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Reading: Matthew 26.36-56
Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his
disciples, 'Sit here while I go over there and pray.'
He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and
agitated. Then he said to them, 'I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain
here, and stay awake with me.' And going a little farther, he threw himself on
the ground and prayed, 'My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me;
yet not what I want but what you want.' Then he came to the disciples and found
them sleeping; and he said to Peter, 'So, could you not stay awake with me one
hour? Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; for the
spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.' Again he went away for the
second time and prayed, 'My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your
will be done.'
Again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. So leaving
them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words.
Then he came to the disciples and said to them, 'Are you still sleeping and
taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into
the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.'
While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived; with him was a
large crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the elders of the
people. Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, 'The one I will kiss is
the man; arrest him.' At once he came up to Jesus and said, 'Greetings, Rabbi!'
and kissed him. Jesus said to him, 'Friend, do what you are here to do.' Then
they came and laid hands on Jesus and arrested him.
Suddenly, one of those with Jesus put his hand on his sword, drew it, and struck
the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, 'Put
your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the
sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send
me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be
fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way?'
At that hour Jesus said to the crowds, 'Have you come out with swords and clubs
to arrest me as though I were a bandit? Day after day I sat in the temple
teaching, and you did not arrest me. But all this has taken place, so that the
scriptures of the prophets may be fulfilled.’ Then all the disciples deserted
him and fled.
Picture: Christ in the Garden of Olives by Paul Gauguin, 1889 (Florida)
The artist and the painting The
painter of the final picture is Paul Gauguin. Gauguin was born in 1848 in Paris,
but in his first year his family left France for Peru. His mother was half
Peruvian and they had family in Lima. His father was a staunch Republican who
could not stand the restoration of monarchy in France in 1849. Gauguin’s
father died on the outward journey, but the family remained in Peru for six
years before returning to France. After schooling in Orléans, Gauguin spent six
years at sea, then returned to Paris and to a career ‘in the City’ as we might
put it, working as a stockbroker.
It was during this period of relatively settled and secure life in Paris that
Gauguin began, as a hobby, drawing and painting. In 1876 his work was first
exhibited, and by the late 1870’s he was acquainted with many of the
Impressionists, spending time with them when on leave from the office, and
exhibiting with them.
In 1883 he made the attempt to become a full time painter; but poverty led his
wife to return to her native Copenhagen with the children, and Gauguin began a
restless and chaotic lifestyle which was to lead to his death at the age of 54
in 1903.
In this last twenty years he spent much time overseas, briefly in Panama and
Martinique, then two years in Tahiti, and finally in Tahiti and the Marquesas
from 1897 until his death.
In many ways, however, the most formative period for his work was the late
1880’s, when he lived and worked in Brittany. Our painting, dating from 1889, is
from this period of transition and development when he left impressionism behind
and found his own style.
Gauguin was not conventionally religious, and certainly his morality was not
conventionally respectable. However, he engaged deeply with the Christian theme
of the suffering of Christ. Strikingly he often identified with the suffering
Christ, and in this picture the figure of Christ is clearly a self-portrait.
This shocked some and convinced others than he was simply going too far; but
there is a fascinating interplay in this association of a struggling artist with
Christ in the garden.
At one level the painting is about a very human Christ going through an agony of
vocation, and being despised, rejected and mocked for being a prophetic figure.
The artist then identifies with Christ and casts himself in the role of Christ.
But, of course, it also works the other way. In portraying Jesus as a struggling
artist, the artist is actually making a theological statement: he is saying that
when God is with us, he is with us like an artist whose work is not understood
or accepted and whose creativity is ignorantly despised. And this insight takes
us deep into the theology of the gospel of Matthew.
Matthew’s account of the agony in the garden
Let me begin not with Matthew’s Gospel but with Mark, on the understanding that
very likely Mark is the earliest of the four gospels.
Mark’s gospel begins at breakneck pace, the sentences are full of words like ‘at
once’, ‘immediately’, and ‘straightaway’, and in the sentences Jesus is ever the
subject of the verbs. Jesus is the central character in the story and he moves
about, speaks, heals, directs the action and drives the narrative. And this goes
on until the later part of chapter 14, into the first few verses of the story of
Jesus’ arrest and passion. Then Jesus is betrayed, or more literally ‘handed
over’, and suddenly it all changes. From chapter 14 verse 43 until the end of
the gospel Jesus does not actually do anything. He is the subject of only four
verbs, and all of them are about speaking in response to a direct question or in
reaction to an event. Jesus is no longer in control, no longer setting the
agenda, no longer driving the narrative. Jesus is now almost entirely passive,
he almost begins to fade out of the picture as far as the language is concerned,
and new characters attract and hold our attention, Peter and his denials, the
High Priest, Pilate, Simon of Cyrene, Joseph of Arimathea, and all the various
servants, maids and soldiers. They are now in the foreground, they command our
attention.
In Mark’s passion Jesus changes abruptly from being the central figure to being
marginal to our interest, all the colour drains out of the picture: there’s
nothing much left to hold our attention.
When we read Mark’s passion we’re left with an uncomfortable experience. Jesus
doesn’t do anything. And if we’re prepared to read the story the way Mark tells
it, we find that the death of Jesus is, for most people in Jerusalem that day,
an inconsequential commonplace, noticed and witnessed by a few passers by and
the odd bystander, just another criminal getting what he deserves. And there’s
hardly a hint of what, if anything, all this might mean; barely a suggestion
that Jesus was accomplishing anything in and through his being crucified.
And just how comfortable are we with that? What we really like is to be told
what all this means; that this suffering and death had a point, a purpose in
some great scheme of things; that God in Jesus was not passive but active,
accomplishing something, achieving something, doing something. We want to know
that Jesus was a winner not a loser, that he was strong, not weak. And it’s
fascinating to me how so many of the attempts to theorise and theologise about
the death of Jesus try to make him active on the cross.
For example, in the letter to the Hebrews the writer draws heavily on the
imagery and understanding of priesthood and sacrifice in the Jewish tradition.
Jesus is ‘a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God’, and his
death on the cross is his making ‘a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the
people’. Jesus is not to be seen as merely the sacrificial offering, he is also
the priest: he does what is done.
Or again there’s a whole tradition in which the cross is presented as a victory
won, alongside the temptations in the wilderness or the agony in the garden.
Jesus is the new and greater Moses, and drawing on the language and imagery of
the Exodus, he overcomes the power of the Devil and leads his people into
freedom. Such language becomes most striking in the poem the Dream of the Rood,
when a Saxon warrior culture delighted to think of Christ on the cross as a
young hero stripped for battle who freely mounted the cross to win a fight.
I don’t mean this evening to weigh the merits of either of these approaches, all
I want to do is highlight the fact that we warm to anything that makes sense of
the cross, and does so by making God active. We like to understand the cross as
the saving act of God, the doing of one whom in Mark is patently done to.
Why might that be? I need, I think, in
case anyone is starting to worry, to say clearly that I’m not suggesting for a
moment that the cross has no significance or meaning, or that it is not through
the cross that we’re saved. What I am saying is that we’re much happier to
understand the meaning of the cross as a decisive act of God rather than as
something which is done to Jesus, as an event in which Jesus, in which God, is
passive.
Let’s now go back to Matthew and see how, if at all he changes what Mark has
written.
If we read through the passion as Matthew tells it we find, in fact, that he
changes very little. There is still the same brute fact that Jesus stops being
the subject of the verbs and becomes ‘done to’ rather than ‘doing’. But there is
a difference in how this passivity is portrayed. Matthew is determined to bring
out the fact that Jesus is ultimately in control of his own destiny. In other
words Matthew is anxious that reading Mark we might think that Jesus had no
choice, that he was trapped and caught and could do nothing about it. But for
Matthew, as even more for John, it is vital that we understand that Jesus
consented to his arrest, that he allowed it to happen.
When Judas arrives and greets him, Jesus says to him ‘Do what you are here to
do’. The sense of the Greek is not a resigned ‘let’s get this over and done’,
but almost a command. Judas and the mob with him have the permission of Jesus to
arrest him, he will not resist. But, says Matthew, he could have resisted if he
had chosen to do so. He knew exactly what was coming: he did not have to wait in
the garden until Judas came, and even when he came with an armed mob, Jesus had
the resources to put up a fight. Some at least of the disciples were armed, but
much more significantly Jesus could call on all the resources of God, the power
to act as he willed. Matthew wants us to see that Jesus faced a real choice, and
that he freely chose not to escape arrest.
This is why Matthew emphasises the incident with the sword and makes much more
of it than Mark. This is not an incidental exploration of pacifism, but a
renunciation by God of the power which God might use. It’s what in the letter to
the Philippians is called the self-emptying of God.
This is also why Matthew emphasises the agony in the garden before the arrival
of the mob. Matthew wants us to see that Jesus faces a real choice and overcomes
a real temptation. It is a struggle for Jesus to submit to the will of God
because he knows that he is about to face extreme pain and death; yet he does
manage to say, and mean, ‘your will be done’. And at the very moment that he
does so, all the disciples desert him and run for their lives.
Some thoughts on the power of God So
Matthew builds on Mark by bringing out the fact that Jesus could have chosen to
act other than the way he in fact acted; but Matthew agrees wholeheartedly with
Mark that Jesus does not actually do anything once he is arrested. Now this, I’d
suggest, is something we find quite hard to handle.
We have a very strong idea of divine action, of God’s omnipotence. Now
‘omnipotence’ is not exactly a biblical word, it’s a philosopher’s word, but
it’s very much the same in meaning as many words which we do find in both
scripture and the language of prayer and worship. We’re very familiar with
addressing God as ‘almighty’ or ‘all powerful’: in fact so over-familiar we
might well ask ourselves what we think we mean, and why we say it quite so often
as we do.
Let me share with you a philosopher’s definition of God:
God is a person who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is
perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator
and sustainer of the universe.
This evening we’re only interested in the words ‘able to do anything’, and if
you ask a philosopher what exactly that means, you will generally be told that
it means something like this:
God can do absolutely anything he wants to do, limited only by what it is
logically possible for God to do.
And what that means is that the only things God cannot do are silly things,
which can appear in grammatically correct sentences, but which couldn’t appear
in the real world: so God cannot make a square circle, because that’s actually
nonsense; and it’s equally silly to ask if God can make a stone so heavy that he
can’t pick it up; and more interestingly, it’s also silly, for just the same
kind of reason, to ask if God can commit an evil act, since God is good and
God’s committing an evil act would be a logical impossibility.
That’s fine. Or is it?
Well no, I don’t think it is. I think the Gospel of Matthew, like the Gospel of
Mark, actually challenges this philosopher’s idea of God and reveals it to be
both inadequate and unhealthy.
On the one hand, Christians believe that God is creator and sustainer of the
universe. Now if doing anything qualifies for the title ‘almighty’, creating the
universe must surely be it. And this is one of those occasions when modern
science, far from making God seem smaller, actually makes God seem much bigger
and more awesome than ever before. God was awesome enough as creator when we
thought the earth was all there really was, and that the sky was more or less an
upturned bowl over the earth. Now that we know that the universe is immense and
that galaxies are practically numberless, God has grown infinitely more awesome
and incomprehensible. So, yes, there’s a place for the language of power and
might in Christian theology: to create, and then to hold in being all that there
is ― that is truly almighty.
On the other hand, once we begin to talk, like the philosophers, of a God who
acts within the world as an omnipotent being, I’m much less happy.
To be honest, the philosophers are no happier than I am, because you very soon
find yourself tied up in verbal and logical knots. First, there’s the problem of
evil: if God can do anything God wants to do, why do bad things happen,
especially to good or innocent people? Again, if God really does act on those
few occasions we call miracles, why are these occasions so rare, and why does
God intervene to help some people and not others? If God can do anything and
does, where does that leave human freedom? How should we understand what it is
that a God who can do, does?
Let me use an analogy from football. Should we think of God as the team coach
standing, in what we now call the ‘technical area’, shouting advice and
encouragement to the team on the pitch? Or should we think of God as a
player-manager, a kind of Roy of the Rovers who scores every time he comes off
the bench? Or is life more like table football, where no matter how free you
think you are as a player, you only kick the ball when God gives you a flick?
The intellectual games played to analyse all the possibilities and try to find
ways around the snags are fascinating enough, but I’m not sure I like
contemplating the picture of God which emerges whichever way you play it. And my
problem is with the basic idea of power and control. Let me give you some verses
from Psalm 139 as an example of what I mean.
The psalm begins with a sense of the awesome power of God. God knows the
psalmist inside out, ‘You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern
my thoughts from afar’. And God is present everywhere, there is no escape from
God: ‘If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are
there.’ And it is God who created the psalmist and all else that exists:
‘wonderful are your works; that I know very well’.
But before we know where we are he’s moved on to asking God to kill people he
regards as wicked: ‘Oh that you would kill the wicked, O God, and t hat the
bloodthirsty would depart from me.’ And I can’t help thinking that such
sentiments take root not from some revelation about the power of God, but from
some very deeply embedded, and deeply sinful, ideas about power and domination.
The psalmist is really asking God to act out his own fantasy of control. He’s
saddling God with being what he would like to be himself: in charge, in control,
able to manipulate and direct, to coerce and to constrain. It seems to me that
those feminist theologians who see all this as simply a projection onto God of a
rather warped understanding of masculinity might have a point: though I have to
say I’ve known some very bossy women in my time!
If our spirituality, our discipleship, is founded only on an image of an
omnipotent God like that, I’m personally convinced that we will not be living a
healthy life: we will not be maturing in faith and love, not be beginning to
advance from glory to glory, not be able to love our neighbour, or perhaps even
ourselves. I fear we will be trapped in an infantile existence, where either we
simply ask Dad to fix it all for us all the time, or consume ourselves in either
rebelling, or suppressing our rebellion, against a God who either won’t do what
we want or won’t let us grow up and be ourselves.
So is there a better way of understanding the power of God? I think there just
might be.
For Christians the definition of God is not a philosopher’s form of words, but
Jesus. As John puts it:
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s
heart, who has made him known.
Jesus makes God know. Jesus yields knowledge of God. And in the passion
narrative of both Mark and Matthew it will not do simply to ignore or dismiss
the passivity of Jesus, the fact that he is done to and is not doing, that he is
not in control or driving the agenda, and the fact that God-with-us is not
Superman. Jesus in Matthew is not the heroic accomplisher of salvation, he does
not win a battle against evil by overpowering Satan or coercing the powers of
this world. What happens, happens, and what changes, changes because of who
Jesus is and not because of what Jesus does. It is a free decision by Jesus not
to use the power he could use, but the key to understanding what is going on is
to realise that in Jesus God is choosing to empty himself and not to exercise
his power.
The Gospel answer to divine omnipotence, to the philosophers’ problem of what
God does, how God acts, is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, is the intimacy of
our relationship with God, our communion in the life of the Trinity. The
Christian definition of divine power is not the philosopher’s words, ‘God can do
absolutely anything he wants to do’, but the words of Jesus in Mark chapter 10
when he says (in answer to those who cannot understand how anyone can be saved
if it’s harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle), ‘in the presence of God, at God’s side, all
is possible, everything has potential, everything is fruitful.’
God’s power in the world is real, but it is not the power of a coercive agent,
nor the power of force or compulsion or duress, nor the power of persuasion,
threat or inducement. The power of God in the world is the power of the Holy
Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who nurtures, enables, transforms and
matures, forgives and makes fruitful, and draws and calls and leads and guides
into a new world of possibility and potential.
Drawing the threads together When Gauguin painted Jesus
in the garden of Gethsemane as a self portrait he made, I would suggest, an
important theological point even if he didn’t consciously know that he did.
Gauguin was driven by a sense of artistic vocation, and one that had cost him
his marriage, his children and any sense of security. He was convinced he had
something important to say, but in 1889 no one seemed to be listening and no one
bought his work. He saw Christ as a fellow artist, one who had a vital message
that went unheard, one whose creativity was rejected, and one who suffered
through the ignorance of others.
If Matthew could have seen the painting he might have found much in it to
approve. But Matthew would want to make an important distinction. Gauguin had no
option but to suffer whatever the world threw at him; but Jesus did not. Jesus
was not merely a misunderstood human artist, but the divine artist of the
creation. As such he had a choice; he could command attention and require
obedience. Yet, says Matthew, he freely chose not to do so; he chose the
artist’s path of offering his creativity and leaving the response to us.
It is very striking in Matthew that the passion can only happen once Jesus has
finished his teaching ministry. In chapter 26 verse 1-2 we read:
When Jesus had finished saying all these things, he said to his disciples, ‘You
know that after two days the Passover is coming and the Son of Man will be
handed over to be crucified.’
And immediately Matthew tells how the chief priests and elders gather in the
palace of the High Priest to conspire to arrest Jesus. Once he has finished his
work, once he has said all that he had to say, once the picture is painted, as
it were, and the creative act complete, then and only then can the response be
made. And the nature of the response is left to us: we can despise and reject,
we can be attracted, but then fall away, or we can discern the hand of the
creator and become true disciples.
I close with some words of the theologian Bill Vanstone:
There is in the God who is disclosed in Jesus first the glory of signs and
mighty works – the glory of free and unfettered activity and achievement; but
when Jesus destines himself, by his own will and initiative, to wait at the end
in exposure and helplessness, there is disclosed, as the ultimate dimension of
divine glory, that same glory which we dimly perceive in our own experience
when, because we love, we destine ourselves to wait and to be exposed and to
receive. The glory of that waiting figure in Gethsemane is not wholly strange
and unfamiliar to us – not so strange that we could mistake it for misfortune
and regard the figure with pity or sheer incomprehension. The glory of God which
finally appears in the waiting figure in the garden is the glory of that not
wholly unfamiliar activity which always, in the end, destines itself to waiting
– the activity of loving.
When God through love has finally revealed his love for the world, he waits to
see if we return his love or reject it, whether we walk with him or walk away.
The choice is ours.
Questions for group discussion or personal
reflection
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How helpful, if at all, do you find the image of God as artist?
Does it provide a better image for a God of love than ‘King’ or ‘Lord’?
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Do we find it easier or more attractive to think of God as
‘superman’, a heroic fixer of our problems, than of God as one who waits on the
response of the world to his love and accepts the world’s rejection, our sin?
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In the Lord’s Prayer we pray, as Jesus prays in the garden, ‘Let
your will be done’: do we mean what we say? How often is this prayer a true
Gethsemane moment for us?
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Do we pay too much attention to activity in church life, and not
enough to waiting on God and the world? Are we so anxious to imitate Christ in
his signs and works, that we forget that the ‘success’ of our evangelism, for
example, is in the hands of others? Are we open to being crucified rather than
accepted? Should we prioritise being faithful rather than being a ‘thriving
church with lots of groups and activities’?
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In Matthew Jesus is authoritative supremely when he allows Judas
freedom to reject him. We tend to think of authority as the exercise of control.
Do we need to rethink the meaning of words like ‘authority’, ‘power’, and
‘strength’? How should authority be exercised in the church and by whom?
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