Mark 14:32-42
Nighttime Garden Prayers

They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, "Sit here while I pray." He took Peter, James and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death," he said to them. "Stay here and keep watch."

Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. "Abba, Father," he said, "everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will."

Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. "Simon," he said to Peter, "are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak."

Once more he went away and prayed the same thing. When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. They did not know what to say to him.

Returning the third time, he said to them, "Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come. Look, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!"

New International Version

None of us can ever comprehend what our Savior experienced the night before His crucifixion. Fully God and fully human; sinless, yet taking on the sin of all of humanity; having set aside His heavenly form and taken up our temporal form in which to fight and defeat Death. His closest disciples were clueless and weak, sleeping during His hours of sorrowful prayer, leaving Him alone to cope with what was to come.

When it comes to writing about this passage, I can only write out of my own flawed, sinful ignorance. I have no experiences in my life that I would dare claim gives me an insight into Jesus' prayer vigil in Gethsemane. At the same time, I do believe we are given this scripture passage in the Gospels so that we can be comforted by it and learn from it. So, with awe and reluctance, I want to write about a few characteristics of Jesus' prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, and consider how this passage can help me strengthen my prayer life.

First, consider the raw honesty of Jesus' prayer. Jesus knew what God's will was, so he prayed not from logic but from emotion that He might be spared the unfathomable events to come. Jesus never deviated from God's will, but he openly expressed in prayer how His own will conflicted with God's. God does not expect me not to have a will of my own, and God certainly knows when I erect a facade that denies what I really want. It was in this garden prayer that Jesus was able to put aside His own desires so He could do what God wanted done. In the same way, God wants us to use prayer as a time to focus on confronting our ways so we can set them aside and follow God's ways for us.

Next, note that Jesus repeated the same prayer for several hours. I foolishly want to ignore this example and reference Jesus' teaching in Matthew 6:7, where the KJV says that when we pray, "use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do". Certainly, Jesus didn't pray for hours because He was concerned that God might not have heard His prayer, as the "heathen" would have thought. So if Jesus didn't need to repeat this prayer for God's sake, then He repeated it for His own sake. This practice goes against my personality in so many ways: when talking with others, I get to my point and move on; when working on a problem that stymies me, I set it aside to come back to it later; when I am tempted to sin, I want to steel my will and bruskly set aside that temptation. Here, however, we see Jesus contemplating the unthinkable, holding it up in prayer so God can bring a heavenly calm to a hellish situation. To stay in God's presence and confront our fears and pain is to let God seep deeper into us. It is an outrageously superficial analogy, but think of how good it feels to take a long shower, even though we can clean ourselves in just a few minutes. Repeating our deep, honest plea and pondering God's gentle response showering on us can mold us and prepare us in ways a shorter prayer cannot do.

I think Jesus found the strength He needed for the evil day to come from this time of prayer. In my human thinking, it seems like a good night's sleep is vital to thinking clearly and to keeping my faith strong; when I am tired, I am more likely to act harshly and without love, and to succumb to temptations. Maybe Jesus knew He wouldn't be able to sleep--and we have all had those nights in our lives--but this is the same man who slept on a boat in the middle of a storm. The eternal truth is that rest for our souls is more important than rest for our bodies, and that being fed spiritually is more important than being fed physically. I know that prayer in the morning is more important to a good start to my day than coffee in the morning, but while I rarely skip my coffee, it is too easy to skip my prayer time. To paraphrase the wise saying, I too often think like a physical being with a soul, and not often enough like a spiritual being with a body.

Finally, while the Gospels give us unique insight into Jesus' time of prayer in Gethsemane, we should not think of this as a "once in a lifetime" event for either Jesus or for us. On numerous occasions, Jesus went by himself to pray for extended periods of the night. We might speculate that none of those were as intense as the Gethsemane prayer time, but we don't know, because the scriptures don't tell us. Instead, I think we need to consider the Gethsemane prayer as one in a sequence of similar sustaining prayer experiences that Jesus had. If Jesus needed these times, how much more do we need them?

We cannot fathom Jesus' intense prayer experience in Gethsemane, where Luke 22 tells us Jesus's sweat fell like drops of blood. Nevertheless, Jesus invites us to join Him in our own nighttime prayer gardens when we face our trials. Jesus assures us there is strength and healing when we honestly lay out before God our fears, doubts, and struggles, and when we take the time to join with God in wrestling with our will until God's Will prevails. We desperately need that honest, open time with God to allow God to wash over us, heal us, and make us into the new creatures God intends.