Every year during Passover week, Jerusalem would be filled with approximately 200,000 Jewish pilgrims. Nearly all of them, like Jesus and his friends and family, would’ve been poor. Throughout that holy week, these hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would gather at table and temple and they would remember. They would remember how they’d once suffered bondage under another empire, and how God had heard their outrage and sent someone to save them.
They would remember how God had promised them, “I will be your God and you will be my People.” Always.
They would remember how with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm God had delivered them from a Caesar called Pharaoh. Passover was a political powder keg, so every year Pontius Pilate would do his damnedest to keep Passover in the past tense. At the beginning of Passover week, Pilate would journey from his seaport home in the west to Jerusalem, escorted by a military triumph, a shock-and-awe storm-trooping parade of horses and chariots and troops armed to the teeth and prisoners bound hand and foot. All of it led by imperial banners that dared as much as declared “Caesar is Lord.”
So when Jesus, at the beginning of that same week, rides into Jerusalem from the opposite direction there could be no mistaking what to expect next. Deliverance from enemies. Defeat of them. Freedom. Exodus from slavery. How could there be any mistaking, any confusing, when Jesus chooses to ride into town — on a donkey, exactly the way the prophet Zechariah had foretold that Israel’s King would return to them. Triumphant and victorious, just before he crushes their enemies. There could be no mistaking what to expect next. That’s why they shout “Hosanna! Save us!” and wave palm branches as they do every year for the festival of Sukkot, another holy day in the fall when they recalled their exodus from Egypt into the wilderness and prayed for God to send them a Messiah. The only reason to shout Hosanna during Passover instead of Sukkot is if you believed that the Messiah for whom you have prayed has arrived.
There could no mistaking what to expect next.
That’s why they welcome him with the words “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel” the very words with which God’s People welcomed Solomon to the Temple. The same words Israel sang upon Solomon’s enthronement. Solomon, David’s son. Solomon, the King. There could be no mistake, no confusion, about what to expect next. Not when he lights the match and tells his followers to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar (i.e., absolutely nothing). Don’t forget, Jesus was carrying the coin in question in his pocket.
There could be no mistaking what to expect next.
Not when he cracks a whip and turns over the Temple’s tables as though he’s dedicating it anew — just as David’s son had done. Not when he takes bread and wine and with them makes himself the New Moses. And not when he gets up from the Exodus table, and leads his followers to, of all places, the Mount of Olives.
The Mount of Olives was ground zero. The front line. The place where the prophet Zechariah had promised that God’s Messiah would initiate a victory of God’s People over the enemy that bound them.
***
From the parody of Pilate’s parade to the palm leaves, from the prophesied donkey to the shouts of hosanna, from Solomon’s welcome to the exodus table to the Mount of Olives everyone in Jerusalem knew what to expect. There could be no mistaking all the signs.
They knew how God was going to use him.
He would be David to Rome’s Goliath. He would face down a Pharaoh named Pilate, deliver the message that the Lord has heard the cries of his People and thus says he: “Let my People go.” As though standing in the Red Sea bed, he would watch Pilate and Herod and all the rest swallowed up in and drowned by God’s righteousness. God’s justice.
They knew how God was going to use him.
And when Jesus invites Peter, James, and John (the same three who’d gone with him to the top of Mt. Horeb where they beheld him transfigured into glory) to go with him to the top of the Mount of Olives these disciples probably expect a similar sight.
To see him transfigured again. To see him charged with God’s glory. To see him armed with it.
Armed for the final and decisive battle. The battle that every sign and scripture from that holy week has led them to expect.
Except —
There on the top of the Mount of Olives Jesus doesn’t look at all as he had on top of that other mountain. Then, his face had shone like the sun. Now, it’s twisted into agony. Then, they’d seen him dazzling white with splendor. Now, he’s distraught with doubt and dread. Then, on top of that other mountain, Moses and the prophet Elijah had appeared on either side of him. Now, on this mountaintop, he’s alone, utterly, already forsaken, alone except for what the prophet Isaiah called the ‘cup of wrath’ that’s before him. Then, God’s voice had torn through the sky with certainty “This is my Beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased.” Now, God doesn’t speak. At all.
So much so that theologian Karl Barth said that Jesus’s prayer in the Garden doesn’t even count as prayer because it’s not a dialogue with God. It’s a one-way conversation. It’s not just that God didn’t speak or answer back, God was entirely absent from him, as dark and silent to him as the whale’s belly was to Jonah.
There, on the Mount of Olives, Peter, James, and John, with their half-drunk eyes, they see him transfigured again. This would-be Messiah who’d spoken bravely about carrying a cross, transfigured to the point where he’s weak in the knees and terrified. This would-be Moses who’d stoically taken exodus bread and talked of his body being broken transfigured so that now he’s begging God to make it only a symbolic gesture. This would- be King who can probably still smell the hosanna palm leaves transfigured until he’s pleading for a Kingdom to come by any other means.
Peter and the sons of Zebedee, they see him transfigured a second time.
From the Teacher who’d taught them to pray “Thy will be done …” to this slumped-over shadow of his former self who seems to pray against the Father’s will.
Jesus had boldly predicted his betrayal and crucifixion. Now he’s telling his disciples he’s “deeply grieved and agitated.” Or, as the Greek inelegantly lays it out there, he tells them he’s “depressed and confused.” Jesus essentially tells the three: “Remain here with me and stay awake, for I am so depressed I could die.”
And then Jesus can only manage a few steps before he throws himself down on the ground, what Matthew describes as ekthembeistai, meaning to shudder in horror, stricken and helpless. He is, in every literal sense of the Greek, scared out of his mind. Or as the Book of Hebrews described Jesus here, crying out frantically with great tears. He is in the garden exactly as Delacroix depicted him: flat in the dirt, almost writhing, stretching out his arms, anguish in his eyes, his hands open in a desperate gesture of pleading.
God’s incarnate Son twisted into a golem of doubt and despair.
Transfigured. As though he’s gone from God’s own righteousness in the flesh to God’s rejection of it.
Peter, James, and John, the other disciples there on the Mount of Olives, any of the other pilgrims in Jerusalem that holy week — they’re not mistaken about what should come next. They weren’t wrong to shout “Hosanna!” They’re all correct about what to expect next. The donkey, the palm leaves, the Passover — it all points to it, they’re right. They’re all right to expect a battle.
A final, once for all, battle. They’re just wrong about the enemy. The enemy isn’t Pilate or Herod, but the One Paul calls the Enemy.
The Pharaoh to whom we’re all — the entire human race — enslaved isn’t Caesar but Sin. Not your little “s” sins but Sin with a capital “S,” whom the New Testament calls the Ruler of this World, the Power behind all the Pharaohs and Pilates and Putins. They’re all correct about what to expect, but their enemies are all propped up by a bigger one.
A battle is what the Gospel wants you to see in Gethsemane. The Gospel wants you to see God initiating a final confrontation with Satan, the Enemy, the Powers, Sin, Death with a capital “D-,” the New Testament uses all those terms interchangeably, take your pick. But a battle is what you’re supposed to see.
Jesus says so himself: “Keep praying,” he tells the three disciples in the garden, “not to enter peiramós,”
The time of trial. That’s not a generic word for any trial or hardship. That’s the New Testament’s word for the final apocalyptic battle between God and the Power of Sin (cf. 1 Pet 4:12). The Gospels want you to see in the dark of Gethsemane the beginning of the battle anticipated by all those hosannas and palm branches.
But it’s not a battle that Jesus wages.
Jesus becomes its wages.
That is, the battle is waged in him.
Upon him.
From here on out, from Gethsemane to Golgotha, the will of the Father and the will of Satan mysteriously coincide in him:
The will of Sin to reject God forever by crucifying Jesus.
The will of the Father to reject Sin forever by crucifying Jesus.
In the garden, Jesus is confronted by two opposing wills that act in a hideous union. In the garden, the line between good and evil inseparably blurs beyond recognition. Which way is the path of the righteous and which is the path that leads to Sheol? Before him lay nothing but the way of Godforsakeness.
That’s the shuddering revulsion, the fear and trembling that overwhelms Jesus in Gethsemane: the realization breaking over him that the will of the Father will be done as the will of Satan is done. In him, upon him, “thy will be done” will be done for both of them, his Father and his enemy, on Earth as in Heaven and in Hell.
But Jesus does not withdraw and flee to the western wilderness. He accepts that he will be the concrete and complete event of God’s rejection of Sin. He agrees to be made vulnerable to the Power of Sin and God’s judgment of it. He consents to absorb the worse that we can do, as slaves to Sin. And he consents to absorb the worst that God can do- the worst that God will ever do. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5, “For our sake, God made him to be Sin who knew no sin.”
He who was without sin was transfigured into sin.
Recently a college student in my parish sent me a link to a Washington Post story about children being tortured in Ukraine by invading Russian soldiers. After the link, all the student wrote in her email, “What do Christians say?!”
What do we say?
Something trite about God’s love?
Maybe because we’ve turned God’s love into a cliche, or because we’ve so sentimentalized what the Church conveys in proclaiming “God loves you,” but many people assume that Christians are naive about the dark reality of sin in the world. But we’re a people who place a torture device on top of our buildings. We’re not naïve — neither about the cruelties of which we’re capable, nor the dreadful seriousness God deals with those cruelties.
What do Christians say about the evil of the world?
The dread, final, righteous, wrath-filled “No” God speaks to Sin.
And the nevertheless “Yes” God speaks to his enslaved sinful creatures. The “Yes” God in Christ speaks to drinking the cup of wrath to its last drops.
The apostle Paul says that in Christ God emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. In Gethsemane, Christ empties himself even of that. He empties himself completely, pours all of himself out such that Martin Luther says when Jesus gets up off the ground in Gethsemane there’s nothing left of Jesus. There’s nothing left of his humanity. He’s an empty vessel; so that, when he drinks the cup of wrath he fills himself completely with our sinfulness.
Jesus isn’t just a stand-in for a sinner like you or me. He isn’t just a substitute for another. He doesn’t simply become a sinner or any sinner. He becomes the greatest and the gravest of sinners. It isn’t that Jesus dies an innocent among thieves. He dies as the worst sinner among them. The worst thief, the worst adulterer, the worst liar, the worst wife beater, the worst child abuser, the worst murderer, the worst war criminal. Jesus swallows all of it. Drinks all of it down and, in doing so, draws into himself the full force of humanity’s hatred for God.
He becomes our hatred for God.
He becomes our evil.
He becomes all of our injustice.
He becomes Sin.
Upon the cross Jesus does not epitomize or announce the Kingdom of God in any way. He becomes the concentrated reality of everything that stands against it.
He is every Pilate and Pharaoh. He is every Herod and Hitler and Putin, every Caesar and every Judas. Every racist, every civilian casualty, every act of terror, and every chemical bomb. All our greed. All our violence. Every ungodly act and every ungodly person.
He becomes all of it.
He becomes Sin.
So that God can forsake it.
Forsake it.
For our sake.
COMMENTS
6 responses to “The Transfiguration in the Garden of Gethsemane”
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Oh my. So much to ponder. Thank you Jesus. Thank you.
So profound. Thank you.
wow
John Flavel—First, we thankfully acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ to be the Surety of the New Testament, Heb. 7.22, and that as such, all the guilt of our sins were laid upon him, Isa. 53.5,6. That is, God imputed, and he bare it in our room and stead. God the Father, as supreme Lawgiver and Judge of all, upon the transgression of the law, admitted the surety-ship of Christ, to answer for the sins of men, Heb. 10.5,6,7. And for this very end he was made under the law, Gal. 4.4,5.
God by imputing the guilt of our sins to Christ, thereby our sins became legally his; as the debt is legally the surety’s debt, though he never borrowed any of it: Thus Christ took our sins upon him, though in him was no sin, 2 Cor. 5.21, “He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin.”
We thankfully acknowledge, that Christ hath so fully satisfied the law for the sins of all that are his, that the debts of believers are fully discharged. His payment is full, and so therefore is our discharge and acquittal, Rom. 8.1,31. The guilt of believers is so perfectly abolished, that it shall never more bring him under condemnation, John 5.24. And so in Christ they are without fault before God.
No inherent righteousness in our own persons, is, or can be more truly our own, for this end and purpose, than Christ’s imputed righteousness is our own. He is the Lord our righteousness, Jeremiah 23.6, We are made the righteousness of God in him, 1 Cor. 5.21.
But notwithstanding all this, we cannot say, that over and above the guilt of sin, that Christ became as completely sinful as we are. He that transgresses the precepts, sins: and the personal sin of one, cannot be in this respect, the personal sin of another. There is no transfusion of the transgression of the precept from one subject to another. This is utterly impossible; even Adam’s personal sins, considered in his single private capacity, are not infused to his posterity.
The guilt of our sin was that which was imputed unto Christ. I know but two ways in the world by which one man’s sins can be imagined to become another’s. Either by imputation, which is legal, and what we affirm; or by essential transfusion from subject to subject. We have as good ground to believe the absurd doctrine of transubstantiation, as this wild notion of the essential transfusion of sin.
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