In The Garden Of Fear

Les Newsom on April 9, 2009

There, in the Garden of Gethsemane, we see a decidedly curious picture of the central figure of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth, soon to be ironically hailed King of the Jews, awaits the events that would surround his death. And he’s terribly shaken.

The scene would not be so interesting were it not for the fact that so many of his followers would face death with far more courage than the emotionally torn man we see before us. Generations of Christian martyrs would go to their deaths without so much as a blink, not a shadow of turning.

Jesus, however, is on his face, an uncommon posture for a rabbi. The stress levels reach maximum as the capillaries under his skin burst and mix with his sweat. And much to our surprise, we find him asking his Father for a way out, a way to pass from having to experience “the cup.”

Ah, there it is. It is the “cup” that has laid him flat and pushed him to such painful extremes. What about the cup terrifies him so? I think two things: first, the imagery in the Old Testament of the cup of God’s wrath is grisly enough just to read, much less to anticipate drinking. Ezekiel 23:32f should suffice to get the picture.

I suspect however that there is something else that Jesus sees in this cup that causes him to cower at the thought of taking it: the hand that holds it. Mark Lane says this:

The dreadful sorrow and anxiety that Jesus Christ experienced in the prayer for the passing of the cup was not just an expression of fear before a dark destiny, nor of a shrinking from the prospect of the physical suffering and death.  It is rather the horror of one who lived a holy life for the father and who came to be with the father for an interlude before his betrayal but found hell rather than heaven open before him.

Once again in our ears is the ring of modern expositors who recoil from the image of sin having seemingly pitted Father against Son from within the Trinity.

Donald MacLeod explains more fully,

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. The sight was unbearable. …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.


What is a follower of Jesus to make of these things? For most, the horror of Gethsemane has been used as a weapon to extract pity from those who would follow Jesus. “Look at his suffering,” we think. “Shouldn’t we have done a better job at serving him in the face of such anguish?” But pity is a poor motivator, fading at the first signs of what feels like equally deserved sympathy for my own struggling.

No, there’s more going on here. Jesus is bearing something for us. The Garden foretells of a coming abandonment. His friends will soon leave him. His enemies will soon consume him. And his Father will soon “forsake” him as well. It is far more than mere pity that draws us to this man. It is the hope that there, in the mind-crushing loneliness of solitary anticipation, Jesus takes upon himself all my deepest fears of abandonment. And in absorbing them, he neutralizes them three short days later in order to secure for me the certainty that whatever loneliness I feel on this day or any other can never be ultimate, can never be the only true thing about me… as loneliness so often feels.