+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in
prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing
in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and
Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace
from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
We can all relate to struggles
of the human will. Such struggles of the human will occur anytime we
interact with another person who wants something different from what we want:
parent and child, husband and wife, boss and employee, or even two peers of any
age or gender. Who should do this? What should we do? Where
should we go? (Believe me when I tell you that both my life as a strong‑willed
person and the life of a woman somewhere out there are easier because I am
single.) In the read second portion of “The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ”,
as drawn and compiled together from the four individual divinely‑inspired
Gospel accounts, we heard of a struggle not between two human
wills but of a struggle between a human will and a divine will. In
keeping with that “Gethsemane” portion of “The Passion”, I direct our attention
tonight to the following two verses from St. Mark’s Gospel account:
And going a little farther, [Jesus] fell on the
ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from Him. And He said, “Abba, Father, all things are
possible for You. Remove this cup from Me. Yet not what I will, but
what You will.”
The specific wording of the theme
for our meditation tonight is the last part of those verses: “Not what I will,
but what You will.”
Those verses are just a
part of St. Mark’s account of Jesus in Gethsemane three times both
praying such a prayer by Himself and then returning to find the disciples
asleep. Though St. Mark’s account is unique for describing the substance of
Jesus’s prayer before giving the actual words, all three so‑called
“synoptic accounts” report this struggle between Jesus’s human will
and the divine will Jesus shared with the Father—the divine will they
shared by virtue of their being two persons of the same, One God.
Again and again, in a long, desperate struggle, Jesus was falling
on the ground, praying for the same thing, saying the same words,
essentially asking that the hour, the terrible anguish or unspeakable torture,
might pass from Him, or pass by Him without touching Him. Jesus was probably praying
fully prostrate like others whom the Bible tells, lying on the ground like a
worm, while Jesus’s human will in prayer tried to impose itself on
His divine will, or at least as close to trying as one can come without
sinning. For, after the expression of the human will, when Jesus says, “Remove
this cup from me”, comes submission to the divine will, when Jesus says,
“Not what I will, but what You will.”
In the struggles of the
human will that I mentioned at the outset—parent and child, husband and wife,
boss and employee, and even two peers of any age or gender—there can be cases
where it really does not matter, either who does something, what
they do, or where they go. But, there can also be cases in which such
things do matter: for example, children who ask for something bad for
them or want their parents to let them do something wrong. Too often, when it
come to our relationship with our Heavenly Father, we are like such
children, are we not? We want to impose our human will on His
divine will. Like Jesus, we know all things are possible for God (at least
all things in keeping with His nature and attributes), and so we approach Him
like a genie who owes us our three wishes or wants: maybe health, wealth, and
happiness, the blessings the so‑called “prosperity gospel preachers”
would have us “claim”. Instead, we should confess as we will in our closing
hymn, “My will is wrong beyond all measure, / It does not will
what pleases [God].”
We not only sin by
trying to impose our human will on God’s divine will, but we sin against
God in countless other ways: in thought, word and deed; by what we have
done, and by what we have left undone. We are by nature sinful. Yet, when
we turn to God both with sorrow over our sin and with faith that He will
forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, that is exactly what He does: He forgives
our sin for Jesus’s sake. Tonight verse 5 of Psalm 32, our second of the
Penitential Psalms, put it this way: “Then I acknowledged my sin
to You and did not cover up my iniquity … and You forgave the guilt of my sin.”
When we repent, God forgives our sin of trying to impose our human will
on His divine will. When we repent, God forgives the countless other ways we
sin. When we repent, God even forgives our sinful natures
themselves.
You and I may know what
it is like to be separated from people we care about, whether by an argument,
by geographical distance, or even by earthly death. But, Jesus was facing two far
greater separations of completely different types. As if facing the
separation of His life-giving soul from His body of clay was not bad
enough, because He bore God’s righteous wrath over our sin, He, the Second
Person of the Blessed Trinity, was also facing separation from the Father—the
Father with Whom He shared the same divine substance. How exactly
that separation even could be possible is part of the mystery of the
Blessed Trinity, just as how exactly Jesus according to His human
nature, not using His divine omniscience, could even think there was a
possibility that the hour might pass from Him is part of the mystery of the
Incarnation. Most likely you and I do not like a picture of Jesus cowering
in fear over the prospect of redeeming us. Perhaps we under-appreciate the cup
of God’s righteous wrath and judgment that Jesus drank on our behalf! The “ineffable
sorrow and anguish” behind Jesus’s prayer was “the horror of One who lives by
God at being cast from Him, at the judgment which delivers up the Holy One to
the power of sin …”
At Jesus’s mention of
all things being possible for God, hearers of St. Mark’s whole Gospel account
will remember, from earlier in the account, when Jesus’s disciples thought anyone’s
being saved was impossible and Jesus’s similarly said all things were possible
with God. What was impossible for them and for us is possible for God because
Jesus died and rose. For us and for our salvation, He sacrificed His human
will, His human life, and, dare we even say, His divinity itself. As one
commentator says, “What deep, incomprehensible humiliation on the part of Christ!
And yet there is not the slightest murmuring or opposing the will of God.”
Instead, His divine nature strengthens His human nature to produce “courage
worthy of God”. After wrestling in prayer, He courageously put His human will
in our service. Jesus may have asked His Father to save Him from the
hour, but in the end, in keeping with His Father’s will, He drank the cup
His Father had given Him. He both experienced that hour and drank that cup for
us, so that, by grace through Faith in Him, we might be saved, with the
forgiveness of our sins.
As Jesus entreats His
dear Father to remove the cup, hearers of St. Mark’s whole Gospel account will
also recall, from earlier in the account, Jesus’s conversation with James and
John, who wanted to sit at His right and left hands in His glory. Jesus asked
them if they were able to drink the cup He would drink and to be
baptized with the baptism with which He was going to be baptized. In other
words, Jesus framed His death for us in terms associated with the ways Jesus
gives us the forgiveness of sins, the forgiveness of sins He won for us by
that very same death. In His crucifixion, Jesus is baptized into God’s
wrath and drinks of the cup of that wrath. When we are baptized and drink of
the cup of blessing of the Lord’s Supper, we overcome death. Made God’s
children at the font and fed the family meal at the rail, we are led by the
Holy Spirit—Whom St. Paul calls “the Spirit of [God’s] Son” and “the Spirit of
adoption as sons”—we are led by that Holy Spirit to pray, “Abba,
Father!”
Our opening hymn
invited us to “Go to dark Gethsemane” in order to “learn of Jesus Christ to
pray”. Indeed, as we heard in the Reading, Jesus asked His three closest
disciples to watch and pray so that they would not enter into temptation. As
for Jesus and His disciples, so also for us: prayer truly is a way of fighting
temptation. But, prayer is a way of fighting temptation only because prayer
seeks the One by Whose help we are enabled to resist temptation. As we
are taught, we pray, “Our Father … Thy will be done … lead us not into
temptation”. Yet, even The Rev. Dr. Luther said he could not pray that Lord’s
Prayer without sinning, and maybe neither can we. And, what is more, we
ultimately still too often give in to the very temptations we might
have been praying God to enable us to resist. So, we live daily in
repentance and faith, not only during the penitential season of Lent, but every
day of every season. We repent and believe and so return to our Baptisms and to
the Lord’s Table to receive the forgiveness we so desperately need.
By nature, our sinful
human flesh does not like the sort of daily death that repentance is, but our
redeemed human will knows better, and it, like Jesus’s human will, submits to
God’s Divine will, saying, “Not what I will, but what You will”. The
submission of Jesus’s human will to the divine will resulted in Jesus’s suffering
and death, and our submission of our human wills to the divine will may result
in the same. Despite such a risk of suffering and death, neither our prayer nor
our submission changes. Put another way, the words our Office Hymn puts in
Jesus’s mouth become our words:
Yes, Father, yes, most willingly / I bear what you command
me;
My will conforms to your decree, I risk what you have asked me. …
Amen.
The peace of God, which
passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +
