Gethsemane

Jesus said in Mark 13 verse 32, But about that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

Be on guard, be alert, you do not know when that time will come.

It's like a man going away.

He leaves his house and puts his servants in charge, each with their assigned task.

He tells the one at the door to keep watch.

Therefore, keep watch, because you do not know when the owner of the house will come back, whether in the evening or at midnight or when the rooster crows or at dawn.

If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping.

What I say to you, I say to everyone, watch.

That word watch in English is the Greek, gregoreo.

It means to watch, to be alert.

Yeah, I studied Greek for one year just to find that out.

It means be ready, stay awake, stay alert.

That's what this word watch means.

Now, hold that thought in your head for a second because we're going to come back to that.

I want to tell you a story from January last year.

I was in Athens in Greece.

And on the second or third night in Athens, we were all fully jet-lagged.

Athens is nine hours behind, which is almost completely the opposite to Sydney, and I barely slept at all one night.

So very early in the morning, 3 or 4 or 5 a.m.

I got up and with two others went for a walk around Athens.

And it was actually the coolest way to experience a city to walk around in the pitch black with no one else around.

We were awake while the whole city was asleep.

So we're walking around Athens for a couple of hours, and finally we come across this cafe.

And being Sydney living coffee lovers, of course we wanted a coffee to begin the day with.

And so I got a coffee from this cafe and a little pastry.

And I've got a photo here of me with my coffee, looking pretty chuffed.

The guy at the cafe taught me how to say thank you in Greek.

It was the first interaction I'd had one-on-one with a Greek person, and he said, ευκαριστό.

He had this really deep voice.

Ευκαριστό is how you say thank you in Greek.

The cafe behind me is where I got the coffee from, and the name of the cafe is Gregores, which is Gregory's.

It's a franchise.

That word, Gregores, is the different form of the same word that Jesus uses here.

It means watch, be ready, be alert.

I thought it was kind of ironic that a place that serves coffee at 5 a.m.

in Athens has a name which means wake up.

This is the coffee that I had in Athens.

Our main passage tonight is the passage that Kathleen read out for us, which is the story of Gethsemane and the arrest of Jesus.

But before we jump into that passage and work through it, I want to go back to the passage that I opened our message with, because I think looking at that passage will help us to frame and understand Gethsemane.

So I'll read the last part of the first passage, Mark 13, 35.

Therefore, Jesus said, Keep watch, because you do not know when the owner of the house will come back, whether in the evening or at midnight or when the rooster crows or at dawn.

If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping.

What I say to you, I say to everyone, G'day, G'day, oh, watch.

What I like about this passage is Jesus, as compiled by the author Mark, gives us four time stamps.

He says, evening, midnight, when the rooster crows, which is a first century idiom for the hours just before dawn, and dawn itself.

And what is even cooler, I think, is that after this passage, Mark has chosen to structure the story of the last night of Jesus' life based on this time formula of the four stages.

So we can see the evening is Mark 14 verse 17.

It says, When evening came, Jesus arrived with the twelve.

That is, in the upper room, the last supper, Jesus broke the bread and the cup.

He said, One of you will betray me.

They all said, No, I won't betray you.

Midnight is the Gethsemane scene, which we'll come to in a second.

When the rooster crows is when the rooster crowed, literally, Mark 14, 72.

Immediately the rooster crowed the second time.

Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken to him.

Before the rooster crows twice, you will disown me three times.

And Peter broke down and wept.

The dawn part of the story is Mark 15 verse 1.

Very early in the morning, which in Greek is one word, and that word is the same word translated dawn.

Very early in the morning, the chief priests with the elders, the teachers of the law and the whole Sanhedrin made their plans.

So they bound Jesus, led him away and handed him over to Pilate.

Mark has given us, at the end of chapter 13, the time formula to understand the story of Jesus last night on earth.

And throughout the whole night, through the four stages of the night, there's this repeated word, Gregoreo, that Jesus says, stay awake, be alert, be constantly ready, be watchful throughout the night.

So we'll zoom in now on the story of Gethsemane and try and hold everything I've just said as context for Gethsemane.

I think the story of The Garden of Gethsemane, which is found in all four Gospels, was experienced very differently by the different people in the garden.

So we're going to kind of look at the three POVs, the point of view of three of the characters in the story.

Firstly, the disciples' experience of Gethsemane.

I think we could say that the disciples came into Gethsemane pretty confident.

The verse immediately before Gethsemane in Mark 14, 31, Jesus had said, You will all fall away.

And then it says in 31, Peter insisted emphatically.

And remember, it's Peter who says this.

Peter insisted emphatically, Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.

And all the others said the same.

They're coming into Gethsemane confident.

They will remain.

They will be with Jesus.

They will not leave him.

And then they enter Gethsemane.

This is verse 32, which Kathleen read for us.

They went to a place called Gethsemane.

It's a garden on the Mount of Olives, or probably in the valley of the Mount of Olives, just a short distance from Jerusalem.

They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, Sit here while I pray.

He took Peter, James, and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled.

My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, he said to them.

Stay here and keep watch.

You'll never guess what that Greek word is, keep watch.

Gere goreo, stay alert, stay awake.

I think we have every reason to believe that disciples wanted to obey.

They had just insisted emphatically, we will not disown you, and so they enter the garden.

Jesus says, stay awake.

I reckon they would have said, sure, we'll stay awake the whole night, the whole night.

They had every good intention.

The spirit was willing, and yet, in 37, after Jesus went forward to pray, he came back to them, and it says, then he returned to his disciples and he found them sleeping.

Simon, Jesus said, are you asleep?

Couldn't you keep watch for one hour?

I think it's significant that Jesus calls Peter Simon here, and that's why I told you to hold it in your minds, that when Peter insisted emphatically, I will not disown you, that was the rock talking, which is what Peter means in Greek, petros.

But now it's Simon because he is not acting like a rock in this moment.

He is acting like his old self.

Simon is the one falling asleep.

Verse 39.

Once more Jesus went away and prayed the same thing.

When he came back, he again found them sleeping because their eyes were heavy.

They didn't know what to say to him.

Returning the third time, Jesus said to them, Are you still sleeping and resting?

Three times, Jesus went away to pray and he told them to stay awake.

Gregoreo, he went away and returned and found them sleeping three times.

We're talking about the disciples who were so confident coming into Gethsemane that they would not abandon Jesus.

They can't even stay awake or stay alert when he tells them to.

I think the conclusion that Jesus says is quite wise and quite telling.

In verse 38, Jesus says, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

The disciples had every intention of following Jesus, of being obedient, of staying awake.

Their spirit was willing.

They wanted to stay awake, but their flesh was weak, and so they fell asleep.

They were undone, I think, by their conscience.

By their context and their contents.

For context, it's midnight.

The disciples have had a huge week in Jerusalem.

They are tired.

The text said their eyes were heavy.

They have a natural desire for sleep because it's midnight.

The context is against them.

And for contents, as in the contents of their body, at the last supper, just a couple of hours before this story, it's highly likely that they would have had four glasses of wine.

They are sleepy.

It's midnight, they are full of wine, and they fall asleep.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weakened by the context and the contents.

Is that relatable?

I find that highly relatable.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

All of us fall under pressure from the context of temptation and the context of desires inside us.

It feels like you can't even walk down the street without a bus driving past with some confronting image wanting to take you away from the Lord.

And for contents, we are filled with desires for things other than God.

Now, desire is not a bad thing, as St.

Augustine said, desire is a good thing, but the problem is when we have disordered desires.

We desire things above God.

All of us know that our spirit can be willing, but our flesh can be weak.

We fall to our context and our contents.

When we enter the metaphorical midnight of temptation and sometimes literally midnight, we fall because our flesh is weak.

The disciples fell asleep, but more tragically, they fell away as well.

Jesus said before our passage in Mark 14 verse 27, you will all fall away.

But Peter and the others insisted, we will not fall away.

Jesus said, you will all fall away.

And Jesus, when he walked into the garden, he walked in with his full band of disciples, the band of brothers.

He walked into the garden with all of them.

And we read in Mark 14, 43.

Just as Jesus was speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, appeared.

With him was a crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders.

If we skip down to verse 50.

Then everyone deserted him and fled.

A young man wearing nothing but a linen garment was following Jesus.

When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garden behind.

The story of Gethsemane, the narrative arc of Gethsemane, goes from the twelve to the three to the one.

Jesus entered the garden with his twelve, or maybe eleven, because Judas had gone.

But with all of his disciples minus one, but Jesus leaves Gethsemane alone.

Gethsemane is the point when the disciples fully split up.

It's like the breaking of the fellowship at the end of the First Lord of the Rings film.

These are disciples who earlier in their life left everything behind to follow Jesus.

And now we see in verse 52, in the case of the naked streaker, he left everything behind to get away from Jesus.

We're seeing a total opposite response from the disciples at this point in the story.

Their spirit was so willing to be obedient to Jesus, but their flesh was weak.

They fell asleep and they fell away.

And so Jesus emerges from Gethsemane alone, and he is alone until he hangs on the cross, until after the resurrection.

So how did Jesus experience Gethsemane?

That's the second perspective that I want to look at.

Now, Jesus gets semeny.

How...

Jesus always knew that he was going to die.

When you read the story of the Gospel of Mark, three times Jesus explicitly says he will die, and he says that to his disciples.

The first time is Mark 8.31.

Jesus began to teach them that the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.

He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

The second time is Mark 9.31.

Jesus said to them, The son of man is going to be delivered into the hands of men.

They will kill him and after three days he will rise.

The third time is Mark 10.33.

We're going up to Jerusalem, Jesus said, and the son of man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law.

They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him, and kill him.

Three days later, he will rise.

Jesus knew he was going to die.

He always knew that that was coming.

And yet, when we read the story of Gethsemane, he seems so affected, so emotional in a way that we have never seen Jesus react in all the stories of the Gospels.

It says in verse 33, Jesus began to be deeply distressed and troubled.

My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death, he said to the disciples.

This emotion in Jesus stands, I think, in stark contrast with other classical philosophers and philosophy systems like the Epicureans and the Stoics.

They had teachings which said that it is noble for a person to walk calmly into death.

Socrates, the great philosopher, according to our histories of the classical period, was condemned to death in a court and he drank a cup of poison totally cool.

He embraced death.

Many of the other Stoics embraced death in a calm and collected way.

And yet here's Jesus, so affected.

It says in, I think it's Luke's Gospel, that he is sweating drops of blood.

He is under so much pressure.

He is so affected by his, by something.

And what is that thing?

Well, I think we see a clue in Mark 14, 35.

Going a little further, Jesus fell to the ground and prayed that if possible, the hour might pass from him.

Abba, father, he said, everything is possible for you.

Take this cup from me, yet not what I will, but what you will, he said.

It's the cup is the difference.

The cup in the Old Testament is this picture of the wrath of God against sin.

And often when the prophets talk about the cup, they're talking about the future outpouring of the full wrath of God against the sinfulness of humanity.

That is what Jesus is looking ahead.

He is looking at the cup, and that is what is making him so affected.

Isaiah 51 is one of the prophets who talks about the cup.

It says, Therefore hear this, you afflicted one, made drunk but not with wine.

This is what your sovereign Lord says, your God who defends his people.

See, I have taken out of your hand the cup that made you stagger.

From that cup, the goblet of my wrath, you will never drink again.

I will put it into the hands of your tormentors, who said to you, fall prostrate that we may walk on you.

And you made your back like the ground, like a street to be walked on.

The cup that Jesus was going to face is the wrath of God against sin.

That is what is affecting him so much.

And so I don't think it was the prospect of physical pain that caused him to react the way that he did, but the wrath of God.

And also, the idea of being separated from his father.

Jesus, throughout the story of the Gospel, up until this point, has been constantly in prayer, constantly in closest communion with the Father.

And now standing in the Valley of Gethsemane, Jesus is looking ahead to the cross, and he's thinking of what it would be to bear the wrath of God and to be separated from him.

On the cross, Jesus will go to say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And I think that that full reality is coming on to Jesus right now in this story.

It wasn't the physical pain, but it was separation from the Father and coming under the wrath of God against sin.

That was what was different about Jesus' death.

He was going to face something that no one ever faced.

So what does he pray?

In Gethsemane, we read the prayer is pretty much, Is there any other way?

Is there any way that this cup could go past me?

Is there another option, Father?

I wonder if Jesus in that moment was thinking of the story of Abraham sacrificing his son, Isaac.

We remember the story.

Abraham had bound his son, Isaac, and placed him on the altar, and he had the knife about to sacrifice his own son because God told him to.

And just as he was about to do it, the angel said, Stop!

And God himself provided a ram caught by its horns in the thicket.

And so Abraham did not sacrifice his son, but sacrificed the ram instead.

I wonder if Jesus is thinking, Father, is there any other sacrifice that could do?

Anyone else who can take the cup of your wrath?

Is there any other way?

And yet through prayer, three times through prayer, I think Jesus finds the answer that there is no one else.

Because the ram caught by its horn in the thicket, in fact, every animal that was ever sacrificed, it got its power from Him.

It was all pointing to Jesus.

He is the Lamb of God who was to be slain for the sin of the world.

He is the ultimate sacrifice.

The cup cannot pass from Jesus, because He is the only one who can bear the cup, and who can come through on the other side alive.

And so Jesus says, not my will, but yours be done, Father.

And He rises from His prayer, from His agony, with a willing spirit and a strong flesh.

And then even as His disciple, who He had loved for three years, even as that disciple betrayed Him to His face with a kiss, handing Him over to be executed, Jesus continued to walk alone.

Even as His other band of brothers, the disciples, even as they fell away and abandoned Him, denied ever knowing Him, Jesus continued to the cross.

Strengthened by His prayer in Gethsemane, Jesus walked alone from the garden.

That was Jesus' Gethsemane.

What about, finally, our Gethsemane?

You and I, who follow Jesus, sometimes find ourselves in a Gethsemane of sorts, in an hour of temptation, in the midnight of faith, in a vulnerable season.

The temptation, I mean in two ways.

Firstly, the kind of micro scale of temptation, you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired, tempted to sin, to lash out, but then also the macro scale of temptation to forsake faith and run away from God altogether.

Both of those temptations are our Gethsemane.

And you just agreed with me 10 minutes ago that we have all found our spirit can be willing, but our flesh is weak.

We have found that.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

And when we look at the disciples' experience of Gethsemane and Jesus' experience of Gethsemane, they are totally different, completely opposite.

And I think we can learn something from both of them about how we are to approach our Gethsemane.

We read that the disciples came into Gethsemane with a willing spirit, but it wasn't enough to overcome their context and their contents.

So they succumbed to the flesh, and the flesh is what the disciples did.

Jesus, on the other hand, he came into Gethsemane maybe with a wavering spirit, but Jesus fell down on his knees more.

He fell down prostrate before the Father in prayer.

He surrendered to the Father.

The disciples fell away, all of them.

They fell away into faithlessness, but Jesus walked out of Gethsemane alone in faithfulness.

And so the two options before all of us, when we go through our own Gethsemane, our own temptation, our own midnight of faith, is succumb to the flesh or surrender to the Father.

Those are the two options we have.

Succumb to sin or sleep or cynicism or apathy or lies, anything.

Succumb to the flesh or surrender to the Father.

The word succumb in the dictionary means to fight against something and to do your best, but eventually to realize you can't beat it, and so you succumb and you let it beat you.

Surrender, on the other hand, is a tactical, strategic move.

Surrender means you look at the threat coming ahead and you say, I cannot beat that.

I will surrender.

Succumbing to the flesh or surrendering to the Father.

Those are the two options for our Gethsemane.

Jesus prayed in the Lord's Prayer, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

There is power when we surrender to the Father, when we say we do not have the strength in our flesh to fight this Gethsemane.

But we surrender to you, Father, and rely on your power, your Spirit.

Because even though our Spirit may be willing, our flesh is weak.

So we must surrender to the Father, surrender to his power.

And as we surrender to the Father in the middle of our Gethsemane, I think we remember how the story goes from Gethsemane, that Jesus walked alone from the valley of Gethsemane to the hill of Golgotha, where he came under the full wrath of God, when he was forsaken and separate from the Father.

Jesus walked into death and he kicked out the back wall of the cave of death, and then he returned to us in resurrection power and new life, so that when you and I walk into our Gethsemane, we can know that he is with us.

As Psalm 23 says, even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, there is a way that we can fear no evil.

He is with us.

He beat Gethsemane.

Jesus beat sin, death and the devil, so that when we go through our temptation, if we would surrender to the Father, surrender to his power, he might deliver us through the valley of Gethsemane, through the temptation.

That's how you make it through.

Not in fighting in your own strength, because if you do that, you will eventually succumb, but in surrendering to the Father.

That's how we get through our Gethsemane.

The call of Jesus throughout the whole night, in the evening, midnight, when the rooster crows and at dawn is, Gregoireo, stay awake, stay alert, keep fighting, be constantly ready.

Not ready to put these ones up and fight the sin, but to do that.

Constantly ready to surrender to the Father, to His power.

What the world needs is followers of Jesus who are awake to His Kingdom, alive to His purposes, who are resisting sin by surrendering to Him, allowing Him to work in and through us to transform this world, to bring the Kingdom to Hornsby, to Sydney, to Australia and to the rest of this world.

The world needs followers of Jesus like that.

Followers of Jesus who will not succumb to the flesh and lash out in whatever sin is tempting us, but who will surrender to the Father and use His power to get through.

So, like jet-lagged travelers in a foreign country, let us be awake to the reality of God.

Alert!

Let's get our spiritual coffee from Gregory's Cafe and make it through the night by surrendering to the power of the Father.

Let me pray.

Lord Jesus, we thank You for Your faithfulness in the garden.

You could have run away from the plan that the Father had, but You carried it through to the end.

You took the wrath of God on the cross in order that we could stand forgiven before Him now, and we thank You for that.

We come boldly into Your presence now with confidence to find grace and mercy to help us in our time of need.

For all of us experiencing a season of Gethsemane or an hour of Gethsemane, we pray that You would move us to our knees and surrender to You, that Your power would fight our battles for us.

We don't want to succumb to the flesh.

We don't want to fight in our own power.

As willing as our spirit is, we believe that our flesh is weak, and so we need You, Father.

Help us, Lord, to stay awake and alert in a world that has fallen asleep to Your reality.

Help us to be people who are like a city on a hill and the salt of the earth, who shine not because of our good deeds, but because of who You are.

Help us to surrender to You, Father.

In Your name we pray.

Amen.

‍