A Sermon Based Upon Mark 14: 32-42, NRSV
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Fifth Sunday of Lent, March 13th, 2016
Winston Churchill is considered one of the two or three greatest political leaders of the Twentieth Century. When he arose on June 18, 1940, to speak to the House of Commons, the weight world was upon his shoulders.
It looked as if Britain was to stand alone against the German Juggernaut that had crushed Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, The Nether-lands, and now France. The morale of the nation was at all time low. The fate of the free world hung in the balance.
The Nazi dictatorship was poised for the final kill, and Winston Churchill made this statement: “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands; but if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.” (Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, pp. 663-664).
We could say that beginning with the garden of Gethsemane, was also Jesus’ finest hour. But I'm not sure he felt like it at the time. This fourteenth chapter of Mark presents a ministry ‘seemingly’ falling apart. We are told that religious leaders are looking for a way to kill him (14.1). A woman has anointed Jesus for his burial (14.3-9). Sitting around the table for a meal with his disciples, Jesus knows it will be his last supper (14.12-16). At that table and after the meal, Jesus predicts those of his own who will turn their backs on him (14.17-31). It's a tragic, depressing, and disturbing picture of increasing evil and approaching darkness. It is the kind of situation that brings fear, dread, and the threat of great physical or emotional pain to Jesus and those involved with him (14.19).
How Jesus faced this coming darkness should be as important as anything he accomplishes in it. That is quite a lot to say, but how Jesus lived and died is just as important for our hope of salvation as why he came to die.
The ‘how’ of Jesus’ death is well known, but it is the ‘fear’ and ‘dread’ of it that becomes especially visible in today’s text (14.33-34). As Jesus prays for the Father to “remove this cup” from him (14.36, what becomes clear is that he must drink “all” of what is to about to come! Jesus must take the cup of betrayal, the cup of rejection, and the cup of suffering, exactly as it has been dealt to him. If Jesus doesn't drink of this cup of pain, suffering, and death, then he will not be able to release the ‘saving grace’ of God’s love. It is only by going through ‘all’ of it that the doorway will open up to the fullness of God’s grace and glory.
While Jesus must go through this moment alone, there is something we still have to learn from his “Gethsemane”. For we too will have to go through the ‘press’ (Gethsemane means ‘oil press’) of life and come to our emotional limits to find ourselves crying out to God in prayer. As someone has said, “everybody prays”. You may not get on your knees, or you may not even go to church or believe in God, but sometime in your life you will face will struggle to find a way keep going. As Churchhill is reported to have said during his ‘finest hour’: “When it seems like you’re going through Hell, keep going!” It was this prayer of Gethsemane that enabled Jesus to ‘keep going’ and it is prayer that can also empower us to find the fullness of God’s grace even when we face the hard struggles in our lives.
AWAKEN
As Jesus approached Gethsemane, he asked his disciples to ‘sit’ (32) and to ‘keep awake’ (34) while he prayed. Of course, when he returned he found them ‘sleeping’ and then scolds them, demanding that at least Simon Peter should have been able to “keep awake” (v. 37-38) to avoid the weakness of his own ‘temptation’.
What Jesus is warning Peter about is not about his sleeping habits, but it’s about his poor praying habits. For Jesus ‘prayer’ is the only way to remain vigilant, to ‘watch’, to remain ‘awake’ or ‘alert’ to all that can confront and challenge our lives and our faith. Prayer the only way we can prepare ourselves against the ‘weakness of the flesh’ to develop the ‘willingness’ of our ‘spirits’ for facing both the opportunities and the disappointments of life.
This challenge to ‘keep awake and pray’ (v.38), or ‘wakefulness’ is foundational to what prayer means. While prayer is also about ‘asking, seeking, and knocking’ to receive all God has for us, we become most aware to what we need to ask for by becoming fully awake and aware of what is going on around and within us. Prayer is foremost about facing squarely both the good and the bad in our lives, so that we become ‘honest with God’ and as we are honest with ourselves and others. Living a life in ‘denial’ of what is really happening can become the most destructive tool against us when our ‘flesh’ is weak and under threat. This is why Jesus is constantly admonishing his disciples to ‘watch and to pray’. Developing a spirit of wakefulness is precursor to all that prayer means and is.
Peter Kreeft gives a powerful image of what ‘wakefulness’ means for prayer, when he says that the beginning ‘method’ for developing wakefulness are is the simple phrase, ‘stop, look, and listen’. “This is what you do at a railroad crossing. God is like a great train crossing the tracks of your life. BUT YOU WANT TO GET RUN OVER BY THIS TRAIN!” You have to become fully awake to God by right now stopping your worry about anything else except your relationship with God, by looking at God with the eyes of faith, and then finally, by listening for that voice that is different than any other. It is the ‘still, small, voice’ that you can only hear when you are fully awake, alert, and aware that you are not alone; God is speaking through nature, through his Word, and through your own heart when you are make yourself still enough to be true to yourself (From Peter Kreeft, “Prayer for Beginners, Ignatius, 2000, pp. 25-30).
Unfortunately, too many people are not ready to ‘awaken’ their souls by being ‘still before the Lord and waiting patiently for him’ (Psa 37:7). There is a novel by Charles Williams, All Hallows Eve, that opens with an account of two souls who are hovering over a city where a car accident has just taken their lives. They cannot return to earth and yet they do not feel able to leave it either. They are confused, not knowing who they are or why they have lived. They are not only confused about themselves, but are also numb and oblivious to the human needs that surround them. They are close to the condition of being in George Bernanos’ description of Hell, which is ‘not to love anymore’. They are not ready to die. They never really found out how to live. They are adrift, because they were never really fully awake to the purpose, calling and meaning of their life. If they had only let themselves be ‘run over by His train’ then, and become awake, they might not now be adrift, having lived before they died. (From Doulas V. Steere’s, Dimensions of Prayer, Upper Room Books, 1962, p. xiv).
So, with this powerful image of a Freight Train coming down the tracks that you are told to ‘get run over by’ so you can become fully awakened to God and to what is happening in your life, would you hear Jesus tell you, as he told his disciples, to ‘keep awake and pray’? It’s not easy to want to become fully awake to this God who invites us to be awake to having everything in our lives ‘run over by this train’. Is there any wonder most people want to find distractions to make them too busy to pray?
WRESTLE
The second aspect of ‘praying through’ the difficult moments of our lives is that it not only means ‘wakefulness’, but it also means ‘wrestling’. Whatever we see in Jesus’ agonizing prayer at Gethsemane, we must become ‘awake’ to the struggle going on in Jesus’ mind, his heart, and in the deepest part of his soul. As Jesus realizes his arrest is near, it does look like God is coming toward him ‘like a great train crossing the tracks of his life’ and that he will be ‘run over’. But when his ‘flesh is (so) weak’, as Jesus says it is, why is His ‘Spirit’ still willing’ (v. 38)? Can you see the ‘struggle’ of Jesus’ heart? Have you ever felt such a ‘struggle’ within you—a struggle between what know you must do, but which you feel you can’t or don’t want to do?
The second great lesson of praying through our pain is about the human ‘struggle’ to have all kinds of possibilities in life, but also having to live within our own limits. While we know that it dangerous to push our limits too far, we also know that it is even a worse kind of life or death to live with the regret of settling for less than what God has enabled us to do or be. Here we need only to recall the first ‘wrestling match’ in the Bible between Jacob and the unnamed ‘man’ in Genesis. This story has ‘dreamlike’ qualities, for it happened in the middle of the night, as Jacob was about to face everything ‘deceitful’ he has done in his life, trying to be ‘blessed’, that he now finds himself wrestling with a strange ‘person’ all through the night. He is determined not to let this person go, even though the struggle is causing him pain and his hip has been put ‘out of joint’. In spite of the pain, he will not let go until this person blesses him. Jacob is wrestling to gain some kind of ‘approval’ which all his conniving and scheming would not attain. It was, and still is the ‘blessing’ that only comes as a ‘gift’ of gracefully undeserved and unearned (See Genesis 32).
The story of Jacob is the story of Israel, and the story of Israel now comes to the forefront in the life of Jesus, as he too struggles and wrestles within himself and with God. While Jesus has already received the ‘blessing’ as God’ beloved son (Mark 1.11), Jesus struggle is to be and reveal the ‘blessing’ for his people according to the purpose God has called him to fulfill.
But what we also see in Jesus is also a ‘reflection’ of the ‘struggle’ that goes on in all of us, if we are fully awakened to God purpose and presence in us. ‘As long as there is one person left on earth,’ someone has written, ‘Jesus is still suffering with and for us’ (Author Unknown). Jesus struggles to do what is right, because we struggle to do what is right, which requires that we also pray through our own struggle until we find the strength to do must be done. Only by doing what we must do right does the true ‘blessing’ come. It doesn’t come when we avoid the struggle, or run from the pain or the ‘train’ of God’s purpose and presence, but it only comes when we pray and go right straight ‘to it, and through it,’ with God’s help, of course. To throw ourselves fully into this ‘way’ that is not just our way is the struggle that never ends until it is fully resolved within in our own hearts.
Do you have time for such wrestling match? We seldom choose it, most often it chooses us. Jacob didn’t choose his ‘deceptive’ life, but his mother did. Israel didn’t choose to struggle by going through the wilderness, it came with the ‘territory’ and the ‘geography’ of being God’s chosen people. Also, Jesus didn’t choose the path suffering, but it was written in Scripture, in the rebellion of evil powers, and it was according to God’s will to accomplish the saving work Jesus was ‘begotten’ to fulfill.
Life’s struggle will find us too, because we live in a world that God created out of the ‘void’ and ‘chaos’ of emptiness or nothingness. For life to mean something and for us to become someone, we must also ‘jump’ into the ring and take on the physical and spiritual forces God had to wrestle with to make life possible at all. To be co-creators with God we have to ‘speak’ and ‘wrestle’ against the darkness because Jesus wrestled, endured and overcame.
This is ‘heavy’, I know, but in Mark’s gospel, we are headed toward the cross---the cross that brings suffering and death, but also brings new hope for redemption, salvation, and everlasting life. While we can’t ‘earn’ this kind of ‘redemption’ for ourselves, we do have to follow and join in the ‘ring’ with Jesus by ‘accepting’ his ‘yoke upon us’ for ourselves. Jesus says after we take this ‘yoke’ upon us, the ‘yoke is easy’ and the ‘burden is light’ (Matthew 11), but how can he say this, after what happened to him or what can happen to us?
In the sports movie Southpaw, Billy Hope is a left-handed, but very gifted boxer, who, because of an eye injury must retire while he is at the top. But early in his retirement, his wife is accidently shot and Billy is sent into a downward spiral using drugs and alcohol as he surrenders to his pain. After proving to be unfit to care for his daughter, Billy is encouraged to get a job at a gym. While working at that gym, with the help of an experienced trainer named ‘Tic’, Billy regains his fighting spirit, and his lightweight title, which he does in one last dramatic fight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southpaw_(film) .
While movie critics rightly complained that Southpaw was only held together by great acting, since the movie was so dull and the ‘script’ too predictable, we also know that this ‘boxing’, or ‘fighting’ theme is a well-worn storyline because it is ‘true’ to all our lives: There is no life without the struggle, the match, or the fight. What ‘wrestling’, ‘boxing’, or any kind of sports competition does, sometimes poorly and a few times greatly, is to ‘project’ or bring out the ‘struggle’ we are all in as we live in ‘hope’ to ‘win the prize’ of our ‘calling’ in life. This prize can only be won, when we stay or get back into the ring and continuing to wrestle, to struggle and to stay in the ‘fight’.
When Nicholas Wolterstorff lost his twenty-five year old son Eric in a mountain climbing accident, he was distraught, suffering through all kinds of emotional anguish and grief. As a trained theologian at Yale, he also wrote his feelings down, keeping a diary of his own ‘struggle’ with his grief. As you get to the end of his “lament’, Wolterstorff writes more deeply about ‘what’ he has learned in his struggle, reflecting on ‘why’ God must calls us to struggle and allow us to suffer together with Him:
“God is love. That is why he suffers. To love our suffering sinful world is to suffer. God so suffered for the world that he gave up his only Son to suffering. The one who does not see God’s suffering does not see his love. God is suffering love…Suffering is down at the center of things, deep down where the meaning is…But mystery remains: Why does God not end his agony by relieving ours?... We are in this together, God and we, together in the history of our world…Our struggle to for joy and justice is our struggle relieve God’s sorrow… “Put your hand into my wounds”, said the risen Christ to Thomas…The wounds tell us who Jesus is…. (From Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, 1987, pp 90-97). And I would add, that to accept the wounds, to take on the hurts, to wrestle with the pain, the problems, to grieve, to pray, and to suffer through and wrestle with the ‘wins’ and ‘losses’ of our lives, will also ‘tell us’ who we are, and as Wolterstorff, must also finally observe, “Suffering may do us good---may be a be a blessing, something to be thankful for” (p. 96). Looking at the world through blood, sweat and tears, he adds:, “I have become a better person….p. 72-73),…. I have seen things that ‘dryed-eyed I could not see’ (p. 26).
WILLING
This brings us to a final lesson from Gethsemane about praying through our struggles, our disappointments, our very difficult decisions, and praying through our despair. Of course the ‘yoke’ of God’s will for Jesus wasn’t easy, just as it isn’t easy for us, but something did change, at least within Jesus himself, after Jesus finishes ‘wrestling’ with God in his prayers. We see this after Jesus returns to his disciples ‘a third time’ to find them still asleep, but it is this time that Jesus resolves his own ‘time of trial’ all by himself, by surrendering and saying: ‘Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners…” (14:41).
When Jesus says ‘enough’, he doesn’t mean enough sleeping, or enough praying, but Jesus means that now he is willing and ready to face ‘the hour’ that ‘has come’ by resolving to do what ‘must’ be done (Mark 8.31). By ‘awakening’ fully to this moment through prayer, and having ‘wrestled’ with the Father in his heart, Jesus is ready to ‘get going’ and to face what and who is ‘at hand’ (14:42).
What we must say about this final aspect of praying, is that prayer is never finished until we are ready to say ‘enough’! After we ‘wrestle’ with what has or must happen, we must willingly resolve to accept and to act for God’s will to be done. True prayer goes ‘exactly’ in both of these directions at once; both accepting what must be done, by acting toward what still can be done. In praying through the hurt, pain, and struggles of our lives, Jesus “enough” will also become our ‘enough.’ There is no real ‘acceptance’ unless we also willingly move toward the purposes of God. There is also no enduring act, unless we are willing to move with God where he leads. This is at the core of what it means to be ‘willing’ in Spirit even when we are still ‘weak’ in our ‘flesh’ (vs. 38).
So, we’ve come full circle with Jesus in Gethsemane, as he prays through this ‘oil press’ moment in his life. When he prays, as we should also pray, through the ‘press’ and ‘struggles’ of and for life, we too become ‘awake’ to who God is what life means. When we ‘pray through’ our tears, our fears, our hurts, and our pains, we also learn what it means to ‘wrestle’ and to suffer together with God for the ‘blessing’ of genuine, unconditional, but costly love. This ‘blessing’ and ‘abandon’ to love becomes ‘enough’ when we are also ‘willing’ to accept in ‘trust’ and then act upon our ‘faith’ in life to keep moving toward God’s perfect will and redemptive purposes.
Are you awake, are you in the fight for right and for life, and are you willing to accept and to act upon the ‘trust’ that only comes through being in this struggle ‘together with God’? If you live, if you are awake, you will ‘struggle’ and you will ‘wrestle’ for something. Why not be willing to give yourself for something that matters now, and forever? Why not find out that only God’s ‘enough’ is ever truly ‘enough’ because it’s the only true ‘blessing’ that can come through the ‘curse’ which will be finally transformed through God’s unconquerable love and redeeming grace.
God’s suffering and redeeming love is the ‘enough’ that brought him off his knees and back on his feet to say, “Enough! The Hour has come…Get up, let’s get going…” (14.41-42) Jesus was willing to ‘get up’ and face what was to come because he was in constant communion with his loving Father. Only the God who is love can affirm that suffering, evil, or death will never be ‘all there is’ or could ever dare to suggest to us that ‘what is’ is never ‘enough’. It is this living relationship with our loving Father who will also grant us this ‘enough’ to ‘get up’ and to ‘get going.’ Communion with him will awaken us to God’s presence, in whom we can find the strength to be willing to keep wrestling for the good, because it know God suffering love is also the source of our own ‘enough’.
“O Lord, who teaches us to pray not our will, but thy will be done, awaken us to your loving presence and strengthen us when we are down and out so that we can get up and keep going toward the hope that is ‘enough’. Amen.
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