Gethsemane
Matthew 26:39 – “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will, but as you will.”
It is the night before the crucifixion. After leaving the Passover meal, Jesus and his disciples went out to the Mount of Olives, to a secluded garden known as Gethsemane. “Sit here and pray while I go over there and pray,” he tells them. It is here that Matthew informs us the Jesus began to be in anguish: “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” Luke adds, “His sweat was like great drops of blood falling to the ground.” It is as though Jesus was dying in the garden at the thought of what was coming. Three times he asks for the “cup” to be removed from him. It is the cup that staggers our sinless, holy Savior in Gethsemane.
In the old testament, the “cup” symbolically represents God’s perfect and holy hatred for sin (Isaiah 51:17, Jeremiah 25:15-16). The cup holds the infinite fury and wrath of Almighty God, which is to be poured out upon our sin. Jesus will drink the fullness of this cup. In his hours on the cross, the penalty of hell due to every believer would be paid in full once and for all by him. The hurricane of God’s wrath would rage against the sinless Savior on Calvary.
That night in the garden, Jesus knew that he was facing something far greater than mere physical death, and he was beginning to taste what he will undergo. As Jonathan Edwards has said,” [In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus] has then a near view of that furnace of wrath, into which he was to be cast; he was brought to the mouth of the furnace that he might look into it, and stand and view its raging flames, and see the glowings of its heat, that he might know where he was going and what he was about to suffer.” What an overwhelming mystery!
If Jesus Christ , the Son Of God, our sinless Savior was so staggered and horrified in Gethsemane by tasting the cup, imagine what it must have been like to drink the cup to the bottom on the cross? No wonder Jesus prayed this heartfelt petition three times, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me..”
Part of what Jesus drinks is expressed when he cries out while hanging on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps 22). Jesus would be forsaken, so that we never would be. We sing something to this effect in a hymn by Stuart Townend: “How great the pain of searing loss, the Father turns his face away as wounds which mar the Chosen One bring many sons to glory.” He would undergo the curse (Gal 3:13) and be cut off (Isa 53:8; Dan 9:26) for us. As Paul so wonderfully says, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21).
The bitter cup that Christ drank belongs to us. Our sins and our failures and our judgement filled that cup to the brim. Let us be amazed by what he did for us. Let us see his atoning sacrifice on our behalf and what it cost him to say, “Nevertheless Father, not my will but your will be done.”
And consider that because of Christ’s obedience, we are graciously given a different cup: the cup of blessing (1 Cor 10). It overflows to us with the blessings of Christ: forgiveness, justification, peace, and eternal life, to name a few. This cup of blessing we normally celebrate in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. By faith, let us drink from this cup of blessing this Easter weekend.