THE SIGN OF AGONY
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Luke 22:39-46 39 Coming out, He went to the Mount of Olives, as He was accustomed, and His disciples also followed Him. 40 When He came to the place, He said to them, “Pray that you may not enter into temptation.” 41 And He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s throw, and He knelt down and prayed, 42 saying, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.” 43 Then an angel appeared to Him from heaven, strengthening Him. 44 And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. 45 When He rose up from prayer, and had come to His disciples, He found them sleeping from sorrow. 46 Then He said to them, “Why do you sleep? Rise and pray, lest you enter into temptation.”
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… My guess is that most if not all of us have learned how difficult it is to understand fully the sorrow and suffering of another person. To go beyond understanding and actually to know the feeling is even more difficult, for to know that is to have experienced the sorrowful event ourselves. When tragedy strikes a friend or loved one, we can and should be sympathetic; we can and should suffer with him. That is part of being a Christian, for “when one part of the body suffers, all suffer with it” (I Cor 12:26). However, we have also learned that no matter how hard we try we can really never enter the inner recesses of someone else’s heart, for this is where the last and deepest suffering takes place.
Years ago on the news I recall the story of a father who had killed several of his own children. Anyone who heard that story was deeply shocked. Hearts go out to the survivors and to the neighbors who had no idea what kind of a monster was living in their neighborhood. Many people expressed their sympathy. And yet the last measure of suffering and sorrow was beyond the reach of mere words. In our human weakness we are not able to cross the barrier between their lives and ours.
Of course, God could enter into this sorrow – right into the very heart of it – but we cannot. There are always inner corners of the human personality which another person cannot reach. It is tragically true that the ultimate sorrow of the human heart and soul must, at the end of the day, be borne alone.
The task we have before us in our Lenten worship tonight is even more difficult. We must try to understand as clearly as possible the suffering of a Man; not someone in our own community but a Man in a garden thousands of miles away and more than two thousand years ago. It is the suffering of a Man who was not only man but also God in the flesh.
That suffering Man in the garden was and is our Savior, Jesus Christ. And the reason He was there and suffered what He suffered is our sin. Yes, our sin was the basic, ultimate, and terrible reason for the great drops of blood, the sword which pierced His heart, and the agony of His soul. Just what was going on there in the Garden of Gethsemane? What does it mean for our life?
Certainly it was a very strange situation. Throughout history men have dreamed of God and the gods and of their meeting with divinity. Over the years many people have built altars and temples for their gods, false or otherwise. They have imagined the Greek gods seated on Mount Olympus, or elsewhere, forever young, forever fair. But those gods remained remote and distant; they were not very involved with the human condition. Those gods were interested in men, but only to see to it that their laws were carried out and that transgressions of the laws of the universe were properly and inevitably punished. Gods were gods, and men were men. This was the way men thought the universe was arranged… But that was before Bethlehem and Calvary.
Here now in Gethsemane, however, there was something amazingly different. Jesus Christ, God and man in one person, was on His face beneath the olive trees. His sweat fell like great drops of blood upon the earth. The immeasurable space around Him was filled with wheeling suns and stars which He had placed into their orbits. His hands – the same hands which were active at the creation of the universe – those hands clutched the dust of the garden in agony. His face was torn by an agony which was new on the earth.
Certainly there had never been anything like this in the long and bitter history of man. It may be that for some of us here tonight there will be in the days, weeks, months, ands years ahead some dark valleys, some agony of soul, some great loneliness. But we will never know anything like what our dear Lord Jesus faced: all the world’s aching sadness, this unimaginable sickening of soul. This was God and man suffering together, and God can suffer more than men.
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There may be various reasons for this reluctance to get close to it Christ’s agony. Primarily, however, the reason lies in the fact that the true meaning of the agony in the garden is intimately, terribly, and eternally personal. It strikes every human being that has ever lived. It concerns every one of us; and certainly we do not want to be directly involved in such terror of soul.
But there are also other human approaches to this agony. In order to soften the horror of the garden, some have said that our Lord’s courage failed Him momentarily. He knew that in another twelve hours He would be dying on a cross. He was, they say, afraid of death. He did not want to go through with the next several hours.
But this is patently false. For if Jesus could have been afraid of death, then He would have been weaker than many brave men who faced death without flinching. He would have been weaker than Stephen, whose face shone as the stones struck him. He would have been weaker than all the great company of martyrs, who met their horrible deaths gladly for His sake. He would have been even weaker than some in this church tonight who looked squarely at death on the land, on the sea, and in the air during the days of war years ago.
No, it was nothing like that. He was not afraid of death or dying. If we look closely at His prayer in the garden, we see that He speaks to His Father not about tomorrow or what would happen on Friday afternoon. He is in agony over something that is happening right now. “This hour”– “this cup!” He is asking His Father in heaven to help Him complete the work which would go on until Friday afternoon.
So what was the real cause of His agony? Anyone who is called to preach during Lent in the year of our Lord 2021 must say it very simply and clearly, again and again. It is the old, old story of sin and grace. What struck Jesus in the garden, what pierced His soul, what painted incredible agony on His face… was sin. The Scriptures make it clear for us: “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us” (2 Cor 5:21). “The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (Is 53:6). “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29).
And so, in the garden that fateful night, all the sin and all the sorrow of all of life and all of history and of all people who lived and ever will live was gathered in His soul. All of it was there. None of it was missing. He bore it all, and He bore it alone. No one could bear it for Him. He did it all. And he did it all for you.
That bit of gossip in which you indulged a few days ago; those impure thoughts that crossed your mind and you entertained; those impure actions you engaged in thinking no one was looking or even cared; the constant and daily breaking of God’s Commandments in more ways than you will ever admit – all of these, all of these were on Christ’s head that night. He became sin for you. And that is why His Father ultimately had to turn His back on His Son and forsake – even damn – Him, as evidenced in our Lord’s scream, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46)
And this is the heart and soul of the Christian faith – the total transfer of every last ounce of our sin onto the bleeding head of Jesus in the garden and on the cross.
The meaning is perfectly clear. We can leave this church tonight quiet, free, and forgiven by faith and trust in Christ’s atoning sacrifice as our Substitute. Our faces are calm and peaceful because His face was torn by agony. We can look up to God again because He looked down into the lowest corners of hell. Every evil thing that worries us, every hidden sin, every fault is all left in the garden with Him. He took care of it. It is His and no longer ours. This is the Christian religion — the religion of atonement, of redemption and forgiveness; there is nothing else like it under the sun. It is all summed up in this: Christ for you. Always and forever.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
