Jesus in Gethsemane and Other Reflections
Matthew 26:36-44
Emmanuel Baptist Church
April 9, 2020; Rev. Kathy Donley
These reflections were offered across a Maundy Thursday service. Interspersed with them were congregational hymns, instrumental music, choir anthems, and spoken prayers. A recording of that worship service may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16t5U6wvuJc&feature=youtu.be
Jesus in Gethsemane
Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem. Weeks earlier, he had decided to leave relative safety of his home in Galilee and go to Jerusalem for the Passover. His disciples had pleaded with him not to go, but his mind was made up. It was necessary, a part of his mission to continue proclaiming the reign of God despite the pressure of friends and adversaries, to continue to speak his truth, even speaking truth to power in the form of political and religious authorities.
Things have escalated quickly this week. From his carefully staged entrance to the city, to turning over the tables in the temple, to the daily confrontations which are intended to entrap Jesus into blasphemy or treason, the stress has mounted. He set his face toward Jerusalem, knowing that it was dangerous. But had he held out hope that somehow, he would be delivered, that it would not cost him his life? Even now, he wonders, is it possible that this cup will pass? Could it be that laying down his precious life will not be required?
He has shared the holiday meal with his closest friends, the people with whom he has shared so much over the last years. This very night, he has washed their feet. This very night, suspicion and competition have again crept into their ranks, as some wondered who would betray him and some pledged their undying loyalty.
This is perhaps the loneliest, saddest, most poignant moment of all – as Judas was leading a mob through the night with torches and spears and swords to arrest him, Jesus and his friends walked to a garden called Gethsemane. Peter, James and John went further into the garden. And then the most remarkable, most human thing began to happen. Jesus became agitated and grieved. It is a powerfully intimate moment of self-disclosure. Jesus honors his closest friends by sharing his truest feelings. “I am deeply grieved, even to death. “Remain here and stay awake with me.” “Don’t leave me now. I need you. . .. I need you to be here for me and with me.” This is a man baring his soul, a man who is about to be tortured and killed and knows it. This is a human being doing what human beings do in moments like that, reaching out to other human beings, to dear ones and friends. “Be there. Stay with me.”[1]
His friends are not there for him and he continues to pour out his heart to God. He pleads “Help me . . . save me . . . rescue me” over and over until he summons the spiritual strength to say “Not my will, but yours be done.” Even now, in the midst of the most dire circumstances, Jesus trusts God.
In Jesus, God took on human form, becoming like us in all ways. We see that so clearly in his grief in the garden. Jesus became as we are so that we might become like he is. The desperation, the fervency of his prayer is common to human beings across time and geography and culture. For the next few minutes, let us consider together some examples of prayers offered in places of devastation or desperation or hard decision. After each short reflection, there will be response in the form of instrumental or vocal music or spoken prayer.
Christmas Eve in Aleppo
Syria has been at war now for 9 years. I can no longer think of Syria apart from the images of vulnerable children. As the first part of Matthew’s gospel says, “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”
In December 2016, there was a temporary ceasefire in Aleppo. On Christmas Eve, Christians all over the city returned to church for the first time in 5 years. The congregation of St. Elias gathered in a ruined cathedral with the roof gone from bombings and open to the sky and the snow. They created a nativity scene from materials they scavenged in the rubble. Those who built it said, “We are using whatever debris we can find to symbolize the triumph of life over death.”[2] They did not choose the cross or the empty tomb, but the manger.
Perhaps they did so because “When the fullness of time came, the time for the Word to be incarnated, God did not choose Rome or Athens for Christ to be born at; He chose occupied Bethlehem. He chose to be one of those oppressed; He chose to be one of those terrorized. When the fullness of time came, God so loved this world with all its ugliness and did not shy away from it. God chose to encounter this world with all its might and terror. He chose to challenge Herod with the face of an innocent child. God did not leave this world to its misery and pain but embraced it with both hands and pulled it to his heart.” [3]
Tijuana
On one of my last days in Tijuana, we walked a dusty road alongside a wall of assorted pieces of cast-off lumber intermittently secured with padlocks. Slowly, I realized that people lived within these structures. These were their front gates, locked because everyone was off at work in maquiladoras, foreign factories in Tijuana, Mexico. They might make $5 per day for a 12-hour shift on an assembly line where they have to ask permission to use the bathroom. In this neighborhood, as in another one-third of Tijuana, there is no water or sewer system. It costs $10 per week to have water delivered via truck. In more wealthy Tijuana neighborhoods, it costs $10 per month. The poor pay four times as much for the same service. This neighborhood runs alongside the freeway which means car exhaust and traffic noise, but also easier access to transportation. Workers who live in other areas may face a 2-hour daily commute plus more hours spent waiting for the bus. The cost of being poor is extracted in money and time.
I began to notice personal touches – a splash of color here, a salvaged front door there. At one entrance was a hard-to-read, hand-lettered sign in Spanish. My companion at that moment was Nasteho, a 22-year-old, Somali-American Muslim woman who speaks and reads Spanish. I asked her what the sign said. On her first attempt, she translated the sign as “I am always here, at the end of the world.”
My heavy heart sank further in recognition of the despair that might lead someone to post such a message on their door. Nasteho found this Spanish different from Spanish she had encountered elsewhere. Unsure that her translation was accurate, she consulted a third member of group, Luz, a Colombian theologian whose first language is Spanish. Luz translated the sign “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”
Then I recognized the words of Jesus, the One who moved into the human neighborhood, the One whose words have been passed from generation to generation, in hundreds of languages, to provide comfort and hope. In this Tijuana neighborhood, they were passed from a Mexican factory worker to a Somali-American Muslim, to a Colombian pastor, and then to me, a white American Christian who has never endured poverty and is illiterate in Spanish. They brought tears to my eyes and a lift to my heart. Here, I saw desperation and suffering and injustice and trauma, but also resilience and hope and generosity and faith, even until the end of the world.
New York City
The cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City is one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in the world. At 121 years old now, it was standing during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Imagine all the people who have passed through its doors, those who have been nurtured in faith -- baptized or married or buried here. Numerous funerals have been held in this place, including those of Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Duke Ellington and Jim Henson.
This cathedral has chairs, not pews. Earlier this week, the chairs were stacked and the transformation began. This Holy Week the church is becoming a coronavirus hospital. Nine climate controlled medical tents capable of holding at least 200 patients have been set up inside. The Rev. Clifton Daniel, dean of the cathedral said, “In the history and tradition of the church and following the example of Jesus, cathedrals have long served as places of refuge and healing in times of plague and community crisis. So, this is not outside the experience of being a cathedral, it is just new to us.”
Two hours upriver from the City, we are all too aware of the devastation being wrought there. And so, we join our prayers to those who have prayed in this situation through the ages -- please pray aloud with me, these words from the Book of Common Prayer.
Keep watch, dear Lord,
with those who work, or watch, or weep this night,
and give your angels charge over those who sleep.
Tend the sick, Lord Christ;
give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering,
pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake. Amen.
Bonhoeffer in Prison
Two days after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, a lecturer at Berlin University named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, took to the radio and denounced the Nazi the leadership principle that was merely a synonym for dictatorship. Bonhoeffer’s broadcast was cut off before he could finish. Shortly after that, he moved to London to serve a German congregation there. Then in 1939, he went to New York City at the invitation of Union Seminary. The plan was for him to stay, to safely sit out the war. Other Germans theologians did so. Karl Barth stayed in Switzerland, Paul Tillich in Chicago.
As soon as Bonhoeffer stepped off the ship and onto the harbor at New York City, he knew he did not belong there. Despite strong pressures from his friends to stay in the United States. He wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr: “I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people ... Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from security.”
In Germany, he ran an underground seminary for the confessing church and became part of the resistance. He was arrested and held in military prison for a year and a half, then transferred to Buchenwald and finally to Flossenburg concentration camp. Under orders from Hitler, he was executed there on April 9, 1945, 75 years ago today, just two weeks before US soldiers liberated the camp. He was led away from the final church service he conducted there. His last words were “This is the end – for me, the beginning of life.”
Earlier in prison, he wrote “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. . .. Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.” [4]
[1] The Rev. John Buchanan, in his sermon “Disappointed” https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2008/030208.html
[2] http://www.naharnet.com/stories/en/222629
[3] Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, in his Christmas Eve sermon 2016 at Christmas Lutheran Church, Bethlehem, Palestine, https://www.mitriraheb.org/en/article/1484299023
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Eberhard Bethge, ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), pp. 360-361