Hebrews 5:7-10 (HCSB)
During His earthly life, He offered prayers and appeals with loud cries and tears to the One who was able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverence. Though He was God’s Son, He learned obedience through what He suffered. After He was perfected, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him, and He was declared by God a high priest in the order of Melchizedek.
This picture of Jesus is a bit different than the one most people have in their minds. A lot of Christians picture Jesus walking serenely through all that He experienced, with trouble and frustrations bouncing off Him like bullets bounced off Superman. The stress and prayers in the garden are often seen as an excusable break in an otherwise exemplary life of serenity.
But there were many times in which Jesus faced injury and death from the Jewish leaders, and even from His own townspeople, His childhood friends, who tried to hurl Him off a cliff (Luke 4:28-30). There were times when His teachings fell on deaf ears, and the hearts of the people were so stony that His words seemed to have no impact at all, leaving those people whom He dearly loved, for whom He had left everything, still lost in the darkness.
Each morning found Jesus wrestling in prayer for those for whom He would soon lay down His life. His cries and tears were not usually for Himself, but for them. And each day He was strengthened as He received fresh direction, fresh insights from God, and as He basked in communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
That all came to a head in the garden, as Jesus saw approaching the one moment when He could escape the painful, unbearable suffering that lay just over the horizon. In that moment, He did not run and hide, but cried out to the Father to check one final time to see if there was any other way to accomplish His task. All that was in Him recoiled at the horror that lay before Him, mere moments away. Yes, there were tears, and yes, there were loud cries that couldn’t even break through the sounds sleep of His friends just a few yards away.
But in the end, He was not released from his mission, He was strengthened for it (Luke 22:43-44). He was not given the power to overcome his enemies, but the power to submit to them so that He could, in the end, gain the ultimate victory over death. When the struggle was over and the victory over His humanity was won through prayer, He marched boldly out to meet His executioners, knowing that He had already won, and that, through His obedience, He would succeed in becoming the High Priest which all humanity needed in order to be reconciled to God.
Father, You are absolutely right. So many of us have been taught that Jesus’ prayer in the garden was somehow a moment of weakness, a stress-caused crack in his otherwise impervious armor of serenity. We don’t perceive Jesus as a passionate pray-er. But when we stop and consider, how could He not be? He gave up all His heavenly glory to save mankind, so how would He not pray passionately for them every day? He loved the people of the world, even those who stood against Him, so how would He not wrestle powerfully for them before Your throne each morning. He knew that His whole mission would ultimately be left in the hands of his all-too-human followers after He had returned to Your right hand, so how could He not intercede for them before You with all that was in Him? In the garden we do not see an exception to how Jesus prayed, but merely the culmination of His prayer life. And it’s amazing think to that He is now and ever interceding for me with that same power, that same passion, that same intensity (Romans 8:34)! Amen.