Luke 22 : The Garden of Gethsemane

AJM Holy Trinity 26.3.06

Introduction

I was reading the paper the other day and I came across the results of an international survey on what people think of different nationalities and their characteristics. You’ll be glad to know that Great Britain came out top. We are deeply admired (at any rate by those who have never actually been here) for our cultured behaviour, sporting achievement and musical excellence – a serious example of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence, I thought to myself. I’ve spent a lot of time this week in the car, and cultured behaviour wasn’t really what I noticed most in my fellow road users… How about other nations? Well, the French are seen as the rudest people on earth, and the Americans as the most ignorant. Neither of those really match my experience either. But we can’t deny that different nationalities have different characteristics, can we. I remember the first time I went to Italy I stayed with a family. I was terrified every mealtime for a week – I thought they were having massive rows because they shouted all the time. They weren’t, they were just telling each other about their day. Then I went to Switzerland and stood awestruck on station platforms watching trains leave by the second hand on the big station clocks. I’ve been to Zambia where the people are quiet and gentle and anxious to please. 20 years ago we went to Yugoslavia, and found work wasn’t on the agenda but bad temper and the singing of nationalist songs was. We went to Ireland, and found we couldn’t get a straight answer to the simplest request for directions; lovely people but they really are Irish. But then how boring it would be if we were all the same.

Now as I read Luke chapter 22, the first thing that strikes me is that it could not have been written by an Englishman. I can’t imagine it being written by an American either; or a Zambian. The French might have done the Last Supper bit, but basically this is a seriously foreign text. Watching The Passion a year ago helped me to visualise it. Maybe the nearest we get to the kind of stuff going on here in this chapter is the images we see on our screens from Iraq. These scenes took place amongst a passionate people in a crowded city, and this chapter has to be one of the busiest in the entire Bible. We’re following Luke’s gospel in our sermon series, and we’ve had to divide this single chapter into 4 chunks. They aren’t even consecutive – bits here and bits there, put together in a way which makes consistent themes.

And yet Luke began his gospel with these words: ‘it seemed good to me to write an orderly account for you, Theophilus’. This, for Luke, is an orderly account! All I can say at this point is that Luke was not Swiss.

Telling the story

Let’s look at how Luke tells the story. The first thing that’s obvious is that he doesn’t really tell it through narrative. There are plenty of things going on, but there isn’t a consistent storyline which holds them together. There are bits deliberately missing – who was the guy with the water jar who Peter and John were supposed to follow? The conversation at the Last Supper doesn’t seem to be reported in the right order, it starts with the climax and ends with the conversation. And there are just too many things going on at the same time.

Story through movement

Maybe we should look not for the storyline but for the movement. It’s more like a film than a newspaper report. Throughout the chapter there are people coming and going. If you’ve read Harry Potter you’ll remember the Marauder’s map, a little live map which shows what everyone in the castle is doing at any one time – unroll it and look, and you can see them all moving about like little dots in different places. It’s a bit like that here. The chief priests and the scribes are over here, plotting. Satan is busy entering into Judas over there. Peter and John are looking for this guy with the water jar so they can prepare the room they’re going to have the Passover meal in. The meal itself happens, and gets renamed the Last Supper. Judas isn’t mentioned at all, but the other gospels say he gets up and goes out. James and John are arguing about who’s going to be the greatest over here, and at the same time Jesus and Simon are having this conversation about denial over there. Then Jesus takes Peter and John and goes out of the city altogether to the garden on the Mount of Olives, and prays while they go to sleep. We don’t know what the other disciples are doing while that’s going on. But in another part of the city a crowd of priests and temple officers and soliders is gathering, and they set off towards the garden. There’s the arrest-Jesus scene, with attendant violence, and then the action moves to the high priest’s house. Even then there are 2 things going on at once – Jesus being mocked and beaten inside, Peter sitting by the fire in the courtyard outside with the soldiers, telling a maid he never knew him. And then finally there’s the council meeting, with Jesus being interrogated and saying he’s the Son of God.

So there’s a lot of movement. At the same time there are two points of calm, where all the rushing around stops and the map goes quiet for a bit. These are the Last Supper and Jesus’ prayer in the garden. It makes a contrast with the rest of the chapter. And this in itself is important – as I look at it, it seems to me that what’s important in this chapter is not where the action is, because that’s also where the confusion is. It’s where the stillness is that matters.

Story through reactions

So Luke is telling the story not the Swiss way, all neat and tidy, but more the Iraqi way, with everyone rushing around at once. The action lurches from crisis to crisis. If there is any order in this account, it isn’t in the action, nor is it in the way the action is told. So let’s try thinking about it a different way, and see if it seems any less complicated. Let’s try following not the plot but the characters. What about them? How do they react to everything that’s going on? Is there a pattern there, perhaps?

Well, we find that they all have completely different reactions. As if it’s all happening so fast that it’s not just us trying to follow it who get confused, it’s them in the thick of it too.

Let’s start with Judas. We know about Judas, don’t we. Judas has been consistently branded the greatest traitor of all time. Dante puts him at the bottom of Hell, along with Brutus and Cassius, almost as the personification of treachery. Think Judas, think betrayal. But maybe it’s not quite as simple as that.

If you read the gospel story you see Judas getting increasingly frustrated and confused. Matthew seems to offer that as an explanation for his action here. Just before Judas goes off to see the chief priests, Matthew tells us what had just happened at Bethany. They’d all gone to Simon the leper’s house. A woman had arrived and poured a whole load of the most expensive ointment you could get all over Jesus’ feet. The disciples – and John says Judas in particular – were furious. Why, demands Judas, wasn’t it sold so the money could be given to the poor? Perhaps he wanted to take the money for himself, John says – possibly with the cynicism of hindsight. Well, maybe he did. But Judas, who had started out with high ideals as a disciple of Jesus, was beginning to show signs of stress. This Jesus who’d promised a new kingdom just seemed to want to go to parties and be pampered by women. Was this what he’d given up everything to follow? One commentator writes : ‘Here is a man, to whom he had honestly given his life, welcoming this useless gesture by an unknown woman in the house of Simon the Leper. Was this the moment of glory for which Judas and the Jews had long waited, when the Son of Man would come on the clouds and his angels with him, to establish his authority on earth for ever? Was this little domestic incident in the house of a leper the culmination of trembling years of hope and expectation, of struggle and suffering, of captivity and exile? The slow process of disclosure, which was beginning to bear fruit in the minds of his other disciples, was lost on Judas. He felt ‘betrayed’. This kind of Messiah was not for him.’ [Stuart Blanch]

So, for Judas maybe it was about disillusionment as much as about money. If money wasn’t going to be used for the cause, if Jesus treated it as of no importance, why shouldn’t he take what Jesus threw away? After all, they were going to find Jesus sooner or later anyway – as Jesus himself pointed out to the soldiers, he wasn’t exactly invisible. It wouldn’t make any difference.

Then there’s Peter. If Judas hasn’t worked out what’s going on, nor has Peter. We’re told Satan entered into Judas, and at the supper table Jesus tells Peter Satan has applied for permission to test him too. Me, I’ll be there with you in prison and in death, Peter declares stoutly. Cut to the next scene – he falls asleep while Jesus prays. Cut to the one after, he sits outside the high priest’s house and denies him three times, then bursts into tears.

The others don’t do much better. Some of them (Mark says James and John) listen to Jesus talking about his death and the coming kingdom of God. They clearly don’t really know what to make of it. So they start arguing about who’s going to be the greatest in this new kingdom. They don’t seem to have decided, like Judas, that there isn’t going to be one after all; and yet they don’t seem to be thinking about it in quite the right way either. Mark says he himself ran away, leaving the loincloth which was his only clothing in the hands of the soldiers who tried to seize him.

So again we get the same picture. If the action is confused, the disciples are more so.

Story through symbol

There’s a monastery in Florence built in the 15^th century. It’s hung with religious paintings, which I spose is what you’d expect in a monastery. But they’re of a kind it’s hard to forget. They were painted by one of the monks, who came to be known as Fra Angelico, or Brother Angel, on account of them. And in each cell he painted a scene from the life of Christ – more from these closing scenes than any other. And it’s obvious when you look at them that he read this story in yet another way. He didn’t make sense of it through the sequence of the events, or through the reactions of the characters. He made sense of it through symbol. And if you look at it there’s a lot of symbolism in this chapter. Most of it comes from Jesus himself. Most of it is missed completely by the disciples. It’s another way of reading the story. Let’s try and tell the story through the pictures the text offers us, without much comment:

· serpent – Satan entered into Judas

· money bag – the chief priests were greatly pleased and agreed to give him money

· water jar – a man carrying a water jar will meet you; follow him

· bread and wine – this is my body; this is my blood

· cockerel – the cock will not crow this day until you have denied 3 times that you know me

· sword – the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one

· kiss – he approached Jesus to kiss him

· blindfold – they blindfolded him and kept mocking him

The genius of Fra Angelico was to see that by meditating on these symbols we can get beyond the cut and thrust of the action, beyond the confused reactions of the disciples, to the heart of the story itself.

Easy applications

Let’s just leave that a minute and come back to the story and the characters. What do we make of it if we do it this way? Well, there are a lot of possible approaches. How would the newspapers tell it? It’s a chapter packed with headlines:

· Treachery – Judas betrays Jesus.

· Fame and celebrity – disciples jostle for supremacy.

· Agony in the garden – Jesus has an awful night.

· Violence – Peter gets it all wrong.

· Night arrest – rebels seized under cover of darkness.

All of these are valid, but maybe none of them quite goes to the heart of it.

I think that there’s a single concept which lies at the heart of this chapter, and which underlies and explains everything which happens. It’s not in the storyline. It’s not in the characters. Perhaps we begin to grasp it in the smooth progression from symbol to symbol. What is this concept? It’s the concept of kingdom, that very same kingdom which Jesus has so often talked about in the leadup to these events.

What are the disciples confused about, Judas with his angry frustration, James and John with their desire for status, Peter with his crazy waving of his sword? It’s the kingdom they are confused about, this new kingdom Jesus has so often promised. What is it, what does he mean, what is he inaugurating, exactly? What kind of thing are they looking for? They still have no real idea.

What are the authorities concerned to prevent? Rebellion aimed at the creation of a new political kingdom. That’s the nightmare of every Roman governor; it’s what he’s there to prevent, and his life may well depend on it. Pilate’s job in Jerusalem wasn’t much easier than ours in say Afghanistan.

What are the priests determined to prevent? The institution of any kind of new religious or spiritual kingdom.

What did Jesus talk about at the Last Supper? Kingdom: I will not eat or drink again until the kingdom of God comes. I confer on you a kingdom. What caused him such anguish in the garden? What he had to do to inaugurate this new kingdom. That’s what it’s all building up to.

So the concept of kingdom is at the heart of this chapter – and nowhere more than in the two still points we mentioned earlier, the supper and the garden. It’s at the heart of our faith too. What does it mean to be a Christian? What did Jesus die for? It means to live in a new kingdom. We probably wouldn’t use that word today. Maybe we’d say in a new world order. Or, if we’re being very intellectual, a new metanarrative. It means to move beyond the confusing swirl of human activity and human thought, and to know that we belong primarily with God, in a world order which is spiritual rather than political. It means to stand in what’s been called the still centre of a turning world; the confusion doesn’t go away, but it kinds of spins round us like the rings of Saturn. It’s not Judas’s kind of kingdom. It’s not Peter’s kind. It’s not James and John’s kind. None of them had yet quite grasped it. But it’s all here, in the still scenes of the supper and the garden.

Let’s move on to the garden.

The garden of Gethsemane

In the first part of this chapter, Jesus invents the Lord’s Supper. ‘He took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And likewise the cup after supper, saying, this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. I shall not eat again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.’

In the second part, we are in the garden of Gethsemane, a quiet place on the Mount of Olives outside the city walls. Jesus wants to go there to pray – he’d been teaching in the city by day, withdrawing here after dark. And here he uses the word cup again, and it serves to connect the two still scenes in the midst of all the bustling human activity. This is what he says: Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours, be done. What’s he got to do? He’s got to open the door to the new kingdom. He can only offer the cup which inaugurates the new covenant, the new relationship between God and human beings, if he himself is prepared to die, prepared to enter into the physical and spiritual pain that will involve. And he doesn’t want, humanly speaking, to do it. The serpent, the money, the cockerel, the sword, the kiss and the blindfold are only the beginning; much worse is to come.

Signs of the kingdom in the garden

So Jesus takes Peter and John into this garden, and prays. He probably prayed for quite some time; it was a big prayer. It was an anguished prayer which rather contrasted with Peter’s confident statement that death was no problem. For Jesus, death is a problem. It reminds me of that story of the two sons, one who said he wouldn’t work in his father’s fields and one who said he would. The one who said he would didn’t get round to it. The one who said he wouldn’t struggled with his conscience and went. It’s like that here. Peter is the son who says death, no problem, and then falls asleep. Jesus is the son who says do I have to, because I don’t want to; and then does it.

Then Judas appears with a crowd made up of priests and soldiers in their employ. They didn’t want to arrest Jesus when he was in the middle of teaching an attentive crowd; it had to be done on the quiet, when no one was there, no risk of riots. So here they are. Peter is now awake again. Remembering Jesus had told him he’d need a sword, he lops off the ear of a guy John says was called Malthus, the chief priest’s servant. That was doubtless what the priests were hoping for – a violent response. It would strengthen their case beautifully if they could say these rebels had put up an armed struggle. Armed struggle was very high on the list of things the Roman governors didn’t want to see. But Jesus, impatient at Peter’s inability to understand his use of symbols, said ‘enough of that!’ and reached out to heal the man’s ear. It wasn’t real swords he was talking about at all, any more than it was really bread and wine that would become so important. Have you ever stopped to wonder what it would have felt like to be Malchus? Fear, anger, howling pain: and then suddenly the storm stops and peace descends on his body. Perhaps Malchus was one of the few that day to go home knowing what this kingdom that Jesus was talking about actually meant.

Then off they all go to the chief priest’s house. Are you the Christ, they ask. From now on, the Son of man will be seated at the right hand of the mighty God, Jesus says. Are you saying you are the Son of God, they ask, just to make sure he hangs himself properly. You say so, he answers – in Greek his reply is neither yes nor no, it’s apparently nearest to a grudging admission that although he himself wouldn’t put it quite like that, and although they don’t really understand what they are asking, effectively the answer is yes. Mark has him say just ‘I am’.

Our response

So there we are. The point of this chapter is not in the chaos of the events, or in the confusion of the disciples. We begin to find it in the neatness of the symbolism. But perhaps we really find it only in the two still points of the chapter, in the supper and in the garden. The chapter is about the end of one world order and the beginning of another. It’s about kingdom.

Well, what do we do with all that? What’s your reaction?

| think mine is complex. There’s all this stuff going on, all this rushing around. There’s a lot of confusion, the people misunderstanding, half understanding, or simply rejecting what Jesus is offering. There are as many different motivations and human emotions going on as there are people involved in the story. And in the middle of it all is Jesus, focussed, telling them what they will need to know (like the Lord’s supper), sighing and not spelling out what they don’t need to know (like what he means when he says they will need swords).

So where am I in all this? Where are you? I suppose life is a bit like this chapter – fast moving, confusing, full of betrayal, disagreement, but also containing loyalty like Peter’s, and human kindness like the owner of the guest room’s. And there’s this colossal figure towering in the midst of it, taking on its pain, putting up with its misunderstanding, focussed above all on God. I suppose for me Jesus is the one who died to make sense of it all. Life can feel a bit like a storm or a flood, with water rushing around all over the place. Jesus is the still point at the centre of the storm. The storm still rages; but it has a resting point now in the middle of it. Life is and always will be a bit of a mess. Where’s the mess for you? Is it in the honking traffic of a world without peace? Is it in the confusion of painful relationships? Is it in our ultimate inability to do anything about the chaos which surrounds us? We have lots of roles and lives, between us. We have a bomb disposal expert in this fellowship. We have a heart surgeon. We have teachers dealing with damaged children. We have a probation officer and prison visitors. We have people who have fled to this country because of the turmoil of their own. We have people suffering from mental illnesses, and people with incurable diseases. We have people who have been abused, and people who have been in prison. Many of us have financial problems and many of us have personal problems. Many of us just look helplessly at a world which is full of these things.

What can we do? Well, not much, actually. We can share the love of God with one another and with those who have never experienced it, and that helps. But maybe above all what we can do is remember Jesus, who cut through the chaos of a groaning world, and died to create a new one. It’s a good time of year to remember it.