Gethsemane and Salvation History

My pastor, Brian Croft, will be preaching on the Gospel of Mark’s account of the Garden of Gethsemane this coming week.  One of the most significant books I read at seminary was Donald Macleod’s The Person of Christ, and in it, Macleod provides a wonderful theological picture of Jesus’ human emotions in the Garden (p. 172-75).  I apologize for so many ellipses, but I had to shorten an already long section that’s worth quoting at length.   I hope you’ll find it as powerful as I have.

NB: Italics are Macleod’s.

Jesus’ grief, “becomes particularly clear in the account of Gethsemane where, as Calvin says, Christ ‘allows the flesh to feel what belongs to it, and, therefore, being truly a man, he trembles at death.’ . . . the narrative resonates the acutest torment and anguish.  This appears, for example, in the fact that he took Peter, James and John with him, not merely for companionship but so that they might watch and pray with him.  It was of paramount importance for himself, for the universe and for mankind that he should not fail in his task, and the temptations that beset him on the eve of his agony represented a real threat to the completion of his obedience.  Hell would do – and was doing – all in its power to divert him from the Father’s will.  Hence the supreme urgency of watching and praying; and hence the need for the prayers for others. . . . In the event they failed him.  He had to watch and pray alone. . . . As Barth puts in in his probing expostion of Gethsemane: ‘There is no one to bear the burden with Him.  There is none to help. . .’  But the impressive thing is that he turned to [the disciples] at all.  How deep must have been his need and his fear!

It is impressive, too, that immediately after telling his disciples that his soul was filled with mortal fear he turned away from them and set his face towards God: ‘He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed’ (Lk. 22:41).  There was nowhere else to go.  Even the physical circumstances of his prayer make plain that it came out of a soul near the end of its resources.  He throws himself prostate on the ground. . . . Here is a man pouring his whole strength, physical and spiritual, into a plea that God would ‘save’ him.

It is clear from all the accounts that Jesus’ experience of turmoil and anguish was both real and profound.  His sorrow was as great as a man could bear, his fear convulsive, his astonishment well-nigh paralysing.  He came within a hearsbreadth of break-down.  He faced the will of God as raw-holiness . . . in its most acute form: and it terrified him . . . the full implications of being the Servant and the Ransom (Mk 10:45) dawned on him only gradually, as he reflected on the Scriptures, observed sin at work and communed with his Father.  In Gethsemane the whole, terrible truth strikes home.  The hour of reckoning has come.  Now is the last moment to escape.  Beyond it there can be no turning back.

When Moses saw the glory of God on Mount Sinai so terrifying was the sight that he trembled with fear.  But that was God in covenant: God in grace.  What Christ saw in Gethsemane was God with the sword raised (Zc 13:7; Mt 26:31).  The sight was unbearable.  In a few short hours, he, the Last Adam, would stand before that God answering for the sin of the world: indeed, identified with the sin of the world (2 Cor 5:21).  He became, as Luther said, ‘the greatest sinner that ever was’ (cf. Gal 3:13).  Consequently, to quote Luther again, ‘No one ever feared death so much as this man.’  He feared it because for him it was no sleep (1 Thes. 4:13), but the wages of sin: death with the sting; death unmodified and unmitigated; death as involving all that sin deserved.  He, alone, would face it without a ‘covering’, providing by his very dying the only covering for the world, but doing so as a holocaust, totally exposed to God’s abhorance of sin.  And he would face death without God, deprived of the one solace and the one resource which had always been there.

The wonder of the love of Christ for his people is not that for their sake he faced death without fear, but that for their sake he faced it, terrified.  Terrified by what he knew, and terrified by what he did not know, he took damnation lovingly. . . .

The agony in the garden is one of the great foundations of his compassion because there he plumbed the depths of our emotional weakness, but nowhere is it more important than here to distinguish between the Lord suffering with us and the Lord suffering for us.  What he faced in Gethsemane (the cost of atonement and redemption) we shall never face; and we shall never face it precisely because he faced it, offering his body as the place where God should effect the condemnation of sin (Rom 8:3).  Gethsemane is as unique as Calvary exactly because, as much as the cross, it belongs not to church history but to salvation history.”