For all those who have knelt in Gethsemane and soaked the earth with tears

For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait. C. S. Lewis

I often forget that Gethsemane is a garden. For gardens are enchanting spots with flowers, manicured rows of vegetables, and lovingly weeded berry patches. Gardens—at least the good ones—shout life and abundance. They offer Crayola signature crayon names like periwinkle, marigold, fushia, rose, olive,  blueberry, carnation pink, and pea green. They enchant us, encourage us, and feed us.

Gethsemane was such a place, a quiet grove of olive trees that offered a respite from the world, a place to pray and recharge. But for all its quiet beauty, the night that Christ brought his disciples there to pray, it was less garden than wasteland. I can recall the first time I saw Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ.  The scene in Gethsemane still haunts me. Head to the ground, blood beading on his forehead, Jim Caviezel, who played Christ, prayed. His arms outstretched, his body prostrate, he prayed. His was an agonizing prayer: Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done. In Gibson’s film, here he wrestles with evil, battling the very human temptation to flee and live, to take his own cup into his own hands.

Gethsemane is the dark night of the soul, the valley of the shadow of death. When you have reached the end of your rope, when the beautiful garden of your life turns black, Gethsemane beckons you. German theologian and Holocaust victim, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

When a man really gives up trying to make something out of himself—a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called clerical somebody), a righteous or unrighteous man, . . . and throws himself into the arms of God. . . then he wakes with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia and it is thus that he becomes a man and Christian.

Gethsemane is just this: throwing yourself into the arms of God. Stripped of any pretense of trying to make something of yourself, you leap into the abyss of shame and sin and fear. You join the communion of the forlorn. You prostrate yourself and weep, searching for—but not finding—the words to pray. In agony, you ask for your cup to be taken from you. Here, Bonhoeffer claims, is where you find Christ. And he should know. His Gethsemane was a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. There, he threw himself into the arms of a suffering God.

Bonhoeffer’s cup was not taken from him. Two weeks before the Allied soldiers liberated Flossenbürg concentration camp, he died on April 8, 1945. In a letter (July 16, 1944) Bonhoeffer writes:

God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us . . . The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.

Bonhoeffer understood that only the suffering God can help us as we kneel in our own Gethsemanes. This God holds our hands and our hearts as we weep. When others forsake us, this God remains steadfast in His love.

This God agonized as His son prayed in earnest. C. S. Lewis reminds us:

In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.

Like me, like you, Christ soaked the garden ground with tears and called upon His father. He became an intimate friend of suffering—human suffering in all its awful, life-stripping forms. And in spite of his repeated prayers, the cup did not pass. How can we measure the love of a God who willingly submits to the most human agony? Why do we feel alone in our suffering when we know that our Gethsemane is the very garden that Christ visited? And when we fall to the earth, when the night threatens to consume us, how could we forget that He kneels beside us?

As a young woman, I was well acquainted with despair, and I often forgot that Christ knelt beside me. I remember nights during which I teetered at the edge of an abyss so deep and so dark that all I could do was to literally hang on by my finger nails. I remember how adrenaline coursed through me, urging me to act, to do something—anything—to keep the blackness at bay. In desperation, I turned to others to convince me that these days would pass. I buckled down and muscled my way through fear and despair by working harder and longer. In misguided pride, I recall thinking that certainly suffering was a solitary venture for hardworking, thinking people like me, wasn’t it? Undoubtedly, God had enough work to do, comforting those who really needed it. He’d given me the resources I needed to take care of my own suffering. I just had to put them to good use.

How painfully arrogant I was in those days! And how incredibly ignorant to forget Christ’s prayer, which is—as C. S. Lewis argues—the only model.  No, I squared my shoulders, gritted my teeth, and set to work. Single handedly, I would move the mountains of my despair. Bulldozing my way through dark days, I would be both contractor and worker, fixing my eyes and heart on the job–not on God. And when despair threatened to undo me, I would simply make a better plan. I owned my cup of suffering, and I would not ask God to take it from me.

For years, my own propensity for self-help made my Gethsemane a private hell. What I didn’t understand, and only later came to realize, was that Gethsemane could also be a life-giving sanctuary. For in Gethsemane, I had only to fall into the arms of God, who waited patiently there to suffer with me. In this sanctuary, I could find the well trodden path to redemptive suffering.  Here, I could look over the edge into the abyss of my own fear and despair and not look away. I could see it for what it is and, more importantly, for what it might be. I could take heart, knowing that God suffers with me, and that others, too, suffer with me and I with them. In community, suffering loses much of its power. And the power that remains is largely redemptive. From the tear-soaked earth, I could rise with others in the assurance of God’s saving, suffering love.

Perhaps the most important thing that I had forgotten in my early years was that Gethsemane gives way to Easter. Christian author Max Lucado writes:

The Bible is the story of two gardens: Eden and Gethsemane. In the first Adam took a fall. In the second, Jesus took a stand. In the first, God sought Adam. In the second, Jesus sought God. In Eden, Adam hid from God. In Gethsemane, Jesus emerged from the tomb. In Eden, Satan led Adam to a tree that led to his death. In Gethsemane, Jesus went to a tree that led to our life.

In Gethsemane, Christ took a stand, suffered, died, rose, and brought us new life. As I think of my own suffering and that of my fellow humans, I see how our Gethsemanes might offer redemption if—and when—we follow Christ’s model. Our garden stories are surely ones of darkness, but they may also be sanctuaries of beauty and blessing. Jesus offers us the way to restore beautiful gardens from our sorrow-soaked patches of earth. His is the model of redemptive suffering. Moving mountains can most certainly wait.

1 Peter 2: 19-21

For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly.  For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.  For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.