Jesus doesn’t give up

 JESUS DOESN’T GIVE UP

He went away a second time and prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.” When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing.

MATTHEW 26.42–44

Love … always perseveres.

1 CORINTHIANS 13.7

Based on MATTHEW 26.36–46

On the hardest night of His life, Jesus had a panic attack.

Earlier, Jesus had given the Passover meal a new meaning: it would be a remembrance of God’s miraculous deliverance — not only from the Egyptians, but also from the enemy of their souls — and it would be a herald of Jesus’ kingdom to come.

And though He knew the victory that awaited Him in the end, Jesus didn’t speed into His arrest and crucifixion like a superhero with a cape.

No. He wrestled against it. By God’s bountiful grace, He preserved for us in the Gospels this heartbreaking scene where Jesus agonises in the garden of Gethsemane, pleading with His Father to find another way. “If it is possible,” He sobs, “may this cup be taken from me.” Jesus knew full well the battle that was about to ensue. After all, He had predicted His betrayal, His rejection, and His death.

But that didn’t make it easy.

In His humanity, Jesus experienced the full spectrum of human emotions. Fear. Anxiety. Panic. Dread.

Let us be careful not to sketch a caricature of Jesus that makes Him aloft from His emotions. Because a big part of the sufferings He bore include not just the physical wounds, which were horrific, but also the emotional and social and spiritual wounds, which were dreadful.

So on this night, Jesus withdrew to His safe place and fell on His face before His Father. “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Lk 22.44). Heavy with grief, weighed down with the horror of what He knew must take place, He pleaded for an alternative. Not once, but three times.

And each time, discerning in His spirit that this was the only way forward, Jesus humbly accepted the cup of God’s wrath and committed to drink it to the dregs, “May your will be done.” As with His wilderness temptation, Jesus faced His own human frailty, and three times He revealed the mettle of His character, the truthfulness of His devotion to the Father, by choosing obedience over comfort.

His disciples, by contrast, couldn’t even stay awake. Their friend and master was enduring the darkest night of His life, and they were dozing after some good food and good wine. Yet Jesus, rather than lash out in fury and disappointment, spends His last moments as a free man praying not just for Himself, but for His fickle friends and, amazingly, for those of us who would come to believe in Him through the ages.

When Jesus would have had every right to think or pray only for Himself, Jesus pours out His emotional and spiritual energy, wrestling in prayer for those He loves, even as those very men were sleeping a few yards away and would soon abandon Him.

Prayer 

Beloved Jesus, Your love far surpasses my understanding. Thank You for never giving up on me, even when I fail You time and time again. Forgive me for becoming so easily discouraged in my love for others. Help me to persevere, to continue to love with Your perfect, unending, never-giving-up love.

In Jesus’s name, Amen.

If you want to read more 

Psa 88, Isa 53.3, 10, Mk 14.32–42, Jn 12.27, 17, 18.11