ABBA FATHER

ABBA FATHER
 

On the Mount there was a garden, and a place where olives were crushed, which gave it its name, Gethsemane. Jesus and His friends had been spending the nights there, either to avoid the odors and noise of the great city, distasteful to them, country-bred as they were, or because they were afraid of being treacherously captured in the midst of their enemies' houses.

“And when He was at the place, He said to His disciples, lit ye here while I go and pray yonder." (Luke 22:40)

But He was so heavy-hearted that He dreaded being alone. He took with Him the three whom He loved the best, Simon Peter, James and John. And when they had gone a little way from the others, He began to be sorrowful and very heavy. "My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here, and watch with me." (Matt. 26:38)

If they answered Him no one knows what they said. But we know that they did not comfort Him with the words which come from the heart when it shares the suffering of a loved one, for He withdrew Himself from them alone, and went further on, to pray. He fell on the ground on His face and prayed, saying, "Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." (Mark 14:36)

He was alone now, alone in the night, alone in the midst of men, alone before God, and He could show His weakness without shame. After all, he was a Man, too, a man of flesh and blood, a living, breathing man, who knew that His de­struction was at hand, that His body would be destroyed, that His flesh would be pierced, that His blood would be poured out on the ground.

But yet He was One with God the Father as well as the Spirit, brooding over the great need of man. He was revealing the very heart of God. (John 5:7; 1 John 5:7)

This was the second temptation. After the defeat of Satan in the desert, the Evangelist says: "he departed from him for a season." (Luke 4:13) He had left Him till this moment. Now He was in a new desert, terribly alone in the darkness, more alone than in the desert where the wild beasts served Him. Cloaked and learned wild beasts were at hand now, but only to tear Him to pieces. In that terrible nocturnal desert, Satan returned to tempt his enemy; at first he had promised Christ, kingdoms, victories, and prodigies, he had tried to draw Him by the bait of power. Now, on the contrary, he counted on His weakness. At the beginning of His life, Christ burning with confident love had not fallen into his trap, but Christ near His end, abandoned by those nearest to Him, encompassed by His enemies, might be conquered by fear, even though He had risen above greed. The prayer to the Father was at the instigation of Satan, was a beginning of cowardice. Jesus knew He must die, that His death was necessary, that He had come to give life by His death, to confirm by His death that greater life which He announced. He had made no effort to avoid death, He had been willing to die for His friends, for all men, for those who did not know Him, for those who hated Him, for those not yet born. He had predicted His death to His friends, had already given them the rewards of His death, the bread of His body, the blood of His soul; and He had no right to ask the Father that the cup might pass from His lips or that His death might be delayed. He had written His words on the dust of the public place, and the wind had quickly obliterated them: He had written them on the hearts of a few men, but He knew how easily eradicated are words written on the hearts of men without the Spirit burning them there. If His truth were to remain forever on the earth so that no one could ever forget it He must write it with His blood. Only with the blood in our veins can truth be written permanently on the pages of earth so that it will not fade under men's footsteps or under the rainfall of centuries. The Cross is the careful and necessary consequence of the Sermon on the Mount. He who brings love is given over to hatred, and He can only conquer hatred by accepting condemnation. Everything must be paid for, the good at a higher price than evil; and the greatest good, which is love, must be paid for by the greatest evil in men's power, assassination.

But all that faith and revelation tell us of His divinity rises up against the idea that He can ever have been subjected to temptation. If the torture and the end of His body had really terrified Him, was there not yet time to save Himself? For many days He had known that they were trying to take Him captive, and even on that night there were ways of escaping the pack of hounds ready to fall upon Him. He would have been safe if, either alone or with His most faithful friends, He had taken the road back to the Jordan, or thence by hidden paths have passed across Perea into the Tetrarchy of Philip, where He had already taken refuge to escape the ill will of Antipas. The Jewish police were so few and primitive that they could scarcely have found Him. The fact that He did not do this, did not flee, shows that He did not try to escape death and the horrors that were to accompany it. From the point of view of our coarse human logic His death was a suicide--a divine voluntary suicide by the hand of others, not unlike that of the heroes of antiquity who fell upon the sword of a friend or a slave. What sort of a life would He have had after such a flight? To grow old obscurely, the fearful mas­ter of a hidden sect, to die at the last, worn out, the death-rattle in His throat like any other man! Better, infinitely better to finish the sowing of the Gospel on the Cross and to water it with His blood. (1 John 5:8) God's Washboard-Cleansing in Scripture is twofold: (1) of a sinner from the guilt of sin - the blood (hyssop) aspect; and (2) of a saint from the defilement of sin - the water (wash) aspect. Under grace the sinner is purged by blood when he believes (Mat 26:28; Heb 1:3; 9:12; 10:14). He had spoken out His truths and now, that those truths should be everlastingly remembered He needed to link with them the horror of His unforgettable death. Perhaps this blood, like a stinging drink, would arouse His disciples forever.

But if the cup that Jesus wished to pass from Him was not fear of death, what else could it have been? Betrayal by him whom He had chosen and loved, by the disciple whose hunger He had fed that very evening with His body, whose thirst He had quenched with His soul? Or the denial close at hand of the other disciple in whom after his cry at Caesarea He had the greatest hope? Or the desertion of all the others who would flee like scattered lambs when the wolf sets his fangs into their mother's body? Or was it grief for that greater denial, the refusal of His own people, the Jews, of the people from whom He was born and who now despised Him like one born out of His time, and suppressed Him like a child of shame, and did not know, but one day would, that the blood of Him who came to save them would never be wiped from their foreheads? Perhaps in the darkness of this last vigil He had a glimpse of the fate which would befall His children later on, the bewilderment of the first saints, the dissensions between them, the desertions, the martyrdoms, the massacres, and after the hour of triumph the weakness of those who should have guided the multitude, the irrepressible schisms, the dismemberment of the Church, the wild dreaming of heretical pride, the growth of innumerable sects, the confusion of false prophets, the boldness of rebellious reformers, the slick self-indulgence of those who deny Him in their actions while glorifying Him in word and gesture: the persecutions of Christians by Christians, the neglect of the lukewarm and the arrogant, the dominion of new Pharisees and new Scribes, distorting and betraying His teachings, the misunderstanding of His words, when they fall into the hands of the hair-splitters, evaluators of the immaterial, separators of the inseparable, who, with learned vanity, disembowel and cut to pieces the living things they pretend to bring to life.

The cup that Jesus wished to pass from Him might there­fore have been not at all any wrong done to Him, but wrongs committed by others, those alive then and close to Him, or those not yet born and far-distant. What He was asking from His Father might have been not His own safety from death, but safety from the evils, which, then and later, were to over­whelm those who claim to believe in Him. The origin of His sadness would have been thus not fear for Himself, but love for others.

But no one will ever know the true meaning of the words cried out by the Son to the Father, in the black loneliness of the Olives. A great French Christian called the story of this night the "Mystery of Jesus." The "Mystery of Judas" is the only human mystery in the Gospels; the prayer of Geth­semane is the most inscrutable, divine mystery of the story of Christ. (Matt. 26:36; Mark 14:32)