Luke 22 & 23
Truth be told, I find it hard to write about the death of Jesus. Sure, I can recount facts, talk about the historical and archaeological evidence that it happened. I’ve walked where Jesus died – or at least somewhere very close. But every time I read the Gospels I get to the part where the Savior whom I love is betrayed and mocked and beaten and flogged and ridiculed and finally tortured to death on a cross and my heart is weighed down with sorrow. I think that’s what is supposed to happen.
Luke begins the narrative after the Last Supper with a dispute among the disciples about which one of them was the greatest. It’s comical irony. Jesus patiently teaches them. He must have been thinking about what was coming, yet He was present in that moment. His disciples were struggling. They had to be. The weight of what was coming must have hung like a dense fog, dulling senses, disorienting thinking, this constant unimaginable gravity. Then Jesus tells poor Peter that he would deny him. Soon. That very night. And Peter, oh Peter, he doesn’t understand yet how much he needs a savior.
Jesus and His disciples walk to the Garden of Gethsemane. It’s not far. Down one hill and up another. Maybe it took them 30 minutes. It still there, that garden. The same olive trees that processed Jesus’ carbon dioxide into oxygen grow there today. Jesus prays and asks that the cup of suffering be removed, but only if His Father was willing. You don’t have to be a parent to imagine the pain God the Father was feeling in that moment. That sentence seems impossible – that God could feel pain. That God could experience a moment. Yet that is precisely what the incarnation is: God in the Moment. God, here, now. God with us. God weeping. God feeling pain. And as I write that my emotions blur my thinking and I am overwhelmed.
Luke tells us that an angel from heaven appeared to Jesus, strengthening Him. I wonder which angel got that assignment? Was it the same angel that ministered to Him after the Temptation? I don’t even know if angels feel emotions like we do. But a robotic, unfeeling angel just seems wrong, like an out of tune violin in an orchestra. So, I like to imagine this angel that gets to strengthen Jesus was overwhelmed too. Overwhelmed with the sadness of the moment, with the tenderness of Jesus in agony asking His Father to spare Him the agony but willing to endure it. An angel strengthened Jesus. I wonder how? Did he speak to Jesus? Encourage Him? What happened when an angel, untold eons old, was sent to strengthen the Incarnate Son of God?
The disciples are famously asleep, and I usually process that as their being tired and their spirit being willing and their flesh being weak. I get it. I am willing and weak every day. But Luke mentions that they are “sleeping from sorrow.” They are not simply tired. They are so overwhelmed with sorrow that their bodies put them to sleep. Have you ever been so sad that you passed out asleep? Grief is a gift God gives us to help us process loss, and they were losing Jesus. They knew it. Deep in their spirits they knew it. And they were overwhelmed. Weak, exhausted, overwhelmed. Jesus, wonderfully, rebukes them. “Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you do not fall into temptation!” And I see in that rebuke the chasm between who Jesus is and who I am. Between who I want to be and who I am today. All my weakness and frailty and forgetfulness and mistakes, all my fears and dullness to spiritual realities. The only thing that could ever make me like Jesus is Jesus. Because without Him, I am asleep when I should be engaged in epic spiritual battle. Without Him, I am lost in darkness and grief.
Jesus is betrayed by Judas, arrested, and brought before Caiaphas, the high priest, I’ve been in the dungeon where they held Jesus overnight. It, like the Garden, still holds the pain of that evening, like the electrons flying around in their atomic orbits are sad. The stones hold the grief. You feel it when you’re there. Peter, in the courtyard, denies Jesus and Luke tells us, “The Lord turned and looked at Peter.” What was the look? Oh, Peter, I grieve with you! Was it some mix of love and sadness and grief and hurt communicated in that look? Oh, how Peter must have wept such great heaving draughts of sorrow. The men there mock Jesus, blindfold Him, hit Him and tell Him to prophesy which one hit him. Pilate passes Jesus to Herod. They mock Him too. Dress Him in a fancy robe.
Finally, Pilate, “delivers Jesus to their will.” Brutal. They crucify Him. The soldiers mock Him. The criminal mocks Him. The crowd mocks Him. Hurl abuse at Him. The moment comes for Jesus to die and the Holy Land grows dark with grief. It’s like the very creation is mourning. And I don’t want to feel what I’m feeling but I can’t just read this and not feel. Luke tells us that the crowds who came to witness the spectacle, when they saw what happened when Jesus died, they turned and walked away, beating their breasts in lament. They had witnessed the death of God the Son and no person can see that and ever be the same.
I know I am not. And as I read and process and meditate on a story I have read countless times, I am grieved to tears and overwhelmed, but not with sorrow. Because I know that the story does not end here. I can bear the grief because joy comes in the morning, because Jesus saved all the broken people when He suffered on that cross. And I am one who was once broken and am being made new. A newness that never fades away. A new life won for me by my marvelous, wonderful, beautiful Savior. A life I can walk in every moment of every day, even the sad ones. A life, HIS life, that now lives in me. I am redeemed, the price is paid, oh, what a Wonderful Savior!
Leave a Reply