Drink This Cup

In the time of coronavirus some people are looking to distract themselves, or “stay positive.” Andra tutto bene, they have been saying in Italy – Everything is going to be okay. But for a lot of people, everything is not okay, and no amount of positive thinking is going to make things okay. You can focus on the positive when you haven’t yet been touched by death.

The message of Jesus Christ offers something different. It forces us to stop avoiding death and face it head on. And be horrified. Christianity presents us with a crucified man. Insulted, mocked, beaten, and nailed to a couple pieces of wood. Just thinking of the physical pain is unbearable. How could people ever invent such a thing?

We must be taken low in order to reach a new high. Then we can be truly positive. It should be no surprise that the beauty and power of God are only revealed in the ugliness and weakness of death; Christianity is summed up in the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. So of course we are confronted with the brutal reality of death. And of course we are given hope that is beyond hope. But still we find it surprising because we spend our whole lives trying not to think about death. But someday it will become unavoidable. Better to think about the death of Jesus now, before we think about the death of ourselves and those we love.

Jesus was always comfortably in command, even when he headed towards Jerusalem where he knew he would be executed.  But then suddenly in the Garden of Gethsemane “he began to be sorrowful and troubled.” The words used here indicate both emotional and mental anguish. Heart and mind. Jesus told his inner circle (Peter, James, and John) just how bad it was, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” Have you ever felt so bad you thought you could die?

Jesus healed. He drove out demons. He called sell-out tax collectors to follow him. The crowds were amazed at the authority of his teaching. Jesus knew his death was coming and chose to go to Jerusalem to face it head on. He told his disciples on the way that he would suffer there and die.

So why was Jesus suddenly overwhelmed with emotion so intense he thought it could kill him? Was he afraid to die? Was he afraid of something even worse than death?

It was the cup he was told to drink. Jesus prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” There are a few possibilities for what the cup contained. The beloved 23^rd Psalm says, “My cup overflows.” Psalm 116 seems to imagine a toast at a great feast: “I will lift up the cup of salvation.”

That is clearly not the idea Jesus had in mind. Today is Maundy Thursday, the night of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples. During this Passover meal, Jesus went off script. Instead of referring back to the deliverance of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, Jesus referred to himself. Taking a cup in hand, he said, “This is my blood of the covenant.” Jesus knew his blood was about to be poured out; it was the plan of God.

It gets even darker. God told the prophet Jeremiah, “Take from my hand this cup filled with the wine of my wrath.” He was to serve this cup to the nations. But not only the nations, also Jerusalem and all the towns of Judah. God’s wrath is not simply the emotion of anger. God’s wrath is his absolute opposition to all that is evil. God’s covenant people were not exempt from his wrath, his opposition to evil. Neither was God’s Son. Jesus went straight from the meal to the Garden of Gethsemane, where his soul was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. He asked the Father multiple times if there was a way to remove the cup. Jesus was about to drink the cup of damnation, not the cup of salvation.

Earlier, Jesus told his followers that “he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things…and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life” (Matthew 16:21). Outspoken Peter took him aside and said, basically, “Stay positive, Jesus.” His actual words were “This shall never happen to you.” Peter had just recognized that Jesus was “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). He thought, understandably, that the Son of the living God should not be thinking about dying. Jesus rebuked Peter. Actually, discerning something more twisted behind Peter’s words, he rebuked Satan. “You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns” (Matthew 16:23). Human beings think about avoiding death. Jesus did not come to avoid death; he came to suffer it. Stay positive? According to one article I read about a week ago, Italians are no longer singing from the balconies. The disease continues to take lives. Those who are not sick are facing poverty. Fears are rising. Andra tutto bene? Maybe it’s not all going to be alright, at least not for everyone.

Our response to death is not simple or predictable. Sarah C. Williams writes about death and the fear of death in her book Perfectly Human. Complications during pregnancy led to a critical situation. As a swarm of people rushed her down a hospital hallway, she felt herself floating above them all. Am I dying? She wondered. It didn’t feel so bad. Next thing, she found herself lying on her side in a bed. Alive. That night instead of relief, she felt fear. “I had come face to face with death the day before, but in the night I had faced the fear of death. The latter was far more dreadful than the first.”

Who knows what Jesus felt as he prayed in Gethsemane? The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther faced periods of intense anguish. He called it Anfechtung, which is of course not completely translatable from German to English. Luther describes these attacks graphically: One is “filled with the worst bitterness, with horror, fright, and sadness, and all this is experienced as eternal.” How heavy could this Anfechtung become? He didn’t know. He only knew that any more would be unbearable. If these attacks “were to reach their climax or last for half an hour or even for one tenth of an hour, man would perish totally and all his bones would be reduced to ashes.”

What depth and weight of anguish did Jesus experience in the Garden, and for how long?  Did Jesus experience the fear of death? The fear of God’s judgment? We don’t know for sure if Jesus felt fear of judgment, but we do know is that Jesus experienced God’s judgment. “He became a curse for us,” the Apostle Paul wrote (Galatians 3:13). Jesus experienced damnation. No wonder he asked God if the cup could be taken away.

Jesus confided in his closest friends, and asked them to stay awake and pray while he went off a little farther. Again and again, while he poured out his tormented soul in prayer, they slept. So he was not quite alone, but really he was alone. But when our hour of suffering comes, we will not be alone. After Joni Eareckson Tada’s diving accident at the age of 17 left her paralyzed (over fifty years ago) she was in despair. One friend climbed up on the bed next to her and began to sing: Man of Sorrows what a name, for the Son of God who came, ruined sinners to reclaim, Hallelujah, what a Savior!” That was the beginning of the healing of her heart, the realization that Jesus had suffered. She did not suffer alone.

Over the hours of agony that night, we see Jesus’ prayers change. First, he prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” The second time he said, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.” After the third time, he said “Rise! Let us go!” Clearly Jesus’ resolve was strengthened through his wrestling in prayer. A close look shows that his attitude changed as well. He went from asking for the cup to be removed, to saying “Your will be done.” And so the will of the human Jesus was brought into alignment with the will of God the Father.

Here we get into the Trinity and the identity of Jesus Christ. Wasn’t Jesus God? How then did he have a separate will from the Father? Jesus had taken the same inner circle – Peter, James, and John – along on another occasion. He went up a mountain. “There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.” There they saw his divine glory. Those same three now saw his suffering. In his glory he did not stop being human and in his suffering he did not stop being God. As God and human, he was completely human, including having a human will. His aligning his will to the will of the Father in the Garden is a model for us. Jesus was asked to drink the cup of damnation. We will drink a cup of suffering, but not that one.

Sarah C. Williams, in Perfectly Human, writes about her pregnancy. She and her husband discovered early on that this baby had a severe deformity and would not survive long after birth, if at all. The doctors expected and assumed that she would abort the baby. “It’s the kindest thing to do, isn’t it?” she said to her husband as they discussed it. But then God spoke in a way she had never experienced before. “We felt God speak a message to our hearts as clearly as if he had been talking with us in person. Here is a sick and dying child. Will you love this child for me?” The book she wrote is beautiful and heartbreaking and full of love.

What a cup they were given to drink. It was a cup of suffering, but it was a cup of love. The same as Jesus. And like Jesus, they were able to align their wills with the will of God the Father through prayer. Still, their cup was not the same as the cup Jesus drank.

Some people face death with greater peace than Jesus did. Why is that? They are not drinking the same cup. We must all drink the cup of suffering and death. But not that death. We don’t experience the agonizing cup of judgment. There was pride, disobedience, and rebellion in the Garden of Eden. There was humility, obedience, and surrender to God in the Garden of Gethsemane. He became our curse. He became sin. The wooden cross was a tree of death for Jesus. It is the tree of life for us. The cup of damnation that Jesus drank becomes the cup of salvation for us.

At the end of the book of Revelation, death is thrown into the lake of fire. Death is damned. If that is what people mean by stay positive, then by all means stay positive. Andra tutto bene! Everything truly will be alright.

Speaking for myself, I have found that the presence of Christ in suffering has enabled me to acknowledge the horror of death. I know that he will see me through. He suffered more deeply than I ever will.

My cup overflows. I will lift up the cup of salvation.

For a few songs that fit the theme of Christ in the Garden, try this playlist.