“Tarry here,” He told the three,
“Tarry here and watch for Me,”
But they heard no bitter moan;
For the three disciples slept
While my loving Savior wept
In Gethsemane, alone.
I can’t remember how old I was when that became my favorite church hymn. I think I might have been a teenager. I had heard the song countless times before, but for some reason, that verse hit me like a ton of bricks. It captured the gravity, the grief, and the desperation of Jesus before He did what only He could in a way that stopped me in my tracks.
We’ve all read the verses about Jesus praying that He could avoid this gruesome, barbaric death. We’ve all read the descriptions of the disciples falling asleep while they were supposed to be keeping watch.
But the song added a new dimension, practically immersing listeners in Jesus’s desolation.
Even though we know Jesus was both fully God and fully man, I think we have a habit of minimizing His humanity.
We subconsciously convince ourselves that even though He cried, and bled, and died like we do, that He had a supernatural advantage that we don’t.
Savannah Guthrie, who has been in the news since her mother’s apparent kidnapping, described it herself on Easter morning.
“In our tradition, we are taught to take comfort in the fact that our Friend Jesus, in his short life, experienced every single emotion that we humans can feel. That His taking on the form of humanity made Him not a distant observer to our pain, but a hands-on experiencer of it. Recently, though, in my own season of trial, I have wondered, I have questioned whether Jesus really ever experienced this particular wound that I feel, this grievous and uniquely cruel injury of not knowing, of uncertainty and confusion and answers withheld. In those darkest moments I have thought bitterly and perhaps irreverently that I have stumbled upon a feeling that Jesus did not know.”
She was raked over the coal for these comments, but I understand why our minds do this.
It’s hard for us to make sense of a fully divine and holy being that can actually relate to us – that faced the same temptations and experienced the world the way we do.
But Jesus is most human to me in the hours before He’s put on the cross.
He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter. “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” He went away a second time and prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”
He was overwhelmed with anguish, and I assume that as He prepared for what was to come, He felt truly alone. His friends couldn’t keep their eyes open and didn’t seem to have any real understanding of what He had to go through, and His Father refused His distraught plea.
What Jesus did for us was so profound precisely because He was one of us. He didn’t want to endure that – none of us would. He felt every crack of the whip, every thorn twisted into His skull and every nail crushing His bones.
But He suffered a slow, sadistic and undeserved death that at full sensation so that we might be saved.
I don’t think it could have happened any other way.
Through agony, humiliation and heartbreak, Jesus fulfilled His purpose, and was exalted to God’s right hand.
Of course, our personal hardships dull in comparison to what Jesus subjected Himself to.
But what if the worst things we ever face are ultimately for our own good and the glory of God?
What if even in a fallen, unfair and sin sick world, God wastes nothing?
When I think of the year I didn’t know I’d survive and all that followed, I realize that I owe my relationship with God to it.
I realized that when I felt betrayed, discarded and without direction, I grew closer to God than I’d ever been, and knew Him at an intensity and intimacy I never had; not coincidentally but because of what I’d been through.
That year beat me to a pulp, broke me down and nearly buried me.
But in my defeat, anger and confusion, I had no choice but to submit to God – even if I did it reluctantly. And He rebuilt me.
When God is all you have, you eventually learn that He’s all you need.
Even if what went wrong isn’t quickly or neatly resolved, you realize that He is what matters and that any real strength doesn’t come from within but from above.
While our nature tells us to evade adversity, the older I get, the more I think that’s where God does His most important work.
As Christians, we are told to take up our crosses, and anticipate trials.
But I think even if we know they’re inevitable, most of us brace for them begrudgingly.
When we’re in them, we’re begging God to take us out. And I understand it; I did it too.
We almost never understand why God is doing something as He’s doing it. As it was happening to me, I was exhausted, furious and unraveling.
We will probably never think of our tribulations the way that we should, but God gives them to us not because He’s apathetic and not because He’s antagonizing us, but because we can’t learn true surrender without them.
You may very well find yourself indignant, doubting the character of your Creator and anxious about your future.
Job lost everything, and it’s exactly how he reacted.
But no matter how abandoned he felt, he kept calling out to God. And God not only restored him but renewed him.
I don’t know that God will ever answer you the way He answered Job. I don’t know that God will double everything that was taken from you. But I do know that God has a plan for your life better than anything you ever could have imagined for yourself, and your struggles aren’t just a part of it, but necessary to fulfill it.
what do you think?