by James Martin
How striking yet how appropriate. A chord was struck in many people’s hearts because they knew instinctively that it represented what Jesus meant when he asked us to do precisely these things—in memory of him.
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JESUS WASHES THE DISCIPLES’ FEET
John 13:1–17
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Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”
After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”
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CHAPTER 20
Gethsemane
“He threw himself on the ground and prayed.”
AFTER THE FOOT WASHING, says the Gospel of John, Jesus spoke at length to his disciples in what is usually called the Last Discourse. It is a passage of preaching that runs for several pages in most Bibles. The discourse runs so long that I often wonder if John is recording something that he heard firsthand (some scholars identify John as the “Beloved Disciple” who appears in the Gospel), if he is reporting the talk as it was passed down in oral tradition, or if he pulled together various talks given by Jesus for his purposes here. (The Synoptics do not include this material.)1
The discourse begins after Jesus acknowledges Judas as his betrayer, by dipping a piece of bread in wine and offering it to Judas. Judas departs, and as the Gospel says, “It was night.”2 Suddenly we are closer to death.
Jesus tells the probably terrified and alarmed disciples that he will soon be “glorified” (on the cross, as a symbol of his obedience, and at his resurrection) and offers them a new commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Over the next two chapters, he will refer to himself as the vine, with the disciples as the branches, and he will try to comfort them over his coming departure. How will they survive without him? First, the Father will send the “Advocate,” the Holy Spirit, to guide them. Second, they are to keep the commandments as he has taught them and thus follow his way. Finally, Jesus offers a prayer for all of them and all who believe in him.
Then it is time to move. John’s Gospel has the disciples walk to the Kidron Valley, just outside Jerusalem, to “a garden.” Luke has them at the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Kidron Valley, and then at a place “a stone’s throw” away. But Matthew and Mark are more specific. Jesus and his friends go to the Mount of Olives, then to “the place called Gethsemane.”
SINCE THE TIME OF Jesus, the location of the Garden of Gethsemane has been more or less fixed. In an aside, the Gospel of John tells us that a garden near the city was known to Judas, “because Jesus often met there with his disciples.” It may have been owned by a friend who permitted Jesus and his companions to meet there often.
Here was one advantage of visiting the Holy Land: seeing the landscape made it easy to read the Gospels and say, “That makes sense.” Gethsemane lies in the valley between Jerusalem and the very steep Mount of Olives. (Gethsemane means “oil press” in Hebrew and Aramaic, a natural function for a place on a hillside covered with olive trees.) On the other side of the Mount of Olives is Bethany, the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. During times of pilgrimage the population of Jerusalem tripled, so the cost of lodging would likely have been steep. Jesus and his disciples may have spent time in Bethany to be with their friends, but also out of economic necessity. So Gethsemane would have been a natural place for Jesus to rest and reflect.
One morning early in our stay, George and I set out on what he later called our “Death March,” which referred not to the fact that we walked the Via Dolorosa, the traditional path that Jesus used en route to his crucifixion, but that it was about ten million degrees outside, and our route took us up and down the hills of Jerusalem.
Walking out of the Lion’s Gate at the eastern part of the Old City, we saw spread before us the vista that so many pilgrims have beheld over the centuries: the Mount of Olives, which stands between Jerusalem and Bethany. At the bottom of the hill was the Garden of Gethsemane, a green patch of land amid the dry landscape, marked by a large basilica with a multiple-domed roof. Slightly to the right was the Church of Dominus Flevit (“The Lord Wept”), where Christ is said to have paused and grieved over Jerusalem for its hard-heartedness.3
Farther to the right, in the Kidron Valley, are the Jewish cemeteries, which were in use during Jesus’s time. Their location was determined by the Jewish belief that this is where God’s judgment of the world would begin, based on passages in the prophets Joel and Zechariah.4 Every time Jesus passed this way, he would have been reminded of death. As he made his way out of the room of the Last Supper, he would have seen these tombs shining in the moonlight.
We tramped down a road and then climbed the sharp incline to the Basilica of Gethsemane. It’s an ungainly building, constructed in 1924 by the Franciscans, who funded its construction with donations from around the world. Thus the official name, the Church of All Nations. The architect was Antonio Barluzzi, who also designed the Church of the Beatitudes by the Sea of Galilee. The long stone structure at Gethsemane is capped with twelve gray domes. Over the doorway is a colorful mosaic of Christ in the Garden, surrounded by lamenting men and women.
Inside is the Holy Stone on which Christ is said to have sweated “drops of blood,” though we were not allowed to touch it since there was a Mass in progress. Over the stone is a mosaic of Christ slumped in prayer atop the stone, under a deep blue background, the primary color used for the ceilings of the church: “It was night.”
The Church of All Nations (also known as the Church of the Agony or the Basilica of Gethsemane, depending on which map you consult) is the third church on this site. The first dated from the fourth century, commemorating the place where the early Christian community gathered to remember Christ at prayer in the Garden. During the twelfth century the Crusaders erected a “new” church on top of the original. A portion of the Byzantine floor is visible, and remnants of the Crusader church were incorporated into the current structure.
Thus the site seems authentic. Murphy-O’Connor, with his usual resistance to award a seal of 100 percent certainty, notes, “No one can be sure of the exact spot at which he prayed, but this limited area was certainly close to the natural route leading from the Temple to the summit of the Mount of Olives and the ridge leading to Bethany.”5 So, once again: if not here, then nearby.
But the church wasn’t as much of a draw for me (or the other pilgrims) as something else: the Hortus Gethsemani, as the sign on the gate read, the Garden of Gethsemane.
Perhaps f
rom seeing too many movies I expected the Garden to be an expansive place, a veritable forest filled with trees and flowers, where one could wander freely. But today it is compact, with just a dozen or so olive trees. They are, however, impressively old. Perhaps not two thousand years old, but old. Bearing small, thin, greenish-gray leaves, the gnarled olive trees stood silently as the tourists peered over the fence that separated us from the ancient garden.
Before visiting the Holy Land, I never could have imagined how close the Garden was to Jerusalem, only a short walk away. As he rested in Gethsemane, Jesus must have stared at the holy city and the nearby graves for a long time, reflecting on his future. What would he do? Just a few minutes’ walk in the other direction would bring him into the open desert, an easy escape from his enemies.
Why didn’t he take that route? More to the point, how was he able to decide on his path?
THE ONLY GOSPEL THAT does not include Jesus praying in Gethsemane is John, who again chooses to emphasize Jesus’s command over events as a manifestation of his divinity. Perhaps any mention of his doubt or anguish would have seemed discordant. In John’s account Jesus and the disciples go to “a place where there was a garden,” a spot Judas knew, as Jesus had brought his friends there frequently. But no praying occurs, only the betrayal.
Not so for the Synoptics. Let’s turn to Mark, which is almost identical to Matthew, and also includes a bit more explanation than Luke.
Mark moves directly into Jesus’s prayer in the Garden: “They went to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I pray.’” Matthew begins differently, saying, “Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane.” As Harrington notes, by naming Jesus first Matthew highlights that Jesus is directing the events of the Passion. But both point to an almost instantaneous change in his emotions. Jesus takes with him three people from his innermost circle—Peter, James, and John, three of the earliest disciples—and he “began to be distressed (ekthambeisthai) and agitated (adēmonein).”
Those two words indicate extreme emotions, and translations vary from “sore amazed . . . and very afraid” to “grieved and agitated.” Raymond Brown, in his book The Death of the Messiah, perhaps the most comprehensive study of the Passion narratives, expounds on those two powerful words:
Ekthambeisthai, “to be greatly distraught” . . . indicates a profound disarray, expressed physically before a terrifying event: a shuddering horror. Adēmonein, “to be troubled,” has a root connotation of being separated from others, a situation that results in anguish.6
Only when Jesus is alone with three close friends do his emotions surface. Often when we are straining to withhold our emotions, it is not until we are with those closest to us that we can “let go.” At the wake before my father’s funeral, I remained relatively unemotional, until one of my closest friends entered the room, smiled, and hugged me. A surge of sadness overtook me, and I wept. Somehow the presence of my friend enabled me to be myself and to honestly express how I felt. Here Jesus, shielded from the larger group of disciples, is able to share himself. His emotions well up as soon as he is alone with his friends. They must have been very close to him, and he to them.
Episodes such as this and the story of Jesus’s weeping at Lazarus’s tomb reveal that Jesus is not a cool, distant sage, but a flesh-and-blood human being. The time in the Garden gives us an extraordinary window into his heart.
Then he confides in his three friends: “My soul is sorrowful unto death (Perilupos estin hē psychē mou heōs thanatou).”7 Jesus may be echoing the words of Psalm 42: “My soul is cast down within me.” Or perhaps he is thinking of a passage from Sirach that expresses the feelings of a person betrayed: “Is it not a sorrow like that for death itself when a dear friend turns into an enemy?”8 Brown suggests that if Jesus had intuited his friends’ coming betrayal and their scattering after his death, it must have weighed on him terribly. Thus not only his arrest, but their coming betrayal may have caused him intense sorrow. The very thought of this, writes Brown, may have felt as if it were enough to kill him.9 Overall, the meaning seems to be: My sadness is so intense that it feels as if it may kill me.
The disciples were probably terrified to hear his words, and they may have found themselves “deeply grieved” as well. Imagine what it must have been like for them to see Jesus visibly upset. The calm teacher upon whom they depended to help them in every situation—a terrifying demoniac, a frightening storm at sea, an immense crowd asking for food, two sisters grieving over their brother’s death—now admits to being “greatly distressed.” Seeing the one in control lose control is always destabilizing.
At this point, perhaps knowing that the disciples would be too distraught to think clearly (Jesus had seen their responses in times of peril before) or simply craving their company in his difficult time, he asks them to stay with him, and to stay awake.
Then something perhaps more striking is described. Matthew and Mark say Jesus “threw himself on the ground and prayed.” Some scholars describe this as the normal way to begin prayer: prostrating oneself in reverence before God was attested to in the Old Testament. But others see a kind of collapse as a result of the intense stress Jesus was experiencing. Michael Casey, a Cistercian monk and spiritual writer, calls it “an astonishingly graphic moment.”10 It would not be surprising if Jesus, crushed by grief, collapsed in the Garden, overwhelmed with emotion. Luke uses the vivid word agōnia, which occurs nowhere else in the New Testament.11
Now Jesus begins to pray. It’s important to remember that the Gospels depict Jesus as praying frequently—both privately, when he withdraws from the disciples, and publicly, as when he teaches his disciples how to pray and when he prays outside the tomb of Lazarus. He does not turn to God simply in times of distress. Luke’s Gospel, sometimes called the Gospel of Prayer, shows Jesus praying at the most important moments of his public ministry—in the desert of course, but also after his first miraculous healings, before choosing the twelve apostles, before Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah, and now after the Last Supper. As Harrington notes, “If you want to know what Luke regarded as the most important moments in Jesus’s life, look at his mentions of Jesus at prayer.”12
In this grave hour, he utters a simple prayer: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.”
In the Garden Jesus shows both his utter humanity and his complete divinity. He begins his prayer with an affectionate address of God as Abba, a word often used by a child for his or her father. One day while I was walking through Jerusalem, outside the Damascus Gate, a young girl ran across my path in pursuit of her father. “Abba! Abba!” she called out in her young voice. It was both startling and moving to hear the exact expression Jesus used.
Thus Jesus’s prayer begins on a note of intimacy. Remember that when we are presented with an Aramaic word preserved in the Greek text it is almost certain to have come from the lips of Jesus. (That is, Mark does not use the Greek patēr, but the original Aramaic.) The word Abba was Jesus’s highly personal way of speaking to the Father.
And as Michael Casey notes, even in this awful moment, when we could forgive him for being distracted or confused or angry, Jesus grounds his relationship with the Father. It is the starting point for all that Jesus does, even now. “By these words Jesus reaffirms the relationship of intimacy that exists between him and God.” Such intimacy enables him not to ignore the impending danger but, as Casey says in a beautiful image, “fix his gaze on the One on whom his selfhood depends.”13
But Jesus is human, and so he prays that what now seems inevitable will not come to pass. “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me,” he says bluntly. In the Old Testament the “cup” was sometimes used by the prophets to refer to suffering.14 Jesus’s very human words here invite us to consider (at least) three important things.
First, Jesus was not courting death. In the previous sentence, Mark tells us that after fal
ling on the ground, Jesus prays that “if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.” Both of his statements—“if it were possible” and “remove this cup”—are not so much expressions of doubt, as a hope that God’s mind be changed somehow. Jesus does not wish death for its own sake; much less does he seek out physical suffering for its own sake. His question is artfully summed up by Raymond Brown: “Could not the Father bring about the kingdom in some other way that did not involve the horrendous suffering of the Son delivered into the hands of sinners?”15
Or, more simply, “Do you really want this, God?” How many of us have asked the same, when confronted with a terrible inevitability. “Please, God, not this.”
Second, not only is he not courting death, it seems that Jesus at this point also does not want to die. In Luke, he asks for the cup to be “removed.” (The Greek parenenke is “to cause to pass, divert, take away.”16) At roughly thirty-three years old, after gathering together so many followers, after seeing the results of his ministry—people healed, reconciled, even raised from the dead—perhaps Jesus still holds out hope for a few more years of ministry. Yes, he could foresee that last week’s events would trigger a Roman reaction and earn him the enmity of some Jewish leaders, but now, in Gethsemane, he does not want to die. This makes his ultimate acceptance of death even more meaningful.
Third, Jesus’s blunt prayer shows that God desires our honesty. In any intimate relationship, if a person says only what he or she thinks he or she should say, the relationship will grow cold, distant, or false. In the Garden, Jesus follows the tradition of many of the psalms: he laments. He says what he desires: he does not want to suffer, if that is at all possible. And he expresses, in a sense, his confusion. Barclay says bluntly, “He did not fully understand why this had to be.”17 An intimate relationship with the Father means transparency at all times, especially in times of distress.