2025-04-14
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
When my in-laws were going through a divorce years ago, my father-in-law came to me one day and poured out his heart. He did not want this, and he was heartbroken. I was stunned and a bit embarrassed. This man, sobbing before me, was always a tough guy, someone I teasingly called Clint Eastwood because he often bore a persona like Dirty Harry. Yet here he was, a puddle of tears and I was perplexed. I felt like I shouldn’t be hearing his intimate fears and pain, and yet I longed to offer him some solace.
Perhaps you feel a similar reticence yet also an attraction as you listen to the account of Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus has never seemed so human and, as he prays to God, asking to be spared the horror of the crucifixion, we at once may feel a bit embarrassed yet also drawn to the fear and pain so clearly exposed in his plaintive cries.
So much of what happens in Holy Week reminds us that Jesus, while fully divine, is also fully human and for many of us, this blatant display of humanity is rather discomforting. It’s why we love the pageantry of Palm Sunday but then want to skip right over to Easter. We’re perfectly happy with Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem with the crowds giving him a hero’s welcome. But as the week goes on, we can’t help but see the fully human Jesus, and we grow increasingly uncomfortable.
We’re much more at home with Divine Jesus, the one who heals people simply by touching them, who calls out unclean spirits, turns water into wine and feeds thousands with a couple of fish and a few loaves of bread. Those miracles stories may not make much sense to us, but they make clear that Jesus is on a whole different level than we could ever be . . . and we kind of prefer it that way!
This human Jesus that we find praying in the garden frightens us because we worry that we should be able to understand him better and emulate him more. We can accept the humanity of the disciples without any problem; they’ve been human and fallible all along. They are often missing the point Jesus is trying to teach them and instead ask silly questions. So, we’re not surprised when they fall asleep when Jesus asks them to stay awake.
But then we hear Jesus crying out, asking God to take away the pain he knows he is about to endure. We witness his friends falling asleep right when he needs them most . . . and we can relate to all of that. We’ve all been in a place at one time or another when we needed something from those closest to us and have been let down. But we’ve also been the friend that failed to do what was needed most in a time of need for someone else. We can understand Jesus’ cries
. . . but we want him to be bigger than that!
The divinity of Jesus is important to us! We need something bigger than us, something beyond our grasp. We want the mystery of Divine Jesus, something we trust not because we’ve mastered it or fully comprehended it, but precisely because we haven’t.
Author and Catholic reformer James Carroll says it this way:
“If Jesus were not regarded as God almost from the start of his movement, he would be of no interest to us. We would never have heard of him. Nothing but his divinity accounts for his place in Western culture – or in our hearts: not his ethic which was admirable, but hardly uncommon; not his preaching, which was firmly in line with Jewish proclaim-ation; not his heroic suffering, which was typical of many anti-Roman Jewish resisters; not his wonder working, which was attributed to all kinds of charismatic figures in the ancient world. Nothing but a two-thousand-year-old divinity claim puts Jesus before us today.”
Carroll may be right. Jesus’ divinity may be what keeps him before us, but it’s his humanity that makes the story of the crucifixion so compelling. It is the very heart of our faith!
When faced with realization that he is about to be killed, Jesus panics and prays to “abba,” using the intimate Aramaic word for “pappa,” asking to make it all go away. He becomes grieved and agitated, and we are frightened by the intensity of his prayer!
While it is disconcerting that Jesus has these human moments, it also makes him make sense to us: he chose his response and so can we. Jesus asks God to make all go away but doesn’t end there. He goes on to say: “your will, not mine, be done.”
Each of us, like Jesus, have moments of suffering – often filled with panic – and we want Divine Jesus to make it all go away. We lift fervent prayers like Jesus did in garden: “Why have you forsaken me? Make it all go away! Please!” This is our prayer when we – or someone we love – is given a devastating diagnosis. When a loved one slowly slipping away from us because of addiction or dementia.
It’s hard for us to give up control, but like Jesus, we need to ask that God’s will be done. As John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg share in The Last Week, such a prayer is not a fatalistic resignation to the will of God, but rather choosing to trust God in the midst of our most dire circumstances, believing that God will strengthen us to get through and that there will be, at the end, resurrection and new life.
We began this morning waving our palms and celebrating. We love to come on this day and then show up again next Sunday with our freshly scrubbed faces and pretty Easter frocks, full of hope and promise. But we’d rather overlook what comes in between, I think in part because the Passion story puts Jesus’ vulnerability front and center, and we’re just not comfortable with that. Yet is an important part of the story at the center of our faith.
So here is my challenge to you this morning: Don't let the story end here, on Palm Sunday. Come back this week to hear the whole story, the story of a human man named Jesus who was betrayed, who suffered, who was overwhelmed and terrified. Risk sitting with Jesus in the garden. Don’t sleep through his fear and his pain. Open your hearts to truly feel the whole experience, even when it makes you squirm. Because when you do, the power of the resurrection is so much greater!
Divine Jesus may be what keeps us interested. But Human Jesus helps us understand and believe. This Holy Week, may his prayer be all of ours: “Your will, not mine, be done.” Amen.