Not My Will, But Yours

Hello, and welcome to The Comfortable Words.

Today’s words are from a very uncomfortable time. Possibly the most uncomfortable time in the life of Christ. You may be familiar with the time in the life of Christ that Christians call the passion. We enter into it through the Garden of Gethsemane.

The word passion is derived from a Latin word meaning “to suffer.”

Jesus knows that a time of great testing is approaching. A time of great suffering. And yet, a time where there is still comfort to be found, just not the way we often think of it.

As we begin I’d like to invite you to take a few slow, deep breaths. We’re going to consider finding comfort in the midst of suffering, and what we’ll discover is entirely counterintuitive.

So invite God’s presence to draw near to you. And pray: come, Holy Spirit.

---

Jesus draws away to be with his closest friends, to pray, and to do something that sounds quite a lot like crying out to God for reprieve, for the suffering that is coming.

There’s all sorts of significant things about this text. But the words of Jesus are very simple.

Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will. (Mark 14:36)

Jesus says this in a moment where we, in retrospect, seem to have the sense that he must have known exactly, blow by blow, what he was heading into in his final days and hours. But I might suggest that because he is not only fully God but fully man, there could easily have been some obscurity involved.

One chapter earlier, in the same gospel, he says it himself:

But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. (Mark 13:32)

Not even the Son.

Jesus knew he was giving himself up to suffering as unto death, but in his humanity, divine certainty was not something that he held onto. Only God can be fully certain of anything, and a significant part of the incarnation is not just that Jesus walked the roads we walk, but that he walked them in a very particularly human way, not grasping at what was his to grasp at.

In this, in a way we may not be able to comprehend, Jesus gives over his divine ownership of certainty and clarity.

So, when Jesus prays, take this cup from me, but not my will, but yours — perhaps there is a small bit of intercession, a little bit of hope beyond hope that the rest of the story doesn’t have to have such a terrible, bloody, betraying ending.

Perhaps.

Like we often pray. Oh God, oh God, make this come out right, even when we know it’s headed towards wrong.

Christ himself, who’s holding out hope for an ending that was much different than the one that came to him.

The thing to notice here is that the words that he spoke in this time of great discomfort were not words of certainty or clarity.

He did not say, all shall be well. He did not wink at the disciples as Judas approached.

He did not enter into his betrayal as though someone had already read the rest of the story. He walked into it in the same way that we walk into our lives, which is with a degree of wondering: what is coming my way?

What is in this cup? Poison or wine? Betrayal or communion?

And I can imagine, as he sat in Gethsemane and saw his friend Judas, saw Judas’s companions, that he had a sinking feeling. That what perhaps he had hoped for, and what he perhaps had prayed for — take this cup from me — this idea that maybe they would come and submit, maybe they would come and repent, maybe they would come with arms open wide, and an honest kiss, and a recognition of the availability of grace. That all of that wondering and hoping sank deep into a pit of his stomach, much like bad news does for you or for me.

And he realizes that this cup is his to drink. Not just “suffering unto death” in a vague sense. But suffering. And death. In specific.

Would you pause here. Where in your own life are you still waiting to find out what is in the cup?

---

I imagine that you were thinking, this is not a very comfortable thought.

This idea of the suffering Christ, or the Christ who would give himself over to something so outside of his own agency — and that is exactly where I want to focus us in.

You see, the comfort of Christ, the comfortable word who is Christ himself, brings comfort in what we might call an entirely upside down way.

In this text, what we see is the God who need not suffer, choose suffering. Not out of any sort of cosmic demand, or strange theological arithmetic about somebody being owed suffering, but out of a choice.

W. H. Vanstone writes in The Stature of Waiting that what exposed Jesus unto death

was his own initiative in presenting the way of the kingdom so powerfully that if its appeal was not accepted it must be received as deadly threat. Jesus was exposed unto death not through inherent weakness but through exercise of strength. No weak and wandering rabbi could either have appealed to the nation’s leaders or threatened them as Jesus did. It was from a position of strength and not of weakness that he passed, by his own initiative, into the hands of men.

By his own initiative.

There is a theological framework for this. The passion that the impassible God embraced. That God willingly chose a thing that had no hold over him unless he let it.

And here we see one of the most odd realities about our followership of Jesus. It’s that when the God of the universe looked for a way to demonstrate ultimate strength, ultimate agency, a pathway towards ultimate comfort —

what he did not do is pick up a sword. He did not feed his ego. He did not look for ways to stay in control.

As a matter of fact, throughout the Gospel of Mark, what we see is that Jesus moved from actor to he who is acted upon in this moment. For thirteen chapters he is the one doing: teaching, healing, calling, confronting, going. And then the grammar changes, and from the Garden on, things are done to him.

Vanstone puts it in Latin: Deus non passibilis sed passus.

God is not subject to suffering, yet he suffered.

This is paradox. Theologians have a concept of divine impassibility — that God in his divine nature cannot suffer or be acted upon by external forces. In other words, God is always subject, never object.

And yet: sed passus. He suffered.

In Mark, at the Garden, we see a sudden shift in the way and words of Jesus. He is, as scripture said, handed over. The word often mistranslated into “betray” is more aptly translated “handed over.” Jesus gives himself to the state of being of “object.”

He is handed over to the will and whim and sin of other men. And in that, he enters his passion — his suffering, which was I think less the physical pain of torture, and even more the spiritual and relational anguish of becoming “object.”

Take a slow breath here. This is the strange center of it.

In light of this we may read Philippians from much more depth:

Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:1-8)

These comfortable words, not my will, but yours, lead Jesus to what is for us the most uncomfortable and unwelcomed place, which is the place where we lay down our right to ourselves. Where we submit to being not the subject of a story, but an object.

Jesus passed into the hands of men by his own initiative, and if you are being mistreated, or bullied, or abused, that is a different thing altogether, and resisting it is not a failure of surrender.

Let me propose this for your consideration: the true prophetic witness of the church and of a Christian is not how they engage out of a place of power, strength, or agency. The prophetic witness comes when, from a place of “being handed over,” one still bears the fruit of the Spirit.

---

How is it that Christ could do this and still experience divine comfort?

I would propose to you that the only way to fully know the character of another is to place yourself entirely in their care and keeping.

To move entirely out of the role of subject, or actor, or agent, and to hold one’s hands up to heaven and say, not what I want, but what you want.

Because when you’re able to say those words, and when God is proven as faithful even in the midst of great suffering or injustice, in that most vulnerable space is the only moment when you actually know that you know that you know that he is good and trustworthy.

Everything else is a belief in our comfort, the way we’re used to accessing it, which is comfort through power or control or ego or strength.

Let me ask you a question. Can you think in your mind of someone you know who’s had a hard time laying down identity? Perhaps someone who has held a title so long that they no longer quite know their own name without it.

Have you ever been around a parent who fills up the room all the time, centering themself, rather than making space for their child?

Have you ever watched someone wrestle against the letting go of a title, or influence, or voice?

We see those things all around us all the time. In families, in business, in church, in politics.

But Jesus, in his passion, allowed himself — in ultimate love — to suffer by becoming object.

He is shepherded around. He is questioned, he is tormented, he is tortured, and he did not open his mouth. He didn’t fight, he didn’t wrestle. He didn’t contest.

I recognize that pull in my own heart. My own interior desire for agency, to operate out of strength and not weakness.

Too often we read the line “he did not open his mouth” and pass right by it. But can you imagine the interior agony? Of knowing what is right and not saying it? Knowing what is just and not demanding it? Knowing what is good and not throwing it in the faces across from you?

My own inclination is to open my mouth quite a lot.

And then I look for the kind face of Jesus, walking before me on the road, and I remember that it is in my weakness that he is strong.

He looked at injustice square in the face, and answered it with his trust in the power and goodness of the care and keeping of God.

This is the kind of trust that we call blind trust.

And yet here we have Jesus. Betrayed by his friends. Or, shall we say, by his friends’ weakness and humanity? All alone, tired, anxious, holding out hope that the whole thing would be okay, and then, when it wasn’t, what does he do?

Does he rage, rage against the dying of the light?

No. He places himself squarely in the hands of God, even in a way that I can’t begin to understand.

In that is the deepest kind of knowing, in the character of God. Because those hands bore him not just through the worst, but also into death, into the sense of absolute betrayal and alienation, further on, into the ground, or the grave, or the place that we don’t know, and then up, up, up again. Into full communion.

Oneness.

This path of surrender, perhaps, is not a comfortable path, but it leads us to celebrate resurrection.

It brings us to the place of all comfort, into the God who is comfort. These comfortable words: not my will, but yours.

---

And yet, underneath all of those things that we might rage against and work against, still comes a place for absolute trust.

The trust that says we don’t understand. We can’t see.

And yet we know, because something of the Spirit tells us it’s true.

As we end, place your hand over your heart, or perhaps make the sign of the cross. And hear these words, which Jesus could not say in the Garden:

That all shall be well. All shall be well. And yes, one day, all manner of things shall be well.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.