Jesus Opens the Gethsemane Pavilion at COP26 (Mt 26, Mk 14, Lk 22, Jn 18)
CLIMATE BIBLE STUDY: november 2021
Agony in the Garden, Pietro Perugino, Years: 1483-93
I spent the week following COP26 flat on my back on the living room couch. This is no doubt the result of jetlag and the rigors of travel home from Glasgow, but my fatigue was also the result of the high emotional toll exacted by a huge and historic event like COP26. COP26 was an two intense weeks, but the run-up to it was also intense, 24 months since COP25. And of course, the six years between when the Paris Agreement was adopted and when it went into full effect in Glasgow has also been emotionally rigorous. Even if you didn’t share my KLM itinerary, or even if you didn’t attend COP26, I’m sure you feel your own level of exhaustion. We might be having a collective experience like Peter, James, and John in the Garden of Gethsemane. We might be feeling the need to stay awake, to keep praying, but here we are: “When [Jesus] came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy” (Mt 26:43). I appreciate the sympathetic interpretation in Luke 22:45 where the disciples were said to be “exhausted from sorrow.”
There is an added exhaustion which is the result of trying to fight through the brain fog and come up with an early declaration of whether COP26 was a success or a failure, a victory or a defeat. Actually, such binary/dualistic thinking can be a strategy: “Just declare COP26 one way or the other; I no longer care. Please just let me sleep!” This could be part of the “temptation” that Jesus warns his three sleepy disciples about. Instead, Jesus gives a model of how to stay awake and pray in times of crises which are attended by sorrow, or by an anguish where it is said of Jesus, “he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.’”
The four passages in the Gospels (Mt 26, Mk 14, Lk 22, Jn 18) which deal with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane before his arrest, claim that Jesus prayed three separate times. We get to hear what he said in two of those three prayers. Here’s how those two prayers are rendered in Matthew’s account:
First: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will."
Then later: “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”
I would argue that there are two similarities between these two prayers, one significant difference, and then one final similarity again. The first similarity is how Jesus centers his prayer in the character of God. God is our father. The Mark account uses the even more intimate term: Abba. God loves us. Additionally, God is powerful and free: he gets to decide what is possible in this world--not Pilate, not Judas, not Caiaphas. The Mark account goes straight to the core sentiment. Whereas Matthew’s account says, “if it is possible,” Mark’s account says: “Abba Father, everything is possible for you.”
The second similarity is the continuation of the cup metaphor. The suffering that Jesus was about to step into—the arrest, the betrayal, the scourging, the shame, the torture, the death—is like a cup full of bitter liquid. It is poised at his lips. It will sear his mouth and tear through his throat. “And being in anguish, Jesus prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Lk 22:44). This is going to hurt.
But then we come to the major difference between the first time that Jesus prays this prayer and the subsequent time. In the first instance, Jesus asks that the cup might be removed from him, that—somehow, in some way—the miraculous hand of the fatherly, possibility-creating God might come down and shove the cup of suffering away from Jesus’s trembling lips. Wouldn’t that be a success? Wouldn’t that be a victory, one that we might wish upon the aftermath of COP26? But in the second prayer, Jesus presumes that the cup will not be removed, that in fact he must drink the cup of suffering down to its dregs: “if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”
In God’s great grace though, we are left with one final similarity, and, yes, I’m referring to Jesus’s obvious willingness to submit himself to the will of God, and yet additionally, Jesus words reveal a foundational insight: in the end, in both cases, the cup of suffering is gone. In the first case, it would be gone because of its removal; in the second it is gone by the drinking of it. I know that there is a big difference between a removal and a drinking—just look at Jesus languished on the cross—but in the end the result is the same: in the end, the cup is gone.
Sometimes, the perseverance required to endure suffering can be as big a miracle from God as being rescued from it. Whenever I teach the Garden of Gethsemane passages, I like to surprise people with the question, “Did you notice the angel?” Luke 22:43 says that after Jesus prayed, “An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him.” And this angel wasn’t sent to rescue Jesus, but rather to strengthen him, to keep him praying and watching in his time of anguish. In the John account, Peter grabs a sword and begins slashing at the soldiers trying to arrest his Lord. “’Put your sword back in its place,’ Jesus said to Peter, ‘for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?’” (Mt 26:52-53). And in the John account: “Jesus commanded Peter, ‘Put your sword away! Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?”
Sometimes God sends an angel with a sword to rescue us; sometimes the angel comes to brace our trembling hand that holds the cup. No doubt, COP26 was, and our climate future will be, some combination of the cup removed and the cup endured. “Stay here and keep watch with me,” Jesus continues to say to us.
You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss
On behalf of the Climate Intercessors leadership team