Between the Last Supper and the Passion, Jesus confronts the place of abandonment, his purpose and confusion. In the garden, we find a moment of intimacy which means so much more than we think.
Tonight we’ll be gathering for our Maundy Thursday service. We’ll hear part of the story of the Last Supper from John’s gospel, the foot washing, and the reminder from Jesus that things are about to change for everyone.
We save the grand sequence of events for the Passion tomorrow.
What strikes me every year, but is never big enough to wrestle the spotlight from the Last Supper or the Crucifixion is this time in the garden. The sun has certainly gone down and they aren’t far from the Temple. The big show with the whole team is done. It soon will be just a handful.
He tells the group that they will all desert him. Peter makes a promise he can’t keep.
And you know Jesus is shaking his head. This is SO Peter. He tells Peter, the trusted about his coming three times denial. Peter, the one who tried to prevent Jesus from fulfilling his plan. The one he called Satan for tempting him with power. This one will do it again.
Everyone Leaves
But this isn’t just Peter. This is everyone. None of them can hack it.
And yet Jesus brings them anyway. He takes Peter, James, and John with him to the garden. Of course they can’t stay awake. They’re half gone already.
The wheels are in motion. It is happening regardless. All that is left for Jesus now is to pray, and he will. The cups are being poured: but only three are for consuming in the next few hours. These sleeping disciples will have to wait for theirs.
The Cup
The scandal of this story is not what happens on Easter. Any God worth more than a hill of beans can pull off a resurrection. It’s what happens the third day before. Hinted by this moment in the garden.
“He said, ‘Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.’”
The cup has symbolized death since our most ancient times. And its place in Hebrew and Greek Scripture is unquestionably been around this same idea. Drinking the cup is about dying or receiving destruction.
And in this moment, we’re being confronted with the question which will bedevil our next 30+ hours: is God pouring a cup of wrath for Jesus to drink?
Is God killing his Son tomorrow?
And the delicious irony is that followers of Jesus have never really agreed enough to say “yes.” Or “no.”
Beyond Wrath
Jesus’s prayer is far more profound than that.
It’s personal. Intimate. He calls God, Abba, which is a term of affection. Like Papa. He calls God Dad and speaks directly. “For you all things are possible.” There is no question.
Then he asks for what he knows he can’t have. He’s already predicted his death. And his resurrection. I don’t think this is fear or anger. Perhaps it is as intimate a sense as before. Perhaps this is his own doubt or his own confusion.
Perhaps this is Jesus’s real trial.
“remove this cup from me”
But the final clause might make this one make more sense:
“yet, not what I want, but what you want.”
I’ve always read this as Jesus resigning himself because he knows: another way of saying “I’d love it if you could do this without my dying in the end, but you gotta do what you gotta do.”
But perhaps it is an acknowledgment of not what God has to do, but what God wants to do. God wants to remove the cup of wrath, not merely from Jesus’s lips, but from our tradition.
God wants us to stop seeing every death as vengeance, every accident as on purpose, every misplaced anger as justification for divine outrage.
What if this is Jesus’s way of saying I don’t like what’s about to happen, but I know you want to end this cycle of violence.
Approaching the Cross
From here, we begin the Triduum. We will gather in our three-part service reflecting on the last three days of Holy Week, from the Last Supper, through the Crucifixion, to the miracle on the third day.
Many of us will be focused on the cross, the passion, and what it is God is trying to do here.
And our tradition has spent 2000 years wrestling with this idea. And I trust that we can wrestle with it again this year.
But perhaps you’ll listen for the cups each day. Listening for what they mean or don’t mean for us. Cups, not only of wrath, but of love. Intimacy. Hope. Joy.
That every teaching, every story, every prayer brings us closer to seeing what Jesus wanted us to see from the very beginning.
That God, the god Jesus would call Abba, like I call my own father, Dad; that God isn’t pouring cups of death and forcing others to drink it. We pour those cups for one another. Papa God is offering love and new life instead.