56. Mark 14:32-42: Gethsemane

Jesus next stop is Gethsemane for prayer. Perhaps surprisingly, after predicting his followers’ desertion, they all accompany him. And if the thought of desertion chilled their blood, what the inner three – Peter, James, and John – experienced there surpasses expression.

“When the great Greek philosopher  Socrates went to his death, he was calm and in control throughout the process.  His followers, though distraught and in tears, remembered his steady teaching  right up to the end, his coolly ironic last words. Not so with Jesus. This story is  neither a Greek-style heroic tale nor a typical Jewish martyrdom. It is unique.  Only if we enter into it – which we can hardly do without fear and trembling on  our own part – will we understand the human depths, and hence the theological  depths, of the story” (Wright, Mark, 244).

As they move through the garden Jesus was, literally translated, “overwhelmed with horror and anguish.” These verbs show Jesus as

-“barely in control,

-on the verge of panic,

-reflecting not only the depth of suffering of a human being who shudders on the threshold of torture and death, but also the numinous terror of the eschatological, transcendent nature of what is about to transpire, a sorrow and anguish so intense it already threatens his life” (Boring, Mark:10836-10839).

This trio of disciples enter here into the heart of God, the broken heart of God for his wayward creatures, the broken heart of God for his damaged creation, the broken heart of the Father for what the Son will undergo. And also, important not to miss, what a victim of forces arbitrary and clandestine and implacably bent on one’s destruction experiences (Williams, Rowan. Meeting God in Mark: Reflections for the Season of Lent [pp. 57-58]. Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition). Mark description is poignant and moving on both accounts.

The pathos deepens as Jesus desperately pleads with the Father that this ordeal be taken from him. He knows what is at stake. He adumbrated it to the disciples already in 10:41-45. Now the rubber hit the road and he is called to “walk the talk.” And that shakes him to the core in a way we can never imagine. For in submitting to this “hour” Jesus knows he is striving for humanity’s freedom from it primal and lethal fantasy to be themselves gods nd thus possessing the power and privilege of running their own lives (Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden) themselves, the place of the enemy’s most vicious attack on humanity and death grip on them. This isn’t a theory of atonement Mark dramatizes here. He is giving voice, rather, to Jesus’ conviction  

“that his execution is the price that is paid to free us once and for all from the fantasy that God’s power is just like ours, only in a hugely inflated version – as we noted earlier, a matter of what we would do if we were lucky enough to be running the universe. The death of Jesus is the price paid to abolish and uproot that fantasy. It does not only destroy the fantasy that God’s power is like ours; it also uproots the corresponding notion that whatever power we attain must be valued and clung to at all costs because it is power endorsed by God. In these lethal errors lie the roots of all our sin and self-inflicted misery, the roots of death. From these errors and their consequences the death of Christ delivers us, dismantling the myth of power that holds us prisoner. In this sense, his life is ‘paid over’ so that we may be set free, like a ransom paid to a kidnapper” (Williams, Meeting God in Mark, 62-63).

At this nexus of fate and providence Jesus turns to his inner three whom he bade to wait waking with him but finds them, all three, sound asleep. Here they fail to admonition to watchfulness Jesus issued in 13:32ff. This proves Jesus word about them as deserters. And in their threefold failure it is hard to escape an analogy to Peter’s threefold failure in John’s gospel.

Finally the storm breaks and Jesus turns to meet it. “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.” The disciples have squandered their time of preparation. Now they will be engulfed and overwhelmed by the storm’s ferocity. Indeed, for them - as for us! - “the spirit . . . is willing, but the flesh is weak” (v.39).

“See, my betrayer is at hand.” (v.42).