Jesus

by James Martin

  But that is not the end of his prayer. Jesus does not simply ask for the removal of suffering or for God to change God’s mind. He says something more important than what has gone before: “Yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

  One cannot separate Jesus’s actions into human and divine; the two “natures” of Jesus are always united. But this passage may offer us a privileged glimpse of both natures. “Remove this cup” is an utterly human request. “Yet, not my will, but yours be done” is an indication of Jesus’s complete union with the Father. Anything one can say about Jesus’s humanity and divinity will fail to explain this great mystery. But here, even in the midst of unimaginable psychological torment, which almost drives Jesus to the ground, one might say he expresses human emotions while being fully united with the Father’s will. The human person is united with the divine will, and the divine one expresses human emotions.

  In his hour of decision Jesus turns to the Father. It would have been easy for him to rise, dust himself off, and walk away. None of his disciples would have condemned him for saying, “I don’t want this cup,” or for escaping into the nearby Judean wilderness with the explanation, “Let’s leave and fight another day.”

  Given Peter’s remonstration when Jesus predicted his suffering, if Jesus had chosen to flee, they would have probably praised him for his canny assessment and followed him. After all, Jesus had done the same before. In Nazareth, when an angry crowd was about to hurl him off a cliff after he declared that the messianic benefits would not come to people in his hometown, he passes “through the midst of them.” This is not the only time he escapes when threatened. In the Gospel of John after Jesus declares, “Before Abraham was, I am” (in other words, “I am God”), the crowd makes ready to stone him. “But Jesus hid himself,” says John, “and went out of the temple.”18

  Why doesn’t he hide himself now? Why doesn’t he pass through their midst? Why doesn’t he do what the disciples must have wanted? Because at this moment, he was able to see that, as far as he could tell, this was what the Father had in mind. This was the future that God had in store, and it was to this that he now surrendered. Once he was able to discern this, he decisively chose to remain on that path. Lohfink writes, perceptively: “The ‘will of God’ is not that Jesus should be killed in Jerusalem, but that Israel everywhere, including in the capital city, should be confronted with the Gospel of the reign of God.”19 And if this means death, Jesus accepts it.

  That answers only the question of how he was able to discern the Father’s will. How was he able to carry out that decision? That’s the more difficult question. Sometimes we see the right thing to do, the generous thing, the charitable thing, but feel unable to do it, unequal to the task, unwilling to pay the price. We feel that we cannot make the sacrifice and say yes to what God seems to be asking.

  For Jesus, however, it was more than a matter of sacrifice. And it was more than a matter of obedience to the Father’s will. It was a matter of trust. Jesus had an intimate relationship with Abba, and so he trusted him. He trusted that, if he did what the Father was asking, no matter how mysterious, confusing, or terrifying, he would not go wrong. So with his Father’s help, he was able to do it.20

  In the end, Jesus’s actions flow from his relationship with the Father. In other words, they flow from love.

  IN GETHSEMANE WE LEARN more about Jesus of Nazareth—and about ourselves. Who among us hasn’t found ourselves in a situation where the inevitable seems impossible? Where the unavoidable seems unimaginable? Who hasn’t said to God, in so many words, “Remove this cup”?

  The most difficult thing in such a situation may be the crushing inevitability. You want to escape from your life, which suddenly feels like an oncoming train about to run you down. It is the shock you feel when you receive a frightening diagnosis from your physician. When you are laid off from a job. When a friend or family member dies. When a relationship ends. You say to yourself, This cannot be happening.

  What’s worse, these situations throw us into a panic, which makes finding God’s “will” more difficult. At the very moment you want to feel most tethered in God, you feel unmoored. Sometimes panic and fear feel like the only rational responses.

  When my father was first diagnosed with the cancer that would take his life, and when I heard that the treatments would only lengthen his life by a few months, I couldn’t believe it. No, no, no, I thought, this is not the way it is supposed to be. Everyone, if they live long enough, will one day know this feeling. Recently when a friend discovered that his father had an inoperable cancer and had only one year to live, he said he felt lost. “I don’t even know where to begin,” he told me.

  Even when confronted with situations that are not life-threatening, we still may say, “Remove this cup.” Long-term suffering can be just as confusing as a catastrophic illness, and it can likewise test our faith. Perhaps you are stuck in a miserable job with no prospects of relief. Or you are caring for someone living with a chronic illness, and you wonder how much longer you can go on. Or you receive a diagnosis of a minor medical problem that will mean a change in the way you live. In each of these cases you want to say, “Remove this cup.” And, again, exacerbating the situation is a fear that can sap your ability to make good decisions. Panic can so master you that you can barely think, let alone pray.

  How can we continue? One way is to look at Jesus in the Garden. He does not avoid the hard truth of his situation. He does not ignore his pain or the pain of his friends. If you are ever tempted to hide your struggles from friends or conceal from your loved ones your deepest pain, listen to what Jesus said to his own friends, “I am deeply grieved, even to death.” These are not the words of a person who is hiding his feelings.

  Expressing your feelings honestly in troubled times is not a sign of weakness, but of humanity and humility. It is also a way to invite into your life friends and relatives who love you. We remember that at the Jordan River, Jesus chose to stand in line, waiting with the rest of humanity to be baptized. In Gethsemane, still in line, he experiences the full range of human emotions, and he shares them with others in a fully human way. For us, expressing sadness and fear allows us to set aside our desire to be in control. It is also an invitation to let others love us.

  Jesus feels the need to pray three times in Gethsemane before he reaches a sense of peace. Too often we feel obliged to move immediately into “Yet your will, not mine” before we have lingered with our feelings and expressed them to God. Or we feel guilty for asking for what we want or what we wish to be relieved of, as if such prayers were merely complaints. But the honest expression of painful emotions is a process that even Jesus went through.

  But Jesus does not end his prayer by acknowledging his feelings. He ends by trusting in God, by conforming his will to the Father’s, even in a dark time. The answer to the question of “How can I go on?” is by being in relationship with Abba.

  The invitation to surrender, to accept our cup, to acknowledge the inevitability of suffering, and to step onto the path of sacrifice comes in the context of a relationship with God. We trust that God will be with us in all that we do and all that we suffer. We do not simply grit our teeth, clench our fists, and push on, alone and unaided. Someone is with us, helping us. To use another image from the Gospels, there is someone else in the boat pulling on the oars—even if we do not feel it.

  Suffering is always difficult to understand. It may have been difficult for Jesus to grasp. It was certainly difficult for the disciples to understand. But they will understand it completely in three days.

  PERHAPS JESUS ALSO SAW his impending suffering not only as God’s will, but the inevitable result of having come into the world. The life span of someone purely good in a world rife with sin was bound to be short. A few years ago when I was praying with this passage on a retreat in Los Angeles, I saw a peregrine falcon attack, capture, and eat a small bird. The falcon perched in a tree on the novitiate grounds and devoured its bloodied prey. It was g
ruesome. And surprising. I don’t live near much nature. But this incident was a powerful symbol of the way of the world, in which the powerful mercilessly crush the weak.

  Jesus understood this violent and bloody world, not only in nature but in his life in first-century Galilee and Judea. He may have sensed this as death was approaching.

  AFTER HIS PRAYER JESUS returns to find the disciples—whether just three or all of them is unclear—sleeping. In many film versions of this event Jesus displays a more confident attitude after his prayer. This seems to fit the text. Jesus is no longer the man collapsed in barely restrained grief on the ground; he is in command. “Through prayer the situation has changed,” writes Casey. “Beforehand Jesus was unmanned, in a state of deep anguish and confusion. Now after prayer has done its work, he appears almost a new man. He stands upright and takes charge of the situation.”21

  How does that “work”? It is impossible to know what Jesus’s prayer life was like, but for the rest of us prayer can spark insights into our situation, provide consoling memories, and offer us feelings of comfort. Moreover, it can gently call us back into our personal relationship with God. In this way we are changed indeed, because not only does God work through us, but in our suffering we remember that we are not alone.

  At this point, Jesus, once again in command of the situation, speaks to the disciples. First he addresses Peter, significantly using his old name, perhaps indicating that his friend has failed to live up to his calling. “Simon,” he says, “are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour?” (An alternate translation, closer to the Greek, is more of a rebuke: “Were you not strong enough to stay awake for one hour?”)

  Then Jesus warns the tired disciples, “Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit is indeed willing but the flesh is weak.” The word used for “trial” (peirasmon) is the same word that Matthew uses in the Our Father, in the verse that is usually translated “Lead us not into temptation.”22 Jesus is urging them to steel themselves for the testing, which they are now failing. The contrast between Jesus, undergoing intense torment and praying to the Father, and the disciples, who cannot even stay awake, is acute. They are ruled not by the “spirit” but the “flesh,” a shorthand way of delineating the battle between good and evil within us.

  Jesus withdraws again and returns. Again he finds them sleeping. They are so addled that they “did not know what to say to him.” Thus they are not only tired but confused—the picture Mark paints of the disciples grows darker. Jesus withdraws to pray a third time and once again—prefiguring Peter’s triple denial at the Crucifixion—he finds them asleep on his return. This time he plainly tells them to face reality.

  “Enough!” he says. “The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.” Judas has entered the familiar Garden. He will kiss Jesus and thus identify him for the authorities.

  Jesus’s time in Gethsemane is now finished, and his hour has come. He knows what he must do.

  * * *

  JESUS IN GETHSEMANE

  Mark 14:32–42

  (See also Matthew 26:36–46; Luke 22:40–46; John 18:1–2)

  * * *

  They went to a place called Gethsemane and he said to the disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be distressed and agitated. And he said to them, “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake.” And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” He came and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. And once more he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy; and they did not know what to say to him. He came a third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 21

  Golgotha

  “Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.”

  THE CHURCH OF THE Holy Sepulchre was the first holy site George and I visited in the Holy Land. As I mentioned earlier, we made our way through the Old City to find the church just a few hours after arriving in Jerusalem.

  The next day, I set out to find it on my own. It was unexpectedly difficult to locate, as one of Christendom’s greatest shrines is not as highly visible as many of the great medieval cathedrals—such as Notre Dame, plunked on its own little island in the heart of Paris; or the cathedral of Chartres, rising gracefully over the wheat fields of France; and certainly not like St. Peter’s Basilica, whose massive dome is a prominent fixture of the Roman skyline. By contrast, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is buried within a jumble of buildings in the Old City—and it could be easily mistaken for just another large church. To add to the confusion, chapels, buildings, and other structures cling to it, as Jerome Murphy-O’Connor says in The Holy Land, “like barnacles.”1

  On the plane ride to Tel Aviv, I was thrilled by Murphy-O’Connor’s lengthy entry on the church. By now accustomed to his scholarly reluctance to pronounce a site authentic unless it had the most impressive bona fides, I was astonished to read: “Is this the place where Christ died and was buried? Yes, very probably.”

  Murphy-O’Connor then provides evidence for his conclusion. At the beginning of the first century, the area was an unused quarry. Tombs cut into one wall of the quarry—and similar to the tomb around which the church is built—can be dated to the time of Jesus. The church was also constructed around a rocky mount very similar to the one described in the Gospels as Golgotha, the hill on which Jesus was crucified. Also, the tomb of Jesus is, as the Gospels say, “nearby” the place of his crucifixion, and the great church encompasses both Golgotha and the tomb. “The site,” says Murphy-O’Connor, “is compatible with the topographical data supplied by the Gospels.”

  But what convinces the New Testament scholar and archaeologist is not the persuasive topographical data, but something else: “The most important argument for the authenticity of the site is the consistent and uncontested tradition of the Jerusalem community, which held liturgical celebrations at the site until AD 66.” That’s until AD 66, as early a date as you can imagine for a site in the Holy Land.

  Around AD 40, the site was encircled by the city walls, and the emperor Hadrian filled in the quarry to erect a Roman temple. In the third century, after Christianity was declared the official religion of the empire, the bishop of Jerusalem petitioned Emperor Constantine to demolish the temple in order to unearth the tomb of Christ, whose location was, not surprisingly, still known by Christians in Jerusalem.2 The location of that important spot could not have been forgotten by the Christian community.

  As excavations were carried out in the fourth century, an eyewitness, Eusebius of Caesarea, the church historian, recounts what happened during the digging: “As layer after layer of the subsoil came into view, the venerable and most holy memorial of the Saviour’s resurrection, beyond all our hopes, came into view.”3 As with the tomb of Peter in Rome, graffiti most likely identified the tomb of Jesus. Work started almost immediately on the new church, and it remained a popular site for pilgrimage until the eleventh century, even after the transfer of Jerusalem to Muslim control in 638.

  In 1009, however, Caliph Hakim set about to demolish the church, and nearly did so, with his men attacking the tomb with picks and hammers. In the wake of this destruction pilgrims’ donations fueled restorations that began soon afterward. The Crusaders gradually built a new place for worship, thus starting an extended period of constru
ction when apses, chapels, and finally a bell tower were added. Since Crusader times the church has been in constant use, though a fire in 1808 and an earthquake in 1927 caused major damage. In 1959 the three major groups responsible for the maintenance of the church—Latins, Greeks, and Armenians—agreed on an organized program of repair.

  That seems to be one of the few things that they agreed on. Today the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a place of occasional infighting among the groups managing the site. It was disheartening to learn that the six groups—Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, and Ethiopians—each with its own particular territories within the church, eye each other for any encroachment on their space or infringement of what they consider their rights. In general, relations are friendly. But Jesus’s desire expressed at the Last Supper that “they may all be one” sometimes seems frustratingly elusive here.4 During one visit to the church I told a friendly Franciscan friar that I’d heard that recently there had been a fistfight. “Oh no,” he said, “just some shoving, that’s all.”

  “Really?” said George when I reported his comment. “Is there a scheduled time for that?”

  On the other hand, it’s edifying that the six disparate groups manage to run the place at all. Rivers of tourists flow in and out; Masses are celebrated; pilgrims pray. Occasionally gaining access to certain chapels is a complicated process, and the ease of entrance depends on which religious group has oversight and which schedule is in place, but at least you can enter without showing any identification. The church welcomes prayer.