Gethsemane

I am now come to the suppressed hour of Jesus. I can use no other expression. I do not regard the grief of the Garden as a sudden thing; rather does it seem to me a thing long repressed. From the memorable day in which He is recorded to have rejoiced in spirit’ there had come to Jesus no moment of unclouded joy. His hours of brightness had been purchased by keeping His eye exclusively in one direction and ignoring the dark sides which were none the less felt to be there. Even His walk from Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives is a peace in the midst of pain; and the intercessory prayer with which it closes, rising as it does to heights of triumph, contains, as we have seen, the transition to Gethsemane.

With the entrance into the Garden the longrepressed hour at last struck. The sorrow which Jesus had kept under lock and key at length broke forth and filled the air with its presence. He had said, ‘I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.’ It is when work is done that the sorrows of the soul assert themselves. Griefs which lie latent in the time of action resume their sway when the hands are folded. The sense of a lost occupation, the feeling that we have nothing more to do, is ever the occasion when the troubles of the heart emerge from their hiding-place. This utterance of Jesus, in itself an expression of grateful gladness, is perhaps the very key which opens the gate into His garden of pain.

Not in equal degrees did Jesus admit His disciples to a vision of His grief. He allowed them all to enter the Garden; but he took three apart from the rest — the same three who had witnessed His transfigured glory — Peter, James, and John. Not even these had a perfect view; He stood somewhat apart from them also. Perhaps we of modern times have a nearer view than any of these. We have brought to our perception of the Portrait an experience of nearly nineteen Christian centuries. Ours is not physically a front view; but on that very account we may have superior advantages for being spectators in the great gallery. The mind of the Master is more on a level with our experience than with that of the men who watched with Him in the Garden. These were miles below Him. They did not then understand Him. We understand Him now better than they did that night; we, and not they, should be the observers in the Garden. Let us watch with Him in this hour! Let us take our stand beside the lonely Sufferer! We do not need to return to a past age; He was then living in our present experience; He was in advance of His time. Let us view the shadows of His night by the light we have derived from Him!

Let us look first at the form in which His sorrow expressed itself. The forms even of the same grief are by no means uniform.

There are, I think, three different ways in which the same form of suffering may express itself, and in each of which the pain may have equal intensity. There are some whose sorrow takes the form of numbness; their spirit of infirmity becomes a dumb spirit; they present to the bystander the attitude of stony apathy. There are some whose sorrow takes the form of rebellion; they rail against the system of the universe; they impugn the justice of Almighty God. And there are some whose sorrow takes the form of effusiveness; they pour forth the torrent of their grief. They do not let it drown their senses like the first class; they do not divert it into anger like the second; they give it outward play, they dwell on itself alone.

Now, this third is the form taken by the grief of Jesus. He gives it full play. He makes no effort to hide it from His followers, for the simple reason that He is not ashamed of it before His Father. There is no rebellion in it, no questioning of the goodness of the

Father; there is simply an abandonment to the sense of pain such as one sees exhibited by a little child in suffering, ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death,’ * Tarry ye here while I go and pray yonder.’ We see the spectacle of a soul * in agony ‘; and the agony finds visible expression in sweat that falls to the ground like drops of blood; while His cry for help rings through the Garden, ‘Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me! ’

What was the cup against which Jesus prayed? The word c this ’ seems to me significant. It is an antithesis to that other cup which He had given to His disciples at the Last Supper. He had no dubiety about that cup; He would not have given it to His disciples had He felt dubiety. Up to that point His course as the expiation for the sin of the world had been clear. It must, therefore, have become dark since then. We are driven to seek a solution within narrow limits — the limits of the Garden. Whatever this cup was which Jesus wanted to pass from

Him, one thing at least is certain — it was in some way connected with the prospect of His death.

But in what way? That is the question which now opens upon us. It will not do to throw a veil of absolute mystery over the scene. He has asked us to ‘watch’ with Him. Watching implies sympathy, and sympathy demands participation. A grief which is to us an absolute mystery cannot be a ground of sympathy. ‘Could ye not watch with me one hour?’ asks Jesus in the Garden. Our ability to do so must be proportionate to our understanding of the nature of His sorrow. That is true of every sick-nurse; the secret of her watching is her sympathy, and the secret of her sympathy is her knowledge of the pain. If we would share in the vigil, we must attempt to draw aside the veil.

I repeat, then, the question — why did Jesus recoil from this particular moment? A great modern thinker has not scrupled to render His words ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death, by the phrase, ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful to die! The suggestion is that the Son of Man was recoiling, as you and I would recoil, from death in the abstract — shrinking humanly back from the shadows that encompass the silent land. Whatever view I formed of the person of Jesus, it would be impossible for me to entertain such a thought. Would it be consistent with the Portrait, with any expression of the Portrait? Here is a soul absolutely steeped in the thought of immortality — a soul to whom the other world has always been the real world and this the land of shadows — a soul so confident of the life eternal that He speaks of it as something which is begun on earth! Here is one who, according to the delineation of the artist, has declared Himself to be already in possession of this life eternal, who professes to keep a reservoir of waters which will make immortal the man who tastes of them! According to that same Portrait He has just proved the truth of His claim by a marvellous and public exhibition of death’s inability to extinguish the spirit! And yet, we are asked to believe that immediately afterwards He pours out torrents of grief by reason of the fact that the valley of death which He is compelled to enter is too dark for His penetration, and that the shadow of death which He is compelled to meet is too deep for His piercing! Surely the statement of such an inconsistency is itself a refutation of it! Surely, theology apart, the canons of artistic interpretation would alone impel us to reject such a solution! The fear of death itself will not explain the grief of the Garden.

Nor is it explained by the anticipation of physical pain. Hundreds for the sake of Jesus have gone to the stake right joyously; hundreds through the heat of their love for Him have been oblivious of their outward fire. Is the disciple to be above his Lord! The martyrs in the cause of Jesus smile at the coming flame; and shall Jesus Himself faint because of it! Has He not Himself disparaged all physical suffering when weighed against mental advantage, ‘Fear not them that kill the body and after that have nothing more that they

VOL. II. O can do!’ It is not conceivable that Gethsemane could have owed its agony to the dread of physical pain. Nay, I am convinced that nothing personal could have caused the grief of Jesus, that it must have come from one source and one alone — the dread of an interference with His work of expiation. Is there anything to suggest such here?

Yes, there was ground for a great dread. His life had been revealing to the Father the possibilities of human righteousness. What of that awful righteousness which His death would reveal! I conceive Him to have thus spoken with Himself: ‘Is my labour to be all in vain! I have been trying to compensate the Father, trying to give Him a little joy in the world He has made. And now there is a storm coming which will sweep all my seeds away! The world is about to spurn my Father! The world is about to kill His chosen child! If I am the Messiah of the Father, nothing so bad has ever been done before. If I am the Messiah of the Father, then to kill me is to trample under foot the Father’s joy.

Is my work for Him to be all undone! I have laboured to make Him glad; I have planted for Him a flower in my heart; I have seen Him smile as He looked on it. And now the world would pluck the flower, would wither the flower! It would undo my work in a night — my work of reconciliation! It would decree the death of purity, the death of holiness, the death of justice, the death of mercy, the death of Love! How couldst Thou bear this, O my Father! Wouldst Thou not henceforth banish man from Thy soul! If it be possible, let this cup, the cup of Thy pain, pass from me! ’

That is my reading of Christ’s shrinking from His own death. He shrank, not from His cross, but from the world’s share in it; that was the cup He wanted to pass from Him. He wanted it to pass in the interest of the world itself. He wanted to avert from that world the danger of wrecking His reconciling work. He wanted to save it from committing the blackest deed of sin ever perpetrated by the sons of men — a deed which He feared might fix for ever an impassable gulf between the life of the creature and the heart of the Father.

You will observe, all this sorrow of Jesus would have been impossible but for His consciousness of a unique moral purity. It is a singular thing that the hour of His utmost humiliation, the hour of His ‘strong crying and tears,’ is precisely that hour in which His consciousness of a supreme moral majesty blazes out most brightly. There have been men whose lives have oscillated between the day and the darkness — men who have felt their glory in the morning and their humiliation in the night. But that the hour of humiliation should itself be the result of conscious glory — that is a strange thing! It will only be found in one experience; it is a feature peculiar to the Portrait of Christ; it separates His from all other portraits. The grief of Gethsemane would have had no existence but for Christ’s sense of holiness. Why does He deplore beyond everything else the world’s state of mind in crucifying Him? Why does He look upon this prospect as the culmination of its sin?

Because it was a projected murder? Men had murdered before, crucified unjustly before. It was because this was a project to murder purity itself. Jesus was not simply an individual, did not at this hour view Himself in the light of an individual. He thought of Himself as an embodiment of sinlessness. The sting of death lay to Him in the fact that it was the world’s effort to kill virtue, to obliterate goodness, to wipe out from the human heart the handwriting of the moral law.

‘What a self-consciousness, you say, ‘on the part of Jesus!’ The strange thing is that it is not — this is another exceptional feature of the Picture. A consciousness of being holy, there certainly is; but it is unaccompanied by any egotism, any sense of self-importance. When we are impeded in our breathing, we become conscious of our breathing, and we realise its value; but the realisation has come not through egotism but through pain. So was it with Christ’s sense of His own holiness. It woke through an attempt to stifle it. It brought to Jesus not a sense of superiority, but a sense of solitude. He felt Himself to be standing apart. The cry in Gethsemane is His cry for communion with the world — with those whom the Father had not yet given Him. It comes from a void in His heart. He possesses something which He wants to share; it pains Him to possess it alone. The attitude of the world threatens to perpetuate His solitude; it is aiming to destroy both Him and His possession. The Son of Man is menaced with eternal separation from the sons of men; and His prayer to the Father is a prayer for the breaking of His solitude. He is conscious of breathing a Divine air; but the consciousness comes to Him not from the sense of majesty, but from man’s effort to stifle His breathing.

A /T Y soul, hast thou considered these words, ‘Could ye not watch with me one hour! ‘It is like the head-nurse in a hospital rebuking the sleep of the undernurses. In the great Hospital of Time, Jesus was keeping watch by the couch of a sick world. In the same ward, with the same patient to take care of, His disciples had fallen asleep. He said to them, He says to thee, c Couldst thou not watch with me one hour! ‘What He asks from thee is no sentimental sympathy; it is sympathy in a cause. He does not ask, * Dost thou feel for me? ‘He asks, ‘Dost thou feel with me?’ Wouldst thou have communion with Jesus; then must thou share the watch of Jesus! The communion He desires is a community of object. He wants thee to have a kindred taste with Him — to love what He loves, to hate what He hates. It is a small thing to Him that thou shouldst cry * Lord, Lord! ‘His question to thee is, ‘Canst thou drink of my cup? ‘His cup is to watch by the sick-bed of the world. Canst thou join Him, O my soul? Canst thou pace with Him the wards of time? Canst thou watch with Him in the infirmary of broken hearts? Canst thou bind with Him the wounds of the fallen? Canst thou heal with Him the bruises of those beaten in the world’s battle? Canst thou calm with Him the nerves unhinged by life’s fitful fever? Canst thou even keep awake through the night in sympathy with His vigil? Then, in the days to come, shall thy Father say to thee, ‘Did I not see thee in the Garden with Him!1