Matthew 26: 36-46
by Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
Maundy Thursday, 2013
Jesus prays for something we’re all too familiar with. He prays that God change a situation. “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.”
It’s a prayer that I know I can relate to. There’ve been times when I feel like I’m caught up in a nightmare playing out in real life—when some terrible thing is happening to me or someone I love—and I say, “Lord, please make this turn out to be just a bad dream.” I can easily imagine that’s how Jesus felt. He’d worked so hard to convey the Gospel to people, and it seemed to have failed. Right there, in the Garden, awaiting His inevitable arrest and crucifixion, betrayed by friends, Jesus probably felt like a terrible failure, and was certainly fearful and lonely—as He puts it “grieved, even to death.” At that moment, He felt like no one understood Him or supported Him, not even God. He was praying for the nightmare to be over, for Him to wake up and it would all be a dream.
That’s not what was going to happen. The inevitable could not be stopped or delayed. He prayed for God to change reality, but that’s not what God did.
But there was a change.
Listen to Him after His time of prayer: “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”
Jesus entered the Garden “grieved even unto death,” fearful, lonely, sorrowful, uncertain. He leaves the Garden confident—self-assured—in command. The situation hasn’t changed—but He has.
He’s Gospel proof that the saying we often see on posters, “Prayer changes things”—isn’t true, or at least is rarely true. Prayer doesn’t change things. Prayer changes us.
Psychologists talk a lot about the importance of resilience. It is one reason, they say, that people who’ve struggled with difficulties in life like mood disorders or intense suffering end up becoming great leaders. We learn resilience by navigating difficult times, times when life is out of our control and we have little choice but to see through to the other side. Such people can be extraordinary leaders because they can be calm when everyone is panicky.
That’s how Jesus is after His time of prayer. Before it He is grieving and sorrowful. There’s nothing wrong with that; in fact, His grief is an essential element of the story that we remember in the Passion Week—His sadness at His Last Supper because He knows what is coming and knows His friends will betray and desert Him. But the Jesus who emerges from His time of prayer maintains His confident demeanor all the way through His trial before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, His torture, and His crucifixion. He can’t change the situation, but His time of prayer has changed Him, prepared Him for what is to come.
So it’s worth our while to ask what did prayer do for Him? And what might it do for us?
First, it knits Jesus’ will to God’s. When He first prays, he says, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want, but what you want.” He acknowledges that God is His Father and His Lord, and that He is a servant of God’s will; and that’s good. But it’s not Jesus’ will KNIT to God’s. Jesus will bear the cross not because He wants to but because He has to. He’s an obedient soldier.
But His next prayer is “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, then your Will be done.” That’s quite a change. Jesus now accepts God’s will as His own. He can be calm about what lies ahead because He knows that, though the path is grim, God is with Him. He no longer will carry the cross because He’s been ordered to. Now He carries the cross because He wants to. It’s His choice.
It’s hard to think of Jesus this way. We like to think He was always in tune with God’s will, right from the start. But though Jesus was the Son of God, He was just as human as you or me. He wouldn’t have needed to pray at all if His will was so in line with God’s that what He thought was what God thought. Scripture shows Jesus again and again going to a lonely place to pray. He needed that time to get Himself centered in God’s will again. He needed it to remind Him that the path He was on with both its bright spots and its terrible darkness was God’s path, and God His Father was with Him. He needed that just as much as you and I need it.
One evidence of His confidence is how He describes Himself after His time of Prayer. He calls Himself “the Son of Man.”
One fear we sometimes have is that we might get engulfed by God, swallowed up, so that our will, our personality, who we are is completely subsumed and we’re just little automatons of God’s will. But Jesus finds Himself in His time of prayer. He finds out who He truly is and lays claim to it when His will and God’s will are knit as one. He knows His calling and can find the calm center in His soul because He has become centered in God. That kind of self-knowledge is what He’ll need to maintain as he faces what lies ahead, and it’s the kind of self-knowledge one can only have because one knows where he or she stands with God—that we are beloved, that our lives, whatever else befalls, rest in the hands of God who loves us and knows us intimately and accepts who we are, God who calls us by name and has shaped the person we are and we are becoming.
These are the benefits of prayer to the Son of God as He faces a terrible trial far beyond what you and I might ever experience. May all of us learn to pray as Jesus prayed. Amen.