Read Luke 22: 39-46
The alarm goes off. It’s time to wake up, prepare breakfast, prepare everyone for work and school, and rush towards the long day of duties. On top of it all, there are meetings and extracurricular activities to attend. It can be a breeze at times, especially when the kids are in their best moods and your spouse is extra understanding about your schedule, but there are times the experience can feel like a mechanical disaster. For an on-the-go parent, everyday can feel like a list of things to be done.
We can always choose to go through each day like that, or we could spend some time to be empowered in the life of the Son.
Jesus had the regular habit of spending time alone in prayer and deepening his fellowship with God the Father. This time of silence and solitude was a conscious part of His hectic schedule. While He served people of all walks of life, He made sure that He had ample time alone. There were times He would even invite His disciples to come away as well to the mountain or the countryside for overnight retreats. He would then go with a vibrant yet calm demeanor and minister to people in the towns of Judea, touching those who were sick and in pain that they would be physically healed. He would counsel the restless and brokenhearted towards wholeness, teach them to believe and live out the good and perfect will of God through His Word, and journey with them so they may know that God is near and with them, and offer them life as it was meant to be.
In the same manner, after observing an eventful Passover meal together with His disciples around the third year of His time with them, He brings them with Him for a walk towards the Mount of Olives. As they gradually scale the heights that evening to see Jerusalem’s Temple from a kilometer or two, thoughts would have run through the minds of the band of ex-fishermen to associate their recent remembrance of God’s deliverance of their people from Egypt with Jesus’ predictions about Himself. Would He have come to set them free from the Roman Empire? Was He there with them to lead them on to a revolution? If He were to die, as He had said, they were willing to go with Him to the end – or so they thought.
Knowing that He was to face the most challenging and gruesome episodes of His life, He came back to the garden where He would often spend the night. Little did His disciples know that this would be the last moments they would have Him with them, since brewing somewhere else inside the city was a plot to arrest Him.
Jesus began His vigil and called on his small group of men to watch and pray, to bear with Him. During the first hour, they were probably intent on praying with Him, yet they could not stay awake and join their Teacher for the long stretch. Where earlier they had valiantly declared their vows to be with Him to the very end, were they now too exhausted after a whole day? I don’t blame them. Even I would sometimes doze off to bed without a prayer for the night’s rest.
Regardless, Jesus walked a short distance away from them, knelt down and poured out His heart to the Father. His tears flowed freely beyond what any person could cry. He appealed with a painfully conflicting desire: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done.”
His pain was heavy with the burden that He bore. Yet it was clear to Him: there was no other way. This was the only way salvation can be made possible for men. It was only through the death of the Lamb of God that the sins of man can be forgiven. It was only through His perfect, sinless sacrifice that man could be restored to fellowship with God and experience life as He meant it to be. In obedience to the will of the Father, Jesus the Son willingly gives up His hold on life that His death would bring this life to many others.
Jesus is consoled by His Father. There is perfect peace amidst the tension. He is comforted by a messenger from heaven. He is strengthened and encouraged, though His tears and sweat flood His face and the ground beneath Him. In His time alone with the Father, He stands up with courage and faces His captors in the next episode of the night.
It was Jesus’ constant and intimate walk with His Father that gave Him strength to journey each day towards His greatest challenge on the historical cross of Calvary. It may be argued that Jesus was not like us, since He is God who became man, and He and the Father are in fact, one, so it wasn’t as difficult at all to walk the pathway that led to His sacrifice. Yet He too was man who experienced the greatest of all sorrows. He is perfectly acquainted with all our life experiences. He doesn’t just give us an example to follow. Rather, He invites us to experience the same perfect peace amidst the tensions and challenges of life. It is at His feet that He offers the greatest strength available. The fullest life we can experience is in an intimate deepening relationship with Him as we respond to that invitation to connect and immerse our life and our every day with Him.
Bj Villanueva is a follower of Jesus, the Greatest Hero of all, and is passionate to help others journey with Him in the Big Story. Serving together with his wife and kids, he teaches at FEBIAS College of Bible and ministers as one of the pastors at Christian Bible Church of Las Piñas.
