Prayer in the Garden
Gethsemane Prayer
It was Saturday morning, October 27, when the bus stopped across the Kidron Valley from the city of Jerusalem. Alisha and I began walking up the hill with our group. We entered a garden filled with Olive Trees. For the next half hour, we were on our own to walk the garden, find a quiet place to sit with Jesus and pray.
It was here that Jesus came the night he would be betrayed.
Here in this garden, he asked his disciples to pray with him.
No one knows where the events that night transpired exactly, but it’s safe to say we’re sitting within a hundred yards of where Jesus knelt, with sweat drops of blood, and prayed these words…
“My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” – Jesus, Matthew 26.39
Have you ever prayed that prayer?
Father, if there’s any other way, let this go a different direction.
Father, if there’s any chance this can unfold differently, please step into this moment and change the consequences, change the diagnosis, change the relationship, change the inevitable reality that I am facing.
If you ever thought you couldn’t relate to Jesus because He’s God, you can relate to Jesus in the garden.
You can relate to Jesus who, knowing He’s moments away from being betrayed by one of his very best of friends, knowing he’s moments away from being led away by force, knowing that pain, suffering, and torture that is worse than most of us could imagine awaits him, Jesus prays exactly what anyone would pray.
Father, it’s there’s any other way…
Jesus’ Prayer
We sat in that garden and I picked up a small rock in my hand as I prayed.
Could this small stone have been here 2000 years ago?
I don’t know, but I’d like to think it was.
Did Jesus walk this same path? Did his sandals press this stone into the dirt? Did he pass by these trees? Some people say that some of these olive trees are 2000 years old. Is that true? Is that even possible? I don’t know.
But I know that in this garden Jesus prayed.
He didn’t just pray for himself. He also prayed for you and for me.
According to John, Jesus prayed for you and me before he entered this garden on the night he was arrested.
I read these words again as I sat in the garden and reflected on this moment in the life of Jesus when he prayed these words…
“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” – Jesus, John 17.20-21
Why?
Why did Jesus pray for us on the precipice of facing the cross?
Because Jesus believed that if we believed He is Messiah because of the testimony of his first disciples then the whole world would have a chance to come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah based on our testimony as his disciples.
That testimony will hold up in a world that has never been so divided because our testimony and our belief in Jesus does something that nothing else in this world can do.
It unites it.
Jesus makes us one.
[Tweet “Jesus makes us one.”]Jesus is about to enter a garden, be arrested by an angry mob, and then his disciples will scatter.
But Sunday’s coming.
And Sunday morning, that group that scattered on Friday night will gather in a house in Jerusalem.
They’ll hear the news that Jesus has risen.
Over the next 40 days, they’ll experience the presence of the resurrected Jesus.
What are the chances they returned to this same Mount of Olives to sing and pray again? Pretty good. In fact, Luke tells us that it was in this same place that Jesus spoke his last words before ascending into heaven. Acts 1.6-12.
And from that day forward, not a single one of them would abandon Jesus again.
Remember…
You may be praying these same words today, “Father… if there’s any other way…”
But remember, Jesus is praying for you. That through your faith, even your faith through the middle of your suffering, especially your faith in the middle of your pain, that other people would come to believe that Jesus is Messiah. That the Jesus who prayed in the garden is the one who hears our prayers today and intercedes on our behalf. Romans 8.34
Maybe my wife said it best…
“After days of following Jesus’ path to sit in this garden where he sat in his last days, I was completely overcome. How could he so many years ago come to earth and then sacrifice it all for me? When he was in this garden did he think of me? I know he did. He thought of all of us. This… he thought of each one of us. How can I do anything but fall at his feet and worship him for all my days? Thank you, Jesus, for sacrificing it all for me. You are enough, you are all I need.”
Jesus, you are all we need.
Read more from our trip to the Holy Land.
