ancient
prediction and the fulfillment of His own prophetic words
spoken earlier in Luke's story. In Luke 9 He spoke of
Himself as the Son of Man for whom it was necessary (dei)
to suffer and to die (vv. 21-22). |
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I wonder
what might happen if I spent more time thinking through
the story of Gethsemane and of the Christ who prayed
there with sweat like great drops of blood as one ancient
version has it. I wonder whether then I might realize
afresh the grandeur of the love of God who spared not His
own Son and of the Son did not spare Himself. For what we
are seeing in our story of Jesus praying is how prayer
and responsibility embrace. |
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Prayer
and Responsibility
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The
temptation, as we have seen, was for Jesus to be
deflected from the will of God. But in praying He stays
aligned with that very will and takes to Himself the
responsibility of the cross and with it He soon drains
the cup of divine judgement for our sakes. Thus He will
do for us what we could not do for ourselves. He makes a
way back for us to the God from whom we have moved away. |
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So Jesus
stayed aligned. But what happened to those disciples?
They sleep. Jesus twice – like a pair of brackets to
the story - commands them to pray and not enter into
temptation's grip (v. 40 and v. 46). But what do we see?
We see Peter in particular, the one who said so
categorically that he would go into death for Jesus (v.
33) sleep rather than pray and soon he denies His Lord
three times. The bold Peter of v. 33 becomes the weeping
Peter of v. 62. He shifted ground in the face of
adversity. That temptation remains for us, does it not? |
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Some years
ago I met a remarkable Christian woman. She was from
Boston and on study leave with her husband in Cambridge.
She had faced adversity in her life on a scale I have yet
to face. As a relatively young mother with small children
she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. As she lay in
hospital a friend visited and said to her that this
experience would either make her a better person or a
bitter one. She chose the better way. Let me suggest that
a key difference to how we respond to adversity may lie
in whether we really hear Jesus' word to His disciples in
the garden or not. "Pray lest temptation overwhelm
you" as the New Testament scholar Jeremias
translates v. 40. In adversity our responsibility is to
stay aligned with the will of God. |
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So then
what have we seen in answer to our two questions? |
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We have
seen that prayer is not talking to oneself but to the
living God and that adversity brings with it the
temptation to shift from Him. But for the godly person
adversity becomes the occasion for an even deeper embrace
of the will of God. There is nothing glib or facile about
this for as we heard in one ancient line of
interpretation Jesus sweated as it were "blood and
tears" (v. 44). |
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What about
the Lord Himself? We have seen that His humanity is real.
His is no cartoon humanity. Do you know what I mean? The
language is human. The movements are human. For Jesus the
pressure was real. For Jesus the struggle in the garden
was real. And for us His triumph has secured a destiny
that no darkness can extinguish. For that triumph, as the
Letter to the Hebrews puts it, reveals to us the Son of
God whose prayers were heard in that garden and who
learned obedience through what He suffered (Hebrews 5:
7-10). And that obedience - even to the extent of death a
cross – is the hinge on which our salvation turns, a
hinge no rust can touch. So pray! |
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