SERMON – ‘Meeting God in the Garden’
The ‘Garden of the Gods’ (pictured) is a spectacular park in Colorado City with stunning natural features, including incredible vertical red rock formations protruding through lush tree canopies. The garden was so named in 1859 by two surveyors exploring the area: Melancton Beach and Rufus Cable. Awestruck by the garden’s stunning beauty, Beach suggested it would be a great site for a beer garden. Cable exclaimed, “Beer Garden! Why, it is a fit place for the gods to assemble. We will call it the Garden of the Gods.”
Archaeological evidence shows that this place has long been regarded as sacred for many Native American peoples, who moved through the park and camped there from about 250 BC. They held that the park was an area of peace and therefore neutral ground. Rival tribes would lay down their weapons when entering the garden.[1]
If Jesus was in the Garden of Gods, what might the scene look like?
In tonight’s Gospel reading, Jesus is in the Garden. It is not the Garden of the Gods, but moonlit Gethsemane, where the Son of God is in the Garden. Although perhaps not as visually stunning as the Garden of the Gods, it is a place made truly sacred by his holy presence.
2 Samuel 15 tells us that many years prior, David ascended the Mount of Olives, weeping as he went, as he fled Absolom’s takeover. But tonight it is Jesus who is sorrowful and troubled in the Garden. He said to his disciples: “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Falling with his face to the ground in desperation and anguish, he pleads with his Father to take his cup of suffering away from him. It is a prayer he would say three times.
Like David who fled Absolom so many years earlier, there is another coup unfolding that night, as Jesus prays in the Garden. Earlier that day Jesus had spoken of this while he reclined at the table, celebrating the Passover with his disciples. While they were eating, he said, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me.”
Talk about pouring cold water on a celebration! Greatly saddened, they said to him one after the other: “Surely you don’t mean me, Lord?” They can’t believe it—what a terrible thought that one of Jesus’ own would do such a thing! But Jesus confirms it is so: “The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me. The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.”
Then Judas, the one who would betray him, said, “Surely you don’t mean me, Rabbi?”
Jesus answered, “You have said so.”
After they had sung a hymn, and went out to the Mount of Olives, the disciples still had these words going through their minds. As things played out that night in the Garden, it would really be all of them that would betray him. Jesus said to them: “This very night you will all fall away on account of me, for it is written:
“‘I will strike the shepherd,
and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’
But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.”
Peter replied, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.”
“Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”
There in the Garden, the hour for the arrival of the betrayer, and the time of Jesus’ arrest, is near. And so in the coolness of the evening Jesus asks the disciples to stay and keep watch with Him, while he goes aside and prays in anguish: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.” Who will stand up for Jesus, and come to his aid? When Jesus returns from prayer, he finds them sleeping. A second time Jesus returns from prayer to still find them sleeping. Matthew brings out the human limitation so profoundly in the text: the eyes of the disciples were heavy. They are just so tired. The spirit is willing but the body is weak. The good that they know they should do, and want to do, they just can’t do. A third time Jesus approaches them and still they sleep. They’ve failed to keep watch. Jesus has to do it all, without the support of anyone.
This is not just something that happened once in history. It is living history—made alive for us again tonight by Jesus the living word who speaks to us: “Stay here and keep watch with me.”
What would you have done, there in the garden?
Like the disciples we might think or say: Surely you don’t mean me Lord? But it is true! We too, like Judas, betray Jesus; we too, are like Peter, denying Jesus, when we are concerned more for our own popularity in the sight of others, than his. We too are like the disciples, often failing to keep watch with our Lord in the daily worship life of word and prayer, so that we don’t fall into temptation to live by self rule—instead at times we willingly run headlong into the devil’s tempting of us, just as Adam and Eve did when the Serpent tempted them. Our spirit might be willing, be the body is weak, and with eyelids drooping, we often drowse and doze, and lose the struggle to put our Heavenly Father’s will above our own.
It was in another garden that the reality of all of this was born for the whole human race. In the Garden of God with his people—the Garden of Eden—that human loyalty and faithfulness to God has ever since missed the mark.
That is exactly why Jesus prays: “Yet not my will, but yours be done”. Each time Jesus prayed to his Father in Heaven for his cup of suffering to be removed he also prayed: “Not as I will, but as you will.” The cup that Jesus speaks of is symbolic for all the wrath God will pour out for the sin of the world. Yet God pours it in Jesus’ cup, not ours. It will be a poisoned chalice for our Lord to drink from; a bitter and lethal beverage judgment, condemnation, suffering, woe and death.
“My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
The good news for you tonight is that Jesus’ Father’s will was done. “Secretly they planned it, with money changing hands; in the quiet garden a kiss betrayed their man” (Robin Mann: When his time was over LHS 759). It was the Father’s will to work through sinful men and have Jesus betrayed. It was the Father’s will for Jesus to be arrested and handed over to be mocked, abused and sentenced to die.
Like the rival Native American tribes who laid down their weapons when entering the area later named The Garden of the Gods, Jesus, the Son of God, entered the Garden of Gethsemane to willingly lay down any use of force; any right of self-defence, let alone retribution. He came in peace and humbled himself, to become obedient unto death, even death on a Cross.
And so the cup we have to drink from is not the cup of wrath and judgment upon us. It is the cup that comes before the Garden of Gethsemane: the cup that Jesus took in the upper room, when he had given thanks, and said something strangely different than the usual Passover blessings when he gave it to his disciples: “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”
Jesus offers you this cup again tonight. What can you offer to the Lord, for all his goodness to you? Nothing. All you can do, as the Psalmist says, is take the cup and call on the name of the Lord—that is, receive the cup of Jesus’ holy and precious blood with joy and thanksgiving—that the punishment we deserved was carried instead by the Son of God, and that before he was betrayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, he prayed: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
Thank God that the one in anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane was obedient to his Father’s will, even to the point of being nailed to a cross for you and me. That time would soon come, even as the time is now fast approaching for us to turn our attention to another garden—a cursed garden of thorns and thistles, a fruitless garden—where the Savior of the world bled, and died, for you. Amen.
[1] ‘Garden of the Gods’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_the_Gods last accessed April 6, 2023 at 11:32am
